Ladycross School
Coordinates: 50°46′28″N 0°07′56″E / 50.7745°N 0.1323°E
Ladycross was a Catholic preparatory school based in Seaford, East Sussex, overlooking the downs with trenches which led up to the cliffs. Founded in 1891, more than 2,000 pupils attended it before its closure in 1977. Among its notable schoolmasters was children's book author George Mills, who taught during the summer of 1956. The school was located on its own 15-acre premises in Seaford throughout its existence, apart from a short period during the Second World War when at the height of the German bombing raids on British towns in 1941, the school was temporarily evacuated to Salperton Park, Gloucestershire.
The school was found in 1891 by Alfred Roper, who later passed it onto his son Tony Roper. Tony Roper had no descendants and in the early 1950s, as he became more elderly, he sought a successor as owner and headmaster from among the parents of children at the school. The only parent interested was Michael Feeny who was a descendant of a Birmingham Catholic family and who had one son at the school at the time. As a school teacher and classicist himself, Michael Feeny had experience in the education business and was therefore an appropriate successor, and over the next quarter century in conjunction with long-serving staff members he ran the school successfully and to the satisfaction of a growing body of parents.
Approaching retirement in the early 1970s at a time when private education appeared under threat, Feeny decided not to take the easy option of selling the land to private developers at a considerable profit, but instead to seek ways of keeping the school in operation. Having tried unsuccessfully to relocate the school to a larger inland location and unable to find a suitable successor as buyer and headmaster, he accepted considerable personal loss and set up a trust and handed over the school and land in Seaford and all its assets to this Trust.
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