A RETIRED headmistress who served the county’s children for more than 30 years has been remembered fondly by former pupils.

Celia Nash, who died aged 92 on September 12th, taught hundreds of youngsters at the Pitt School in Llanarth during a career spanning more than three decades.

Ex-pupil, Pam Francis, said, ‘I have so many wonderful memories of Mrs Nash from my time in school. She was a very special lady and a very caring teacher’.

The eldest child of miner, Harry Bentley and Annie, a pottery painter, Celia was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1925.

When Celia turned 15 her mother insisted on her starting work as a Nursery Assistant. Fortunately her head teacher intervened and persuaded her family to let her stay on in school.

She won a state scholarship to London University to study History but, along with other students, she was attached to Cambridge University where she studied for a year.

During World War 2 she had a close shave when she was strafed by a German fighter plane as she cycled back to the university town from Newmarket. She dived into a ditch, later discovering that her tyres had been shot through.

Back in London, she survived the late onslaught of V1 and V2 Bombs and was among the elated crowds who walked down the Mall on VE Day, observing that Winston Churchill was too drunk to stand unaided.

A Diploma at the London School of Education followed and in her teaching post in Hampstead she met her future husband and fellow teacher Paddy Nash.

Celia and Paddy were married in September 1949 and two weeks later alighted from a train at Penpergwm Station and reached their destination of Llanarth Court.

The Hon Fflorens Roch, owner of the Llanarth Estate, had just given her 18th Century mansion to the Dominicans, an order of Catholic Clergy, who had set up a preparatory school there, then known as Blackfriars.

The newlyweds were employed as teachers and lived in the Court. Within a year they had moved to the Pitt House and the first of three children had been born.

Celia was employed to teach in the Pitt School, which had two classes - Infants were ‘Downstairs’ and the Juniors were ‘Upstairs’. At that time many local teachers had taken the two year training course at Caerleon College and a woman with a degree was a comparative rarity in the profession.

Celia worked closely with the head teacher, Miss Eileen Badham, whose engagement to local man Frank Price lasted 17 years while she nursed her elderly parents. Eileen and Frank eventually married, moved to Monmouth and Celia was appointed Head.

The school prospered and served the local area well. Celia was joined at different times by three other excellent teachers, Dorrie Francis, Ceinwen Davies and Pia Malnati, and kind-hearted dinner ladies including Mary Charles, Pam Parry, Iris Meredith and Nancy Webb.

Before the introduction of Comprehensive Education the Pitt School had a reputation for its success in getting its children to the local Grammar Schools.

Village schools were fairly basic in the 1950s; former pupils will remember the outside toilets, the tap in the yard, the ‘Tin’ against which balls were kicked and thrown and which separated the school from the cemetery next door.

Then there was the ‘shed’ in which pupils sheltered from the rain, the brook, the infant teacher’s ploy of getting the children to listen silently for a mouse which never seemed to emerge from the cupboard, and maybe the warmth and smells when Mr Powell-the-blacksmith was shoeing horses in his smithy in the Estate Yard.

They may also remember ‘nature walks’ and the Christmas Parties where Fflorens and her husband, Wattie Roch, sat quietly watching as all the children opened presents that had been bought from the proceeds of a Whist Drive, with a little help, no doubt from Fflorens.

Pupils went on to their Secondary Schools and then to work or higher education, many moved in other parts of the country and around the world. The shire horses which once worked the Estate were long retired. Mechanisation increased and rural jobs disappeared.

The school’s roll of forty children was no longer considered suitable for new curriculums. Celia suffered a minor stroke in 1977 and she retired in 1983. The school closed down five years later and was converted into a house in 1990.

Celia and Paddy, who died in 2015, moved to Abergavenny in their later years, and are now buried together in Llanarth, near to Eileen and Frank, in the peaceful cemetery just beyond the old school wall.