There is a unique link there between one of fashion's best kept secrets, a teacher training college in Putney, art critic John Ruskin, May Day, today - Friday May 1 - and the old Weymouth Grammar School.
Whitelands College, which is now part of the University of Roehampton, was once a model of Victorian training for Victorian schoolmarms.
Each year since 1881 a student from the college has been elected by her peers as May Queen, a wonderful English tradition, though some say it's a ". .primitive folk custom," which was then looked forward to in every school in the country.
Each year the award for being elected was a volume of the work of John Ruskin, a specially made dress for the occasion and a cross of gold.
Yet, the recognition of the day was far removed from tradition or folk, but is more wrapped up in scholastic matters.
The one-time principal of the college, a clergyman called John Faunthorpe, was a friend of Ruskin and suggested that he donated one of his books to the college as a prize.
The reply was that he intensely disliked any forms of competition but "...I believe the recognition of an uncontending and natural worth to be one of the most solemn duties of young and old.
"Suppose you made it a custom that the scholars should annually choose, by ballot, with vowed secrecy, their Queen of the May?
"The criteria the electors had to follow was simply that their chosen one should have the qualities of being the "...likeablest and loveablest."
So it was that a tradition was born, albeit a very private and unheralded one.
What then, is the Weymouth Grammar School connection?
Malcolm Cole was an acknowledged Ruskin scholar with an international reputation who was a senior lecturer at Whitelands. He married Jennifer Snell, a fellow ex-Weymouth Grammar School pupil.
He was also the archivist at the college and had in his care an extremely valuable collection of dresses, gold crosses, letters and other memorabilia, which is itself a history of fashion, from the elaborate designs of Victorian England, through the extravagance of the Edwardians, and then through two wars and the ".. .crimplene fifties".
During the war dresses were made of such things as butter muslin, parachute silk and mosquito netting, such was the austerity which existed - a far cry from the wonderful silks and satins of the more elegant ages.
The collection's worth can only be guessed at, probably priceless. In 1992, Malcolm, a Companion of Ruskin's Guild of St George, gave the Ruskin Lecture, Be Like Daisies, at Liberty of Regent Street, London.
The somewhat strange name was because John Ruskin thought that all women should "...be like daisies," and Malcolm's lecture explained just what was meant by this.
Coinciding with that lecture the public was able to look at part of this unique collection for the first time when it was entrusted to Liberty to go on display, an exhibition which attracted a more- than-average number of people through the doors.
The lecture was presented to over 250 people and some extracts from the writings and letters of Ruskin were read by Jennifer Cole, Malcolm's wife.
A press release at the time said that "...her remarkably professional delivery was doubtless first learned at Weymouth Grammar School in the fifties where she was head girl and when she played leading roles in the school's Gilbert and Sullivan productions.
"John Ruskin ...as Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford, his teaching was enormously successful in affecting male undergraduates' artistic tastes but achieved little in in terms of altering their lifestyles.
"It was at this stage that he turned to Whitelands College where its students adopted his philosophy about the need for real beauty in everyone's lives, 'even common peoples', if the world was to become a better place.
"Ruskin was deeply upset by demands for a better world being voiced by people who were not, themselves, prepared to make a personal effort to deserve a better world.
"Perhaps it was a similar message which Jenny and Malcolm Cole absorbed in their schooldays in Weymouth."
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