Eileen Hutchins

Eileen Morley Hutchins, born 28 June 1902 in Hay-on-Wye, Herefordshire and died 9 October 1987 in Stourbridge was a Steiner school teacher, author and founder of the Elmfield Rudolf Steiner School in Stourbridge.

Together with her sister Shirley, Eileen Hutchins experienced a strict upbringing. She was a gifted child, beginning to read Scott and Dickens at the early age of 14, but it was seeing her first Shakespeare performance that became, for her, a life-changing experience. It led her to study literature at Oxford university, from which she graduated with honours and all her life she deepened her knowledge, not just of tales and legends but of all beautiful literature, including contemporary authors.

Initially she began to teach in Colwyn Bay, then moved to the Leeds High School in the 1920s, where she met Edith Rigby who introduced her to Anthroposophy and to the work of Rudolf Steiner. In November 1930 she joined the Maud Wilson Group of the Anthroposophical Society in Leeds and attended its meetings.

Meanwhile, her sister Shirley Hutchins, to whom she had a very close relationship throughout her life, had started to work at a home for children with Special Needs near Birmingham called Sunfield after the original Anthroposophical curative home, the Sonnenhof in Arlesheim near Basle, Switzerland. Fried Geuter, the founder of the home got to know of Eileen and wrote, asking if she would be willing to come to Sunfield and teach his and the other co-worker children. She began there in 1931 but soon a number of other children joined her and they needed a larger space. It was Lloyd and Theodora Wilson, Fried Geuter’s co-founder, Michael Wilson’s parents, who offered the budding school space in their home, Elmfield, in Selly Oak, Birmingham. In 1934 the school joined "The New School" as the second Rudolf Steiner school in Britain. Eileen taught first in the primary school, then later in the high school as the children grew older.

...
Wikipedia