On 22 May 1686, Lady Jane Noel (1664-1733), daughter of Edward Noel, 1st Earl of Gainsborough (1641-1689) and Lady Elizabeth Wriothesley (d.1680), married William Digby, 5th Baron Digby (1661-1752), commonly called ‘the good Lord Digby’. They had four sons and eight daughters. Lady Jane died at Sherborne on 10 September 1733, aged 69, and was buried in the Digby vault in Sherborne Abbey.
During her lifetime Lady Jane Digby set up in Sherborne a charity school for poor girls, which her husband William Lord Digby continued to maintain after her death.
On 16 September 1743, William Lord Digby granted in trust to the Master and Brethren of Sherborne Almshouse a roofless tenement (i.e. a barn) called Ashcombe with 56 acres of pasture and meadow in Caundle Marsh, the rents from which were to be used to educate and clothe thirteen poor girls of the town (aged 7-14) and to pay the salary of a schoolmistress. At the same time Lord Digby also gave a ‘newly erected dwelling house’ in Westbury (now part of the Britannia Inn) for the occupation of the schoolmistress and the school. On leaving the school every girl was given a Bible, a Book of Common Prayer, and a copy of a pious work entitled The Whole Duty of Man.
Lord Digby said ‘he intended this benefaction as a tacit compliment to the memory of his lady.’ (Hutchins History of Dorset (1870), vol.4, p.294).
The school, which became known as Lord Digby’s School, had a number of homes over the years. From 1743 to 1887 and 1892 to 1898 it was located at Foundation House in Westbury (now the Britannia Inn), and from 1887 to 1892 at Westbury House (now Wessex House). In 1898, the School relocated to a property in Newland formerly occupied by St Swithin’s Laundry (now the site of Waitrose car park), where it remained until 1931 when it moved across the road to Sherborne House (now The Sherborne).
Lord Digby’s School remained at Sherborne House until 1992 when it was amalgamated with Foster’s School and St Aldhelm’s School to create the Gryphon School.
Headmistresses of Lord Digby’s School
(?) Mary Gaylard
1770 Mary Bishop
1770 Frances Soper
1774 Eleanor Gaylard
1808 Ann Longman
1812 Ann Noake (1770-1864)
1851 Sophia Jane Hughes (1818-1880)
1855 Theodosia Thomas
1856 Priscilla Brett (c.1815-1867)
1867 Mrs Mary Kenerston (née Noel) (1839-1896)
1885 Harriet Sophie Clarke (1846-1926)
1905 Susie Ellen Duxfield (1883-1962
1911 Ellen Ida Pearson (1879-1955)
1917 Margaret Millicent Billinger (1883-1942)
1942 Helen Cecilia Thomson (1902-1996)
1967 Mrs Monica Jane Fellowes Ditmas (née Richardson) (b.1924)
1979 Shelagh Mary Hill
Rachel Hassall
Further reading:
Barbara Elsmore (ed.), Looking Back at Lord Digby’s School (Lord Digby’s School Old Girls’ Society in association with Sherborne Museum, 2014)
Shelagh M. Hill, Sherborne House and its people (Dorchester, 1996)
H.C. Thomson, Lord Digby’s School: Some Aspects of Its History (The Abbey Press, Sherborne, 1969)
Friends of Sherborne House, ‘Short History’ (accessed 12 August 2024)
See also: