Jolly Hockey Sticks

Image: © A J Paxton Taken: 17 Sep 2022

No. 1, the Quadrant, bears two black plaques. The first reads: The Quadrant. Built circa 1860. Coventry's finest example of terraced housing for the prosperous middle-classes of that era. The neo-classic terrace is built in six individual sections each with its own variations in design. The second reads: Angela Brazil Children's Writer Lived and worked here 1911-1947 The Quadrant is a very striking row of mid-Victorian town houses in a city centre which has very few large Victorian buildings. The Brazil plaque was placed on no. 1 in 1999. Angela Brazil was a very successful and influential writer of boarding school stories for girls. A Lancashire woman, she settled in Coventry in 1911 and lived in this house with her brother and sister until her death. She was a well-known figure in the city, active in local charity work, the study of local history and the preservation of historic monuments. She refused to move out during the second world war. The Quadrant survived the air raids, but much of the surrounding area was destroyed; no. 1 stands opposite Greyfriars church, which was bombed in 1941. See Wikipedia on Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Brazil , also this article from the Coventry Evening Telegraph reproduced here https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Harking+back+to+author%27s+%27jollies%27+PARTY+GUESTS+OF+50+YEARS+AGO...-a060233071 . The expression 'jolly hockey sticks', associated in Britain with stories about private girls' schools, does not appear to have been used by Brazil, but became current in the 1950s and 1960s, when the genre was in decline and being widely parodied. See this discussion at the Oxford English Dictionary site https://public.oed.com/appeals/jolly-hockey-sticks/ and this entry on Jem Bloomfield's blog quiteirregular https://quiteirregular.wordpress.com/2015/09/14/jolly-hockey-sticks-the-decline-of-british-schoolgirl-fiction/ .

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