St Augustine's Girls' School magazine was published annually from 1925 to at least 1930. Each issue provided a review of the previous year in school by the headmistress, the names of head girls and teaching staff, lists of sporting achievements, debating topics, school outings and examples of the girls' creative writing.
The first issue, published in 1925, had a foreword by the Norfolk writer Lilias Rider Haggard, daughter of the novelist Sir Henry Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon's Mines. She wrote:
I have been asked to write a foreword to your first Magazine. I wish every success to it and its Mother, St. Augustine's School. I hope this number may be the first of many and that the Magazine may prove a true bond of interest between pupils and mistresses - a record of work and play, events happy and sad, and the thoughts and aspirations of many of you; that is the real vocation of a school magazine. I was impressed by your motto - "All my Ideals are fashioning me." An Ideal is not a thing you can see or touch - nor buy with money - yet it is a precious possession, a great aim in your life, which leads you alwys onwards - to better and higher things. All the women in the world's history who have done noble things, have had great Ideals, and have achieved the work of their lives through them. Joan of Arc who strove to rid her beloved France of her enemies and set her high above war, suffereing, and poverty, Florence Nightingale who worked under terrible conditions nursing the wounded soldiers, and the heroines of your own particular county, Elizabeth Fry and Nurse Cavell. Ideals never fail you. Success. Possessions, Riches, all looking so wonderful, may, as you grow older, turn to dust in your hands. The girl who strives unswervingly to live up to an Ideal, will always have that inner happiness which comes from the knowledge she has always done her best, than which no one can do more.
L. RIDER HAGGARD.
Ditchingham, March 27th, 1925.
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