The Happiest Days of Your Life 1950

In September 1949, chaos erupts when St Swithin’s Girls’ School is accidentally billeted at Nutbourne College, a boys’ school in Hampshire. Wetherby Pond, [Alastair Sim], and Muriel Whitchurch, [Margaret Rutherford], struggle to hold things together as the children and staff squeeze into newly cramped spaces, making it impossible to share dormitories or other facilities without sparks flying.

Humor also springs from the wholesale departure of Nutbourne College’s domestic staff and their hurried, not-so-effective replacements from the St Swithin’s Home Economics class, whose well-meaning lessons clash with the practicalities of running a mixed-age, mixed-gender setup.

The core tension revolves around the parents of the St Swithin’s girls, who deem the mixed environment improper, and the need to hide the fact that the school has become co-educational. Pond is openly offended by the suggestion that his boys might be unsuitable company for the girls, but he must appease Miss Whitchurch to safeguard his chances of landing a prestigious all-boys school, a position that hinges on the support of visiting governors who are connected to her.

Matters come to a head when a group of school governors from the coveted new post and the parents of some St Swithin’s pupils arrive for visits at the same time. Frantic classroom changes follow, and hockey, lacrosse, and rugby nets and posts get swapped about as staff and pupils scramble to hide the arrangement.

Two simultaneous tours are arranged: one for the girls’ parents, and a separate one for the governors, and never the twain must meet. The facade finally begins to crumble when the parents become obsessed with watching a girls’ lacrosse match at the same moment a governor is promised a rugby match, forcing everyone to improvise under pressure.

The punchline arrives with a Ministry of Schools official who, weeks too late, arrives to declare everything sorted out: “You’re a co-educational school, I believe; well I’ve arranged for another co-educational school to replace St Swithin’s next week… Oh, it appears they’re ahead of schedule.” > You’re a co-educational school, I believe; well I’ve arranged for another co-educational school to replace St Swithin’s next week… Oh, it appears they’re ahead of schedule.

The curtain falls on Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford, quietly pondering in which remote and unattractive corner of the British Empire they might best try to salvage their careers, with Miss Whitchurch mentioning a brother who “grows groundnuts in Tanganyika.”