David Dean OBE
Founder Principal, Raddery School 1978 to 1995

By chance I came upon George Ripley in 1978. Within a couple of hours I also met Frances as we three drank tea together in their Pineridge home at the Findhorn Foundation. I had gravitated towards the Foundation shortly after Valery and I had lost our first child, Jennifer Else, to cancer aged two and a half years. George, with Frances, was to become an uplifting and visionary influence over almost the rest of their lives on what was to happen next for us and, by extension, many others. Over their twenty plus years of service to the new Raddery School for children with special needs, at Fortrose on the Black Isle, George attended faultlessly every single Council Meeting, three times a year together with each public event involving children, their parents and/or carers and the Raddery team. Beyond that, with his imagination, experience and flair, George was ever available to me personally when I found it a boon to be able to sound him out on one issue or another. He was forever consistent in the warmth and love with which his showed his deep care for our community.

By the time I walked into the new Universal Hall where George and Lyle Schnadt were on hand to explain to interested visitors just how this innovative building had been devised and put together, we recently bereaved parents had been through the mill. At the same time, we had also had our eyes opened just enough to let us into a world and a way of thinking beyond the confines of our traditional Scottish and English Christian thinking. In Edinburgh, where Jennifer died, we were, for many weeks, supported and enabled to care for her by a healer. The concept we struggled with to begin with and yet, in our growing less than enamoured by the culture of meeting special educational needs in a residential setting for boys in North Wales, which was my work at the time, that overall experience guided us first to George and Frances and through them to a number of extraordinarily gifted and welcoming individuals within the Foundation itself.

Raddery School official opening Sept 1979 photo David Dean

Raddery School official opening Sept 1979

We founded Raddery School a year later. It was to be a giant step away from the traditional often underwhelming and containing near countrywide ‘special school’ culture of the day and aim directly towards being home to boys and girls whose own home and school circumstances coupled with their emotional, behavioural and sometimes, learning difficulties were of such an order that mainstream schooling was deemed by the authorities not a suitable option. Over the years and with the understanding and strong support of George, Frances, and our carefully assembled group of Trustees and Council Members the staff team at Raddery embraced the ideals of a ‘therapeutic environment’ which aimed to stimulate in children, skills they hardly knew they were capable of, compassion, formal and informal learning, adventure, resilience and a belief in themselves.

As the embryonic team in 1978/79 restored the neglected Raddery House on the Black Isle, George’s energy and physical presence, together with Frances, saw him, paintbrush in hand, flowing with his unique perceptions, or ‘take on life’ if you will, suggestions and names of contacts by the score who could assist us in the unstoppable move towards the day when the first ten children would arrive. George negotiated the manufacture, at the Foundation, of five dining tables cum settles or seats, imaginatively designed from the prototype made by Valery’s father, John Fleming.

The whole school community met each morning in our Meeting House. It was our ‘spiritual start to the day’ – very rooted to where the children were and where we grounded ourselves before lessons started.  The picture on the left shows our Sunrise Panel, woven by the same craftspeople who made the one for the Findhorn Sanctuary. Below you can see several different meetings, each held in its own carefully constructed room setting, allowed for a healthy mix of solemnity and ‘fun stuff’.

George introduced us to Rudi Beckemer who, as a skilled colour therapist, came up with the integrated design scheme for each room in the house and to Barbara D’Arcy-Thomson who invited Valery to work with her on making available to the new school her deep knowledge of flower remedies. And through Barbara to Gaston St. Pierre and the Metamorphic Technique foot massage practice which, for years, was a weekly feature of our Friday nights gathered around the common room fire. Through George again we were befriended by his wise close friend, Albert Harloff and at Johnstripe, the Ripley home, for a while, high on the moors, Peter Caddy. In 1994, Eileen too, through George, played a significant role in helping us respond to our growing feelings that we should be withdrawing from our decade and a half, deeply involved in Raddery. Of long term significance for me has been my contact again via George, with the unstoppable Liza Hollingshead and Ecologia. For through Liza I met the irrepressible, child centred, Madge Bray and the therapeutically gifted Beverley A’Court both of whose work chimed with our own. At approximately the same time as these notable women I made my first professional foray into Gorbachev’s Russia, shortly to be Yeltsin’s and then, the rest is still unfolding. Even after we did leave Raddery some eighteen months later, George and Frances continued as Council Members and were prepared to go public when they felt the school was straying from its mandate and ethos.

The images above give a taste of the activities at Raddery School.

After years of visiting one another in their different homes and ours too, Valery and I last saw George on the three occasions when we visited him at The Grove Care Home in Elgin. On the first visit, he was able to spot, by the town’s duck pond and with some delight, an ice cream van at over one hundred yards.

As Godfather to our daughter, Polly who thought the world of him, George demonstrated that gentle, considerate humour, delivered, as with many of his pronouncements, whether in School Council Meetings, or a family occasion with us or explaining his response to a recent reading he and others had engaged in with ‘A Course Of Miracles’, in his deep, sonorous voice reminiscent, he felt, of the recorded sound produced by the celebrated Russian bass singer, Rebrov whom he greatly admired and could be found singing lustily alongside.

George looked you straight in the eye. In our association together at Raddery, he never avoided the difficult questions, of which, in that work, there were many. In Council Meetings particularly, the uniquely, uplifting ‘Georgian’ contributions to the matter in hand, jumping a horizon or two if appropriate, seemed to hit the spot. Valery and I owe George a very deep appreciation and feel the better for having had him walk beside us. Significantly too, in committing himself to the Raddery cause, few may realise what a great ambassador for the Findhorn Foundation he was.

David Dean OBE
Founder Principal, Raddery School 1978 to 1995

(All photos by David Dean)