Marjorie Beebee (nee West) 1937-2024

After being a pupil here, Marjorie returned to LEH to teach the clarinet from the late 1970s to the 1990s, for much of that time alongside her husband Graham, who taught the piano and died in 2023. She is survived by her sister Christine, daughter Helen (themselves both LEH alumnae), and son David. Her daughter Helen Beebee, Class of 1984, has kindly sent us this tribute.

"Marjorie, my mother, died in December 2024. She attended the senior school from 1948 to 1956, where she struck up a lifelong friendship with Mary Scruton (later Leaper). She returned to LEH in the 1970s to teach the clarinet, which she continued until she retired in the 1990s.

This overlapped with my time at the school (1979-1984); much to my chagrin, she would occasionally get accosted in the staff room by my geography teacher complaining that I had ‘lost’ my geography exercise book again (this being my go-to excuse for failing to hand in my homework).

After retiring she kept in touch with the school, attending occasional alumnae events and – as a lifelong Hampton resident – bumping into ex-colleagues in the supermarket or Bushy Park or in her exercise classes.

I think it’s fair to say that Marjorie did not hugely enjoy school. She was not especially academically inclined – I rather suspect she was wilfully bad at maths just to annoy her father, whose ideas about what she ought to be doing with her time, or indeed her life, she very much did not share.

During her teenage years her passions were playing tennis, the clarinet, and ballroom dancing. Her mother Norah taught ballroom dancing classes in a converted barn that had once been owned by the actress and dancer Jessie Matthews, who lived in Hampton in the 1930s; Marjorie learned her dancing there and then taught alongside her mother.

After leaving school, Marjorie declined to attend university and instead continued her ballroom dancing teaching. She would go into London to act as one of the ‘pros’ in evening dances, which were frequented by many sons of African political elites who were studying at LSE and other London colleges; she recalled that many of the other women there did not want to dance with black men (this was the 1950s), so she would spend the evening teaching future African presidents how to foxtrot.

In the late 1950s, Marjorie trained as an exercise teacher for the Women’s League of Health and Beauty (WLHB). The WLHB had been running since the 1930s, and in its heyday was a hugely popular organisation; its members put on occasional massed displays at the Royal Albert Hall, and even Wembley Stadium. The classes focus on mobility, posture and fitness – they are considerably more sedate than aerobics and many women attend (and, in Marjorie’s case, teach) classes into their 80s – and are still going, as ‘FLexercise’.

After two years of full-time training, which included anatomy and physiology as well as various forms of dance, Marjorie taught classes in various locations. She taught a class at the Greenwood Centre in Hampton Hill (which is still going strong) from around 1990 until she retired from exercise teaching in 2019, by which time she had taught for WLHB for over 60 years.

Alongside her interest in dance and movement, Marjorie’s passion for music was growing. She met my father, Graham – who taught piano at LEH in the 80s and I think 90s – while playing in an orchestra at Morley College in Waterloo (he also played the trombone), and their married life – and my and my brother’s childhood – was a constant whirl of rehearsals, concerts and musical get-togethers. Fate delivered a cruel blow in the form of encroaching deafness, which started in Marjorie’s 40s.

She still played and listened to music for a long time after that, but with increasing frustration as the music became increasingly distorted for her. She still enjoyed watching my brother David perform in jazz gigs until relatively recently, however; seeing the musicians at close quarters and being able to hear the rhythm gave her a lot of pleasure.

Marjorie lived her entire life on the same plot of land in Hampton – first on Courtlands Avenue and then, when she got married, in a wooden bungalow that she and Graham had built at the end of the garden of her parents’ house, on Old Farm Road – which was in fact no more than a dirt track until the early 1980s.

However once my brother and I had flown the nest, and especially in her retirement, she discovered the joys of travel, and she embarked on many adventures – for example trekking in Nepal with my brother, travelling around Peru with a university friend of mine, visiting me when I was working in Australia, and visiting several countries with Chris including Cuba and India. Her travelling days came to an end when she managed to trip over in the airport in Calcutta in 2016 and had to spend several weeks in hospital there before she could be flown home.

Marjorie’s life was a life well lived. She combined a free-spirited and adventurous nature with a large dose of good common sense, pursuing her passions when she could but never at anyone else’s expense.  She was loved by her family and friends, and deeply appreciated by her very many exercise class members, clarinet pupils and fellow musicians."