Ladycross School

The school was founded in 1891 by Alfred Roper, who later passed it onto his son Tony Roper. Tony Roper had no descendants and in the early 1950s, as he became more elderly, he sought a successor as owner and headmaster from among the parents of children at the school. The only parent interested was Michael Feeny who was a descendant of a Birmingham Catholic family and who had one son at the school at the time. As a school teacher and classicist himself, Feeny had experience in the education business, and ran the school over the next quarter century in conjunction with long-serving staff members. Approaching retirement in the early 1970s at a time when private education appeared under…