They were the hell-raising, out-of-control girls who drank, smoked and gambled their way through a totalitarian boarding school while wreaking as much havoc as possible.
St Trinian’s became shorthand for disorderly conduct across the country, but the fictional school’s roots are far closer to home.
Ronald Searle’s iconic comic strip, which depicted scenes of mayhem from Joyce Grenfell and co. far removed from the inward institutions often described in literature, took its name from an Edinburgh school which experimented with educational methods considered groundbreaking for the time.
READ MORE - 31 retro Edinburgh signs that will give you a serious nostalgia overload
In its 24-year stint between 1922 and 1946, St Trinian's was renowned for its absolute dedication to the ‘Dalton Plan’ adopted by founder Catherine Fraser Lee.
It left a lasting impression on popular culture - one its headmistress was never entirely comfortable with admitting.
A full 19 years before Searle initially put pen to paper on his first St Trinian’s drawing, the original was welcoming its first pupils through the doors at Palmerston Road in the Grange from as far afield as South Africa and the United States.
Demand quickly forced the need for a larger premises in the city centre and within three years the school had relocated to the former St Leonard’s mansion boasting a roll of nearly 200 pupils.
Searle’s connection did not arrive until after the outbreak of the Second World War and in far more genteel surroundings. While he would spend part of the conflict as a prisoner of war, he was initially stationed in Kirkcudbright.
Visiting the artists’ community that had sprung up in the village, Searle became friends with the Johnston family and was quickly fascinated by their daughters Cécilé and Pat’s burning desire to return to school.
Pupils had been evacuated from Edinburgh to the countryside two years earlier, with teachers setting up shop in Galashiels.
Intrigued by the supposedly ‘cutting edge’ methods, Searle was inspired to sketch a version in which the pupils lived and ‘learned’ in lawless surroundings - at one stage even conniving to blow up the institution.
But while their literary equivalents caused chaos across a fictional slice of Oxfordshire, the Edinburgh belles were being exposed to their own brand of outlandish education in the form of ‘innovative’ measures.
One article reported how pupils would often ‘dance to music on the lawns while memorising facts and figures’ while teachers carried out such radical experiments as making students eat meals in reverse order - from pudding to starter.
Not quite the flour-strafed antics depicted in Searle’s comics then, but there were parallels between fiction and reality. The Dalton method effectively gave pupils carte blanche to study what they wished with no homework and preached ‘self-discipline,’ though failure to adhere to that tenet was often met with swift reprisal.
Searle based much of the brutal punishment at the hands of Trinian’s teachers on his experiences as an allied prisoner of war working on the Burma railways, however as one former pupil described, Miss Fraser Lee could be as ruthless in her sanctions for misbehaviour.
"It was always freezing cold and coldness seemed to be regarded as an aid to learning," recalled Helen Lillie, who attended the school, in 2002.
"Miss Fraser Lee was as implacable a dictator as any in Europe in the 1930s."
The setting shifted closer to home for Searle after the war, with the actual building based on two in his native Cambridge, however the St Trinian’s name remained for the production of a series of films based on the comic strip.
Not that it passed without incident. A newspaper advert for the 1955 pupil reunion at the original St Trinian's confused the name with its fictional cousin, causing Fraser Lee to claim she was “broken hearted” at the comparison.
Searle’s cartoons had yet to catch fire by the time the school closed in 1946, however they were just months away from becoming a cult classic which endured in popularity throughout several generations. A 2007 film reboot starring the likes of Gemma Arterton, Lena Hadley, Talulah Riley, Jodie Whittaker and Colin Firth was not universally well received by critics, but remains one of the highest grossing British independent films of the modern era.
The St Leonard’s building was absorbed into the University of Edinburgh’s Pollock Halls complex later in the 20th century and formed part of the athlete’s village for the 1970 Commonwealth Games, but its hidden claim to fame remains.
READ NEXT:
All the Edinburgh pubs and restaurants that we've sadly lost this year
'We were past 12 weeks so thought we were OK, then our lives were torn apart'
Midlothian rapist Sean Hogg changes name and identity after walking free from court
West Lothian mum-of-three jailed after uncle catches her stealing from her dad
Beautiful Edinburgh mews apartment with quaint features now on the market
