Eileen Morley Hutchins, born 28 June 1902 in Hay-on-Wye, Herefordshire and died 9 October 1987 in Stourbridge was a Steiner school teacher, author and founder of the Elmfield Rudolf Steiner School in Stourbridge.
Education
lieutenant led her to study literature at Oxford university, from which she graduated with honours and all her life she deepened her knowledge, not just of tales and legends but of all beautiful literature, including contemporary authors. In November 1930 she joined the Maud Wilson Group of the Anthroposophical Society in Leeds and attended its meetings
Career
She was a gifted child, beginning to read Scott and Dickens at the early age of 14, but it was seeing her first Shakespeare performance that became, for her, a life-changing experience. She began there in 1931 but soon a number of other children joined her and they needed a larger space. In 1934 the school joined “The New School” as the second Rudolf Steiner school in Britain.
Eileen taught first in the primary school, then later in the high school as the children grew older.
During the War years it was not possible to keep the school open in Birmingham, so space was made for the children in the village of Clent, to which Sunfield Homes had long since moved. Some months later, apart from a nursery school where Eileen taught, the school remained closed.
At the end of the war, Eileen Hutchins’ father bought a house for Elmfield in Park Hill, on the outskirts of Stourbridge, so Eileen was able to re-found the school, now as a day school. Despite growing blindness and deafness as she grew older, Eileen Hutchins continued to direct the school until 1984 and also played a carrying role within the countrywide Steiner schools movement.
She was a born storyteller, wrote poems and plays, commentaries and handbooks on Waldorf education, translated the German poet Novalis and lectured both in the United Kingdom and abroad.
She spent the last three years of her life quite content in a nursing home and died at the age of 85.