Presidential profile

Chloe and Nick Bennett

SOSA Presidents
January – December 2007

Nick grew up in a Quaker home. His father went to both Sibford (1908-1911), under the headship of James Harrod, and Saffron Walden. He also had a brother at Saffron Walden for ten years. Consequently they went regularly to Parents Weekends and Old Scholar Reunions. When Nick left Sibford in 1959 having arrived in 1954 for the last years of the headship of Arthur Johnstone and the first years of Hugh Maw’s headship, he immediately joined SOSA and was pulled on to the Committee to provide a younger perspective to their deliberations. Does this sound familiar?

Chloe was born in London, the daughter of a landscape architect and a painter. She was brought up first in Oxfordshire (unfortunately her parents didn’t find Sibford and sent her to a boarding school in Buckinghamshire) and then in Edinburgh, where she lived until the mid 1990s when she moved to York to do a landscape conservation course. She met and married Nick and attended her first SOSA reunion on their honeymoon. She has regularly attended Sibford events ever since. Having worked most of her life in accountants’ offices, she now works part time as a parish clerk as well as in partnership with Nick as a bookseller.

Chloe and Nick met through their shared interest in history and archaeology in general and garden history in particular, but especially books. Their joint libraries were considerable and when Nick’s mother died they inherited her library and decided to set up a small business selling second hand books, as Nick had taken early retirement in 2004 and they had moved to Suffolk.

They are delighted to be Joint Presidents in 2007. Chloe considers it a great honour to be asked, having never been a scholar at Sibford.