It is a matter of historical record that Durham School has been, for much of its 600-year history, a boarding school meant exclusively for boys. Co-educational boarding was only made possible in 1985, with the opening of Pimlico House, soon to be followed by MacLeod House in 2005. While this was the first time girls were permitted into Durham School, our sister preparatory organisation Bow School allowed a female boarder over seventy years prior. 

Kathleen Ida Primrose Gordon Davies (1902-1956) known to the students of Bow simply as 'Primrose', was the niece of George Shafto Legard (1874-1924), a former Bowite who spent twenty-eight years on the school's staff, eventually becoming headmaster in 1917. The Legards were a wealthy family of Yorkshire baronets, while George Legard's mother, Frances Shafto, was a direct descendent of the 'Bobby Shafto' from the famous ballad. Before marrying into the Legard family, Frances Shafto had been married to Major John Coates, having a child, Blanche Davies, with him. Primrose was in turn the daughter of Blanche.

As relatives of George Shafto Legard, Blanche and Primrose Davies lived on the Bow School site. Normally, any female students would have attended the Durham High School for Girls, but Primrose was particularly insistent that she be allowed to attend Bow. According to her elder sister, Mrs Dorothy 'Diddie' Johnson, she was "reduced to tears at the prospect of leaving home to become a boarder". Having made her case, she entered Bow School in 1910, joining her brother, Vivian Gordon Davies, who was at the school from 1906 to 1912.

Primrose (pictured above) was an active, sporty girl, and during the five years she spent at Bow she participated in a number of sporting activities. During the annual Athletic Sports events, she won the 220 yards handicap two years in a row, beating Sir Gilbert Longden, a future Tory politician, in these competitions as well as in the 1913 100 yards handicap. C.D. Watkinson's Bow School 1885-1985: A Centenary Record (1986) records the testimony of an anonymous Old Bowite who had a good deal of fondness for the young student: "She was the loveliest person I have ever known, my darlin' Primrose." 

She graduated from Bow School to the Durham High School for Girls in 1915, retaining her enthusiasm for sport. She was a member of the tennis and hockey County Durham teams in 1922, and owned a motor bike which she frequently used. She returned to the school ten years after she left it, participating in the Old Bowite Race of 1925; naturally, she won. On her wedding day in August 1925, the guard of honour was the Bow School Cadet Corps. 

The story of Primrose disproves the long-held assumption that the Edwardian boy's school system was sharply divided from the girls' school system; while it was unusual, there was precedent for this early intermixing. Singularly, Bow School would later welcome another female student into its walls, with Headmaster Geoffrey la Trobe Foster's daughter, Gillian Foster, joining the school in 1934.