There will be a decidedly softer presence at Queen Victoria School this year, writes

George Hume, as the first girls prepare to take their place.

IT HAS taken 88 years and cost a million pounds but today 41 girls will go where no girls have gone before. They will dress in the scarlet tunics of Queen Victoria's soldiers, sit down to their school books in the Jam Factory and provide a challenge for the lads.

The Queen Victoria School at Dunblane, a bastion of male isolation, will never be the same again. Built as a practical memorial to the dead of the Boer Wars, intended to cater for the orphan sons of Scottish soldiers, it has ever since been for boys only.

Times, however, have changed, and equal opportunities will take their place in class when Girl 4515, Tammy Allan, turns up for the start of the new session at the Jam Factory, so called by King Edward VII when he officially opened the first bleak block in 1908.

QVS will at long last have done the unthinkable and gone co-ed. Boys and girls, brothers and sisters, will study together, learn their grace notes side by side under the keen care of the Pipe Major and jointly take

a stronghold of tradition into the future.

Headmaster Brian Raine has no doubt about the benefits of having girls in the school. ``Co-education is the best of both worlds . . . it is the most sensible and effective form of education.

``There are equal opportunities in the armed forces now, and we have been coming under parental pressure to provide for daughters as well as sons. Co-education keeps families together - it is absolutely the right thing to do.''

Queen Victoria School was, in every sense, built by the

people of Scotland. Public subscription put the buildings up - the entire staff of the Caledonian Railway Company, for example, gave a day's pay - and generous gifts such as the swimming pool, courtesy Pullars of Perth, made it one of the best-equipped schools in the country.

As a mark of how their school came into being, QVS boys to this day wear uniform identical to that of their forebears when they fell to the bullets of the Boer . . . their backs to the veldt and their face to the foe, as it is recorded on a war memorial.

For ceremonial occasions, and there are not a few of these at QVS, the girls will turn out, like the boys, in the No 1 uniform used by the army before 1914: scarlet tunic with hook and eye collar, Glengarry, kilt - kilted skirt in the case of the girls - and hose.

Off-parade clothing is uniform, but less formal and the quasi-military aspects of life at QVS have in recent years faded almost out of sight. Even the khaki cavalry capes issued to the boys to serve as topcoats have, at last, been given their marching orders.

The ethos of the school, says Raine, is now just like that of any boarding school without military links, although QVS, he claims, is enhanced by tradition and ceremony. Even before the arrival of the girls, the school is undoubtedly a softer, more caring institution than it was when handkerchiefs sewn over cardboard squares were kept pristine for inspection parade.

Once unthinkable, almost as many teddy bears as boys now bed down in the junior house and green-painted kit boxes, once trimmed at bed ends to the accuracy of an RSM's whisker, have gone back to the Quarter Master's stores. Also gone are the days of teachers' bat boys. Despite high-pitched voices and sometimes sticking-out ears, these boys had not travelled from Transylvania to roost in Dunblane, but were just ordinary 10-year-olds whose duty it was, for a shilling a week, to clean Sir's shoes and make his bed.

As for the white tiles and brown-paint decor which reminded one member of staff of an inverted Black Forest gateau - well, King Edward VII would not now recognise the place. Boys still write to their parents but it is some 30 years since the following went out: ``Dear Mum. If you don't come and get my by five o'clock on Thursday I shall kill my-self. I shall take poison. Good-bye, Alastair. PS And I've got some.'' So ``civilian'' is QVS that it no longer has a Commandant, having been turned into a Government Agency four years ago. This makes Raine not only headmaster but chief executive as well, the income needed to run the school

coming from the Ministry

of Defence.

Says Raine: ``QVS exists to provide stable and uninterrupted education for the children of service personnel. Our royal warrant puts our first priority as compassionate cases and cases of need and that remains so today.''

The original rules of admission have been broadened to cover the children of personnel in all three armed forces, and the requirement for at least one parent to be Scottish has been dropped. It is sufficient for the father or mother of a prospective pupil to have served, or be serving, in Scotland.

Some of the girls coming to the school next session have suffered a succession of school moves . . . in one case 13. At QVS they will be able to settle down and continue their education no matter where their father or mother is posted or how often.

Alice Hainey, assistant head teacher, says the boys will benefit too. ``The girls will have a good socialising effect, soften the macho atmosphere of an all boys school, and because girls work harder and steadier that should prove a challenge to the boys and bring them on.''

Preparations for the girls have involved the conversion of one house and the building of an extension for bedrooms, total cost some #1m. The girls range in age from 11 to 17 and some have brothers in the school already.

The first girl to register at QVS - from the start each pupil has been numbered and Tammy Allan brings the count to 4515 - is making it a family affair. One brother has already passed through QVS and a second is still there.

Hockey and netball will provide new opportunities for QVS pupils to add to the school's score of cups, and every girl, as every boy, will have an opportunity to try piping, drumming, or dancing before opting for their choice.

Already the odds are being calculated of a girl leading the school's pipes and drums for their traditional performances at Murrayfield rugby internationals, an occasion that would justify even more than the usual bags of swank.

A girl pipe major at QVS - now that would be the stuff of history. At such an occasion Queen Victoria, one imagines, would be amused.