In 1940 Greenways Preparatory School was evacuated from Bognor Regis, Sussex to Ashton Gifford House, and the property became a school. The poet Adrian Mitchell attending the school (which was run by Vivien Hancock, a friend of his mother) during the 1940s. The poet Siegfried Sassoon's son, George, also attended Greenways in the mid-1940s. The school was a conveniently short distance from Heytesbury, where Sassoon lived. Siegried Sassoon was a close friend of Vivien Hancock (giving her a present of a horse when her own died). Sassoon's wife, Hester, accused Sassoon and Hancock of being "too close" in 1945, and Vivien Hancock eventually threatened legal action against her. Vivien's own son, Anthony, was killed (aged 21) in 1945 on the Western Front in France. When Vivien Hancock needed money to purchase the school outright, it was Sassoon who lent her the £8,000 she required (and who then waived the low rate of interest when Vivien Hancock had difficulty meeting it). The politician and author Ferdinand Mount was briefly a student at Greenways in the 1950s.