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Introduction
T
his book is about the School that I have come to know
very well as I have worked here since the early 1990s.
I lived locally long before I came to work here and
have been friends with many parents whose children have
gone through the School, have taught many pupils and come
to know many teachers whose company I have enjoyed in
what has always been a welcoming and entertaining Common
Room. I have given lectures about the School’s architecture and
have found out a great deal about it on the way. However, until
September of last year I must admit that I had never thought of
trying to provide a portrait of the School, largely in photographs,
in the form of a book.
I have seen other such books and have felt they often fell short
of getting to the heart of the institution they were trying to reflect
and tended to concentrate too much on smiling faces without
context, or perhaps just looked like an almost cynical compilation
of commissioned photographs – more like a prospectus than a
portrait and giving a somewhat artificial impression. I did not
want this for our School when I started work but it was not easy
to decide how to show all the facets of somewhere I was very
familiar with but of which I found I knew very little indeed in
terms of its history and the changes it has seen over its 150 years.
I have explored the Archive as much as time has
allowed, and exploited the Archivist (Chris Nathan) in a most
unreasonable way! I would like to thank Chris and Derek
Roe (Governor and OSE) as both have helped me in very
important ways. I have involved many teachers and others
by asking them to provide me with material as I wanted it
to be a book reflecting the whole community in its 150th
year. I have asked professional photographers to take some
specific pictures to augment the offerings of individuals and
older material, I hope without swamping it. I have included,
wherever possible, quotes from OSE (though I would have
liked to have had time to find many more as they have been
so interesting). In some ways, the book is a patchwork quilt of
material, both in its photography and writing, and cannot be
read with the expectation that it will be either comprehensive
or that the different styles of the contributors will not be
apparent. My aim has been to show a modern school with
character and many, many facets on the academic, sporting/
outdoors, and performing fronts. I have tried to connect this
present School with its history without getting mired in the
huge amount of information available and to make a visual
portrait without too much text. I hope that it will be a portrait
recognised equally by those at the School now and those who
left, perhaps a long time ago.
In all this, I might well have failed. I know that there
will be those who feel that I have left out many things that
I ought to have put in. Ultimately I hope that, despite such
weaknesses, everyone reading it will find photographs and
passages of text that tell stories to hold their interest. Most of
all I hope that the pictures are interesting, sometimes fun, and
often fascinating. My final hope is that everyone who opens
the book can recognise the School they know in the pictures
that have been chosen.
It is a story that carries us from small and unregulated
beginnings in limited premises without many rules or
expectations on the part of parents, except perhaps regarding
religious education and harsh discipline, to the co-ed school
that we know with its 12 Houses, each with its own character,
and high expectations from parents, teachers and pupils alike.
Nicola Hunter
Deputy Academic Director
INTRODUCTION