St Edward's, 150 Years

Introduction

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

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