President |
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PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
At Speech Day in early July, the Caterham School audience heard Dr David Starkey’s remarkable comparison of the education of the young Henry VIII and the modern curriculum, and witnessed the pride of the school in the successes of its latest generation of leavers. A few weeks later we heard that, once again, these pupils achieved outstandingly good results in their A and AS levels. Congratulations to you all – the newest recruits to the Old Caterhamians Association. We look forward to welcoming you to our events, and hearing your news as you go on to build careers on the foundation of your Caterham education.
Between these two events I had the privilege of accompanying a group of Caterham students to Tanzania, on the third visit to Lerang’wa Primary School, with which our school has a now strong link. After our warm welcome we settled down to a week of lessons and sport with the Tanzanian children. I am no teacher (or sports player), but stood in for a few a periods with Standard Seven, the final primary year. The children are 14-15 and working for their exams that will hopefully take them through to secondary school. What was impressive was their keenness to benefit from education, with almost all of them hoping to go on to secondary school and expressing high ambitions for their future.
I learnt a lot on the trip, and gained many insights into life of people in the African bush – and into the lives of British teenagers. For both, communication is key: the African kids all wanted my mobile phone number, the Caterham contingent more about their Facebook contacts. I have had a Facebook profile for some time, and check it in a desultory sort of way, but for others it seems to be something of a modus vivendi. There is no doubt, however, about its power to keep people in contact with each other, and to enable friendships to be rekindled.
A striking example of this came a couple of weeks ago, when one Chris Curtis sent me a ‘friends’ request. I had known a Chris Curtis at school, but had had no contact since leaving: there was no picture and I thought there had been a mistake. But there hadn’t been, and in consequence I’m back in touch with Chris, and indeed a number of other former friends and acquaintances from school days. As the School’s Bicentennial approaches, when all Old Caterhamians will be invited to join in the celebrations, whether members of the OCA or not, such networking facilities are going to be of great value in bringing the community together.
The biggest annual occasion in the Old Caterhamian calendar comes in November, when we gather on Remembrance Sunday to commemorate those who have fallen for our country. Much of the time one feels a sort of remote sadness on such occasions, for the tragedy and waste of war: most of those we commemorate are, to most of us, nothing more than a carved name. Last Sunday, taking a circuitous route through London to avoid getting to a party too early, I found myself behind the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and noticed a memorial I hadn’t seen before. It is to the victims of the Bali bombing of 12 October 2002 and it includes the name Douglas Warner, aged 35. Dougie Warner was my exact contemporary at Caterham, and although we were not close, we were classmates in David Rogers’ D set maths (along, indeed, with the aforementioned Chris Curtis). Here, at last, was a carved name that really meant something.
All
enquiries to: OCA Administration, Alina Rennie