School rolling back the years for milestone

Taken from: North Norfolk News, Thursday, December 3, 2009.
By Richard Batson
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Photo from EDP24

The years, and the fashions that went with them, were back at Cromer High School this week as it celebrated its 60th anniversary.

A week of events to mark the milestone kicked off with the staff and students dressed up in clothes from the decades since the school was founded at the end of the 1940's.

There were wartime evacuees, Fifties rock and rollers, Sixties hippies, Seventies glam rockers and Eighties new romantics.

The school was Norfolk's first of a new wave of "secondary moderns" when it opened under head Barrington Boyce in September 1949.

Education minister George Tomlinson attended the official opening in December 1949, telling everyone that  the school was lucky to be finished before cutbacks removed some of the frills with future building in a "somewhat less elaborate form."

School scrapbooks, kept in order by former Religious Studies teacher Peter Bower, give a snapshot of events and achievements over its 60 years.

Clippings from the 1950s show a boys' gymnastics team with short back and sides haircuts and snake belts holding up their shorts as they prepare to do military style precision routines.

In 1961 the school won a Norfolk tennis competition, triumphing in the Stevenson Cup at only the second attempt.

The following decade saw the end of an era in Cromer as long-serving headteacher Alec Gray retired after 22 years at the helm, bowing out in December 1978.

A new music and drama centre was opened by well known singer and broadcaster Ian Wallace in 1988, and two years earlier 15-year-old Southrepps pupil Cassandra Rowlands' award-winning singing voice won her the lead role in a musical Little Mary Sunshine in Norwich and a place on the TV talent show New Faces.

In 1992 the school switched to grant maintained status to get more budget freedom and, after months of wrangling, a solution was found to finding a site on the field for a new $1.4m junior school.

Now a specialist language college, it has links with Cromer's twin towns of Crest in France and Nidda in Germany, along with a school in Shanghai, China with a party of students due to visit there in 2010.

Yesterday former pupils and staff headed back to the school for an open day, which included a morning of seeing memorabilia and attending lessons.

Speaking ahead of the event, current head Glyn Hambling, the sixth in its 60 years, who took over in September 2007, said visitors would be able to reminisce about their Cromer High experiences.

He said: "For many it will be an emotional time. They will have very, very fond memories of the school.

"This week is about celebrating the impact, the support and success the school has achieved over a number of years.

"It's also for the students to reflect on the heritage and history of the school. They are the people making the new history."