Watling Street has a long history and is a popular local school. Imagery from Bing! Maps.
Right – here’s something I’ve been wanting to feature here for a while, but have been having trouble getting my hands on, as finding a copy of ‘Memories of Watling Street School 125 Year Anniversary 1878-2003’ by Jan Farrow is rather hard.
Thankfully, due to some legwork by a couple of contacts, I can present the following complete, scanned copy of the 100 page, A4 sized work in electronic format for all to download and peruse.
The book was produced by the school 13 years ago as a limited run of hand-bound booklets, which seem to have been either laser printed of photocopied. The version presented here was scanned by friend of the blog Richard Burnell after being lent a copy, for which I’m very grateful indeed. Note the text in the scanned version is searchable.
It’s a wonderfully competent work, as one would expect from a top local historian like Jan Farrow; but I didn’t expect it to be as lively and engaging as it is. It’s beautifully arranged and presented, with a constantly varying range of content and is much better than these things generally tend to be. It’s a highly professional book, and it’s sad that up until now, it’s not been more widely available.
I know a few of you were after a copy, so here you go.
I’ve posted the first 20 pages in a gallery below, but there are nearly a hundred in the full work which can be downloaded at this link – it’s a necessarily large file, so be patient if on a slow connection.
Memories of Watling Street School 125 Year Anniversary PDF format – 56 megabytes
There’s a huge range of stuff in here, and I hope some of it might spark discussion: if you have anything to say, please feel free to comment or mail me on BrownhillsBob at Googlemail dot com. Thanks!
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