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With forty years service, Graham Person, Head Groundsman at Summer Fields School in Oxford, still has a twinkle in his eyes.
Tom James reports
any of our nation's greatest politicians, actors and sportsmen found their calling while attending some of Britain's finest
educational institutions. The wealth of facilities at their disposal and a willingness to continue investing have helped ensure parents across the generations remain as determined as ever to give their children the best possible chance to hone their early development, before moving on to greatness and acclaim. Summer Fields, a Preparatory School in North Oxford, is one such institution, and can boast a long and illustrious list of ‘Old Summerfieldians’ in its 157-year history, such as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (his grandson is the current headmaster) to famed Hollywood actor Christopher Lee and co-star of The Avengers, Patrick Macnee. The boarding and day preparatory school was founded in 1864 and established to offer the highest standard of education for boys aged seven to 13. It takes a full tour of the grounds to
reveal the extent of Summer Fields seventy acre estate - land that had for most of the school’s earlier history been run as a farm by owner and founder Archibald Maclaren, a fencing master who ran a gymnasium in Oxford, and
his wife Gertrude, a fine Classical scholar and gifted teacher. The school took its first steps into education in 1863 when Charles William Shirley Brooks, the soon-to-be editor of Punch, asked the couple to educate his sons. The school remained in the Maclaren family for seventy-five years before benefactors, John Evans and Geoffrey Bolton, assumed control in 1939, forming Summer Fields into a charitable trust in 1955, with a board of governors that included Harold Macmillan. Nigel Talbot Rice became headmaster in 1975 and the school embarked on a major extension of its facilities stretching over two decades. A series of capital campaigns enabled it to launch an ambitious building programme and the tradition of investment has remained the core vision of succeeding headmasters, and lives on today as the school invests in another major improvement of and addition to its outdoor sports provision. Summer Fields has long supported
and promoted sport, reflected appropriately in the school motto, ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’ - ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’, which also echoes the sentiments of the Maclaren founders, who were both keen sports enthusiasts.
The Person-al Approach...
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