Educational Establishments
Gloucester Rugby’s first-team training centre is located at Hartpury College where players and coaches have available two turf pitches, cross and power training gyms, a sports rehabilitation centre and a performance laboratory
Founded sixty-f
five years ago
as one of a number of county farm institutes being established to provide practical training in agriculture and food production, Hartpury College is recognised today as a centre of excellence for those looking to pursue a sports-r
related
career. Former student, Michael Bird, walks the well- tended playing surfaces laid where cows used to graze
Hartpury College
Top class surfaces - top class results
around four miles north-west of Gloucester. Their backgrounds were as varied as the
I
Hartpury College’s head of horticulture, Mark Harwood-Browne, is responsible for all of the college’s grounds
94 I PC JUNE/JULY 2014
clothes they wore. Sons of farmers, bankers, bakers and lawyers, a crop of ex-servicemen, a few looking to escape from dreary offices and one or two straight out of school. Yet, all had one thing in common; they
were the very first students to enrol at the Gloucestershire County Farm Institute, set up by the County’s Education Committee to provide full-time training in agriculture for those who would be helping meet the nation’s urgent need for home-grown food during those austere post-war years. Over the next twenty-eight years, the
t was a cold, dreary morning in October 1949 when a group of apprehensive young men gathered in the entrance hall of an imposing mansion house located near the village of Hartpury,
college’s first principal, John David Griffiths - known to all as “JD” - guided the establishment with dedication and care through many changes. Starting off with forty-four full-time male
students studying for a county certificate in agriculture, he welcomed female students in 1953, setting up separate departments for agriculture, horticulture, poultry-keeping and rural homecraft - both full and part-time. Before his retirement in the late 1970s, JD
also oversaw major building works, the acquisition of additional land and the introduction of new courses leading to a National Certificate or Diploma in Agriculture. Whilst most of the developments at Hartpury College during its first forty years were directed towards agricultural education and training, the past twenty-five have
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