Spectrum - 1965 - Southgate County School

headmaster, succeeding Mr. Auger in 1945. He was the
brilliant producer of all the G. & S. operas throughout
the years, as well as the founder of the foreign holiday
visits, a first rate scholar, a teacher of abounding energy,
and a man well able to second Mr. Auger when his
illness troubled hard. He was succeeded by another
forceful disciplinarian and warm-hearted mathematician,
Mr. Johnston (from 1929), who has firmly led the
school in more relaxing times and inspired co-operation
by example and goodwill.
subjects in earlier years and he enabled a wider range of
sixth form studies, encouraging general studies alongside
these. Parents Days in their present form were his
innovation, as well as the split of the Eistedfood into
separate House Music and Drama Festivals, and the
strength of the present library. For this the school was
fortunate in 1958 to tie for first place in the Lord Mayor's
Show Essay Competition out of 5,741 entries and so
be presented with a complete set of Encyclopaedia
Britannica.
The School team in 1915
The change in buildings brought the end of the
physical links too. Cold, dark, traditional, central Fox
Lane with huts, canteen and trees was left for the inaccessible
barren plain of Sussex Way, all glass, light,
heat, sun and new potential. Only the War Memorial
remains from the old buildings and metamorphosed
traditions fitted to an age of new bureaucratic education
tied so closely to local Education Committee demands.
Mr. Forrest proved just such a man to cope under these
conditions. A born administrator, he weathers well the
floods of paperwork so that each occasion on the school
calendar, which gets busier every year, passes without
flaw or confusion. An Oxford classicist, his educational
sympathies in the grammar school framework are broad
and understanding. He immediately increased the range
of languages studied, making available more choices of
Personally, Mr. Forrest is a shy, slightly built, gently
humoured, unassuming man, ascetic, self-driving, pipepuffing
and "beetling with busy-ness". Behind the scenes
he works infinitely, no one could do his homework better,
and he gives every backing and encouragement to new
ideas and enterprises as they come from staff and prefects
alike. There is always a willing ear and ready response
to initiative from any source within the school, hence
the changes in school examinations, House names, the
change in the prefect system and the building of the
prefects' rooms, the new magazine, the proliferation of a
range of ephemeral clubs and societies, the outings,
visits, speakers, foreign holidays, drama tours, field
courses and innumerable activities of the school year, all
as the motivating talents come and go. The change to
G.C.E. from old matric days makes academic comparisons
difficult but far more people take more exams,
percentage passes increase favourably and steadily and
the record remains as still one of the best in the county.
Perhaps the most celebrated scholar of our history dates
from this period, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, currently
leading a group of school brains at Oxford. Other
notables of the post-war period are Graham Bullen,
lecturer in Crystallography at Essex University, Lena
Jeger (nee Chivers) current Labour M.P. for St. Pancras,
George Dixon, Councillor on the Greater London
Borough Council and Peter Baker, Spurs footballer.
Perhaps the only thing which has remained the same is
the separation by sexes of the staff-rooms, in a period
when the average age is younger that it has ever been.
Even so, they remain comfortable, alluring refuges for
a race of teachers seeing life softly and thoughtfully,
communicating their ease to generations of young people
who have been satisfactorily equipped for the suburban
mores in which they find themselves.