This is the time of year we glance over our shoulder to times and ages past in our celebration of Christmas before we firmly look forward again in the New Year. Our Archive of School magazines, bolstered this year with the bequest of John Allard’s Year Books, offers a great view into Christmases Past at the School.
School clubs were the staple of many a Borden pupil - Chess Club with Mr Sayer and Wargames with Alun Davies spring to this Editors mind. But delve further back and it seems the School had some interesting other clubs.
Sittingbourne Heritage Museum has put together a video, available on YouTube, detailing a brief history of the building that was the original site of the School on College Road. Previous news article has highlighted the likelihood of the site, which later became an Adult Education Centre, being redeveloped as a residential site.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwAq1E97RG8
Brigadier Ernest Goode, CBE who attended BGS in the early 1920s had a long military career. He was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps and soon after seconded for duty with the Sudan Defence Force, 1935-43. Following this wartime service he was appointed aide-de-camp to The Queen, 1959-62.
If you want to hear more about his time in the Sudan, a recording of his experiences in the Sudan is available on the Imperial War Museum's website:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80004261
This is not a typing error!! A recent search through the School Archives has unearthed a very old School Inspection Report dated October 1914 and it is reproduced in full here.
During a recent visit to the school archives, we uncovered a number of new copies of “Borden Grammar School – A History in Photographs”. See full story for extracts from the book.
The 1970 Speech Day Programme has been provided to us for publication. If visitors of the site have any BGS school memorabilia that they wish to share, please send it to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Stephen Lynas has supplied us with a couple of photos from the Annual Dinner, held on 23 March, together with a school photo of the Form 5A in 1967. Amazingly, Stephen has also been able to supply all the names on the school photo!
