Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School is a mixed-sex grammar school with academy status located in Hurst Road (A222), Sidcup in the London Borough of Bexley, England. It is located adjacent to Lamorbey Park, the Rose Bruford College drama school and Hurstmere School. Pupils at the school are divided into a series of six houses, known as Davies, Edlmann, Lester, Staff, Townshend, and Williams, while an annual school magazine, The Chronicle, is also produced by the students. The current head teacher, Nigel Walker, has held his position since 2009.
Founded as the Sidcup County School for Boys in 1931 to meet the lack of secondary schools in the newly urbanised town, it was initially opened at 27 Station Road, with the position of first headmaster being given to C. R. McGregor Williams. In 1935, the school began moving into a purpose-built site at Crittall's Corner, Footscray, being renamed Chislehurst and Sidcup County School in 1938. Damaged during The Blitz, after the culmination of the Second World War, reforms implemented as a result of the Education Act 1944 led to the local decision that the institution would become a grammar school and that it would relocate to a new, larger building on Hurst Road in the Lamorbey area of Sidcup, a move that took place after the resignation of McGregor Williams in 1954.
As a result of the government's Circular 10/65 in 1965, plans were implemented to merge Chislehurst and Sidcup with the neighbouring Hurstmere into a single comprehensive school, although these were opposed by the successive Conservative Party administrations of Bexley Council, eventually being scuppered under the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. In 1973 the school was made co-educational, admitting female pupils alongside the male, resulting in the adoption of its current name. The school rose to national headlines in January 1983 following the suspension of most of the school's sixth form for drinking alcohol at the preceding Christmas party. In 2004 it became a sports college and in 2011 an academy.
History
Foundation: 1930 Having been an agricultural village since the Late Middle Ages, the Kentish town of Sidcup began to urbanise following the opening of Sidcup railway station on the South Eastern Railway's new Dartford Loop Line in 1866. The new transport links to central London led to increasing numbers of middle class professionals moving to the town, in particular from inner London suburbs such as Camberwell and New Cross, which were experiencing social unrest and a rise in slum housing. After the rail line's electrification following the culmination of the First World War, speculative builders bought up cheap farmland around the town and by 1930 its population had risen to just short of 12,000, and would treble within the next two decades.
Sidcup's dramatic population rise led to a strain on local schooling, with many boys having to travel several miles to Dartford and Erith to attend secondary school. This problem was exacerbated by the government's stated intention of raising the school leaving age to cut the number of unemployed in the midst of the Great Depression. For this reason, the Bexley and Sidcup Urban District Councils, and later the Bromley Rural and Chislehurst District Education Committee, requested that the Maidstone-centered Kent County Council finance the creation of a new school in the area. In April 1930, the council's Secondary and University Education Sub-Committee agreed to open up what they called the Sidcup County School for Boys on the old premises of the County School for Girls, which was then moving from its original site at 27 Station Road to a new, specially constructed site in Beaverwood Road.
27 Station Road: 1931–1935
The red-brick site at 27 Station Road had been built in 1900 to house the Sidcup High School for Girls and Kindergarten, although additional office space was added in 1930 to convert it into the boys school. In July, the Secondary Education Sub-Committee began advertising to find a headmaster for the school, and in the following Spring appointed Welshman C. R. McGregor Williams (1889–1954), who had formerly been the headmaster of the recently closed Uckfield Grammar School, Sussex. The son of a tailor, McGregor Williams was born in Newport and educated at Newport High School and Cardiff College, University of Wales, where he gained a degree in modern languages. Having fought for the British Army at the Battle of the Somme, he later taught at what would become Varndean School in Brighton. He spent his spare time studying for an MA with a thesis on Molière's religious philosophy from the University of Wales and in 1926 obtained a doctorate on the poetry of John Payne from the University of Paris.
Williams chose the school's motto of "Abeunt Studia in Mores", which he had taken from Ovid's Heroides, in which it is proclaimed by the poet Sappho in her love letter to Phaon. Williams also chose purple as the school's colour, supposedly because it was associated with war wounds and liturgical mourning, something that he and his wife considered appropriate following the death toll of the First World War. It was agreed that the school would initially take in 62 boys, of whom 52 would be fee-paying, 8 of whom would have free-place scholarships and 2 of which would be "junior exhibitioners". Fee-paying residents of either Kent or London counties were charged £4 a term, while "outsiders" were instead charged £10. Half of the first intake of students lived in Sidcup itself, while the others mostly came from neighbouring districts such as Petts Wood, Chislehurst, Orpington, Foots Cray and New Eltham. The school opened on Thursday 17 September 1931, with a dedication ceremony taking place on Friday 25 September.
During its first year, the school began production of its own magazine, The Chronicle, while the house system was introduced in the spring term of 1932. Initially, there were only four school houses, known as A, B, C and D. In 1937, two more, E and F, were added. It would only be in 1953 that these houses were renamed. In October 1932, the school first expelled a pupil, William Duck, as punishment for allegedly spitting at passers-by from an open-top bus. Headmaster McGregor Williams was widely known for his scruffy appearance about the school. He was often stern towards the students, and implemented corporal punishment to punish disobedient pupils, beating them with a sawn-off cricket bat; he was twice prosecuted in court for using excessive force in this manner, but was acquitted on both occasions.
This view of Macgregor Williams is not supported by all. Pupils attending in his years as head report that they witnessed no evidence of beatings or indeed that he was a scruffy individual.
A staunch supporter of the Conservative Party, he adored drama and took part in some of the school's early performances, as well as introducing the sport of lacrosse, of which he was a keen fan, to the school. In July 1933, the school's first foreign trip went ahead, with McGregor Williams' taking pupils to the Rhineland in Germany. At the time under the control of the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, the school continued taking pupils to the region in future years; in 1937 McGregor Williams and his pupils traveled the country wearing swastika armbands which they had been given by members of the Hitler Youth movement.
Crittall's Corner: 1935–1954 The old building at 27 Station Road had always been intended as a temporary site for the school, with a larger, purpose-built building planned for construction at Crittall's Corner, just south of the town. The first wing of the new building opened on 11 November 1935 and for a while the school remained divided between the two sites, with students' often having to travel across Sidcup to get to different lessons. Construction of the building only came to an end in 1938, when the school was moved in its entirety to the new site. The new building, designed by John Poltock – who would later design Cairo's Victoria College – was a modernist construct known for its prominent use of large metal-framed windows that allowed the building to be filled with natural light. Designed to house 660 students, more than were currently enrolled in the school, it was widely acclaimed both in architectural journals and in the popular press. It was also in 1935 that the school introduced purple blazers for uniforms, although the majority of students continued to wear their grey blazers; it would only be in the 1950s that the school's students had gone entirely over to purple. In 1938, the school was renamed Chislehurst and Sidcup County School; this was because the Sidcup Urban District Council had been abolished in 1934, its role being adopted by the newly created Chislehurst and Sidcup Urban District Council.
In 1939, Britain entered the Second World War and a number of the school's teachers were called up to fight in the British Army. Headmaster McGregor Williams meanwhile joined the Home Guard, eventually becoming the head of the Chislehurst platoon. At the school, the students set about digging out trenches to use as bomb shelters and assemblies were cancelled. Students were expected to carry their gas masks around with them in case of chemical attack and during the ensuing Blitz – in which the German Luftwaffe began bombing London and the areas around it – the school was affected by a nearby landmine on 17 September 1940, destroying the glass of all the windows on one side. On 16 June 1944, the school was once more struck, this time by a V-1 flying bomb which destroyed one end of the Assembly Hall; much of the damage to the school would not be permanently repaired until 1951. By the time that the war came to an end in 1945, 280 former pupils and 13 members of staff had fought in the armed forces, with 45 of them having been killed.
In 1944, Conservative politician Rab Butler put forward the Education Act 1944, suggesting a large-scale reform of British schools by introducing a "tripartite system" that divided students based on their academic ability and allocating them to one of three schools: the grammar school, secondary technical school and secondary modern school.Wells 2002. p. 71. Deciding how to implement these reforms on a local scale, in 1946, E. V. Mills chaired a meeting of the Divisional Executive in which they suggested radically changing the schooling system in the area. They decided that Chislehurst and Sidcup County School would become a grammar and would be moved from its site at Crittall's Corner to a much larger space at Lamorbey in Sidcup, where it would be situated alongside a newly built technical school, Hurstmere School. Meanwhile, the site at Crittall's Corner would be converted into a secondary modern, which would later be known as Kemnal Technology College. This was partly to alleviate problems of overcrowding; the population of the local area had tripled since 1931 and the Crittall's Corner building was taking in more than the number of students that it had been built to accommodate.
The decision to move the school was deeply opposed by Headmaster McGregor Williams, who wanted his school to remain within the Crittall's Corner building, of which he was particularly fond; he wrote letters to Members of Parliament suggesting expansion at the present site, but to no avail. He decided to retire prior to the move to the new site, stepping down in July 1953 and dying five months later. Meanwhile, academic achievement at the school remained high in the post-war years, with a large percentage of pupils going on to gain university degrees. Of note is that the July 1946 issue of The Chronicle contained several illustrations by a student, Quentin Blake, later to become a famous illustrator. Blake subsequently became the magazine's editor, a position he retained from 1949 to 1951.
Hurst Road, Sidcup 1954-67