Upper School History trip to Vienna and Budapest.
Lunchtime classes Lunchtimes provide a good opportunity for pupils to attend specialist lessons put on by staff. These allow pupils to consolidate work covered over the course of the year, or to seek further guidance on examination technique. Oxbridge lessons run from mid-way through the Michaelmas term of the Remove, and aim to prepare candidates for interviews and aptitude tests by exposing them to a range of readings and concepts they may not otherwise encounter.
There are also many ad hoc outings across the academic year. In Michaelmas 2018, for instance, a group of Remove historians heard Dr Anna Beer speak at the British Library about her new biography of Sir Walter Raleigh, and Art Historian, Michael Prodger, gave us an expert tour of the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Ribera exhibition. Towards the end of the summer holidays, pupils in the Remove who intend to read History at university may join the department’s Reading Party. Taking place in and around London – and often held in conjunction with the JAGS History Department – the week provides a superb opportunity for historical discussion ahead of the hurly-burly of the A2 academic year. This year saw trips to Chichester Cathedral, Arundel Castle, Eltham Palace, William Morris’s Red House, the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich, and (following a walking tour of ‘Suffragette and Suffragist London’) the Foundling Museum, where pupils could see the tokens that eighteenth-century mothers had left with the babies they felt forced to give up. St. Stephen’s Cathedral to the baroque glamour of the Jesuit Church to the neoclassical chill of the Hofburg Palace: Catholicism respectively triumphant, combative and displaced by the State … The aestheticisation of death was a recurrent leitmotif: in the Imperial Crypt we marvelled at the skill with which bronze had been rendered like silk, skin, fur and bone on the tombs of the Habsburg dynasts…’ Harry, Year 13 ‘Mr Smith began with a walking tour spanning a half-a-dozen miles and as many centuries. We went from the Gothic heights of
History trips include a visit to the French battlefields of the First World War. The Archives The History Department makes extensive use of the College Library and Archives. Lower School pupils have the opportunity to handle the personal affects of our founder, the great Jacobean impresario, Edward Alleyn. All Year 9 pupils research the life of an OA who served in the Great War. And those entering the Upper Sixth can make use of the Archives in completing their Extended Essays – several have proved enterprising historians, poring over Manorial Court Rolls and Committee Minutes to produce highly-original research.
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