Saturday 29 June 2019
Leavers of 1958/1959 & 1960 Reunion
Following the success in 2017 of a combined leavers reunion held at the school for all those who left HCS between 1955 and 1957, staff at the Development Office organised another joint reunion on Saturday 29th June 2019, this time for members who left between 1958 and 1960.Thus, on a very warm Saturday morning, almost 30 people, including partners, family members and friends turned up to watch a series of skull & coxless pair races on the river in the morning before moving to Wyeside to see an HCS Junior XI team take on a Cathedral School Llandaff side.A very fine buffet lunch was laid on at 12.30pm for our particular group inside the pavilion before we returned to the boundary to watch some more cricket, using the shade of a nearby sycamore tree. Temperatures had already reached 30 degrees!School Tour> Around 2.30pm, many of us prepared to return to the school for a tour of the buildings as from 3pm. We started off in the recently re-furbished OH Archive Room inside No,1 where there were so many items of memorabilia, artefacts and interesting exhibits on display. We then moved across to view the cavernous Sports Hall, opened by Dame Kelly Holmes in 2009 before entering one of the laboratories in the adjacent Science Block.This particular building had long since been re-configured and sections re-built from what we ‘oldies’ remember as being the ‘new‘ gymnasium, erected in mid-Fifties on the site of what were formerly our Fives courts.As several OHs were staying at the Green Dragon Hotel, a small group of us agreed to rendezvous in the main bar for drinks after 6pm. We then wandered through High Town, past the life-size bronze effigy of the famous Hereford Bull mounted on its own plinth and close to The Old House, then on to Gilbies Bar & Bistro to continue a leisurely catch-up in a cool open-air setting whilst enjoying an evening meal.(*) International visitors> It’s well worth mentioning here that, apart from some of us not having seen one another for at least 60 years, THREE OHs featured in the above picture had flown over to the UK specially to attend this reunion. They travelled from as far afield as Australia (NSW); Canada (BC) and South Africa (Johannesburg).Peter