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Sixth-formers enjoyed some traditional food – as well as plentiful helpings of History and Politics – on their trip to Russia.

The party of 30 boys from Years 12 and 13, along with four members of staff, landed in Moscow for a six-day, two-city tour, during which they learned more about Russian life, from the era of the Tsars through the soviet period and up to the present day.

Helen MacGregor, Head of History, said: “It was a great trip; the boys really got into the culture of the country. The visit not only increased their understanding of their A-level History material but also of modern-day politics, including the reasons for the evident popularity of President Putin among Russian voters.”

Among the highlights were visits to Red Square and to the dark marble pyramid that is Lenin’s Mausoleum. “He died in 1924 and the boys have learned so much about him, so it was amazing to actually see him,” said Miss MacGregor. The boys also saw Stalin’s resting place in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

In the afternoon they had a guided tour of the Novodevichy Cemetery. Constructed in 1898 its importance dates to the 1930s when it became home to the remains of famous Russians whose bodies were disinterred when Stalin ordered the demolition of the abbeys. Anton Chekhov, Nikita Kruschev and Boris Yeltsin are among those buried at Novodevichy.

In the evening there was a total change of mood with a visit to the HC Spartak Ice Hockey stadium. The group stayed in a hotel for the first night where they partook of traditional Russian fare, namely borscht and cabbage soup. “The boys enjoyed trying the local food, but Moscow’s McDonalds was also a hit,” added Miss MacGregor.

After a second day of sightseeing in Moscow, which took in the Patriotic War Museum and the Metro, the boys relished a game of bowling. They then took the Grand Express overnight train to travel the 800 kms to St Petersburg. “It was so exciting to be whizzing through Russia in the dark to arrive in St Petersburg the following morning,” said Miss MacGregor.

“The boys were blown away by the beauty of the palaces there. So much gold and decoration, including the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace, which had to be recreated after it was dismantled and disappeared during WWII, presumably looted by the Nazis.”

Whilst in St Petersburg, the boys went to a Soviet Arcade Machine Museum where they tried out a selection of old games, including pinball and table football.

On the final morning, the boys went to the Hermitage Museum, which boasts the second largest art collection in the world, ranked second only to The Louvre in Paris. The museum and gallery were founded by Catherine the Great and house a collection of more than 3 million items, although only a small proportion is on public display at any one time.

Miss MacGregor said: “Trips both support what the boys learn in the classroom whilst offering them unique enrichment opportunities. They returned with much greater insight into the topics they have been studying, having had a thoroughly enjoyable experience.”

QE under long-serving Headmaster Ernest Jenkins (1930-1961) was so strict that a prefect punished a boy for buying an ice-cream without wearing his School cap…on a Sunday afternoon.

This was just one of the anecdotes which three alumni from the 1940s–60s shared with current Year 7 pupils to help them with a project looking at the history of the School. In a special assembly, they recalled a School that, like today’s QE, enjoyed both academic and sporting success, yet one which was in many ways very different.

Ken Cooper (OE 1942–1950), David Farrer (1954–1961) and John Todd (1958–1964) were introduced by Head of History Helen MacGregor. There was an opportunity for the Year 7 boys to ask them questions, which typically focused largely on the disciplinary regime of the time!

The hapless young ice-cream buyer was ordered to write lines when he was caught bare-headed one hot weekend making his purchase from a shop near his home in Southgate. Although the older pupil was within his rights – prefects of the time were authorised to dole out such punishments and boys were supposed to wear their caps even when not at school – the visiting alumni recalled that he was considered by his classmates to have gone too far, even by the strict standards of the day.

The three visitors reminded the boys that the School was much smaller in the 1940s and 1950s, with a roll of only about 400-450 boys, split into four Houses, not the current six. The School was very much less diverse and boys typically lived very locally.

All indoor activities took place in QE’s Main Building, with the hall even being used for lunch for a time after the refectory was bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1941. The lunches themselves were reported to have been dreadful. “The potatoes were black; the meat looked like it had come off the bottom of someone’s shoe,” said Mr Cooper.

At first, all that lay behind the Main Building was the ‘Gun Field’. Later, an unheated, open-air swimming pool was built; boys were expected to swim in it in all weathers.

The whole School met each morning for assembly, addressed by the Headmaster in his gown: all masters (teachers) wore gowns daily, while prefects wore half-length undergraduate-type gowns.

School ran six days a week, with games on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. Sport was a huge part of School life and was very popular: the best memories of many Old Elizabethans from that era are from sports on Stapylton Field, the visitors stated. The rugby and cricket were both good, and QE established a very strong reputation in athletics. Fixtures against the top public schools had been established by Mr Jenkins (pictured below), who modelled the School on such institutions during his long headmastership, which extended from 1930–1961.

During his tenure, the strictness of the regime was seen in the use of corporal punishment. The cane was still very much in use and boys could, in the schoolboy slang of the time, be ‘whacked’ for a variety of misdemeanours. The three alumni reported, though, that they accepted this as being a normal part of school education and thought that there was usually good reason for the punishment! Mr Todd recalled going to be caned and being asked to select which of three different canes should be used. He remembered being concerned that it would be very obvious that he had hidden a workbook down the back of his trousers to cushion the blows, although this was, in fact, not commented upon by the master.

While much has obviously changed, the visitors reflected that in 2018, just as in their day, expectations at the School are high, both in terms of behaviour and of academic attainment. A grammar school then and now, QE through to the early 1960s had a good reputation for sending boys to Oxbridge and other top universities, albeit in a context in which only about 3% of sixth-formers nationally went on to university, with most school-leavers going straight into employment.

Although they had very positive memories of their time at QE, the three visiting old boys were in little doubt that the fabric of the School, the opportunities available to boys and the outcomes achieved are all very much better now.

Year 7 will be continuing their work on the History project through the rest of this term.

Forty-four Year 9 boys visited the major battle sites and cemeteries from World War I in a trip designed to reinforce their classroom History lessons on the conflict.

With plenty of opportunity to walk through preserved trenches just as this year’s poppies were starting to flower, the boys had time to reflect on life in the trenches. Some sites illustrated the global nature of the conflict, showing the role of countries from the British Empire and Commonwealth – particularly Canada and nearby Newfoundland.

History teacher Simon Walker said: “The trip was important both emotionally and analytically, helping students understand how trench warfare worked and appreciate the experience of those who fought, as well as giving them an opportunity to reflect on the cost of war and consider what we can learn from the way soldiers have been memorialised.”

The trip aligned closely with the Year 9 scheme of work, which covers the changing nature of warfare up to 1945, with World War I a major topic.

On their visit to one site, Vimy Ridge, the guides for the QE boys and the four accompanying members of staff were students on a programme funded by the Canadian government, reflecting the national importance of the site in Canada.

One striking contrast was seen in the ways the fallen were commemorated at:

• Tyne Cot cemetery – the resting place of more than 11,900 servicemen of the British Empire at the battlefield of the Third Battle of Ypres (also known as the Battle of Passchendaele), where boys learned that many bodies could not be identified.
• Thiepval Memorial – commemorating 72,246 British and South African servicemen known to have died in the Battles of the Somme whose bodies could not be found.
• Essex Farm cemetery – a smaller Allied cemetery, with some moving examples of men from the ‘pals’ battalions’ who died on the same day being buried with their headstones touching to show solidarity between them.
• Beaumont-Hamel – the site of a memorial as well as trenches where Newfoundlanders fought during the Somme campaign; with 84% of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment battalion dying, the conflict brought devastation to some communities, depriving Newfoundland of most of its young men and seriously damaging its economy.
• The German Langemark cemetery – here, all graves are communal, with one huge mass grave in the middle and thousands of tiny names engraved on the stones around it. The headstones are very plan slabs laid flat on the ground, the relative lack of dignity in burial illustrating the hostility of Belgians towards Germans after the war. (The mass grave was partly because the Belgians would not grant the Germans enough land for individual burials.

Other memorable highlights of the trip to the sites in France and Belgium included the sight of Lochnagar Crater, the biggest crater of World War I, where boys learned about tunnelling and the use of mines. They attended the Last Post ceremony at Menin Gate in Ypres to commemorate soldiers lost in the 1914–1918 – a ceremony performed every evening since 1927, even during World War II. They also learned how medical provision developed during the conflict, visiting a field hospital where John McCrae worked as a surgeon and composed his famous poem, In Flanders Fields.

On the final day came visits to La Coupole and Blockhaus Bunker, which were sites for the production and launch of V1 and V2 rockets during World War II, where there was information on the role of concentration camp slave labour used by the Nazis. “These visits helped to develop students’ understanding of the changing nature of warfare in World War II, as well as providing a foundation for the space race and arms race topics that form an important part of the GSCE Conflict and Tension unit on the Cold War.

There were lighter moments, too, including a popular visit to the Leonida chocolate shop and the time when the boys’ keen-eyed coach driver spotted a World War I wire fence post unearthed and left at the roadside by a local farmer.

Overall, said Mr Walker, the trip gave boys “an opportunity to deepen their understanding of the Year 9 theme about the changing nature of warfare, whilst also giving them personal experiences and time to reflect in order to help them develop and articulate their own emotional responses”. In addition, it supported understanding of the genocide topic being covered in the second half of term, and of GCSE topics including the Cold War and the Health and the People unit.

A first-year pupil’s focus on the Grenfell Tower fire took him to victory in the new Lower School History Essay competition.

Sasha Temple impressed History teacher Simon Walker with his rationale for choosing the housing block conflagration as a source that would be useful to historians of the future studying 21st-century London. Entrants not only had to name two such sources, but also to explain what historians would be able to learn from their content or provenance.

Year 7’s Sasha beat off competition both from his peers and from Year 8 to take the prize. His success was announced in assembly by Mr Walker.

“Sasha’s choice of source, and his justification for that choice, were impressive mainly for two reasons. First, it was very specific to London, revealing much about the city rather than just the early 21st century more generally.

“And second, Sasha showed great perceptiveness in considering the provenance of the source – the story that lies behind it, and what we can learn from this. As a Year 7 student, Sasha has not received much, if any, instruction in this skill yet, but nonetheless he was able to think of his source not just as an inanimate object that simply exists, but as something whose existence reveals much about human affairs.”

Mr Walker added that Sasha was therefore able to explore how the tragic events of June 2017 and their aftermath reflect on society and on social attitudes within contemporary London. “For example, Sasha considered how, if we compare the remains of Grenfell Tower to other blocks of flats in the city, we can establish from the absence of safety measures such as sprinklers and fire extinguishers that there is great inequality in today’s London. Alongside this, Sasha highlighted that the cheap material from which the tower was constructed reflects on the lack of concern within the society of London towards the safety, and more generally the wellbeing, of the city’s poorer inhabitants.”

Sasha’s other source was Barnet Amenity Site, the Borough’s recycling and tip facility.

The rules of the new competition specified that submissions had to be typed and handed in to the History department by the first day back after half-term.

While Year 8 boys learned much about the gulf separating the past from the present on their History trip to Hampton Court Palace, they did see one thing that was familiar – the royal motto, ‘Dieu et mon droit’.

Because QE was founded through a charter granted by Queen Elizabeth I, the School has the French phrase, which is the motto of the monarch of the United Kingdom, as part of its crest.

Said to have first been used as a battle cry by Richard I as long ago as the 12th century, it remains in use to this day. But why, the boys wondered, was it so prominent at Hampton Court – a palace built more than 300 years after the words were first spoken? The Chapel Royal there has it written on the ceiling no fewer than 32 times!

Head of History Helen MacGregor said the guide in the chapel had explained this to the visitors. The motto, meaning ‘God and my right’, refers to the divine right to rule. The first Tudor king, Henry VII, had come to power because he defeated Richard III in the Wars of the Roses; he thus had a rather dubious claim to the throne. The ubiquity of the motto at Hampton Court was, therefore, an attempt by Henry VII’s son, Henry VIII, almost literally to stamp his authority on the newly built palace, which he had seized from Cardinal Wolsey. “The Tudors wanted to make sure everyone knew they were in control,” said Miss MacGregor.

Knowing that Latin was the lingua franca of the educated man in Europe in this period, the boys had also wondered why the motto was not in Latin, or even in English. “The answer is that French was the royal language of the rich – a legacy of the Norman Conquest – with only commoners speaking English.”

All of Year 8 went on the trip to the palace in south west London on the River Thames. The visit, which is split over two days, is arranged to complement Year 8’s study of Tudor England with particular attention to the Reformation.

The boys learned about diverse aspects of English Early Modern society, including the role of kings and queens, the lifestyle of people in different social classes and the architectural history of the palace itself.

Pupils also had the chance to explore more unusual aspects, such as the culinary history of Hampton Court. They found out about the elaborate dining rules, about the challenge of cooking for 600 people each day and about people’s dietary likes and dislikes in the period.

“This was a very good trip with lovely weather. The boys enjoyed the opportunity to make the connection between what they have been learning in lessons and this beautiful and fascinating historic location,” said Miss MacGregor.