Historical focus

ARCHIVE DIGITISATION PROJECTION

Our school’s resident archive room has gone digital! The development and alumni department has been working with SDS Digitisation to bring our school’s one hundred years’ worth of memorabilia to life. Our online archive can be found on our alumni portal, Claremont Connect, homepage under ‘Archive’. The Claremont Fan Court School Archive preserves material connected to our school’s history from its foundation in 1922 to current day. We hope our digital archive will be a valuable resource for our alumni, students and wider community. By making this available online, we hope to make A feature of the Mansion that can be easily overlooked is down the corridor, outside Leopold (now the headmaster’s office) and next to the drawing room. It is of course a dumbwaiter. Dumbwaiters, in some form, have been in use since Roman times; but in 1887, George W. Cannon filed the first patent for a mechanical dumbwaiter operated by pulleys and weights. This design featured a counterbalanced weight to help the car move vertically. The dumbwaiter at Claremont is a later electric kind which required no manpower at all. Electric motors were added in the 1920s and increased the ease in sending food from the basement kitchens (now the art department) upstairs. The dumbwaiters have been decommissioned, the kitchen end has been sealed off and the hatch covered by student paintings, the one in the servery is an empty space for mugs. While the Leopold end is still visible, the hatch is filled with textbooks and serves as a quirky feature.

our collective history more accessible and that we will continue to grow and build in the coming years.

Our digital archive currently contains material from Clear View School, Claremont School and Fan Court School. In the future, we intend to digitise material from Claremont Fan Court School. The school has an onsite archive room which contains material related to the school’s extra-curricular, administration and alumni activities, mostly dating from 1978 when Claremont School and Fan Court School amalgamated to become co-educational. Additional records related to the earlier period of the school’s history as two separate schools can be found at The Surrey History Centre, Woking.

Our varied collection of memorabilia would not be in our grateful possession without the generosity of our alumni and wider school community. If you would like to contribute any material of your own or from a relative to our school archive, please do contact the alumni and development department via alumni@claremont.surrey.sch.uk or ring 01372 467841. Please also do contact us if you wish to donate to the Archive Fund to support the ongoing digitisation of our school archive.