REFLECTIONS ON… THE JOHANNEUM EXCHANGE

This is the world’s longest-running school exchange programme, running since 1948. Only the pandemic has interrupted our annual trip.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of former Head, Fred ‘Wilkie’ Wilkinson’s revolutionary ‘experiment in friendship’ as London and Hamburg bore the scars of war: Latymer’s exchange with the Johanneum School in Hamburg, Germany.

As we gear up for celebrations of our pioneering exchange this autumn, we’d love to hear your memories of the exchange, and of the friends you made in Hamburg.

Please write to us at: Latymerians@latymerfoundation.org

More details of the 75th anniversary celebrations can found on page 16 under Events.

Roger TABOR (1962)

An abiding memory from my time in Hamburg was of a vibrant city still recovering from the devastation of World War II, with large open spaces visible from my host’s apartment block, but one populated with people who were determined to make us feel very welcome.

I imagine the welcome will be no less today, but the Hamburg of today will be very different, though still with recognisable landmarks.

For me it was an important life experience, being my first foreign visit - holidays abroad being much less common then. Travel was by boat and rail and took a long time. While it is so long ago that memories have faded, the discovery of my scrapbook has reminded me how fully we were introduced to Hamburg. From what must have been a mixture of School organised visits and outings with my hosts, I have a record of statistics about the port, a plan of the huge cemetery at Ohlsdorf, pictures of the Willkomm Hoeft, where ships arriving in Hamburg were greeted with their own national anthem, a guide to the Planten und Blumen exhibition park, programmes from a variety of theatre and the opera, black and white ‘snaps’ of the zoo, many churches and other buildings, and a bunch of public transport tickets!

We had an outing to see the Kiel canal, and a more poignant one to Lueneberg Heath, to see the barbed wire and watchtowers of the border with the Soviet Occupation Zone (later the DDR). The politics of the divided Germany were very raw at that time; I remember the consternation of my hosts reading a newspaper report of the beginning of construction of a wall in part of Berlin – a precursor of what became the great icon of the Cold War.

Graham SANSOM (1966)

2023 is not only the 75th anniversary of the Johanneum Exchange, but also marks my own 75th year on this planet and, more importantly, the 60th anniversary of the first of my two exchanges with Werner Vogel and his family in Hamburg. Last year I was visiting my daughter, son-in-law and half-Dutch grandchildren in the Netherlands and decided – pretty much on a whim – to take the train to Hamburg and see if I could track down Werner.

Since my move to Australia, we’d had no contact for more than fifty years, but thanks to Google I was able to establish that the Vogel’s house still stood in Wellingsbüttel and remained in the family name.

I simply went to the house and knocked on the door. I didn’t get a response, so I spoke to a neighbour and left a note. Amazingly it did the trick, and within a few hours Werner contacted me at my hotel. It turned out that one of his nephews now occupies the house, and that Werner himself lives only a short distance away. The next day I was very warmly welcomed for morning tea, joyful conversation, and hugs with Werner and his wife Angela before having to catch the train back to Amsterdam.