And then there were eight! REUNIONS

CHRIS FRY (1957-1964)

Our school group has been meeting informally snce 1995.We’ve lost a few members over the years - but we still have a good group of stalwarts.

IT started with a chance encounter in New Street in the mid-seventies. I was living in Huddersfield at the time and bumped into former classmate, Tony Hirst. We reminisced about our schooldays and our former classmates and decided to join the Old Almondburians’ Society and go to the annual dinner. There we met up with several others of our school year (1957).

We continued to attend the dinner for a few years until we realised that not only was the dinner becoming more expensive but that the format of the evening with speeches from on high, etc was not what we wanted: we just wanted time to talk to each other over a meal and a drink or two. We decided therefore to discontinue going to the dinners but to continue to meet as a group once a year in town. The School kindly helped us to track down others in our year and our first grand gathering took place at The Head of Steam at Huddersfield railway station in, I estimate,

November 1995 with about 15-20 former schoolfriends.

We repeated this for several years until someone suggested we should double the number of get-togethers in Huddersfield to twice a year, once in April and the second in October.

The next development was, in addition to these two gatherings in Huddersfield, to have two ‘in-betweeners’ but that these take place somewhere betweenYorkshire and the Midlands in view of the number of people who now lived south of Yorkshire. Therefore, in addition to Huddersfield, we have met in Sheffield, Derby, Burton-on-Trent, Manchester, Leeds and Nottingham.Three of us even met up in Budapest one autumn!

Despite the passing of time, several interests have kept us together. Firstly, a good sense of humour, recollections of our former teachers and schoolmates plus a good thirst! Perhaps it’s because of our age, we were part of the seventies’ Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) generation so our venues unwaveringly include real ale pubs.

Our Huddersfield trail has usually included The Head of Steam, The Kings Arms, The Grove, The Plumbers Arms, The County and The Rat and Ratchet (not necessarily all in one trip!)

Our numbers have inevitably shrunk over the years, some because of a reduction of interest in meeting up but also we are all getting old (c. 77 now). Regrettably several have passed away or have a debilitating health problem. The good news is that we still have seven or eight stalwarts. n

David Coupland,David Eastward

David Tomlinson, Richard Harrison, Richard (‘Jasper’) Hardcastle

We also mourn Tom Rockett whom we frequently bumped into in one Huddersfield pub or other and Tony Booth. Get well soon: Tony Hirst