History

A head for sites

Head Ed Elliott took all Year 7 pupils on a local studies field trip to Bartlow and Castle Camps where they visited the Roman burial mounds and medieval friezes in Bartlow, and the plague village and witch marks at Castle Camps. Meanwhile, Year 10 students took part in a ‘History Around Us’ tour of Cambridge, where they considered how the city evolved from the late Iron Age to circ. 1540.

Essay success

Shaaon Bhattacharya (Lower Sixth) came third in the New College of the Humanities Art History 2021 essay competition addressing the question of ‘Should the West return cultural artefacts to their former colonial territories?’ He explains more…

“My essay addressed the very topical issue of decolonising museum collections – think the Elgin Marbles, the Benin Bronzes or the Shuar shrunken heads. While many equate this with repatriation of cultural artefacts, I argue in my essay this is not the inevitable solution. My research shows that there are indeed instances where, such as in the case of the Benin Bronzes, repatriation is appropriate on the grounds that they could be adequately maintained and displayed in their nations of origin. However, there is no hard-and-fast rule for decolonising museum collections. Where repatriation is not possible, either because the nation of origin is unable to maintain the objects, or because it is hard to establish to whom an object should be repatriated, I argue that museums have an obligation, in their primary educational role, to display all objects with their full historical context to enrich the experience and learning of museum-goers.”

Charles Fowkes Bolt (Upper Sixth) scored the highest mark nationally in the OCR A level history qualification with a total of 194 out of 200 (97%). John Webb, a member of the school support staff, was a guest of the History Society where he showed his impressive coin collection gathered over many years.