Concordia 2025

Concordia Winter 2024

at the Commonwealth Games are displayed with other trophies and fencing battle books. The display also includes a bayonet fencing mask which was found by master-in-charge of fencing, Eliot Williams, during a clean-up in 2023. Thanks to an award from the Clubs and Societies Fund, supported by generous gifts from OMTs and parents to the Head Master’s Discretionary Fund, the mask was sent to a specialist leather and textiles conservator to be cleaned. opportunities to curate mini exhibitions in the display cabinets, undertake cataloguing and help answer enquiries by researching primary source material. 12 March 2025 is school Archives Day and the archive will be opened to boys, staff and the wider community. A session is planned with the Classics department, and boys will get the opportunity to handle fragile objects from the school’s archaeological collection. With time, the educational value of the archive will grow, and the collections will be used more to form part of academic extension and enrichment. The archive has been stored and listed, but it is not organised intellectually or catalogued to industry standard. An important next step for the archive is to audit and arrange archival collections, remove duplicates and introduce a new catalogue. There is a lot to do and hopefully my next hundred days will start to see more engagement and opportunity. In 2025 I hope to establish a new school Archives Club, which will give the boys

by Eric Ravilious, the prolific Sussex artist and engraver who was killed flying over Iceland while working as a war artist during World War II. Boys, look up when you are eating your chicken and chips! And then there is the mighty Beast by sculptor Lynn Chadwick, perhaps the most famous OMT artist, who represented Britain in the Venice Biennale in 1956, which greets all visitors to campus, standing sentinel outside the Music Department. With time, I hope to tell the stories of why these works are here and what value they bring to the school. My first hundred days in the archive have included much time spent opening boxes of material in order to assess the consistencies and strategies of past collecting. I have curated three displays of archival material, with the most recent display celebrating the history of fencing at MTS. While fencing is now a recreational rather than competitive sport for Divisions and above, there has been a proud tradition of the sport dating back to the 1890s. The current display includes the team photo from 1911. Merchant Taylors’ was the first school to employ a professional coach and the salle, originally above the Great Hall at Sandy Lodge, was the first school fencing salle in the country. Photographs of OMT and British Fencing Champion Sandy Leckie (1951– 1957) who fenced three times at the Olympic games in 1960, 1964 and 1968, and for Scotland

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“ When the school moved from its premises at Charterhouse Square in the City of London in 1933, key artefacts were brought to Sandy Lodge, including the Monitors’ and Prompters’ tables which you can now see attached to the walls around the school. The statue of Sir Thomas White, which the boys see every day outside our modern Design and Technology building, also came from the City. ”