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Left: Foundation Stone in the Head Master's Quad Right: A photograph of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret from the official souvenir programme from George VI’s coronation on May 12th 1937

Concordia Winter 2022

31

The Queen Mother was to return once more in 1975, to open the new Music Department which had been the vision of former Head Master, Brian Rees, and which was completed under Francis Davey. A stark reminder that the 1970s were a different decade from the 1930s and 1960s comes in the form of the preparations documentation that survives in the school archive. At the top of the folder is a procedure for action to be taken on receipt of a bomb threat! Reading it now, one can’t help feeling it looks a little naïve. The visit took place in November and the Queen Mother paid tribute to the generosity of the parents, old boys and the Merchant Taylors’ Company whose benefaction enabled the building of not just the Music Department, but also study areas in the Manor of the Rose Boarding House and the squash courts. In words that our own generation would recognise, she reflected on the impact of technology on the modern world. She counselled: “Man does not live by technology alone, but by all the accumulated beauty and wisdom of the past, in which science and the arts should combine to produce that ideal of the renaissance, the complete man.”