On a warm, sunny day in May, a small, discreet gathering of OS met the village historian for ‘The Three Suttons’,  Michael Beaman (1952 W, Staff 1963-1992), who had kindly agreed to provide a guided tour of Sutton Valence village. For the next hour or so, we were shown various buildings of interest in the village.  

One of the first buildings we stopped to look at was Bennett House, which some of us remembered very well from the 1950s as being the boarding house in which we started our school careers at SVS.  It is now used as staff accommodation. We then looked at what had once been a row of cottages perched precariously on the bank opposite The Queen’s Head pub. By the 1950s, only Counters, the newsagent, remained, but that too has now gone. We moved on to look at the Almshouses which in our day were used for Hunting Society meetings. Now it is used as a dayroom for The Juniors. 

Valence House was pointed out (no longer owned by the School) for its architectural interest. We looked at The Swan, once the meeting place for all OS functions at the School; it is now a private house.  We were all amazed at Michael’s knowledge of the village and its buildings and we found his talk most interesting. We are most grateful to him for taking us round the village. For those interested, a synopsis of his tour is available in the Archives section of this magazine.

After lunch we went into School and assembled in the James Room (the old Art Room in Centre Block) where we were given a fascinating talk by David Pickard (Staff 1977-2001, 2009-2015) on the archives he had put out in the room which illustrated the history of the School. David had assembled an extraordinary range of archives for us to look at ranging from SVS Rugby colours caps of various designs, to Hunting Society Minute Books, to the Sports Books once filled in by the first team captains of the various sports, to the Westminster House Book 1953-1958. David had gone to enormous trouble to assemble such an interesting array of archives for us. Furthermore, his searches produced another unique archive: the map of the SVS Baton Race, which is mentioned elsewhere in the magazine.  We are extremely grateful for the time and effort that David went to on our behalf.

We would also like to thank Will Radford, Alumni Relations and Development Manager, for being with us throughout the day and for making sure that everything happened at the right time and in the right place.