23 Aug 2022

A first day smile from David Palmer

The pictures keep on arriving and the latest submissions come from David Palmer who was at St Mary’s between 1960 and 1967.

I’ve always said how rare photos like this are – people simply didn’t take photographs in the same way they do today – when absolutely anything and everything is captured on a phone.

So it was great to receive this picture of David on his first day in September 1960, pictured outside the main entrance with the caretaker’s house in the background. The caretaker at this time was Jim Murphy who, somewhat inevitably, was called ‘Spud’ but should not be confused by Fr John Patrick Murphy would arrive in 1967 and become an even better known ‘Spud.’

David has supplied a couple of other interesting pictures too, see below, with names. The first is the 1960s intake football team from the 1963/64 season so when these lads were fourth years. Their manager is Michael ‘Mick’ Lynch, a highly-respected history master who was an old boy of St Mary’s College. One name is missing so, as ever, if you know it, let us know. One quirk of the 1960 intake was that there were two boys called John O’Brien who were both in the football team. David says they were differentiated by the nicknames ‘Big John’ and ‘Little John’

The second photograph shows the U12 cricket team from the summer of 1961 with Fr McKeown as master in charge.

U12 cricket X1 in the summer of 1961: Back row, left to right, Alan Farrington, Peter Cutting, John O’Brien, Alan Baldwin, Paul Marriott, John Jagger, Mark Rawlings, Fr J J McKeown. Front row, left to right, David Palmer, John Mulvey, Richard Webster, Peter Firth, Danny Mott, Philip Parsons.