Over the past few years, I’ve spent far too long in the Central Library at Bexleyheath poring over back editions of The Kentish Times. Way before spin doctors and schools employing media relations managers, St Mary’s was good at generating regular publicity. This is useful because everyday photos of school life during the 1950s and 60s appear virtually non-existent.

The local paper loyally covered every school play between 1956 and 1971, most sports days and the majority of prize givings, often sending a reporter and a photographer along.

However, one great disappointment is that the original negatives of all the hundreds of photographs taken at the school do not appear to have survived. While Bexley Borough archives took possession of all Kentish Times photographic negatives, a few years back, all pictures pertaining to St Mary’s were notable by their absence, which is both frustrating and odd.

However, I was able to scan some rather poor quality copies from the microfiche, such as the one above.

This was taken in December 1968 at the annual prize giving and shows, left to right, head boy John Pelican, Patrick Dunleavy, deputy head boy Charles Bewlay and the late Fabian Goody.

Pelican, then in the lower sixth, won the year prize for Geography which he would go on to study at Durham in 1969. Bewlay would head to the University of East Anglia to read Maths.

Fifth formers Dunleavy and Goody would both go to Oxford in the summer of 1970 – Dunleavy winning an Open scholarship to Corpus Christi to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and Goody winning a Kitchener Scholarship to St Catherine’s to read Modern Languages.