The St Mary’s time machine turns back almost half a century to the summer of ‘73 when the charts were full of the likes of Can The Can, Rubber Bullets and Skweeze Me Pleeze Me.

Sunderland have just achieved a shock win over Leeds to win the FA Cup Final and more than one St Mary’s lad will be rushing home to watch a new children’s science fiction drama on ITV called The Tomorrow People.

But there’s a shock much closer to home – and one that will have seismic ramifications on the school.

News has just broken that, due to a shortage of nuns and the loss of Direct Grant status, St Joseph’s Convent School for Girls in the north of the borough faces closure. The proposed solution is an amalgamation with St Mary’s.

The details were revealed in two bombshell letters from St Mary’s headmaster Fr Philip Graystone and the Convent’s headmistress Sr Elizabeth Fox to parents of their respective schools. At that time, the amalgamation was scheduled for September 1976. It would in fact be three years later than that.

If the merger news upset pupils it did not show because the A-level results that summer were some of the best the school recorded with two open scholarships awarded, six Oxford entrances won, plus one Cambridge entrant – Nicholas Rogers – the first since Crabb and Reilly in 1969.

The two open scholarships went to Martin Harrison who went to Corpus Christi, Oxford, to read geography and David Faldon who headed to Imperial College, London to read chemical engineering.

Four pupils – John Bone, Bernard Hunt, James Kelly and Stephen Reilly – won places at Oxford to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics while David Dunleavy and Douglas Town won Oxford places to read history and modern languages respectively.

Nicholas Rogers and Patrick Anglim shared the Craven Prize for Outstanding Academic Achievement at A-level with Greg, the eldest of the six Hawes brothers, winning The Catenian Trophy at O-level.

No wonder Fr Graystone is beaming in the picture above which appeared in the Kentish Times. These were all lads who had started at St Mary’s in 1966 and with the Hull Marist becoming headmaster the following year, his influence on the school had undoubtedly borne fruit.