After a very windy day yesterday, the forecast is for more of the same today, albeit not quite to the same extent. Do take good care as you are walking around school and if you do happen to notice any damage which has been caused by the stormy weather, please report it to a member of staff. It has certainly been an extremely busy and successful first half of term and I suspect many, if not all of you, are ready for a well-earned break. Just 5 days to go now, but it is important that you keep pushing yourself and giving of your best. For those of you in the 5^th Form with mock exams around the corner, do make sure that you have a clear revision programme in place for the half-term. They may not be the real exams, but diligent preparation will help ensure that you are in a position to give them your best shot and, just as importantly, to learn from the experience; indeed, only by doing so will you be able to identify properly where the gaps in your knowledge and understanding lie. U6th likewise. With the incentive of some very good university offers now in, for which congratulations, you need to see next week not solely as a chance to rest, but also to be disciplined about getting a good deal of independent study done too. I wish you all well.

On Saturday there were some comprehensive victories on the hockey pitch against Cranbrook, following on from an excellent performance by our U18 boys on Thursday in the prestigious Frank Mason Tournament. For the fourth year in a row we reached the final, after a 3-1 win over Kent College in the semi-final, before losing to a very strong Tonbridge side 3-2, conceding a goal right at the end. We wish the team wel

l today as they play against Kingston Grammar in the next round of the National Cup. Similarly, the very best of luck to our U15 rugby side against the Crypt School tomorrow in the quarter final of the National Vase Competition. You have done St Lawrence College proud and we are all behind you.

Of course, the most important event of the weekend was the annual inter-house singing competition, without doubt one of my favourite events in the school calendar for a number of reasons. Firstly, and this year was certainly no different, I am always impressed by the huge array of talent we have in this school. Some of you are well-known performers within our community and it is always fantastic to see and hear you entertaining us with something new. Equally, however, we love it when, as teachers, we get to see a number of pupils in a completely different light, showing off skills which I did not know they possess – Demi particularly stood out for me in this regard on the drums and really got the evening off to an incredible start. And then, of course, there are those pupils who have just been waiting patiently for their moment in the spotlight and, when it comes, grab it with both hands – well done Philip for adding something special to Lodge’s version of Yellow Submarine!

Two other things really struck me on Saturday evening. The first was your behaviour, the respect and appreciation you showed towards your friends in other Houses. I am only too aware of how much the competition means to many of you and how much you would like to win the coveted trophy. But of equal importance to me was the way in which all of you helped to create a supportive atmosphere throughout the evening as well as the way those of you who did not end up winning in the end showed real graciousness. That, for me, is a mark of true character and of an excellent school.

The second point I wanted to make was how evident it was that, you had spent considerable time rehearsing – and this hard work really paid off. Aside from the undeniable benefit of helping to boost that crucial sense of house spirit, one of the reasons, as a school, why we continue to place great emphasis on pupil-led events like the house singing and house drama competitions, is that it gets you working in team and gives some of you the opportunity to lead – key skills which employers are increasingly looking for today in a competitive workplace. For some of you, for whom performing on stage is a daunting prospect, I know this requires courage and takes you well out of your comfort zone, but that is fine and indeed to be encouraged. In years to come beyond SLC, you may well find that the House Singing Competition remains one of your abiding memories, regardless of whether you see yourself as musician or not, as is the case for a number of OLs I have spoken to in recent times.

So well done to all of you who took part, including the staff, some of whom I know were just as nervous as you were. And for those of you lower down the school, whatever the outcome this year, please do not let that put you off giving it your best shot again in 2021 and beyond. Many congratulations to Josh Crottie and Alex Kirchschlager for winning the small group ensemble. Please can they come up. And can I now ask Rasmi, as House Captain, to come up to receive the trophy on behalf of Bellerby.

So onto my thought for this week. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Channel 5 TV programme ‘New lives in the wild’.

Now I am not a big watcher of television, but I do find this documentary series, now in its eleventh season, particularly compelling viewing. Having heard him speak at a conference a few years ago about the transformational effect boarding school had on him, I must confess that I am a big fan of the explorer journalist Ben Fogle, who presents the programme.

What fascinates me is how all the people Ben Fogle meets and spends his week with, in some of the remotest places on the planet, have chosen to give up a life of relative security, and in some cases quite considerable fame and wealth, and instead have opted to lead an existence, almost entirely cut off from society, and deprived of the modern-day creature comforts to which they were accustomed. Moreover, in the majority of episodes it quickly transpires that this dramatic change in lifestyle was not undertaken on a whim, but in fact was very much a conscious decision, one which in a good number of instances was taken a long while ago. Indeed, in the most recent episode I watched about a former professional photographer who gave up everything to live in the tiniest underground house imaginable amongst the beauty of the mountains in Oregon (think Mr Tumnis’s house in Narnia and shrink it), he has been doing so for thirty years. Perhaps even more remarkably, what invariably comes across in every interview Ben has with the people he stays with, is the fact that, without exception, they have no regrets whatsoever; indeed more than that, they claim that it is the period in their lives when they have enjoyed the greatest levels of happiness and fulfilment.

Part of my admiration undoubtedly comes from the fact that I know I could never entertain making such a bold and drastic move. And I am certainly not standing here this morning suggesting that you should; on the contrary, I imagine that very few, if indeed, any of you in this room would or will consider going off grid and leading a life of solitude in the future. But I do think it is worth spending a few moments reflecting on what motivates some human beings to want to live in this way and, more importantly, if there are any potential benefits of doing so that we can learn from or adapt for our own lives. There are four I would like to consider briefly.

The first is their common desire to detach themselves from a materialistic world. Now I know that I would find it exceptionally hard to do without certain possessions, to no longer have the possibility to buy new clothes or to be able to go out for dinner or the cinema. Equally, however, what I also know is that at times I suspect I give too much weight to the extent to which such things can contribute to my sense of contentment and well-being. Last week, I alluded to the life-changing experience I had working as a volunteer teacher in Tanzania. It was during my time there that it really came home to me that having lots in a material sense did not necessarily make me any happier. Indeed, the orphaned children I worked with, who had next to nothing comparatively, were genuinely some of the happiest children I have ever met. Perhaps, one might argue, this was because they did not know what they were missing out on. But I think the true answer lies elsewhere. The fact they had never experienced that desire to want the latest or best of anything meant that they were somehow more content with their lot, not to mention far more resourceful than anyone else I have ever known. Not too different in fact from the people in ‘New lives in the wild’.

The second point to make is their enjoyment of solitude. I consider myself to be a pretty sociable person and, as such, the idea of being on my own for days or weeks at a time fills me with horror. And I have to say that I do think the loss of human interaction the people on the programme experience is an extremely high price to pay for their hermit lifestyles. But it has, nevertheless, made me stop and consider whether I am perhaps too dependent on having other people around me more or less all of the time, and whether in fact there might be something to be said for me carving out a little more time to be on my own – time to reflect, time to appreciate complete silence, time simply to enjoy the beauty of nature around me.    

The third common theme that seems to unite the people in ‘New lives in the wild’ is their disillusionment with what they perceive to be a corrupt or flawed society. One such example appeared in a recent episode – a former Olympic athletics coach, named Nikola Boric, who enjoyed considerable success training runners and triathletes, leading a number of them to gold medals. Increasingly disenchanted with a sport that appeared not to be a level playing field, the final straw came when one of his athletes was refused entry to a competition for having the ‘wrong’ sponsors. He consequently decided to leave his glamorous and lucrative lifestyle behind. He bought a plot of land in Croatia for £10,000, donated the rest of his money and possessions to friends, keeping just €500 for himself, and built a mud hut from scratch in the middle of the woods. An extreme reaction you might think, and I would be inclined to agree. Would it not have been better to address the issue head on rather than seemingly running away from it? Quite probably. But I do, nonetheless, have a certain respect for remaining true to one’s principles and refusing to associate with something which does not align with your values.

And finally, there is an environmental aspect. Each of the people Ben Fogle gets to know has an acute sense of the need to lead their lives in a way that is ecologically friendly and sustainable – be this not having electricity, using local streams and rivers to get water and to wash or thinking carefully about the materials used to build their houses. A far cry from the world in which we all live and I dare say sacrifices that we would find it incredibly difficult to make. But at a time when concerns for the future of our planet are regularly being discussed, as highlighted by David Attenborough and Boris Johnson last week as they launched a climate change drive in the hope of achieving carbon neutrality in 30 years, we do have a duty as responsible citizens to consider ways in which we can contribute to this cause.

Four ideas then that I think we could all reflect on this week. I am certainly not intending to live life as a recluse in the back of beyond any time soon, but I do intend to make a few small changes to my way of operating and general mindset. I hope that you may feel minded to do the same.

Thank you for your attention and once again well done on all that you have achieved so far this term. I hope you have a really good week. 

Well, it’s two weeks until half-term with a good deal still to look forward to, not least the much anticipated House Singing Competition of course on Saturday evening. Do keep working hard and make sure that you are getting plenty of quality sleep too. I would like to start this morning by saying well done to all of you involved in some very competitive hockey and netball matches against Sutton Valence over the weekend. This is invariably one of our toughest block fixtures of the term and so it proved again. I was delighted to be able to witness first hand your tremendous commitment both on the astros and on the netball courts. Equally, I was pleased to see you playing in the right spirit too and to hear the same message from your coaches. In the end, honours were pretty much shared between the two schools. Particular congratulations to our 1st XI hockey side for securing a 6-3 victory and also to our 1^st VII netball team who in a very tense affair ended up drawing 18 all. Earlier in the week, it was fantastic to hear too about our U13 boys being crowned Kent County Champions in hockey, following their defeat of Eltham College on penalty strokes in the final. They now go on to compete in the regionals. Well done to all of you involved.

Those of you who were in Chapel a couple of weeks ago will recall Reverend Goodwin Hudson speaking to you about Zach Whitehead going to Uganda to work with the Abode Project – a project which seeks to provide a home and an education for children in the Kabale region of the country. Zach is there currently and is involved in building an orphanage and school as well as helping to organize a small music festival. You will remember too that Zach was seeking a wide range of items for the new school. True to form, a good number of you responded to the call and as a consequence Zach was able to fly out with two 25Kg bags full of equipment and clothing. So thank you very much to those of you who contributed.

Showing concern for society and the wider community, volunteering and fundraising for worthy causes are all things I believe we feel strongly about as a school – indeed, it is an area of school life we have focused quite a bit on in recent times, last term’s ‘Rowvember’ event being a prime example. In light of this, it gives me great pleasure this morning to welcome and introduce you to our guest, Andy Robertson. Mr Pegden and I heard Andy speak last term at a conference we both attended, and we both found that what he had to say resonated very much with some of our aims as a school. Andy works for Tearfund, a Christian Charity based in the UK, whose primary aim is supporting those in poverty and providing disaster relief for disadvantaged communities in different parts of the world. A good number of you will have had the opportunity to meet Andy during the course of the day, and indeed I know some of the boarders amongst you had chance to do so yesterday evening. I know you will make him feel welcome and will be interested to hear what he has to share about Tearfund. Some core themes he will cover are - 

You are not too young to make a difference - you can be a voice for change 

A lack of information and education leads to extreme poverty 

Tearfund is working to change lives through communities- empowering people to be the change - as well as campaigning on the detrimental effect of single use plastic and how it hits those living in poverty the hardest.

 

I do hope that you had a lovely long exeat weekend and may I take this opportunity to thank those members of staff whose turn it was be on duty, providing others with the chance to have a break and re-charge the batteries.

As in previous weeks, I am going to begin this morning by handing out certificates, this time for achievements in a different area of school life. Drama. The following pupils have all achieved distinctions in their LAMDA exams, so can I please invite them to come up to the stage to receive their certificates.

Albie Sibson-Harris – Miming Grade 3

Rebecca Dawson – Speaking Verse and Prose Grade 3

Georgia Binfield – Miming Grade 4

William Khan - Speaking Verse and Prose Grade 4

Caspar Durrant – Miming Grade 5

Well done to all of you. Now, today I wanted to celebrate some good news for a member of staff as well. Having successfully completed her training, Ms Yanchunis has officially been appointed an Officer in the Combined Cadet Force and to recognise this I am delighted to be able to present her with her scroll from Her Majesty The Queen. Ms Yanchunis – would you like to come up.

As some of you may know, today, the 27^th January, is Holocaust Memorial Day and to get us thinking about the significance of this, I would like to start by showing you a short video clip - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCrmmMZHNTM

I imagine that most of you in this room are aware of the word ‘Holocaust’, even if you would not all necessarily be able to talk about what it really means or refers to in great detail. Most commonly, the Holocaust refers to the systematic killing of six million Jewish people, as well as other minority groups (whom I will come onto shortly), by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. The word Holocaust is in fact derived from the Greek word holokauston, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. This word was specifically chosen because in the ultimate manifestation of the Nazi killing programme—the extermination camps - the bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria.

As you saw in the video, this year the date is particularly significant since it marks the 75^th anniversary of the liberation of arguably the most notorious extermination camp from the Second World War, Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. And similar to Remembrance Sunday on 11^th November, where we remember all those who have given their lives in armed conflict and in service of their country, Holocaust Memorial Day encourages us to remember the millions of people who died in what is perhaps the best known example of genocide; genocide being the deliberate killing of a large group of people from a particular nation or ethnic group.

It is worth pointing out, however, that whilst the Jewish population undoubtedly represented the biggest proportion of those killed, and were very much the group most singled out for complete annihilation, the Nazis did target other groups too for discrimination – essentially those they believed threatened their ideal of a pure Aryan race. Hitler’s devotion to achieving racial purity meant that hatred was also focused on Roma and Sinti people (sometimes referred to as Gypsies). Slavic people from Poland and Russia were also considered inferior and were targeted, whilst the desire to ‘improve’ the genetic make-up of the population also resulted in the disabled, either mentally or physically, being persecuted and killed. Likewise, those who were considered political opponents, specifically communists, as well as homosexual people and those whose religious beliefs conflicted with Nazi ideology, such as Jehovah’s witnesses, were also deported to death camps. Many of these groups did not receive acknowledgement of their suffering until many years after 1945, though Holocaust Memorial Day does at least give us the chance to do so now.

So why is it important that we continue to mark something that happened so long ago, something which none of us in this room were responsible for? Well, ensuring that we remember is certainly part of it, all the more so when the number of Holocaust survivors who are still alive is dwindling fast; indeed, in the not too distant future there will be no one left capable of providing first-hand accounts of what actually happened. All that will remain will be the message and the stories passed down from generation to generation, the black and white video footage, accounts recorded in books and the power of Holocaust poetry. I have asked Amelia to read one such poem for us this morning.

Auschwitz – By Charles N Whittaker

The semiquaver chugging of the train on the track,

And the people on board who will never go back,

And the terror in the eyes of all the young ones to go,

With no one knowing as the train comes to slow.

 

Those men at the station as the ramps drop down,

Where humanity lost is the only crippled sound,

Hope gone for those who stand behind the hard sharp wire,

And the smoke in the towers rises just a little higher.

 

And the blue ink stabs a little harder in the skin,

Above the veins of despair where murder let it in,

And the terror in the eyes of all those about to leave,

Another train on the track no last minute reprieve,

 

And the slow, crotchet chugging of the train on the track

And the people on board, who will never go back.

.

From my point of view, it has been pleasing to see in the last couple of years, new books still appearing, written by survivors of Auschwitz, books such as ‘The Tatooist of Auschwitz’ and ‘The Librarian of Auschwitz’, books which tell personal stories but also give us as the reader an insight into the horrors of the camp. For me, one of the most powerful books I have read about the holocaust is ‘Se questo è un uomo’ (‘If this is a man’), written by an Italian chemist named Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz who saw it as his responsibility to those who had perished, to tell his and their story, in the hope that the memory of what happened would never be forgotten, nor destroyed.

Like many things, nothing quite beats going to a place yourself, of course, and I would encourage you all to visit Auschwitz at some point in your lives. I went there twenty years ago on a school trip and the memory of it is still very much imprinted on my mind – the piles of glasses and suitcases, stacked on top of each other, the eeriness of the gas chambers and the haunting feeling I had inside of me when we stepped inside Block 11, the torture and interrogation building. So too is the memory of seeing the reaction of the students I took there. On the coach journey back to Krakow afterwards nobody spoke for an hour, staff or pupils, we simply sought to process what we had seen, to reflect. I know the same was true of the pupils from this school who accompanied Mrs Locsei-Campell and Mr Gale to Auschwitz on an educational visit a number of years ago. Indeed, the older ones amongst you may recall the hugely powerful chapel talk given by one of our former pupils, Nina Schenk, who went on that very trip.

So, remembrance yes. But of arguably greater importance, is the need for us to learn from the mistakes of the past, in this case in order to ensure that never again will a whole people be reduced to tattooed numbers, dehumanised, exterminated. Because the sad reality is that as human beings we continue to make the same mistakes, genocides have continued to take place around the world and are still happening today. And the purpose of Holocaust Memorial Day is to remember and acknowledge those atrocities too. Let me give you some examples.

In the 1970s in Cambodia, under the leadership of Pol Pot and his political party the Khmer Rouge, with its haunting slogan ‘To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss’, it is estimated two million civilians died from execution, disease, exhaustion or starvation. Two decades later, in Rwanda in 1994, we saw the extreme tension and conflict between the two main tribes – the Hutus and the Tutsis - which resulted in around 1 million Tutsis being massacred, including women, children and babies. Remarkably, the enormous scale of this genocide was carried out almost entirely usually using machetes and clubs. Even more tragically, the killers were frequently people they knew – neighbours, work colleagues, former friends, sometimes even relatives through marriage.

Elsewhere, between 1992 and 1995, the Bosnian war resulted in the death of around 100,000 people, and the displacement of over two million men, women and children. Under the orders of Slobodan Milošević, the President of Serbia, a campaign of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide was carried out by Bosnian Serb troops. The violence and killings culminated in a massacre that lasted three days when over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered in and around Srebrenica. Many were shot trying to escape and their bodies were bulldozed into mass graves and concealed. This particular genocide is the largest incidence of mass-murder in Europe since World War II.

More recently, in Sudan, under the control of General Omar Al-Bashir, the government used armed militia, known as the Janjaweed, to carry acts of ethnic cleansing against black Africans in Darfur, a region in the west of the country. This has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and even today the United Nations estimates that 4.7 million people are still affected by the conflict and denied their basic human rights.

So, Holocaust Memorial Day is a day when we must seek to learn the lessons of the past and recognise that the genocide witnessed in World War II was not a one-off event. Quite remarkably, there are still those who refuse to admit that the Jewish Holocaust ever happened, despite the irrefutable evidence to the contrary. By and large, we are fortunate here in the UK; we are not at immediate risk of genocide. However, discrimination has not ended, nor has use of the language of hatred or exclusion. And the threat of terrorism at the hands of extremists, though still relatively low, has evolved in recent years and is growing. So, as you go about your day today, I would ask you to remember. Perhaps some of you will choose to support the ‘we remember’ campaign on social media. And in the longer term, as you go through life, I would ask that you do all that you can to help ensure history does not repeat itself, not to be silent or to be a bystander if and when you see instances of racism, discrimination or persecution.

I leave you this morning with a second video, put together with some more familiar faces. Advance warning that you may find one of two of the images distressing, but I would urge you to keep watching – after all, Holocaust Memorial Day is not something we should close our eyes to.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/24/top-footballers-to-mark-holocaust-memorial-day-with-anti-racism-video-kane-houghton-klopp-lampard-lineker