18
April 2015
Abingdon
Out of the Past
... and Mrs Thatcher Wore Yellow
L to R Donald Willis,
Sir George Sinclair OA, MP, Eric Anderson,
Denis Thatcher, Maragaret Thatcher
The dark ages for Abingdon lie between 1970 and 1990 since the archives have few
photographs from this period only slides and some negatives. Now however, thanks
to a digitization project by a group of boys from Crescent House, Asten Yeo, Michael
Man and Felipe Jin Li, these images are beginning to emerge from the past. So far they
have revealed Mrs Thatcher’s 1974 visit to inaugurate the building of the Dining Hall, and
publicity photographs from the early 1990s.
On Monday 16 February the School
received a visit from Lady Alison Radford,
the great-great-grand daughter of William
Strange, headmaster of Abingdon School
1840-1868. She and her daughter and
son-in-law were fascinated to see Dr
Strange’s portrait and to examine some of
the documents from the archives relating
to his headmastership. Lady Radford
was able to tell us that the family still
possessed the tea and coffee service
the OAs gave Dr Strange in 1863 both
as a token of gratitude and to mark the
School’s tercentenary.
Lady Alison Radford with
Robert and Anne Hickling
The Fate of
Lt W.C. Williams
All his family and school knew was that
Cyril Williams, OA 1913, had gone missing
on 24 September 1916 whilst on a patrol in
Salonika, presumed killed in action. Now a
Bulgarian family can tell us what happened
to him. Bantscho Guev was a clerk in a
field hospital on the Dorian front when a
prisoner, an English lieutenant, was brought
in to have his wounds dressed prior to
questioning. Later that day Bantscho came
across the lieutenant’s half buried body
abandoned in a ditch. The man’s face
haunted him and in later life he often recalled
the episode, so much so that his son, Iliya,
wrote it down. Now Iliya’s grandson, Ilian,
has translated the story into English. After
some difficulties with the transcription of
what his great-grandfather heard and wrote
down in Cyrillic, Ilian was able to work out
that it read, Cyril Williams, Newport. Ilian
put that into Google and discovered him
on Abingdon’s WW1 website. Ilian made
contact with the School hoping that one
day it might help Williams’ family to discover
his fate.
Lieutenant Cyril Williams,
Hampshire Regiment
R. Bantscho Guev,
Iliya Guev is the baby
Read the whole story at:
