As part of their PSHE programme in conjunction with their ICT lessons, Year 7 students have been researching the Old Scholars who died in the First World War. First the students visited the memorial sited in the refectory of the school. Then they noted the names of the soldiers who died. The students used the war graves commission to find out more about them. The students found where some of the soldiers were buried and some details of the family of the deceased. The results of the search are written below.
Among the Old Scholars who were researched was Hugo Harrison Jackson, who joined the Friends ambulance unit and acted as a stretcher bearer. The Friends’ Ambulance Unit (FAU) was a volunteer ambulance service, founded by individual members of the British Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), in line with their Peace Testimony. The FAU operated from 1914–1919, 1939–1946 and 1946–1959 in 25 different countries around the world. It was independent of the Quakers’ organisation and chiefly staffed by registered conscientious objectors. The Unit was founded as the ‘Anglo-Belgian Ambulance Unit’ at the start of World War I in 1914 and later renamed the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. Members were trained at Jordans, a hamlet in Buckinghamshire, that was a centre for Quakerism. Altogether it sent over a thousand men to France and Belgium, where they worked on ambulance convoys and ambulance trains with the French and British armies. It was dissolved in 1919.
Matthew Jarman
Subject Leader of ICT