Reflecting on VE Day Celebrations

From our Headmaster, George Vance

In the morning Assembly last Thursday we were able to bring VE Day 80 even closer to home with an artefact from the school archive room. 18 years ago when I first came to Rockport, a former parent from my last school contacted me to present me with a memento he had acquired whilst working at Rockport on the roof of the main building some years before: a lead roof tile with the scored inscription, ‘DE Green, VE Day 8/5/45’.

Its provenance was confirmed sometime later when I showed it to a pair of late-great ORs, Dr John Crosslé and Tony Greeves, who remembered David Green as a boy who attended Rockport at the same time as them during the war years. Apparently, all three were part of a group of boys who had climbed onto the roof that day, to witness what was part of the first ever VE Day celebrations. They, John and Tony explained, watched in awe as Royal Navy ships of the fleet roared up and down the lough sounding their alarms while Spitfires skimmed across the water, before soaring into the sky above the school giving an impromptu air show of spectacular aerobatics. It was during this spectacle that Green must have marked the occasion by carving his name into the lead.

The unbridled joy they felt that day must have been palpable, and in stark contrast to their experience of the Belfast Blitz just a few years before when the whole school had sheltered in the basement as they heard the bombers pass overhead and the subsequent ‘crumps’ (their word) of the bombs landing on the city. Poignant stuff.

Thank you and very well done to all who contributed (and who came) to the school’s VE Day 80th anniversary celebrations. The garden parties on both lawns were a wonderful tribute to that greatest generation, and will have served to remind our children and young people about those who gave so much in the cause of freedom. Later in the day there was a real authenticity in the scene where Miss Carr serenaded children and adults alike in period dress with songs form the 40s from a military tent beside a WW2 Hotchkiss Jeep (it’s handy to have a parent who was a producer on Saving Private Ryan), following an excellent afternoon tea provided by our catering team.