Welcome to TOBA

   Recently, 35 years since we left Burford, I had the great pleasure of lunching with an Old Burfordian who left us in 1978, and her Burford Mum who had been a pillar of the PTA, a staunch supporter of Burford community events, and airport taxi driver for the boarding students of the time.

    With us was Louise’s Scottish husband, my Burford son, Mark, and his Norwegian wife. Explaining the Burford days to the two non-Burford folk led me to ask why it was that despite the many changes of personnel, buildings, organisation and outcomes across the years, there is something of a Burford Buzz that makes us cling to the school. I still look forward to any news of school and town.

  Something of that unique quality comes from its very rich history. Edna Rylands and Agnes Simpson outlined this in their history published at the quatercentenary in 1971 – everything from Wysdom in court for short-changing the public, through legal action against Griffiths, the schoolmaster who misused the funds in the 1760s, to maintaining the agricultural speciality in the late nineteenth century and then, against all odds, admitting girls in the 1920s, developing boarding as a state school and then  following a reorganisation after 1944 which saw Bampton closed and Burford maintained. Survival required a continuing loyalty.

  Across the centuries the tie to the changing community it serves has made for some individuality. This community extended to the Wychwoods, the upper Thames villages and, over the years, a national link to the agricultural world, and eventually, following the strong RAF Brize Norton responsibility, an international boarding group keeping word of mouth support growing. It is the cohesion of that community – the changing student body from year to year, school staff of whatever role, Burford townspeople, diverse village residents, northern country farming humour, and then the scatter of other cultures all saw the school as ‘theirs’. The continuing loyalty required core values which have clearly changed and developed over the years.

  Year on year there has been a growing ‘unofficial’ history of people and events. From my time I think of explosive sessions in the chemistry labs; of unhappiness when ‘ag students’ were kept at history rather than aiding farrowing sows; of boarders distributing milk to Burford whilst heavy snow persisted; scant acknowledgement of Health and Safety by the stage crews; the start of bigger aspirations on the sports field with the first of the cricket matches against the County Offices (led by Tim Brighouse),  and of Pam Ayres early public performance in the music hall of 1972. Clearly, although necessarily changing, 450 years of history and tradition, drives the continuing buzz!

  Derek Glover