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Cambridge Greek Plays Trip
Jonathan Amarnath, 5S
One Thursday morning in mid-
October, Mrs Baker, Miss Stewart
and Mr Ceeraz, along with a bunch
of U6 and L6 Classical Civilisation
and Greek pupils, six Fifth Form
Greek pupils and two U4 Greek
pupils set off to Cambridge.
Upon arrival we had a brief snack then headed
to Corpus Christi College where I gave a talk
about the Corpus Clock or Chronophage. The
clock took several years to build and cost £1
million; mostly because the outer face of the
clock is made from steel plated with 24-carat
gold leaf. It was built by John Taylor and
unveiled by Professor Stephen Hawking. If one
were to look at it, the creepy grasshopper on
top would grab your attention. This is
the Chronophage or TimeEater; the clock
is named the Chronophage since it represents
how quickly we lose time and how time flies
past us, especially when we are having a
good time.
After free time, when we could go and have
lunch at any café or restaurant which took
our fancy, we met at the Cambridge Arts
Theatre, the main focus of the trip. We took
our seats inside and given a talk by Professor
Simon Goldhill, who offered some interesting
opinions about the two plays which we were
about to see, whilst also giving us an insight
of what to expect. The first play - both plays
were performed in Greek with surtitles - was
Antigone
Sophocles’ tragedy. It tells of King
Creon who declares that the state comes
before family and so disallows burial rites
for Polynices. However, Antigone, Polynices’
sister, is caught trying to bury him. A bitter
tragedy ensues. The second of the plays was a
comedy by Aristophanes:
Lysistrata
. Lysistrata
is fed up with the ongoing war and decides
that she, along with all the other women,
will abstain from sex until the war ends. This
results in the men suffering and so they decide
to end the war. The play filled the crowd with
raucous laughter and the adaptation made
for more comic genius with a chorus of Nigel
Farage, Donald Trump and, our favourite, the
blubbering Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson.
The plays ended with lots of us still smiling
at some of the jokes. It was an intriguing
experience and anyone who may have gone
thinking that the plays might be boring would
have definitely thought differently afterwards.
CLASSICS / HUMANITIES 7
Fifth Form
Battlefields Trip
Jamil Haque, 5E
In November 2016 the Fifth Form went on the
Battlefields Trip to France and Belgium to visit various
sites connected with the First World War, ranging from
graveyards to actual battlefields. The Battle of the
Somme was a significant battle fought by the British
and French against Germany in order to regain lost
territory in France. Here we visited the Beaumont
Hamel memorial, erected in memory of the many
Canadian troops who were killed during the War. The
site of the memorial is one of the few places where you
can walk through the trench lines and across No Man’s
Land. The area was littered with huge craters from the
numerous shells dropped during the Battle of Vimy
Ridge making the landscape look almost alien. Behind
the trenches stands a large statue of a caribou crying
out over the battlefield for soldiers who died there.
On the trip, we visited many of the graveyards in which the allied
forces and Germans are buried. One such graveyard was Tyne Cot
in Belgium. It is the largest British cemetery in the world, containing
almost 12,000 graves, many unnamed, and 35,000 inscriptions
dedicated to brave solders who gave their lives during the First World
War but have no known place of burial. The cemetery was huge with
rows of graves extending for as far as the eye could see. It was here,
on Remembrance Sunday, that we took part in a minute’s silence to
commemorate those who had died here.
Finally, one of the most emotional moments of the trip was when we
visited the grave of Old Bancroftian Arnold Capel Bathos at Combles
Communal Cemetery. Unlike the other sites we visited, here it was
just our group in a relatively
small cemetery
standing over the
grave of a 25 year-
old man who went
to the same school
as us. We placed a
wreath of poppies
over his grave and
recited a poem in
dedication to him. It
was a poignant end
to a memorable trip.