Today is Ralph Sadleir’s birthday, well…sort of.  Never-the-less we celebrate it with vigour and enthusiasm, with our picnic lunch and traditional sports day afternoon.  It was my first experience of this momentous day in the school calendar and it is fair to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it – in no small part thanks to the glorious weather that had been prayed for by Mr Morgan and Miss Bickerstaff all week!!

The day started with M5’s assembly, which told us about the life of Ralph Sadleir, more of which can be found on the website.  Mrs Hinton also showed some pictures of places the Year 7’s will recognise from their France Trip that were of particular importance today – the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

Speaking of anniversaries – this week saw that of the ‘ball of the century’ bowled by Shane Warne, which leads us nicely onto the result from the Year 6 District Kwik Cricket Tournament.  Both teams won all their matches and we now advance to the County round of the tournament.  Not to be outdone on the sporting front, the Year 7 and 8 girls’ rounders teams won their respective matches against St Mary’s.

And so to the traditional sports day – the tension, the drama, the excitement were there for all to see as the children scoffed down their picnic lunches, whose nutritional value had been carefully calculated by Mr Rowe and the Ralphies team to enable peak performance in the afternoon activities.  Each Tutor or Teaching Group had been assigned a Commonwealth country earlier in the week and the children proudly displayed the flags, badges or banners that they had made.  The competition was fierce but the support and sportsmanship equally so.

The winners:

M5 – Samoa

A6 – Ghana

Pasteur – Samoa

Waterloo – Singapore

It was a great end to the week and in the immortal words of our eponymous Tudor gent ‘be proud of your achievements but do not let them define you, if you came and tried then you are a winner!!!’

Have a great weekend.