Part of the celebrations marking 350 years at Drogheda Grammar School

A new school history celebrates the 350th anniversary of Drogheda Grammar School

Patrick Comerford

I have fond memories of Drogheda Grammar School from the1960s, when it was located at Laurence Street in Drogheda and I was a schoolboy in neighbouring Gormanston, Co Meath.

Now it is a pleasure, half a century later, to be part of the celebrations of Drogheda Grammar School of the 350th anniversary of the school’s foundation in 1669.

Drogheda Grammar School is one of the oldest secondary schools in Ireland and has been providing first class education to local, national and international students for almost 350 years.

Drogheda Grammar School was founded under a Royal Charter granted to Erasmus Smith in 1669 and is now enjoying its fourth century of continuous educational service to the community.

It was originally a boys’ boarding school, but has been a co-educational school for over 50 years.

Drogheda Grammar School Ltd is a company with charitable status called that was set up in the early 1950s when a group of local people – mostly Quakers – saved the school from threatened closure. They included Victor and Winifred Bewley, Bevan Lamb, Basil Jacob, Doris Johnson, and other members of the Allen, Bewley, Douglas, Haughton and Young families.

Although the school is not a Quaker school, it is run along the Quaker principle of ‘every individual is of value and has something to contribute.’

The school was located in Drogheda’s town centre, beside Saint Laurence’s Gate until 1976, when it moved to Eden View and an 18-acre campus at Mornington, outside Drogheda.

Today, there are 360 students at the school, where the campus includes a Regency house flanked by woodland, with modern classroom and dormitory buildings and extensive playing fields.

The reflection room in the new school building (2012) features a stained-glass window that was originally in the old school building in Laurence Street. The Bole Memorial window is named after Bobbie Bole, a student who died at the school in 1942, and was created by the famous Harry Clarke Stained Glass Studio in the 1940s.

Famous past pupils include John Foster, last Speaker of the Irish House of Commons; three generals, Taylor, Ford and Pringle; Sir Thomas Brown; Henry Grattan; Archbishop Magee; Bishop Stopford; Bishop Bourke; Lord Mayo; Henry Singleton, later Chief Justice of Ireland; John Healy, the longest-serving editor of The Irish Times; and, more recently, the author and screenwriter Derek Landy.

The history of the school is celebrated in a new book, Drogheda Grammar School, 1669-2019, edited by the school principal Hugh Baker and local historian John McCullen.

Historians still debate whether the Duke of Wellington attended Drogheda Grammar. But I was invited to contribute Chapter 4 on his life and legacy: ‘Wellington: the Irish hero at Waterloo who introduced Catholic Emancipation’ (Chapter 4, pp 31-37).

Other chapters look at Henry Grattan, the history of the school over the past 3½ centuries, past pupils, including those who died in World War I, headmasters at the school since its foundation, student life, teachers’ reminiscences, the history of Eden View, and a moving chapter by local historian Brendan Matthews that includes a sad account of the demolition of the former school buildings on Laurence Street by developers in 1989.

The new book was launched just before Christmas at the school’s Carol Service in the Bevan Lamb Hall. The book can be bought through Drogheda Grammar School.

As for my chapter on the Duke of Wellington, more on this later HERE.

Remembering Anne Frank 75 years after the Holocaust

Anne Frank depicted in a mural in Berlin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

1, I am not going to be here next Monday, sorry. I am going to a reception in the House of Lords [in London organised by the Council of Christians and Jews] to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, to reflect on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and to launch a prayer for Christians for Holocaust Memorial Day.

2, The concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland was liberated 75 years ago this month, on 27 January 1945.

3, I visited Auschwitz a few years ago. One of the best-known children in Auschwitz was a girl called Ann Frank. I have visited her house in Amsterdam, and more recently I visited the Anne Frank Centre in Berlin. Has anyone been to Amsterdam? Has anyone been to Berlin?

4, When I was a boy, I read Anne Frank’s diary. Does anyone keep a diary? When I first read this book, I was 14, about the same age as Anne Frank was when she died. Some of my friends at the time thought I was a bit of a sissy for reading a book by a girl. But this is one of the best-known books in the world.

5, Anne Frank was a girl of 10 when World War II began … the same age as some of you, a little older than some of you. She was born in Frankfurt in Germany over 90 years ago, in 1929. When she was 4½, the Nazis seized power in Germany, and her family moved to Holland, to Amsterdam. They were Jews, and they thought they would be safer.

6, In her book, The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne tells of how she lived in hiding, in a secret room, at the top of the house. She went into hiding in 1942, when she was 13. She lived in a secret room, hidden behind a bookcase at the top of the house.

7, But the Frank family was betrayed and arrested two years later in August 1944, and sent to concentration camps. Anne and her sister Margot were moved from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where they died of typhus 75 years ago, in February or March 1945.

8, Her father, Otto Frank, survived Auschwitz and returned to Amsterdam in June 1945. Her diary was first published in English in 1952, seven years after she died.

9, Over 6 million Jews were killed in the concentration camps. I will be remembering them, and the survivors, and Anne Frank, in London next Monday.

10, We remember people who died in the Holocaust not only to honour them, or to read about them, but so that this should never happen again.

These notes were prepared for a reflection at a school assembly in Rathkeale on 13 January 2020

Anne Frank: Parallel Stories, a retelling of Anne Frank’s life guided by the Academy-Award winning actress Helen Mirren, is in cinemas for a limited time only, starting on 27 January, Holocaust Memorial Day.

‘Arbeit macht frei’ … the gate at Auschwitz (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)