275 Newsletter March 2023

Celebrating together in our 275 anniversary year

WELCOME

Spring is in the air, and with it comes a sense of renewal and rejuvenation. As the weather warms up and the days get longer, many of us look forward to spending more time outside, enjoying the beauty of nature and indulging in the bounties of the season.

In this month’s newsletter, we will be shining a spotlight on food at Kingswood. In 1749, John Wesley produced a document entitled “A Short Account of the School in Kingswood, Near Bristol”, describing his vision for Kingswood School and the pupils diet throughout the week which is the focus of our “Kingswood In 12 Objects” feature.

I am proud to say that food at Kingswood has evolved greatly since Wesley’s time and continues to do so, with the vision of the Kingswood Cookery School and its partnership with Leiths.

I am delighted to contribute to this month’s newsletter, particularly as we

are focusing on one of my passions, food! As the Executive Chef at Kingswood School, I firmly believe that food is a vital part of our pupils’ development, journey, and wellbeing - both for our day pupils, boarding community and staff.

My background in the restaurant industry has taught me the importance of creating menus that customers enjoy, and I am thrilled to be able to bring this passion to Kingswood. When I first joined the School in 2001, the food on offer was vastly different from what we serve now. Over the years, I have developed a nutritious and varied menu that focuses on sustainability and local produce, with a close eye on our carbon footprint.

We are committed to supporting local suppliers, and we use Newton Farm as our primary butcher and Manor Farm for our free-range eggs, which is owned by a former pupil. Sustainability is at the forefront of our minds, from using biodegradable, low carbon, low palm oil products to composting our vegetable peelings on the school grounds. We are continuously seeking ways to increase our sustainability efforts. (Cont. on page 2)

“Over the years, I have developed a nutritious and varied menu that focuses on sustainability and local produce...”

As our pupils' awareness of food has grown, they have become more engaged with the menus. I regularly receive feedback from School Council meetings and make changes to the menu as needed, although regrettably, the request for chips to be served every day is not possible. Our pupils' enthusiasm for food is exciting, and we recently served a Cuban street food theme night for the boarders, which was very well received. I am privileged to have an excellent team of chefs working across the Senior School, Prep School and Nursery. These chefs come from various backgrounds including restaurants, cafés, bakeries and are hard-working and imaginative which is a huge benefit to Kingswood.

This year, we are co-hosting the Methodist Transforming Lives Education Conference and are tasked with creating and delivering a menu for 200 delegates. I drew inspiration from the original John Wesley proposed menu and plan to use a lamb dish, but elevated from the boiled mutton he suggested. I am confident he would approve of the food we serve to our students and think it is conducive to their health. The last 22 years have flown by at Kingswood, I have not lost any of my enthusiasm for making great dishes for our community to enjoy. I am very much looking forward to the introduction of the Cookery School; not only will it benefit the pupils, but it will also benefit the wider community which is very exciting.

I am grateful to work alongside a fantastic team of chefs who bring their creativity and passion for food every day. Together, we strive to ensure that food remains an integral part of our community now and in the future.

Mr Adrian Fairlie Executive Chef

METHODIST MODERN ART EXHIBITION RETURNS TO KINGSWOOD FOR 275 CELEBRATIONS

As part of the 275 celebrations, Kingswood is hosting the 2023 Methodist Education International Conference with ‘Transforming Lives’ being the theme.

The collection is a selection of over 50 works, including some by wellknown artists such as Graham Sutherland, Elisabeth Frink, William Roberts, Patrick Heron, offering an exploration of Christian themes to a wide audience. In the early 1960s the collection was housed at Kingswood School, with individual items being lent to other Methodist schools and colleges.

Part of the collection will be hosted at Kingswood, with 10 pieces of work reflecting themes of Methodist Education.

To arrange a viewing of this special exhibition, please contact Rev. Katy Thomas on kthomas@kingswood.bath.sch.uk

L-R: Sharon Traylor, Pauline Bass, Adrian Fairlie, Tami Fairlie

G.Howard - Washing of Feet; J.Sahi - Dalit Madonna, from the Methodist Modern Art Collection © TMCP, used with permission www.methodist.org.uk/artcollection

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

We look forward to enjoying an exciting line-up of events for our 275 anniversary year.

APRIL

WEDNESDAY 19 APRIL

• London Business Networking Event East India Club – 6.30pm to 8.30pm

Everyone welcome. Please contact Michele Greene to book your free place: mgreene@kingswood.bath.sch.uk

TUESDAY 25 APRIL

• Dr Rebecca Torrance Jenkins

Dr Rebecca Torrance Jenkins, Head of Preparatory Science at KPS, spent a decade working in the field of educational neuroscience, using science to explain what makes a great teacher so great. Her work across all ages, and in both the independent and state sector, has seen her link theory and practice; testing laboratory findings in real classrooms to improve learning outcomes. Dr TJ will be sharing her top takeaways and guidance for parents.

This lecture will be streamed live – book your place now.

MAY

THURSDAY 4 MAY

• 275 Anthology Launch – Commemorating 275 years Kingswood Chapel – 6.30pm to 7.45pm

Watch this space. Full details will be available in April’s issue of the 275 newsletter.

WEDNESDAY 10 MAY

• Hong Kong Reception – Evening

SATURDAY 13 MAY

• Tokyo Reception – Evening

To join either of these international reception events, please contact Graham Papenfus: gpapenfus@kingswood.bath.sch.uk

TUESDAY 23 MAY

• Sophie Montagne - Polar Performance Ice Maidens Expedition

Sophie is a former journalist and luxury marketer who took on the Ice Maidens challenge, despite her fear of the cold and aversion to physical activity. She underwent intense training and overcame personal obstacles, eventually being selected for the final team.

The experience was transformative, giving her confidence and a new perspective on her abilities. In her talk, she will share her journey and the lessons she learned from participating in the Ice Maidens challenge. Click here to find out more.

This lecture will be streamed live – book your place now.

JUNE

FRIDAY 9 JUNE

• 275 Community Golf Day

Cumberwell Golf Club

Everyone welcome. Please contact Michele Greene if you are interested in playing either on your own or in your own fourball: mgreene@kingswood.bath.sch.uk

THURSDAY 15 JUNE

• Nairobi Reception

Please contact Michele Greene to book your free place: mgreene@kingswood.bath.sch.uk

FRIDAY 23 JUNE

• 275 Celebration Supper

Everyone is welcome to come along and enjoy a lovely supper cooked by our School Chefs in the School Dining Hall – guests welcome. Please contact Michele Greene: mgreene@kingswood.bath.sch.uk | £15 per person

SATURDAY 24 JUNE

• 275 Celebration Day – Details TBC

Open to Old Kingswoodians. An opportunity to return to School for Class Reunions, a Chapel Service and School lunch. Please contact Michele Greene for further details or to book: mgreene@kingswood.bath.sch.uk

SEPTEMBER

SEPTEMBER

• The Modern Maverick, Ed Haddon – Details TBC

This lecture will be streamed live – book your place now.

CELEBRATING 275 AT KINGSWOOD PREP SCHOOL

At our Prep School, we have been putting our 275th anniversary celebrations at the heart of our R.E. curriculum this term.

Year 5 have been looking at Christianity and the founding of Methodism while Year 6 has been looking more deeply at John Wesley himself. Children have been putting videos onto a secure international platform to share their thoughts about our school founder with Methodist schools around the world. This is going to be a tremendous way to bring our international community together ready for further celebrations later this year. Our Charity Monitors, Evie, Iris, Skye and Sophia, have been sharing their ideas to get across what we, as a school, have been focusing on over

the last 12 months. This message, along with an interview with Mandy Briggs, the Education Officer at the New Rooms in Bristol, is part of the lessons that Kingswood Prep School are creating and sharing with primary schools around the UK and the world. John Wesley put giving at the heart of his teachings; this remains a core part of our Methodist school communities.

The focus for this year’s 275th anniversary celebrations highlights the U.N.’s second Global Development Goal, which is Zero Hunger. At KPS, we have been looking at both the global community, but also our local communities. This culminated in a trip to the Kingswood chapel with the Year 9s, where local charities explained what important work they are doing in our community. Going forward this year, we will be continuing to work with local charities, Julian House and Bath Food Bank as well as other exciting educational opportunities throughout the whole school.

Ms Helen Worrall Deputy Head, Kingswood Prep School

Our Charity Monitors talk about what the children have been doing to mark 275 so far this year.

“John Wesley put giving at the heart of his teachings; this remains a core part of our Methodist school communities.”

KINGSWOOD COOKERY

All our pupils need to develop cookery skills for life.

The importance of knowing how to cook on a budget, using fresh ingredients from scratch, as well as the benefits of cooking and sharing a meal with others is now accepted as a bedrock of our society. Cooking is recognised as a pastime with benefits to mind and body.

I was thrilled therefore when our planning application was approved to build a cookery school at Kingswood. This will fill an important gap in our current curricular and co-curricular offering and provide us with another avenue to do important work within the local community.

…that will offer something for everyone, young or old

The vision is that Kingswood Cookery will offer a combination of academic, enrichment and co-curricular cookery to students during term time, and commercial cookery courses to parents and the wider public during evenings, weekends and school holidays. Given our status as a Leiths Academy School, our students will have the opportunity to study for the prestigious Extended Certificate in Professional Cookery alongside their A Levels. I know from previous experience that our afterschool cookery clubs will be extremely popular with pupils, both prep and senior, as well as their parents who will get to enjoy the fruits of their child’s labour from the food taken home at the end of the day (if it gets that far!).

…and will help us to support our country’s national food strategy

We have an ambitious plan in partnership with the Leith Academy…

The plan is ambitious – this is not simply a teaching kitchen to deliver cooking skills to pupils (as important as this is). This is a branded cookery school incorporating Leiths School of Food & Wine and will be a ‘premier league’ offering for the benefit of our pupils and the local community. This project ranks highly in terms of short term priorities because it will help to underpin our strategic plan in a number of key areas; sixth form recruitment and retention, diversifying the Foundation’s revenue streams, generating enterprise income to reinvest in the school, and creating a valuable source of competitive advantage against other local and national schools.

Our country is also facing the twin and overlapping problems of food poverty (where people are choosing between heating and eating) and an obesity epidemic on account of excess consumption of less healthy, more processed food. The national food strategy needs advocates and people to help deliver it. There is deprivation right here in Bath with many families eligible for free school meals. Kingswood Cookery will be a facility that will enable us to be part of the solution. For example, I am excited about pupils from St Marks (one of our partner state schools) being able to make use of what will be a state-of-the-art facility during their Hospitality and Catering course.

I want to establish a broad and beneficial outreach programme which could include;

• Local secondary cross curricular programme e.g., French and Spanish cookery

• Local primary ‘Field to fork’ programme

• Virtual School & ‘looked after children’ life skills cookery

• Training for local school catering teams Food and drink has a very high profile

in Bath, the West Country and indeed the UK and this project represents a high-quality response to feedback from parents, pupils and staff, both for their benefit and in pursuit of our wish to be celebrated as a socially and environmentally responsible member of the local community.

Andrew Gordon-Brown Headmaster & Principal of The Kingswood Foundation

WE NEED YOUR HELP…

Whilst Kingswood is a very popular school, we have no endowment and need to raise funds through donations if we are to deliver on our strategic vision. I am very grateful to the parents, alumni and other stakeholders who have already pledged their support, in cash or in kind. We are about halfway towards our target to raise the £1m required to build the Cookery School and I would love to hear from anyone who is in a position to support our appeal.

WESLEY’S PULPIT

In 1748 on the original Kingswood School site a pulpit was built into the chapel for John Wesley. This became known as Wesley’s Chapel and Wesley’s Pulpit.

When Kingswood moved to Bath in 1851 the pulpit was left in Bristol and in 1919 Wesley’s Chapel was demolished. Someone had the idea to preserve his original Pulpit, although we’re not sure who, and present it to the then well-established Kingswood in Bath. There are records to show that in 1938 it was being stored in the school tower and was too dilapidated for reconstruction. It remained there until the 1960s and was then moved to the basement of Summerhill. In 1983 the Headmaster, Laurie Campbell, retrieved it and began to plan for its rebuild.

John Allison, then Head of Design and Technology at Kingswood, worked with drawings of the original to rebuild the Pulpit into the balcony of

the Dining Hall, looking to preserve as much of the original construction as possible. The photos show how Wesley’s Pulpit looks today, as rebuilt by John Allison in 1983. John Allison also made a model of the Pulpit from card, which was recently rediscovered. The images show the damaged model with broken sections and water damage. The Kingswood Archivist, Zoë Parsons, approached the DT Kingswood Repair Shop to see if it could be brought back to life. Mr Castrique asked Adam Reilly, a Year 10 student, to take a look as his skills as both an Art and a DT scholar could come in helpful in this restoration.

Adam began by photographing the Pulpit in the Dining Hall and then worked over the February half term break repairing intricate details of the model, stripping back old paint work and meticulously hand painting, masking off and airbrushing new paint onto the model. I’m sure you will agree with me that Adam has done an outstanding job of restoring this piece.

The model will now go on display in the Museum at the New Room in Bristol, the oldest Methodist building in the world at 1739, which tells the story of John Wesley’s life.

Huge congratulations and thanks to Adam for all of his hard work which has enabled this model to be appreciated by so many people in the future.

The DT Kingswood Repair Shop meet on a Tuesday after school and have undertaken a wide range of repairs from furniture to furnishings and toys.

If you have any items that you would like repaired, please do bring them along to Mr Castrique in DT1 at 4:30pm on a Tuesday.

POTTERY WORKSHOPS

Kingswood is abuzz with the arrival of Spring and the blooming of many flowers.

To commemorate the 275th anniversary of Kingswood, Mrs Fox, the Teacher and Art Coordinator at KPS, will be conducting three art workshops where participants can create stunning ceramic flowers.

After the Easter Holidays, parents of children in Years 4 through 6 are welcome to sign up for Saturday morning workshops where they can make clay flowers and leaves with their children.

COMING SOON! YOUR CHANCE TO PURCHASE A KINGSWOOD CELEBRATORY 275 TIE

All necessary materials will be provided, and Mrs Fox will demonstrate various clay techniques while providing friendly encouragement. The clay used in the workshop is a grogged, buff earthenware-stoneware blend, that will be robust enough to withstand outdoor display once fired.

The workshops are designed to be relaxed and enjoyable, with uplifting music playing in the background. What a lovely way to celebrate 275 years of Kingswood! We are excited to see the beautiful creations displayed throughout the school grounds.

PRE-ORDER “A SCHOOL SET APART”, WRITTEN BY GARY BEST

£15

(Kingswood Headmaster 1987 to 2008)

(£20 inc P&P)

Pre-order your copy of Gary Best's latest book

A journey through time, tracing the legacy of Kingswood School and its Alumni from 1748 to 2023, as we commemorate 275 years of excellence in education.

A journey through time, tracing the legacy of Kingswood School and its Alumni from 1748 to 2023, as we commemorate 275 years of excellence in education

HOW TO ORDER

How to order

Click on the QR Code to order and pay for your book, choosing the 'Association' payment type

If you have opted for posting then please add your address in the payment description box

Click on the QR Code to order and pay for your book, choosing the ‘Association’ payment type. If you have opted for posting then please add your address in the payment description box.

As part of our 275 anniversary we launched a design competition to create a 275 tie which the whole Kingswood Community could purchase and proudly wear.

Look out for the April edition as we share the design and get to know the designer and the process they followed to create it.

£15

(£20 inc P&P)

A HISTORY OF Kingswood in 12 Objects

This month, we turn our attention to the School food...

OBJECT THREE A GLIMPSE INTO SCHOOL MENUS THROUGH THE CENTURIES

In 1749, John Wesley produced a document entitled “A Short Account of the School in Kingswood, Near Bristol”, describing his vision for Kingswood School. John Wesley is so meticulous he even details the students’ diet for each day of the week, on Tuesdays, for example, they would eat boiled mutton! On Saturdays, it was bacon and greens and apple dumplings. And the students were to drink water at meals and nothing between meals.

Here is the menu as it appeared in Wesley’s document.

This contrasts immensely with the fantastic varied menus on offer at Kingswood today! (shown right)

Interestingly, in the 1870s the concept of a birthday dessert was perhaps a little different from today! (Figure 1)

Searching through the school magazines yielded the following article from the Kingwood School Magazine in November 1905, written by E. G. Barber (K.S. 1869-1875) recalling mealtimes at school. (Figure 2)

In 1901, the tables were converted into smaller ones and placed across the width with a central gangway, as today.

Trawling through many folders retrieved from the catacombs of Summerhill, I found some Food Committee Minutes, from the 1960s. They consist of short informative lists compiled by teaching staff, a representative from each of the five houses and catering staff.

In February 1961, they met three times and comments included:

“…Fish this week excellent...”

“…Sausage and onion pie was extremely popular. Can we have it more often?…”

“…Kippers disliked – small and dry…”

“…They would like bread omelettes…”

“…Can rice puddings be made free from lumps?…”

“…Can curry return to the list?...” A note next to this comment reads:”…N. B. Arrived next day!...”

YOUR MEMORIES

Do you have fond memories of your time at Kingswood that you would like to share with the community? If so, we would like to hear from you.

We would very much like to include some of your most treasured moments from your time at Kingswood. Whether it was a particular event, a memorable teacher, or a group of friends that made a lasting impact on you, we want to know about it!

Simply send an email with your memory, to marketing@kingswood.bath.sch.uk, keeping them to a maximum of 150 words.

You could see your memory in the next edition.

Zoë Parsons Archivist

FIGURE 2

FIGURE 1

School Kitchen, 1930s

Dining Hall, early C.20th