• St. John's Home
• Picture Pages Intro
• A poet visits
• St. John's Under Snow
• The Lord Mayor Visits
• Science Discovery Day
• Venice Art Trip
• Yr7 Normandy Trip
• Serre Chevalier Ski Trip
• Fireworks Evening
• Summer Term 1999
• Building Work II
• Pila Ski Trip
• Autumn Term Roundup
• Building Work I
• Night Under Canvas
• Summer Fun Day 1998
• Junior Sports Day
• 1998 U.S. Ski Trip
• Helicopter Visit
• A Cricket Match
• Easter Term Roundup
• First Match for the U8s
• Summer Concert
• Paris Art Trip
• Saracens Visit
• End of Year
• A hectic half a term
• 1997 U.S. Ski Trip

As soon as we got back from the Easter Holidays the Fifth Forms were away again - to Normandy in the north east of France.

Here's a large group of them down in the old fishing port part of Harfleur. It now very much caters for the tourist trade rather than fishing boats or cargo vessels.

This gun that Alex and Ciaran seem to be trying to operate is a Second World War field gun, and behind them to the left is an anti-aircraft gun, and that chateau with the twin cupolas seems to be vaguely familiar... What ties them all together is D-Day and the Normandy landings of June 1944. Arromanches was at the western end of the British Sector for the D-Day landings and today has an important D-Day museum (Musée du Débarque ment) which the boys visited.

Here they are walking up a steep hill heading out of Arromanches. That line of four objects stretching out into the bay is the remains of Port Winston, a Mulberry Harbour (artificial port) from the Normandy Landings. Work began on it 7th June (D-Day +1) and it was ready for use ten days later. This one served the British Sector and another one was off Omaha Beach in the American Sector.

This is another important D-Day site: the Pegasus Bridge at Benouville near Caen. Shortly after midnight on June 6th 1944 Major Howard and 160 men of the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry landed by glider and took this bridge - vital for a rapid breakout east from the landing beaches. Click here for a fuller explanation of the events at Pegasus Bridge.

Mont St. Michel is built on an island in a bay just off the coast on the Normandy / Brittany border. In 708 the bishop of Avranches, after a vision of the Archangel Michael declared it a pilgrimage site. In the 10th century Benedictine monks started work on the monastery that we see here today. The lower parts of the Abbey are Romanesque (or what we would call Norman) and the upper levels are Gothic and the whole thing is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Top