AOSA CENTENARY HISTORY 1841 - 1941
page fifty-six
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Appendix
From its very commencement the School has owed much to members of the Richardson family, of Newcastle-on-Tyne. David Richardson and his sons Hugh and Gilbert, each maintained the traditional connection. Hugh Richardson provided trenchant criticisms of the teaching and the staff, and novel if sometimes quaintly impossible suggestions for new lines of experiment in education. To Gilbert many generations of scholars owe, even if they have never paid, thanks for valuable, erudite, and well-selected additions to the library.
Generally
accepted as a sort of unofficial vice-chairman of the Committee, perhaps
on account of his long service and his equal relationship to John Pease
with the chairman, J. Edward Hodgkin has found opportunities in several
ways to forward the School’s interests. Almost from its inception
he has been closely identified with the electrical plant; and has taken
detailed interest in the four building extensions that Ayton has experienced
during the forty-two years of his membership. He took a leading part
in the negotiations which ultimately led to the transfer of Rawdon
scholars and the loan of some Rawdon funds to Ayton. He also succeeded
in diverting to the School considerable legacies from Sarah Jane Fletcher
that had been left to extinct or non-available charities; as an active
trustee of Edward Walton’s Charity, he arranged in 1939 the merger
of its funds with those of Ayton, thus echoing and improving on the
temporary association begun just 100 years ago.
For a number of years the practice has been followed of appointing two members of Committee to check the accounts so as to save the time of the Quarterly Committee. In this connection the work of Ernest and Reginald Sibson and Ada M. S. Jackson as well as their present-day followers, John Cornforth and J. Arthur Taylor, both old scholars, has been of great value.
There has always been a specially close affinity between Ayton and Darlington, originating in the Pease family benefactions in the early years of the School. This close touch is still maintained, the General Purposes Committee being well supported by such stalwart members as Reginald J. Mounsey, his wife Mary (nee Pease) and his sister Amy E. Wallis, now honorary secretary of the women’s committee.
The advent of the Rawdon element has brought a welcome contingent of Yorkshire Friends to the Quarterly Committee, since certain Monthly Meetings send representatives, one of whom, William Thistlethwaite of Harrogate, was at one time on the staff and has served faithfully on the General Purposes Committee for over twenty years.
These names commemorate but a few persons of the recent past and of the present. Many others with them have given and are giving to the School their time, care, devotion. Thus they follow in the steps of their worthy predecessors, and join the past with the present in desiring nothing more than the truth of the motto, adapted from an institution vastly more renowned, ‘Floreat Aytona.’
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