The Breakspear School

  1. Archives
  2. The 1980s
  3. 1982
  4. School Journey- Isle of Wight

School Journey- Isle of Wight

Mrs. Connie Dove's Albums of school photographs contain a group of slide transparencies dating from May 1982. The residential school journey was on the Isle of Wight, with a brief trip to Portsmouth via the hovercraft.

Any further information about this trip would be gratefully received!

Darren Burgess sent us the following recollections of this Isle of Wight trip...
You asked for more information with regards to the Isle of White trip. If I recall the year was split into 3 and so each form went in rotation. I was in 4D, Mrs Dove’s form and the other teachers that accompanied us were Ms Dewar (PE teacher) and I think the other teacher might have been Mr MacDermott but not 100% there.

The week away was good fun and we went to Carisbrooke Castle, Alum Bay, Blackgang Chine, walks over the downs and cliff tops, Robin Hill adventure playground & Country Park and a day trip over to Portsmouth to see the HMS Victory. I have a feeling we stayed at a hotel called The Priory or similar.

The most notable thing that sticks in my mind was this hovercraft trip. We’d left early from our hotel and spent the day over there and the weather was getting progressively worse as the day went on. When it was time to head back over to the Isle of White we were told that the wind was too high for the hovercraft, after all it was only a little passenger job, not a car carrying one.

Well there we were huddled in this little shed out of the driving rain and Mrs Dove and Ms Dewar were frantically trying to work out who had any money left as it looked like we may have to get bed & breakfast rooms over night when they finally announced that they were going to make a last run as the wind had died down to the maximum they could pilot the hovercraft in.

To this day I still remember myself, Peter Haines, Richard Gale and Clay Mitchell sitting in the very front seats as the thing was blown around and bounced like a bucking bronco all the way over to Ryde (IIRC). When we got off we found out that we were the only 4 on a packed hovercraft not to have been sick, including the stewardesses.

We all had to make projects up when we got back consisting of diaries and postcards/photographs etc of where we’d been and what we’d done.

I’d be interested to see some of the other photographs that Mrs Dove took as she was never without her camera the whole time we were there.