WHEATLEY Park School has celebrated its 40th anniversary with former pupil Theresa May praising the eduction she got there.

The Home Secretary was at Holton Park Girls’ Grammar School in 1971 when it converted to a comprehensive, by merging with the Shotover School secondary modern.

But the transition was not always easy, with teachers having to race between the school’s two sites to make lessons until the entire school was rebuilt at Holton Park in the mid-80s.

The school’s business manager Kevin Heritage, who first taught there in 1979, said: “When I first started, the bells went simultaneously in both school, and you jumped in the car and went to the next school one-and-a-half miles down the road.

“Members of staff without cars had to wait at the gates and hitch rides to get down to their next lessons.”

He added: “Many of the teachers here had never taught boys before, and it took five or six years to sort itself out.”

Mrs May, who was at the school when it became Wheatley Park, told the Oxford Mail: “I have fond memories of my time at the school, which gave me a good education and prepared me well for my varied career since.”

A special exhibition about Holton Park’s history entitled 40 Years On went on display at Wheatley Park School, and the archive tracing the building’s history opened to the 150 former pupils, former members of staff and invited guests.

Roman coins have been found the on the site, as well the remains of a Norman watch tower, later con- verted into a hunting lodge for the walled deer park.

Archivist Nigel Phillips said: “There is a fantastic history here.

“When you think this is where Oliver Cromwell’s daughter Bridget married in the middle of the Civil War in 1646, it gives a sense of what has happened here.”

The estate was in the hands of the Tyndale-Biscoe family until 1911, before being bought by the Balfours who entertained King George V and Queen Mary at the house.

After the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944, it became an American military hospital for soldiers with head injuries.

By the spring of 1945, there were 3,500 American soldiers at the site, many brought in on ambulances from Wheatley station during the night, so people could not see their disfigurements.

The park was bought by the local authority in 1948, with Holton Park Girls’ Grammar School opening a year later as the sister school of Lord Williams’ Boys Grammar School in Thame.

Wheatley Park School opened during the comprehensive shake-up in the 1970s.

Ex-grammar school pupil Marilyn Yurdan, 64, who has written a memoir of her time there, said: “It was quite a shock coming back, simply because of the size of it and what has happened to a lot of the buildings.”