IT WAS smiles all round from these cricketing heroes. Pupils at Temple Cowley School in Oxford had won the Trustee Savings Bank County Knockout Cup – and there was no holding back on the celebrations.

The school’s under-13 team had beaten Lord Williams’s School, Thame, by 19 runs in a tense final in 1986.

The winning cricketers are pictured, top, left to right, Abdul Rashid, Michael Maciak, Milorad Misina, Richard McClean, Vincent Crump and Stuart Dudley, and front, Philip Toomey, David Cook, Philip Knight (captain), Simon Woodman and Barney Charalambous.

The school in Temple Road, Cowley, had a long tradition of encouraging pupils to take up sport.

In 1958, when it celebrated its 25th anniversary, a new £1,000 sports pavilion was opened, after a successful fundraising campaign.

The opening ceremony, performed by Mr MAH Bellhouse, deputy chairman of Pressed Steel, Cowley, was followed by a parents’ cricket match and a rounders match between the girls and former pupils.

Another notable sporting achievement came in 1979 when the school football team finished runnersup in a national six-a-side competition at Wembley.

The school also had a tradition of celebrating Empire Day, with parades in the quadrangle on May 24 each year to celebrate the British Empire.

Stage productions appeared regularly on the school programme. Frank Dibb, theatre critic of The Oxford Times, was impressed by performers in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers in 1955 and Pirates of Penzance the following year, although he said the cast could have “smiled more”.

The Mikado was the choice in 1957, although no critic appears to have attended.

The school was one of the first in the city to organise an overseas trip, with 22 pupils travelling to Florence and Rome in 1955. In 1962, headmaster Colin King complained to parents about “casual absenteeism” – some pupils were apparently taking a morning or afternoon off to buy shoes or have their hair done.

The first pupils arrived at the school in January 1933 and the official opening by Sir Henry Pelham, permanent secretary to the board of education, took place five months later, on June 23. One of the original teachers, Molly Axtell, recalled the early days when she attended the school’s 50th anniversary in 1983. She told how children from Cowley and Iffley schools and The Poplars, the Cowley Poor Law School, mingled with Welsh children whose fathers had come to Oxford to work at the thriving car factory.

The Poor Law children “crept along corridors after years of being scolded for making a noise on the flagstones of the Poor Law school”. Another longserving teacher, Rosemary Adams, who also attended the celebrations, recalled teaching a class of 48 and remembered pupils helping with the Dig for Victory campaign during the war.

The school closed in 2003 when city schools reverted from a three-tier to two-tier system of education.