THEIR school days may be long gone, but their memories live on.

Former pupils of Milham Ford School in Oxford met up at the Randolph Hotel after leaving the school around half a century ago.

Nearly 30 of them turned up on Wednesday to reminisce about their times at the Marston Road school.

The last time they had a full reunion of the group was in the 1980s.

Janet Simons, 75, who now lives in Tackley, organised the reunion along with Angela Munday.

The former secretary at Littlemore Mental Hospital said: “It was a fantastic day and the Randolph did marvellously.

“We are a friendly bunch and when we met up we just started chatting as if we had seen each other yesterday.

“We have got some good memories of the school and I would say we all enjoyed our time there. We had a wonderful sports field and it was a fantastic building.”

Milham Ford School started life in the 1890s as a private nursery for boys and girls in Iffley Road.

It moved to Cowley Place shortly afterwards and was named after a nearby crossing over the River Cherwell.

By 1939 the building had been sold to the City of Oxford education authority and the school moved to new premises off Marston Road.

It became a grammar school in 1944 and a girls’ comprehensive school in 1974 but was closed down in 2003 as part of Oxfordshire County Council’s reorganisation of the city’s schools.

The building was sold to Oxford Brookes University which now uses it as its Faculty of Health and Life Sciences.

Maureen Varju, 75, went on to become a biochemist and served as mayor of Abingdon in the 1990s.

She said: “In one way you feel sad about the school being closed. It is such a magnificent building. But thing move on and as you get older you become resigned that things change.

“It was wonderful seeing all our old friends together again. Some of us haven’t seen each other for well over 50 years.

“We had a very good education there and it stood us in good stead.”