IT WASN‘T surprising that these schoolboys from Oxford were smiling.

They were preparing to leave for the trip of a lifetime to Kenya.

The 14 boys, all aged 13 and under, from the Dragon School in Oxford were setting off for an eight-match hockey tour of the East African country in 1981.

They were Michael Stuart-Clark, Christopher Haywood, Jonathan White, Fergus Livingstone, Peter Wilkinson, Julian Vacher, Simon Bloedow, John Stevenson, Andrew Wilkinson, Dominic Seymour, Toby Joll, Edward Allen, Thomas Mermagen and Peter Chippendale.

Parents contributed towards the £7,000 cost, but there was also help from an anonymous benefactor and Barclays Bank.

The boys raised £140 for pocket money by going on a sponsored walk.

Leading the party were headmaster John Ingram, who apparently acted as ‘matron’, teacher John Blackburn and Welsh and Great Britain hockey international Peter Wilson.

The tour followed a visit to Oxford two years earlier by a group from the Banda School, in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, where Dougie Dalrymple, a former Dragon master, was head.

The Dragon party were due to play school teams in Nairobi and Nakuru, but it wasn’t all hockey.

The programme included two days in the game parks, two days on the coast and one day in Athens.

The results of the matches they played aren’t recorded.

Does anyone know? And where are the young hockey players now?