John Rettie recently achieved a Saltire Award for the independent research he has conducted into his family history. For the past year John has been researching online and at the Mitchell Library, uncovering documentary evidence providing a fascinating insight into people and events from his family’s past spanning six generations.
John has discovered his showman heritage on his father’s side of the familyand a shipbuilding and naval tradition on his mother’s side.

John decided to contact several long-lost members of his family, and organised a meeting to reunite his gran and her cousin’s family, thus using all of his hard work and research skills to bring distant family members back together. Well done, John!

Remembrance Day was especially poignant this year, coming as it did on the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. This considered, and holding true to Woodfarm’s commitment to respect advocated in our Rights Respecting School Award Classroom Charter, pupils and staff were determined to make a special effort to mark the occasion with the utmost deference and gratitude. Pupils in S2 – who have been studying the Great War in Social Subjects – participated in a poetry competition centred on the theme of remembrance. Many outstanding poems were submitted, with pupils in other year groups choosing to take part too. After careful consideration it was decided that the poem by Anna K from S2 most fittingly summed up the mood of the occasion:

Delicate poppies dance on the breeze;

They murmur a chant that is heard by the trees.
The trees whisper the line over and over
That is repeated again by the grass and the clover.
Soon joins in the ground and the mud and the mire;
The phrase they repeat will never tire.
People from every nation say it too;
Haunting and sorrowful the line is so true.
On this special day, 11th of November,
Everything vows: ‘we will remember’.

Anna’s poem was engraved onto a golden plaque and attached to Woodfarm’s own commemorative poppy wreath purchased from the Lady Haig Foundation. This was placed at Thornliebank War Memorial on Armistice Day by Mrs MacGlashan in a short service of remembrance attended by our Head Boy and Girl, representatives from the Pupil Council, pupils and staff from the cluster primaries, councillors, representatives from the Cooperative Funeral Service and local residents. After a beautiful rendition of the ‘Last Post’ on trumpet by S6 pupil, Ewan Sinclair, Anna read her poem aloud to the assembled group. Meanwhile, in the school itself, all pupils and staff impeccably observed the minute silence at 11am.

You are welcome to view our poppy wreath for yourself at the War Memorial in Thornliebank.  Some of our S2 pupils have had the chance to visit the site during class time, as especially moving experience for S2 pupil, Taylor Meechan, whose great, great grandfather’s name – William Meechan – appears on the memorial itself as one of the fallen in the Great War.
Thank you to everyone in the school and the local community for marking this special year of remembrance with such thoughtfulness and dignity.