January 1911
This magazine will probably come as a surprise to most of those who are interested in the fortunes of our new school. It is, perhaps, a bold venture to issue a magazine of this character, in a school that has only been opened about ten days, and whose numbers are so few that we wander through our big building, listening, with amusement, to the echoes of our own voices in the long and empty corridors. But we believe that there is only one way of preserving an unbroken record of our history, and that is by putting down, month by month, all that happens to us, in the pages of a school magazine.
We have, at the moment of writing this introduction, not a penny with which to pay the printer, but he is a cheerful and opulent soul, and will not mind waiting a little. We are few in number, but we shall grow - older, wiser, and more numerous. We have no athletic feats to chronicle, for we have played no matches. We have no successes to blazon forth, for no-one has sat for any examinations. We have hopes and aims, but these we prefer to keep to ourselves till they come to fruition and tell their own story. We have ambitions of the spirit which underlies these, let this little paper be an example. It is launched by a band of young hopefuls in the full belief that it is destined to take a high place amongst the periodicals of its own class.
E. YOUNG.
We have had some difficulty in choosing a name for our paper, ourselves, and our future old boys. It was quite impossible to be called, for instance, "County-ovians" or anything ugly of that description. As we are on the Northwick Park estate, we might have been Northwickians, but that suggested Pickwickians. As we are opposite one end of Sheepcote Road, we had a momentary though of Sheepcotians, but that designation was soon disposed of, for sufficiently obvious reasons. And so, after trying first one title and then another, we have come to the conclusion that Gayton Road shall possess the honour of lending us the word Gaytonian, a not inappropriate term, seeing that our tone is as gay as it is hopeful, for which vile joke we at once prostrate ourselves in humble supplication for forgiveness.
The school colours are green and blue, and the appropriate flower when it can be obtained is the forget-me-not.
This paper will be issued eight or nine times a year. It costs, with our present circulation, about 2½d. per copy. Subscriptions, (2s. per annum post free) will be gratefully received by the editors, for periods extending from a year to a century. Those subscribers who pay for a century in advance are requested to state to whom distant issues of the paper are to be addressed.
(I first reproduced this in the Gayton Times in 1968, which I edited, with Gordon Jones as Chief Reporter, Dave Rose as Sub-Editor, and Paul Danon, Peter Horsman, Paul Novak, Geoff Perkins, N. Taylor and Robert Wallace as reporters. - Jeff Maynard)