David Mart was born in Ashby before moving to Stapenhill where he attended St Peter’s Junior school. His father was a grocer and managed a store in the centre of Burton for a number of years before eventually becoming a manager for Fine Fare supermarkets and having responsibility for around 50 stores.

When David started school, with a birthday in July, he should have been one of the oldest in the class but it was decided that he should be able to cope with the work a year above and so started school early.

In 1956, David went to Burton Grammar School but, effectively a year ahead of himself, it sometimes proved a struggle to be the youngest in the class. His greatest love was Mathematics which he largely attributes to the inspiration of his maths teacher of the time, a certain Harry ‘Brab’ Smith!

David left the Grammar School in 1963 with a fixed mind that he was going to himself teach Mathematics. He qualified from Borough Road College in 1966 and was delighted some five years later to be given the opportunity to be a member of Harry Smith’s team at the Winshill Grammar School in 1971. He confesses to finding it a little daunting at first, going into the Staffroom with many of his old teachers who were now colleagues. It didn’t take long however, to feel like a member of staff rather than a pupil.

Mr Mart faced more of challenge than he at first perhaps anticipated. He had taken over from Mr James (Jomo) Moore whose lessons had been riotous and everyone was very considerably behind the expected syllabus and had grown comfortable with the culture that Maths was something of a free-for-all. To this day, my first lesson with Mr Mart provides me with a very clear memory of the school as he very successfully asserted himself where Mr Moore had failed. Maths lesons were suddenly very different with a necessarily increased workload to make up for lost time.

I can put hand on heart and say that this had a big influence on my life. Unknowingly, I had a reasonably strong natural ability for maths. The ‘O’ Level most had once dreaded turned out to be something of a breeze and I went on to take a number of mathematically intense higher education courses and fairly maths dependent Engineering career with good confidence. It is partly in gratitude for such influences that I felt that this website was worth doing. Thank-you David!

At the end of his first year, I can remember our class making the unprecedented gesture of clubbing together to purchase a bottle of wine to present to him. Ironically, David also has a clear recollection of this as the first gesture of the start of being accepted by pupils as someone who could help them learn if they were prepared to put in a little effort.

He also recalls his first 4A being academically challenging in a way that he thoroughly enjoyed and hadn’t experienced before; and 5C being equally challenging in a different way… but a great bunch of lads !?

He took time away from Burton Grammar School in order to get a degree at Nottingham University. During his time away, the school had undergone the transition from the Grammar School so when he returned, it was to the newly created Abbot Beyne Comprehensive school. This provides him with a fairly unique history with the school; seeing the changeover from Bond Street to Winshill School as a pupil and later, seeing the changeover from Burton Grammar School to Abbot Beyne Comprehensive School as a teacher.

Life, he recalls, was very different and demanded entirely new skills. He proved however, to be well equipped and made good progress in the new regime. He soon became Head of Year and, after going on to gain a Masters Degree from Nottingham, became ‘Pastoral and Academic Coordinator’ before finally being appointed ‘Assistant Headteacher’. He finally retired in 2005.

David still lives in Newhall with his wife, Gill of over 40 happy years. He has two children and three grandchildren who live in New Zealand.

“A picture paints a thousand words“, and one of the aims of this website is to provide where possible, an archive of pictures that have been painstakingly restored to their original pristine condition. Many of the pictures I have managed to unearth however, show signs of being over fifty years old. I have had to work with paper distortion, coffee cup rings, scratches, creases and even writing across the face.

The 1968 intake group photo had a number of damaged areas. Graham Coleman’s face, for example, was badly scarred and yet looks perfect here. How?

Faces have the advantage of being symetrical. The undamaged side of the face therefore provided the perfect patch once cut out and horizontally inverted. After a small amount of careful rubbing out around the edge of the patch and a bit of smoothing, the face is as good as new. The rest of the scratch is covered with a simpler patch taken from the rest of the background, using a ‘cloud’ shape rather than a sharp rectangle because the human eye is remarkably good at detecting straight lines of repair. Finally, some filtering is applied to sharpen and clean the image and a hue is applied to give it a very faint, warm, cepia type effect. The whole process is done at exactly twice full size and reduced again on completion.

It is even possible to convert black and white photos into a colour one although it is a time consuming process. This example shows a brief extract of the same 1968 intake photo.

This is used very sparingly however, because a colourized picture can look a little artificial making it far less effective than the original monochrome.

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In some cases, the original pictures are so poor that they can only provide a framework for the restored picture. In this picture of the original grammar school, still standing in Friar’s Walk, the original image from the BGS website has little hope of being restored because there is simply too little to work with.

Using the original as a template, texture is carefully added. The sky, for example, is cut out to reveal the sky placed underneath from a completely different picture. In the same way, some of the pictures on this website never even actually existed! They have been constructed from the best available photo source. In one instance for example, a master’s head has been stuck onto a different body because no suitable picture could be found.

Whilst I try to keep the picture quality of this website as high as possible, images are sometimes of lesser quality than I would like. I can assure that this is not through my being lax; it is because I sometimes have poor quality sources to work from.

• Some sets of photos (from a particular photographer) are all printed on ‘canvas effect’ paper, which produces graining when scanned.
• Some scans have been performed without disassembling the cardboard mounts producing a few millimeters gap which reduces quality.
• Some original photos have not been particularly good (over/under exposed, poor depth of field).
• Some images have been ‘over-cooked’ when being compressed by older compression techniques.

By way of example, this shows a staff group together with what I had to work with. The original image was skewed, scratched, under-exposed, cropped (you can see that as in a number of cases, the windows are my own construction and the floor has been ‘hand painted’.

I am producing the best I can, with particular consideration to making faces as clear as possible, and if ever I stumble across a superior source, I am always happy to start from scratch on a replacement.

If YOU have a better version of a picture that is already featured, I am still very happy to receive the best possible scan (or photo in the post).

Although hand-written and scribbled on, the below Staff List provides a valuable record of School Staff.

There was a full school photo taken in 1920. Whilst the quality is much lower than I would like, it is the best I can put together from the available resources and it does at least serve to provide a flavour of what the school was like at the time.

Click here to view large image

The year was significant because the number of Grammar School pupils exceeded 200 for the first time. At this time, the vast majority of the school was fee paying and ‘School Certificates’ and ‘Higher School Certificates’ were the standard qualifications being some 32 years before the replacement by ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels.

 In 1920, just 17 ’School Certificates’ were awarded together with 3 ‘Higher School Certificates’.

Back Row: Martin Smith, Andy Fawkes, Paul Farnsworth, William Smith, Chris Birkin, John Butler, Nigel Radford, Peter Evans, Roy Brassington, Terry Morse
Front Row: Steven Dines, Richard Cope, David Kirkland, John Hutt, Ezra Somekh (Form Master), Paul Robinson, Martin Taylor, Paul Andrews, Michael Bexon

Back Row: Norman Jones, Dennis Grimsley, M. Bates, H. Wilson, B05
Middle Row: Atkinson, D. Barker, Philip Bond
Front Row: P. Williams, J. Parker

Back Row: Dai ‘Taffy’ Davies, R. Hayle, J. Tovey, R. White, I. Cotton, Norman Jones
Front Row: G.Newman, F02, M. Wilkins, Victor Roebuck, P.Williams, P. Bond, F06

Back Row: David Hough, David Berker, Kenny Adams, Robert Ash, Ian May
Middle Row: M.Potter, Paul Williams, Bob Taylor, M04, Cumpstead, Sam Smith, Tony Grief, Chris Powell, Dennis Minns, John Davies, Tony Fletcher, Andrew Gadsby
Front Row: Les Harrison, Derek Davenport, Tony Docksey, David Woolley, Peter Taylor, Bob Fletcher, Tommy Parker
Floor: Cosgrove, Alan Marshall

Back Row: Cosgrove, Huckerby, Bob Fletcher, Tony Fletcher, Dennis Minns, Keith Illsley, Ken Crocker, Clive Miller
Front Row: Tommy Parker, Derek Davenport, Peter Taylor, Tony Docksey, Tony Grief, John Davies