ONE-HUNDRED YEARS AGO Saturday October 11, 1919

Concert in town hall

A most successful concert was held in the town hall on Wednesday night under the auspices of Campbeltown Grammar School Former Pupils’ Association.

This newly-formed organisation is fortunate in being guided in its initial steps by an energetic and enterprising committee of young men, and that their first public venture should have been of such high merit and unqualified success is certainly a most encouraging augury for the future of their association.

The audience was large, the hall being crowded, and the excellent programme presented was received with every mark of appreciation.

The chair was occupied by Mr R. Y. Cunningham, M.A., J.P., F.E.I.S.

The chairman, in the course of his remarks, said the idea of a former pupils’ association was one that had been long present in his mind but he never personally attempted to set the idea going, because he thought that such an association ought to be created by a felt want among former pupils themselves.

Only in that way, he thought, could it be a living organisation, able to accomplish the things which it set out to attain.

He had been asked what was the use of a former pupils’ association – what did they aim at, what did they hope to do? The most comprehensive answer, he thought, was to be found in the second rule of the constitution drawn up by the committee, viz., ‘The object is to create a bond of fellowship among former pupils’.

He dared say that the vast majority of his audience had passed through the Grammar School of Campbeltown.

When people met away from their native district, it was a common experience to find that one of the first topics of conversation was their old school.

During the period he was in command of the Scottish Command Depot in Ireland, he found from his conversations with the soldiers there, many of whom were ‘old contemptibles’, that much of their conversation, both at the front and at home, concerned their old schools and schoolmasters.

He did not think that an association like this required much to commend it to the Campbeltown public.