@abingdon_school @abingdonschool @abingdonschool linkedin.com/school/abingdonschool The Abingdon Foundation, Park Road, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, OX14 1DE Edited by Julia Cooke - [email protected] 01235 521563 Sir Nicholas Winton One Life featured the work of the British humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton (19092015) who helped rescue over 600 (mainly Jewish) children from German occupied Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s through what became known as the kindertransport. Sir Nicholas found British homes for these children, many of whose parents subsequently died in the Holocaust. Sir Nicholas’s son, Nicholas Winton OA 1970, will be talking about his father’s work in the Amey Theatre on Monday 16 June at 7pm. Further details will be announced in due course. Out of the Past Abingdon The arrival of girls next year might seem to be a radical break with the past but in fact 2026 will see the 66th anniversary of the start of shared drama productions with SHSK, and the 50th anniversary of the start of shared Sixth Form classes. In 1952, Jennifer Pulley sat Scholarship Level chemistry at Abingdon, winning a scholarship to read chemistry at Oxford. But only Lucy Eden has been a full-time pupil, joining the Upper Sixth in 1981. On leaving, she was asked if there was one change she would like to see, and she replied – become co-ed. A milk splash It may not look particularly impressive but in 1969, this was a famous photograph at Abingdon. Three Sixth Form physicists (Jonathan Mitchell, Roger Plail and Nicholas Winton) had devised their own apparatus for taking high-speed photographs of a milk splash to show how it both forms and decays - something only possible with professional equipment. Their device won them an appearance (and 2nd place) on the BBC’s Young Scientist of the Year Competition. In total, Abingdon took seven Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe. At least one, Joseph Taglicht, under the kindertransport scheme. Like Taglicht, brothers Michael and George Moschytz, also came from Germany. Wolfgang Schafer and Wilfred Olscher came from Austria, and Peter Bodenstein and Harry Baecker came from Czechoslovakia. Writing to the School in 2019 George Moschytz remembered how Abingdon and England had ‘essentially saved’ his family from the ‘havoc and chaos that Hitler brought upon us and our people’. Jewish refugees at Abingdon George Moschytz, middle of the centre row, 1942 A joint production of Arsenic and Old Lace Girls and Abingdon School
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