Elliott Videos
The Video below is for all those who want to see the Elliott School as it was before the rebuild and change of name. I hope it brings back memories for you. Please click the arrow in the centre of the screen to play the introduction video.
More about the growing collection of other Elliott Videos
Background: As a former pupil, I was lucky enough to be allowed to look around the school some forty years after I'd left it, and even to photograph some areas. I was astonished how little had changed, but saddened by how much it had deteriorated. I realised others might feel the same nostalgia I did, and that's really how this website began. As its popularity grew, I noticed how many ex-pupils now lived abroad, so some 50-odd years after the new school first opened, I turned those old photographs into the video you see above.
A few years later, former teacher Peter Payne sent me a clip from a cine film showing a School Journey to the Alps in 1984. I edited it together with some computer software and posted that online too.
Then, in the summer of 2013, I was given access to the old Elliott School buildings just before the builders moved in to refurbish them for Ark Putney Academy's arrival after 2015. That visit produced three more videos, which I again shared online. I was later invited to the school's Annual Remembrance Service - a particularly poignant one, as it fell during the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War - followed by an update from the new Head on the building's refurbishment.
When the Elliott Building (now the Ark Academy) reopened, a group of us filmed that too. All of these videos are on my video website (link below), and I've also put together a YouTube playlist, linked below as well.
In 2017, I got in touch with Pascal M Mindlin about a documentary his company, Interlane Productions, had made in 2006 - the story of Elliott School's wartime evacuation, produced as part of the 60th anniversary commemorations of the end of WWII, in which veterans who'd lived through the evacuation were reunited with the pupils still at school at the time. I asked Pascal if we could host a copy here, and he generously agreed.
Andy Lambert (Pupil) 1958-1963
Hampshire 2026