The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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Moor Grange County Secondary School
As the RAF aims to recruit the working class lads of a Leeds secondary school, they in turn demonstrate their athletic and comic abilities when enacting a farcical horse race.
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Overview
Moor Grange County School, a secondary school in Leeds, is targeted by the RAF for recruitment in 1968, while the students show the typical sporting enthusiasm and sense of humour of working class teenagers. Local M.P. Merlyn Rees pays a visit to the school that later also had Trevor Chaplin and Jill Swinburne (aka James Bolam and Barbara Flynn) as teachers in the wonderful Beiderbecke Trilogy. Crime writer Colin Campbell may possibly be also seen in the film as a young lad.
Moor Grange County Secondary School was renamed Moor Grange High School in the 1970s, and demolished in the late 1980s. It has two notable claims to fame: as the location for the school staff room and hall in Yorkshire TV’s The Beiderbecke Trilogy (1984-87), and also for having rugby legend Sir Ian McGeechan as both a former vice-head boy and later a teacher. McGeechan, nicknamed “Geechy”, captained Scotland, and played for the British Lions before having a highly successful career coaching both of these teams. Merlyn Rees was Labour M.P. for Leeds South, and at the Home Office, in 1968, and later served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Home Secretary in the 1970s Labour government.
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