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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.

Non-Fiction 1968 11 mins Silent

From the collection of:

Logo for Yorkshire Film Archive

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.