The First World War became very personal at Newton Prep’s history assembly this week, as Mr McAfee unlocked the treasure trove of letters, models, heart-rending telegrams and a war report from none other than the Red Baron himself: all from the family archives of Henry (Yr 8) and Elfreda (Yr5).
Their great-great-uncle, Cecil Fenwick, was a young, untested Second Lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps when he set off on a bomb raid over enemy lines on a chilly autumnal morning in 1916… never to be heard from again. For over a year, his family prayed that he was just Missing in Action and had perhaps been captured as a Prisoner of War, but it was not to be. In a concise war report written by Baron Manfred von Richthofen, he recorded that the dead ‘inmate’ of a plane he had shot down with 400 bullets was Lt.William Cecil Fenwick. It was the Baron’s 4th ‘kill’ of the war, against a plane that was never built for combat and against a boy who hadn’t even finished his training. Richthofen went on to shoot down a total of 80 planes before the war’s end, going down in history as the infamous Red Baron.
With readings from Mr McAfee, Miss Hales, Mr Kendall and Mrs Biran, the sometimes far-flung history of World War One suddenly came alive with the immediacy of the handwritten letters and the innocence of young Cecil as he wrote home to his nearest and dearest. A poignant glimpse into what war-time actually meant to the families of those who fought.
The Assembly followed a week in which the centenary of WW1 dominated the school timetable: a visit by our Year 6s to Emanuel to see their Emanuel School at War exhibition, followed by the Year 8s trip to Battersea Park for the Remembrance Day Service at the war memorial there, on Tuesday. The poppies at the Tower may be disappearing, but at Newton Prep, we shall not forget…
