It was 2017, and I was in my eighth year as Headteacher of Kingsbury High School, a wonderful comprehensive of 2000 students with backgrounds as diverse as the city in which they live. It was due to be my final year, although in the event I returned for a short stint following just two terms of retirement – but that’s another story.

We were putting on a celebration of Kingsbury High’s half-century. It had become a comprehensive in 1967, an amalgamation of the Kingsbury County Grammar School and Tylers Croft Secondary Modern Schools.

That was intentionally a plural, by the way, for Tylers Croft was indeed two schools, one for girls and the other for boys. They opened in 1952, in a single building with facilities mirrored on either side. One of the first pupils was Charlie Watts, later drummer with the Rolling Stones; a piece of his ceramic artwork still hangs proudly on the main corridor. Another early pupil, a friend of Charlie’s, was leading double-bassist Dave Green, still a regular on the London jazz circuit. There must have been something in the Tylers Croft water back then.

Kingsbury County, however, goes back further, to 1925, when it opened in a disused Airco building in Colindale, before moving to a purpose-built school in 1932.

Back in 2017, we wanted to celebrate our predecessor schools, as well as our fifty years of comprehensive education, and I began searching through archive material which had been gathering dust in a container out in the playground. Surprisingly little has survived from those early days, but, among the returns to the Board of Education, log books, maps, miscellaneous reports and photographs, was a box of eight anonymous-looking brown manila files, enclosing hundreds of old letters. Closer inspection showed that these had been written by former scholars of the school during the Second World War. They had survived previous culls of documentation, probably because of a note placed alongside them by former Deputy Headmaster, Douglas Peacock. Bearing in mind the date, he had either been looking out material for a previous anniversary or simply leaving things in order upon his retirement. His note was rough and ready, as you can see, but his forethought ensured that the letters remained in store for another thirty years until I discovered them. When I in turn left the school, I was determined to do something with them. The rest, as they say, is history.