The Secretary hereby gives notice that the Annual General Meeting of the Society of Old Priceans will take place at the Solent Hotel and Spa, Whiteley on Friday, 1st October 2021 commencing at 11.00am.
It is understood that all present members of the Committee are willing to continue to serve.
Nominations to serve on the Committee must be received by Friday, 18th September supported by two members.
A year and a half of challenges presented by the covid pandemic has at least given time to develop the Society’s website.
The coming of Internet communications has saved money on postage and printing and speeded up the distribution of information but it has entailed considerable expenditure on website infrastructure by the Society.
Tim Berners-Lee created the first website thirty years ago and since then there has been a dramatic explosion in all areas of the Internet, including better and more varied machines for consuming the Internet, including smart phones, tablets and smart TVs, hugely faster network provision throughout the world and much more sophisticated and complex web design software.
The Society has operated a website for many years, initially on a Hampshire County Council server with limited space but provided free to local groups. This was closed down by Hampshire and it was found necessary to move to a commercial server which would cope with the range and complexity of the Society’s website.
The greater freedom offered by the commercial site necessitated the use of more sophisticated and complex software with a steep initial learning curve. Fortunately, high speed broadband eventually arrived to enable the webmaster to handle the size of the task.
Currently the Society’s website hosts more than 600 webpages, searchable by Google site-specific search functions, with 1.25GB of images and it has very recently been supplemented with 142 Lion magazines dating from 1915 to 1975 which are all in searchable pdf format. All twenty Newsletters prepared by David Goldring are also available on the site.
In addition, the Society maintains contact with members all over the World using the free email bulk sender, Mailchimp. This helps to avoid the problem whereby any private address sending too many multiple messages may be taken off-line by ISPs as a possible spam site.
In the past five years roughly 200 messages have been sent as Member Updates notifying members of forth-coming events, contact from other members and inevitably news of the passing of those associated with Prices.
In this context, we must note the passing of Peter Watkins, Headmaster in succession to Eric Poyner in 1979 before retiring in 1984 as Principal of Prices College.
Also noted was the passing of Diedre Buckley, one of the few female members of staff in the days of Prices Grammar School.
Michael Peagram (1964-71)
Honorary Secretary