School history / School photographs, 1923 to the late 1960s
The Boy Who Ran Round the School Photo: Answer, No
For a century, schools with panoramic photographs have told the legend of the boy who sprinted behind the back row and appeared at both ends. Then I tried it on Boxing Day.
In the summer of 1966 a contributor to The Shirburnian, signing himself Inside Left, reported that Sherborne’s whole-school photograph of 1927, hanging in room 18, still prompted three standard questions. Was he in it? What was the background? And the third, which he answered with the economy of a man who had been asked it for years: “is it true that a crook type once ran round and thus appeared twice? Answer, no.”
He had checked. The two boys at the ends of the 1923 photograph were, he conceded, remarkably alike, and he wondered whether that was where the legend began. He also noted, from the same picture, two moustaches. Not masters’.
Sherborne had spent forty years debunking a legend by squinting. I respect that. I have done the same with a Year 3 class photo.
Elsewhere the case stayed open. David Bolland, at St Dunstan’s in Burnham-on-Sea from 1927 to 1932, remembers a panoramic camera that started on the right and moved slowly to the left, so that anyone on the right felt an urge to rush across while it was busy with the middle. It was attempted once, he writes, and frowned on by the headmaster. Keith James, at Dynevor Boys’ Grammar School in Swansea, recalls almost a thousand pupils and teachers in a semicircle while the lens swung through 180 degrees. Not in his own 1967 picture, but on later occasions, “a few enterprising youths” ran the length of the line and appeared at both ends.
Phones do this now, badly, for free. On Boxing Day I lined up fourteen relatives on the patio for a panorama, and our youngest, Monty, who is eight and had been reading over my shoulder, set off from the left the moment I started to turn.
He appears twice. He appears at both ends, grinning, in two different jumpers, because he took one off on the way. My mother, in the middle, appears with no torso. My husband asked for a retake on the grounds that he had been blinking. My sister said the dog had been sliced in half. Monty asked who else wanted to try.
I did. I am forty-four and I own the correct trainers. I took the far right, handed the phone to my brother-in-law, waited for it to pass me, and ran behind fourteen people, a garden bench and a water butt. I arrived on the left as he lowered the phone. I appear once, at the right-hand end, already leaving.
It is on the mantelpiece. There has been no complaint, and certainly no retake. At Easter my sister’s eldest asked the standard question. Is it true that a mother once ran round and thus appeared twice? Answer, no.
Sources
- David Bolland, The Life and Times, volume one, chapter two: St Dunstan’s, Burnham-on-Sea
- Keith James, The Art of Panoramic Photography: Tips and tools, 31 July 2026
- The Shirburnian, Summer 1966, Groups, signed Inside Left, printed page 12
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column