AMMAN VALLEY SECONDARY MODERN
PHOTOGRAPH 1961
(Scroll down for the complete photograph)

In October 1961 the pupils and staff of Amman Valley Secondary Modern School in Ammanford were assembled for a photograph of the whole school. At that time there were about 1,000 staff and pupils, a small enough number to include everyone in agroup photograph. Pupils and staff were arranged in a semi-circle with the camera at the centre so that everyone was equidistant from the lens. This ensured the resulting photograph would show everyone lined up in a straight line (the school building behind wasn't so lucky, which ended up curved in the photograph).

In 1970 Amman Valley Grammar School and Amman Valley Secondary Modern were merged to create Amman Valley Comprehensive. The 1700 pupils of the new school would defeat the camera's ability to capture everyone in one shot and there has never been a school photograph since.

The photograph that everyone purchased in 1961 was a long scroll about three feet long, a bit like the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the Norman Conquest of 1066 but without the axes, bows and arrows, which the pupils kindly agreed to leave at home for the occasion. That photograph has been scanned in for this web site and broken down into manageable portions to display on your computer monitor. (What you see on your screen below is actually twelve separate sectons cunningly stitched together by computer software to give the appearance of one long, seamless photograph.)

As the shadows of time lengthen across our lives you may wish to remember yourself or your school friends as you were in the sunshine of your youth. If you spot yourself, or any friend, former boyfriend, girlfriend etc., in these photographs and you want to take a copy off the screen, follow this procedure:

(1) Right click your mouse on the photograph.

(2) A menu will appear so select 'Save Picture As' and save it in a suitable folder - for example 'My Documents' will do.

(3) You can now e-mail it as an attachment to someone to remind them what their former self was like. Or you can open it in a suitable graphics editor such as Paint Shop Pro; or you can insert in into a Desk Top Publisher or your Word Processor and print it off. There is photographic quality paper available for ink jet printers which can result in very high quality photographs.

The technology of the Internet is dependent on ordinary telephone lines so that large graphic files (i.e. photographs) can take a few seconds to appear on your computer screen. (The reason you are reading this otherwise quite useless piece of information, by the way, is to allow time for the photographs below to download. Text, however, appears almost instantaneously, so you can read these words while the photographs arrive in a more leisurely manner.)

In the photograph that follows no attempt has been made to identify anyone: that's your job. The teachers are lined up on either side of the headmaster. The sequence of left to right on your screen also represents left to right in the original photograph. Use the horizontal scroll bar to scroll across to each section and the vertical scroll bar to scroll up and down within each section.

Date this page last updated: October 1, 2010