Culford School - Miscellanea

Miscellanea

• During the 1940s, Basil Brown, the amateur archaeologist most famous for his discovery of the Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon burial, worked as a stoker at the school. Enlisting the help of several Culford boys, he dug out two Roman pottery kilns at nearby West Stow, inspiring Stanley West to return two decades later to unearth what is now considered an important Anglo-Saxon settlement.

• Recent construction of the indoor tennis centre unearthed the body of a Bronze Age child.
• Backdrops of Culford Park, and particularly the thatched cricket pavilion, were featured in the BBC's Lovejoy series.

• The London and North Eastern Railway named one of their Class B17s, no. 2815, “Culford Hall”.

• In September 1940, during the Battle of Britain, a German Junkers 88A-1 aircraft was shot down by the RAF over the school's lake, resulting in numerous fragments of the plane disappearing into Cadogan House as souvenirs. Thanks to Old Boys, the School Archive now has a number of these fragments including the maker's plate and an oxygen bottle.

• In 1999 The Sun ran the headline 'Pot Pupils Kicked Out at Toff School' after five pupils were caught smoking cannabis.

• The school is featured in a 2005 Victorian crime novel by Ethard Wendel Van Stee as having turned out one James Lott, notorious swindler and one of the chief protagonists of the tale. Van Stee imagines Lott's father having "packed him off to join the first class at the East Anglian School for Boys, later the Culford School, in Bury St Edmunds, ostensibly to provide him with a good Christian education." Having "expected the school, in its mysterious way, to turn the son of a publican into a young gentleman," he would not be disappointed; "However, like ice cream, the products of the East Anglian School for Boys were turned out in distinctive flavours..."

• The Culford Masonic Lodge numbers Old Culfordians and former staff amongst its members.

• A bronze statue of the Victorian racing greyhound Master McGrath on the south lawns of Culford Hall led to some speculation that he is buried there.