Read the 1945 WBHS School Magazine online
Courtesy of the WBHS Archives in the Oude Wijnberg Museum – the digital copy of the 1945 School Magazine.
From the Magazine Editorial by Dr Godfrey Bobbins (‘G. B.’):
On the last day of the December term of 1944 there took place in the Hall a ceremony that marked the introduction, not of a new activity, but of a new conception of our many activities.
This conception, without our being aware of it, we had long needed; and through it we have gathered up the threads of our school life into a pattern, computed the value of every undertaking and of every individual contribution to it and learnt to honour the House of which members, in the new sense of proportion we have acquired, have been most active and most successful not only in games but also in their scholarship and any essays in artistic excellence on which they have ventured.
The ceremony was the presentation of the Friedlander Shield. The shield was offered for House competition by Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Friedlander and their three sons in memory of Cecil Friedlandcr, whom many Old Boys and the older members of the Staff recall as a boy and a man of great ability and of fine and rare sportsmanship and charm, the first of the Old Boys to lose his life in the recent war. The gift, and the constructive thought behind it, is yet another of Mr. Friedlander’s wise and generous contributions to our endowment and to the spirit of our School; and the beauty of the shield, the badge and the many medallions for the recording of the names of the winning Houses is in keeping with the new conception of manifold service to the School which the trophy is designed both to record and to encourage.