No. 140 The Trusty Servant by Rebecca Viola( H, 23-). Bobber Pot was won by Beloe’ s with an energetic performance of ELO’ s‘ Mr Blue Sky’, conducted by Oli Street( K, 21-).
Drama
Kevin Fondain-Foglietti( CoRo, 20-; Head of Drama, 23-) writes: In Cloister Time 2025, the French Department returned to the stage with another ambitious production, this time presenting a more modern classic, Un Chapeau de Paille d’ Italie by Eugène Labiche. Once again, pupils rose impressively to the challenge of performing entirely in French. Arun Sharma( Coll, 21-) gave a particularly memorable performance in the role of Fadinard, and the audience greatly appreciated the expertly-designed surtitles that supported the action.
At the end of the term, the Junior Drama Festival returned in a slightly revised format for its 2025 edition. This year, each House’ s play had to meet a shared set of constraints: the same props and costumes, and all devised around the theme of Heroes and Villains. The standard was exceptionally high across the board, with JP embracing the challenge with visible enthusiasm. Freddie’ s won the prize for Best Play with a brilliantly chaotic train robbery gone wrong, while Chawker’ s took home the creativity prize for their inventive portrayal of a phone-phobic housemaster.
Short Half opened with Beloe’ s taking to the stage, choosing to revive the beloved TV classic’ Allo’ Allo for their house play. Directed by George Hewett and Luke Edwards, the performance was a tremendous success and a joyful start to the new term.
We now look ahead to the Phil’ s house play, The Wind in the Willows, followed shortly by a highly-anticipated Christmas Pantomime before the term draws to a close.
Sport
Mark Burley( CoRo, 20-; Director of Sport) writes: Climbing is not a new sport at Winchester, but has recently been reinvigorated by the climbing wall in the Sports Centre, and this term 11 pupils of the climbing team took on a competitive Southern School Climbing Competition hosted at Parthian Climbing Centre, Southampton. The competition consisted of 26 schools, top ropes, bouldering problems and lead climbing. The climbing team came an impressive 5th overall, with some very promising individual performances: Catherine Brunt( G, 24-) finished 3rd overall in the female category, Cosmo Clifton( F, 24-) 3rd in the boulder category for years 10-11 and Louie Stoesser( G, 24-) placing joint 1st in years 10-11 for top ropes. The team will now be looking ahead to Nationals in the new year.
Mid-way through Short Half, Soccer XI have won 5, drawn 2 and lost 3, one of which was to the OWs on the 150 th anniversary celebration of the OWFC being established with the FA( see OW news). The 3 rd round of the Boodles Cup sees us visit Cheadle Hulme School on the 20 th November. On Friday 10th October we also held the first ever Friday Night Lights fixture for the school when Soccer XI played Wellington College 1st XI up at Winchester City FC. Over the last couple of years, we have established an excellent relationship with WCFC and our teams use the 4G pitch for training across the term. The team was well supported by over 50 of their peers, a number of staff and several Winchester and Wellington parents, which helped generate a great atmosphere.
Under the floodlights the match itself was a tense affair. Winchester took the lead through a penalty and had several chances, but the Wellington keeper was up to the task. Wellington equalised early into the 2nd half and with their tails up they managed to take the lead. Unfortunately, despite a few close chances we couldn’ t tie the game up and the visitors took away The W Cup. The team will get their chance to win the pot back in December when we play Wellington in the reverse fixture.
In October the Winchester Golf Team took two foursome pairs to the West Sussex GC Schools’ Invitational, a prestigious season opener against 15 other schools, including golfing heavyweights Wellington and Epsom. Winchester’ s 1st pair, Harry Ho( I, 24-) & Seb Wells( G, 21-) played some very good golf in the difficult windy, rainy conditions and finished with a fantastic score which proved to be the lowest of the day by a handsome, 3-stroke margin, despite Wellington boasting a 1st pair with a combined handicap of + 8. 2nd pair Kevin Gu( G, 24-) and Sander Andreasen( A, 22-) struggled at times, but played as a team and completed a commendable round, contributing 29 points to the school’ s total, enough for Winchester to come out on top overall, bringing home the season’ s first piece of silverware.
Summer round up 2025 In what has been the most positive season for cricket in many years, especially in terms of results across different teams, there have been some notable performances.
Cameron Mitchinson( I, 24-) in his debut season, has amassed 750 runs for Yearlings and U17s, as well as taking 20 wickets whilst leading the Yearlings A to success in the U14 John Harvey Trophy competition. 7-fors have become something of a tradition amongst our bowlers in recent years and George Bowder( B, 20-25) was added to the list( again!) as he took 7 scalps from the OWs on Wykeham Day. This takes him beyond 30 wickets this term and over 100 for the school overall.
Congratulations to the girls’ team for their unbeaten season. The 3rds, 4ths and both Yearlings B and C only lost
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