A FORMER day boy at Ermysted’s Grammar School has completed a tour of his alma mater 40 years later.

The tour was a mix of nostalgia and surprise at the school’s changes since the 1980s for Michael Luick-Thrams, who spent time at the Skipton school from 1981 to 1982 as part of a Rotary exchange.

Mr Luick-Thrams was described, in an edition of the Craven Herald of autumn 1981, as a “Yank” (he grew up in Iowa).

His tour of the school on Friday, September 20 was organized by assistant head and history teacher George Barrett, and conducted with two senior boys.

While Mr Luick-Thrams, who now divides his time between the United States and Germany,  has fond memories of his own time as a pupil which he says “changed his life,” the Ermysted’s of today had evidently changed for him.

In his own words, “Old England has been replaced by Cool Britannia.”

The diversity of the school cohort was a surprise, and, said Mr Luick-Thrams, “today, it seems about half of the teachers are women,” which was apparently not the case in the early 1980s.

He said: “When our little troupe passed a class with a dozen Girls School co-eds in it, it seemed odd and somehow disorienting: in the 1980s, we lads were prohibited from hanging around the Girls School walls and told not to ‘bump into’ them at the sweet shop just past the front gate.”

The senior boys accompanying Mr Barrett and Mr Luick-Thrams on the tour both said that bullying, especially of the youngest grades by older boys, is never tolerated, and neither are racist and homophobic comments.

To see the Ermysted’s crest with rainbow stickers was, said Mr Luick-Thrams, “an utterly unimaginable revolution” during his own school days.

After what he describes as three days of “hunting down Doug,” Mr Luick-Thrams also had a successful meeting with Douglas Grant, now retired, who taught history at Ermysted’s.

Mr Luick-Thrams said of Mr Grant: “Then my favourite teacher, now he, too, marvels at the changes which in the early 1980s we both held for desirable yet inconceivable.

“What a pleasure as well as affirmation it was, to once again sit and simply talk about ‘life and the universe.’”

More information about Mr Luick-Thrams’ projects, including his book Out of Hitler’s Reach, which documents an abandoned Quaker boarding school in Iowa that became the home of World War Two refugees from 1939 to 1943, is available online at https://usgerrelations.traces.org/Personnel/Luick-Thrams_Michael_bio.html