Farnborough Grammar School came into existence in September 1936 when the Aldershot County High School
outgrew its premises in Highfield Avenue and the boys were relocated to Farnborough. The A.C.H.S. building was new in 1912 although it was then called the Aldershot
Secondary School. It was co-educational from 1912 through to 1936 and most of its male teaching staff transferred to Farnborough, among them their Headmaster,
A.E. Chapman, and his deputy, F.G. Solloway. Mr. Solloway had been at Aldershot High since the day it opened.
A booklet written by school master Basil Jowett in 1957 to commemorate F.G.S.s 21st anniversary provides a comprehensive
history of the school and its predecessors.
All additions, corrections and comments are welcome. Click here to send a message with your default email program
F.G.S. - 1954 to 1961
Site last updated 13th July 2019
There is a new menu. The content is currently not much different
to the old one. It requires tweaking technically first and then the content will be addressed.
The Menu adopts the so called ‘Hamburgerְ’ style on smaller screens. (Under 480 pixels wide.)
MK. 25th August 2019
Finding the originally submitted images to see if they can be improved or made larger is proving to be troublesome.
Although I have not deleted any FGS emails since the site began some of those
emails appear to have lost their attachments. Although the message refers to an
attachment it is simply not there, fortunately there have not been too many of those.
The main problem is that the quality of the originals is not always very good
and some were always so small that they were never used. A disappointing number
are tiny images embedded within Word documents which has always been a good way
of destroying quality. Some were sent through the post and returned so there is no hope for them.
But not all bad news. My original negatives were scanned with a Nikon Coolscan
scanner and much better results are being obtained by photographing them with a
36 megapixel SLR using a special contraption and a flashgun. The old colour
slides are in a poor state but Photoshop has made a passable job of restoring
them even though the colours are definitely not at all natural.
The amalgamation of several single image pages in to one with several images has reduced their
number from 2,157 to 2,049. There may be some broken links.
MK. 21st August 2019
Quite a lot of pages have been switched to the new format now,
too many to individually identify. Some pages have had their images rescanned
(my own photos) or at least reprocessed (those from elsewhere). Where a whole
page is of higher resolution images a footnote to that effect has been added -
more as a reminder to me than anything else.
There has been a tentative move into smaller text on smaller viewing devices but
that is very much at an early stage.
The two column Index pages, images with text alongside in both columns are not
working too well on small screens and a different approach will be tried which
may keep the text better aligned with the images. (This was implemented on the
main Index page on 18th August and is an improvement.)
I knew it would be a long job and I wasn’t wrong. I still have no idea how best
to tackle the Publications pages which are totally incompatible with small screens.
MK. 16th August 2019
Adjustments to simple pages, that is text only and text with a
small number of left aligned pictures, are not difficult to adapt to the new
layout and a large number have been done already. The adjusted pages are easily
identified by their centrally placed title. They were all centred on the old
site but that was lost by the switch to the new system and they all adopted left alignment. The central
realignment provides an easy means to see if any individual page has been given attention.
Pages which were laid out in a tabular fashion with fixed cell sizes have not
been touched as yet and that includes all the near 1,000 Publications pages.
Probably each booklet will be presented as a simple long page with some sort of
Index to aid access. Maybe not ideal but relatively simple to do and spare time can be
in short supply.
Looking back at so many pages produced over a span of twenty years has revealed
many formatting inconsistencies which will be fixed in due course - if
enthusiasm for it does not wane too much.
All the font sizes remain the same irrespective of the size of the viewing
screen, only pictures scale to size at present. An attempt will be made to
improve that situation in due course - probably.
MK. 12th August 2019
Quite a lot of changes today but the most noticeable is that the
page width is no longer fixed at 1,000 pixels, it can be dragged to any width up
to 4,320 pixels or reduced to a strip. In time the text may be constrained
because it can be a long line for the eye to follow.
There is a big conflict between the fixed image sizes used since 2001 and that will take a long
time to fix but the Menu behaves better than anticipated and pages make some
attempt to adapt themselves to a mobile phone sized screen.
The likely new look of picture pages may be seen on the
Wally Cotgrieve and
Doc Naish pages. The
negatives of all the Photos featured are still available and will be reprocessed
at much higher resolution in due course.
The Index (front) page has also been revised. There is
a single column version
and a two column version that looks more like the old
one. (The single column version has been removed - 14 August 2019.)
The code used on The Index page and many others is totally incompatible
with the need to scale pictures to different sizes. Both of the new versions use
an entirely different technique.
MK. 10th August 2019
Several long sessions at the keyboard has resulted in every page file and every link from those files being updated to the new standard
well ahead of yesterday’s pessimistic schedule. You may notice that pages ending in htm now end in shtml.
To protect saved links, Google searches etc. it has been arranged that attempts
to access htm pages will automatically be switched to the shtml equivalent.
The menu which used to be embedded into every page now exists only as a single
stand alone file which is injected into each page as it loads into the browser
making web site maintenance much easier. At present the net result is that the
site should look exactly as it did before but different under the bonnet.
The object of the exercise is to make f-g-s mobile compatible. At present the
menu itself isn’t so that must be redesigned and a major problem is that the
images have always been displayed at a fixed size. It may have been a good idea
20 years ago but it is the last thing one wants if a page is to be scaled to fit
the size of the viewing screen. Every image will need to be changed and some of
the originals are no longer available to rescan as they were loaned via the post and returned.
Eventually is will be possible to fine tune the look of the site to suit all
popular screen sizes but that is probably a long way off. Right now you should
see no changes. The temporary site
will be removed within a day or two if no unforeseen problems manifest themselves.
MK. 9th August 2019
There are 2,157 pages in this website with tens of thousands of links
and every page suffix must be renamed. Software deals with the links but
it can take three minutes per page if it happens to be linked to every other one, via the menu usually, so progress is slow.
After four weeks every folder has been changed apart from ‘Publications’.
Al-Fa,
Annual Records etc. and there are an awful lot of them. Some are done but about
890 remain. It will likely take another month if boredom doesn’t get me first!
When they are all done the real work begins.
MK. 8th August 2019
This website is horribly dated. It started in 2002 with around 150 of my own
FGS photos in an age of dial up internet. One of the design aims was to keep
each page under 100 kilobytes in size. When former pupils submitted photos they
had to be placed where they seemed to fit in best with the existing ones. Over
the years that technique has resulted in a rather messy design.
17 years later the internet runs hundreds, thousands even, of times faster and
most viewing is done on mobile devices.
This website makes no allowance for mobile viewing and the navigation is unduly
complex catering as it does for those who back in 2002 didn’t want to download
large images. So changes are afoot; it may take months, perhaps even years but a
start must be made or nothing will ever get done.
The plan is to allow pages to scale all the way from a mobile phone screen to
full HD. A practical problem is that some of the submitted images may not be
available in sufficiently high resolution but little can be done about that.
For simplicity image pages will likely be shown as a vertical list with captions
below. All the ‘click for enlarged versions’ must go. Some pages are designed in
a way which cannot be made suitable for mobile viewing and will require a
radical redesign. The emphasis will have to be on ease and simplicity or the job
will never be finished.
Another thing that must go is the menu which is old and cumbersome and makes
updating the site far more difficult than it needs to be. For ease of future
maintenance files will be moved from .htm to .shtml. That may
make some pages inaccessible for a while without manual URL editing.
Not ideal but modifying the site piece by piece is much more likely to result in
the job being completed eventually than starting from scratch.
The old site - modified perhaps - should remain available from the Home button on the menu bar above.
If all else fails
a copy of the site frozen as at today’s date has been placed here.
The initial changes will not be visible to the viewer or possibly break the site
completely, hard to forecast! This note will be updated at significant junctures.
MK. 13th July 2019