The Summer of ’56 saw the class of 1956 graduate from Aberdeen Grammar School with varying degrees of individual success after six years of middle and upper school “study”.

There were also those in Upper Six who had achieved all they needed for their further education requirements but who stayed on for other reasons such as membership of the Rugby or Cricket teams or Presidential Office in the like of School Debating Society or even to taking a leading part in one of the school plays or shows.

Thus the “final” year at Grammar in 1956 (which of course started out in the autumn if 1955) was, in common with most Senior Schools in Scotland then and now, divided into two parts: Upper Six and Lower Six. The bulk of the output of the year, therefore, was Lower Six. This is the story of both groups making up the class of ’56, and also the story of those who chose to leave in the summer of ’55 for early entry to University or some other course of tertiary education.

Any exercise in the nature of a web site has to answer the unwritten question why do all this in the first place, especially fifty years later? There are a number of very good reasons for that. Firstly, there have been some extremely successful reunions with everybody getting on famously even more famously than we got on at school! Secondly some of the precious memories are fading from individuals but the collective gatherings tend to stimulate the brain cells creating an urgent need to record their recollections before memories fade altogether. The third reason is because we can.  Modern technology gives us the tools to do this in a readily accessible form.  For as we all know, information is not information if you cannot put your hand on it.

The last reason is the hardest of all to entertain. Not to put too fine a point on it, as we have reached the appointed span of three score years and ten, we may not have much longer to tell this story, for although we produced no royalty or knights or knaves, there is a story to be told. Most of all we owe it to the classmates who are no longer with us to tell their story as a tribute to their being and more aptly to their being at Grammar School.