Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
HARRIS FELTON (L6) This article was written as part of the History Witold Pilecki Essay Competition 2022. On October 23rd 1956, in Budapest, 20,000 students and workers gathered around the statue of Jozsef Bem, the hero of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution. The president of the Writers union, Peter Veres, read the manifesto outlining the demands of the protestors- freedom of speech, a more liberal form of socialism, the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Hungarian independence and membership of the United Nations. The Nemzeti Dal, the patriotic poem of Hungary is chanted by the crowds, with the repeating phrase “This we swear, this we swear, that we will no longer be slaves”. By the evening, the Secretary of the Communist Party of Hungary, Erno Gero, would give a speech rejecting the demands of the intelligentsia and the students. Gero’s statement provoked a dramatic response and later that evening the 8 metre tall bronze statue of Joseph Stalin was torn down and replaced b...