The St John's Millennium time capsule
Past and present united when pupils in the Prep opened a time capsule from the year 2000. The capsule had been held prepared by members of the congregation of St John’s Methodist Church, now the School Chapel, and contained everyday items from the turn of the millennium, as well as handwritten letters from members of the congregation. It has since inspired a new project involving our current Year 6 pupils that will span well beyond their time in school.
The St John’s time capsule told a story not just about the time it was prepared in but about the people who prepared it. One letter came from Irene, born in 1917, who moved from Cardiff up to North Wales to train as a nurse, and joined the congregation of St John’s. Colwyn Bay became her home. A second came from the minister of St John’s at the time, Graham Peacock, who reflected on the strange fact that his congregation’s future was now the children’s present.
Other items spoke of the era in which the capsule was prepared, revealing not only what was present in the year 2000 but what was absent. Namely, the realm of the internet, in which so many of us now spend so much of our time. It was in only 1990 that Tim Berners-Lee started a conceptual revolution in his proposal for a collection of documents viewable from anywhere in the world and linked together by a hypertext protocol – a worldwide web. In 2000 the web was in its infancy, and while St John’s was ahead of the curve, having helped to create a Circuit website, the capsule its congregation had prepared was, aside from this passing reference to an emerging world, strikingly analogue, containing instead a wealth of printed media, including newspapers and magazines.
There was one other nod to digital technology, in the form of a cassette tape and a video tape. Given the breakneck pace at which digital media has advanced since 2000, these technologies appeared to the Prep children as borderline archaic.
Technological changes have also driven social and economic changes. Twenty years isn’t a long time in the life of a town, but the growth of the internet has precipitated huge changes in Colwyn Bay in the last twenty years, most notably on its high street, where retail has been disrupted by online shopping. In his letter to the children, Graham Peacock wondered what Colwyn Bay would look like in their present.
Yet while some things change, others stay the same. The newspaper of the day contained much that you could find in last weekend’s papers, from political scandals to Premier League football. The Prep children were particularly amused by the end of Graham Peacock’s letter, in which he asked the burning question of the day – will Manchester United win the league?
Kirsty and her daughter talk to the Prep pupils
Rydal Penrhos was enormously grateful to the members of St John’s who put together the time capsule. When you’re eight years old, the past doesn’t seem quite real; life is ‘the intense moment / isolated, with no before and after’. Historical consciousness comes gradually. While it may be the case that the Prep children couldn’t relate to the items in the capsule in exactly the way the members of St John’s did – and that some of the meaning of these objects is therefore lost – it’s heartening to begin to discover a ‘lifetime burning in every moment / and not the lifetime of one man only’.
A few weeks after the capsule was opened, a contributor to it returned to school to speak to the pupils. Kirsty Hill, now Agar, daughter of one of the School's alumni, Andrew Hill (RS 1969-79), revealed that she had completed a questionnaire about her life when the capsule was created, and discussed her dreams for the future as an eight-year-old! Kirsty’s story speaks to the unique, precious innocence of childhood; when anything is possible, nothing is adulterated and everything will soon change or be forgotten with age.
Opening a time capsule can make these distant points in memory accessible again. As such, our Year 6 pupils are now preparing their own time capsule to immortalize this period in their lives and the world around them. Pupils are collecting items that capture their experience of the present moment: photos of their sports teams; items of uniform and kit; pages from workbooks and art sketchbooks; contemporary books and magazines. In twenty years’ time, these pupils will then be invited back to school to open the capsule with the Prep and Pre-School pupils of tomorrow.
Andrew Hill, Kirsty's father, second from left, at an alumni reunion in School
It will be interesting to see how the world will have changed, whether the then-adult Year 6s will feel the same nostalgia as Kirsty, or how many of the items will be familiar to tomorrow’s children, who will no doubt look at today’s SD Cards and NFC tags the same way today’s look at cassette tapes and VCR.
Rydal Penrhos is glad to have a living time capsule of its own, in the form of our archives. Every day that our pupils continue to learn and grow, they add to this time capsule; their ordinary, everyday objects have the potential to become points of reminiscence in the future.
We endeavour to preserve our school and archives so that you can visit and feel that sense of past-in-present by walking through our corridors and grounds. You are more than welcome to visit the school during this year’s Founders’ Weekend.
Chaplain Rob Beamish and Prep pupils investigate the time capsule
