The office of examiner will be performed by the Naval Instructor of the Flagship, or the Senior Naval Instructor present, and in the event of the Fleet being absent, but such other properly qualified person, either a clergyman or a graduate, who will be called upon to draw up a report upon the school for transmission to the Admiralty Inspector of Schools England. A further paragraph in the next edition of the newspaper apologised for the omission of any reference to 'The Reverend B. Howe, Chaplain to the Yard, who has the honour of first proposing the school to the Admiral Superintendent in March last, Admiral Stopford readily took up the suggestion and forwarded Mr Howes letters to the Admiralty, supporting them with all this influence'.

I think we can take this as firm evidence of the opening of the first official Dockyard School (and direct forerunner of Tal Handaq School today) on 1 November 1858, making the school almost 120 years old. In the preceding article, Commander Bellamy took up the story from the move of the school (originally in or near the Chapel by the sail loft in the Sta Margherita Cospicua, area) to the old dining hall. I now continue where he left off.

You may have noticed that although he mentions Verdala he still talks about the 'school', in the singular, because at the time there was just one all-age RN Children's School, housed on two separate sites, some but not all of the primary children being at Verdala. It was about 1954 that it proved possible to house all the primary section at Verdala and also about that time a separate Verdala Headmaster was appointed, although he was still responsible to the Headmaster, Tal Handaq.

The huge total of 1470 pupils, referred to by Cdr Bellamy, was for the two sections of the school combined, only 700 of them being at Tal Handaq. He might have been surprised had he known then that in 1960 the numbers were to reach 1050 at Tal Handaq and 1200 at Verdala, those at Tal Handaq being housed in buildings which were expanded from a theoretical capacity of 600 in 1958 to 800 in 1960. I was on the staff at the time and although I can't really remember where all those pupils went, I do know that there were a few 'floating' classes with no rooms of their own. Tal Handaq has always quietly got on with the job of achieving what most people would think of as impossible without making a fuss about it.