When the OX14 Learning Partnership’s colts walked out at Holland Park in Kensington this May, the team itself told the story of the day: girls from St Helen and St Katharine alongside boys from Radley College and students from John Mason School, Fitzharrys School and Larkmead School, with independent and state schools fielding as a team.
The colts were playing in the Mayors’ Charity Cricket Match, a fixture between the Mayor’s XI of Abingdon-on-Thames and that of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea. The match celebrated the historic links between the two communities and raised money for the Mayors’ chosen charities: Occtopus, the Oxford Colon Cancer Trust, and London’s Air Ambulance Charity. For the Mayor of Abingdon, it marked the culmination of a year of fundraising and a fitting close to his mayoral year.
It proved a day to remember. Brought together with the help of John Sparks of Radley College, who coordinated the side, the colts won their match and were presented with the winners’ bat, while the Abingdon adult team also came out on top. England and Middlesex bowler Angus Fraser kept the scoreboard, and the players met Chanderkanta Kaul, a former captain of the India women’s Test team and an inspiring reminder of how far the game can take them.
For the two St Helen and St Katharine students who took part, the value of the day lay as much off the pitch as on it: a chance to meet and play with young people from schools they might never otherwise have encountered, to grow in confidence and to see at first-hand how sport can draw a community together for a cause that matters. This was partnership in its truest sense: five schools, independent and state, forming a single team and sharing in its success.
That, in the end, was the real result: a reminder that a shared history can still inspire friendship and partnership today and of what the schools of the OX14 Learning Partnership can achieve when they take the field together.
