Heather Wheeler, of Plymtree, Cullompton, writes:

I read with interest Viv Wilson's article about the former Teignmouth Grammar School song (Teignmouth Post, January 21).

The confident optimism of its sentiments are certainly out of tune with the cynicism of the present. Even if school songs were not themselves outdated it is hard to imagine These things shall be as anyone's choice today – even without the arrogant reference to Man's lordship.

I think it very unlikely, though, that had he had access to the internet Old Sid or Squibs, as our revered headmaster Sidney Silverston was known, would have chosen differently. I'm sure he understood the nuances well enough. I don't know what his religious convictions were, if any, but I doubt that a Humanaist slant would have troubled him or that he would have deferred to the objections of the more conservative of Christians.

TGS was in any case a county school, not a church foundation.

Nether, of course, was a school song a statement of creed: rather like a motto, it served as an inpsiration or an exhortation to a common goal.

However inappropriate the song seems now, I suggest it should be seen in the context of the time. TGS was formed in the inter-war years at a time when the l914-18 war was seen as the War to end all Wars.

The cessations of the horrifying and unprecedented slaughter led to a new idealism symbolised in the establishment of the League of Nations, to a detrmination that it should never happen again and to the hope of the emergence of a better world.

No wonder Addington Symond's words proved popular as a choice for a school song to inspire the young.

l The reproduction of part of the l934 school photograph interested me too, especially as my mother, then Ruth Haigh, appears fourth from left in the third row as a young teacher.THIS AND OTHER LETTERS IN OUR ONLINE EDITION