When the Fartown School website was launched (on 17th February, 2001) we started with just a handful of old school friends. Initially the website was created and hosted on AOL and the list of names of former pupils, although in alphabetical order, were all on the one page. Within three months our list had grown to such an extent that we had to create extra pages to hold all the names, but the lists kept on growing. In August 2001, almost six months after our launch, our pages were given a face lift and the lists of former pupils were given a page for every letter of the alphabet.

In the beginning, to try and find your old classmate you had to go through every letter of the alphabet to see if they had registered. We have now introduced what we are calling 'Year Books' which allow you to go direct to the year that you were at school and see at a glance if any of your friends have registered with the site.

Choose the year you wish to view from the drop down menu below then you will be able to view the names of all the people that left school in that particular year (as long as they have registered with us). Travel between the years by choosing another year from the drop down menu, or click on the links underneath it to take you back to either the main Year Book page or Fartown School's main introduction page.

If your name is included in these lists but you have not yet registered with the site, please go to the registration page to submit your details.  If you have already registered and you are included on one of the lists, please check that your details are entered correctly (and remember to let us know if you change your email address so we can update your page).  If there are some details missing from beside your name, please send an email with the missing information (i.e. the year you started school or your present location).

The "Good Old Days" . . . . .

Everyone enjoys reminiscing about 'the good old days' - how you could have a great night out for a fiver and still afford a bag of chips on the way home. Those in their late thirties might remember always having 2p in their pocket so they could call home from a red BT phone box. The minimum call cost is now 30p.

Or if you're over 50, you may recall a gallon of petrol only costing 11p in 1960 (it was sold in gallons back then), which equates to 2.4p a litre, as opposed to 90p a litre now. By the end of the '60s, the average price of a home was £4,874, now it's over £186,000, an increase of almost 2,000 per cent (far above the rate of inflation over the same period).

But was everything as cheap as it seems when viewed through rose-tinted spectacles? After all, the cost of living is relative. These days, the average price of a pint is approaching £3 in many cities, but people are earning more, too.

To give you a few ideas, and by way of comparison, see how the average cost of bread, milk, petrol and beer has changed over the decades (the figures for 1960 have been converted into decimal):-