Old school register

The list is being compiled by a group of former students, including George Barker, who wrote the book The Slog Smugglers about his experiences as a boarder, and Worthing-based old boy Roger Tilbury, of Hythe Road.

They have used the internet, school records and the electoral register to trace, already, almost 1,400 old boys, including 33 in Australia, 20 in the USA and one now in Brazil.

Mr Tilbury, 59, a day pupil between 1957 and 1962, said he had been working on the list for three years.

He became involved after someone contacted him via the Friends Reunited website and told him about Mr Barker's book. The Slog Smugglers was published in 2001 and was a personal account of Mr Barker's school days in the 1950s.

Mr Tilbury said: "It was the first book since the Hobbit I read without putting it down once. I contacted George Barker and he said how much better it would have been if he had had more memories from old boys.

"I had the electoral roll on CD and it just started there."

The two men used the electoral roll to trace former pupils and their parents who had been at Steyning Grammar and started to write to them.

Mr Tilbury said they believed there were 2,500 former pupils still alive and, so far, they had traced 1,393 of them.

He added: "The school very kindly lent us the old school record books, which have one page per pupil. What we are desperate to find are the old registers.

"The record books do not have the full names in them. Unfortunately, from the 1940s to the 1950s, the school did not keep these records complete, so we are still hoping the registers will turn up."

He said other old boys were now compiling a CD ROM of archive material, pictures and old magazines and another was working on a website.

A new directory of old boys will be published in the autumn.

To contact Mr Tilbury, email him at [email protected]