These children were laden with goods to bring harvest cheer to a group of elderly people.

We believe they were pupils at the little thatched church school at Iffley, on the outskirts of Oxford.

They had brought their gifts to Rose Hill community centre, where the popular Silver Threads Club met.

The picture was taken at harvest time in October 1961, two months before the school was due to close.

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It was published in our sister paper, The Oxford Times, in a feature on Iffley, one of a weekly series when a reporter and photographer dropped in on a selected village.

The community centre had recently been extended and was serving a much wider area than previously, including Iffley.

The paper reported: “This thriving new centre is already so pressed for space that an extension has just been completed and a further one is on the drawing boards.”

The 20 or so activities at the time included boxing, whist, badminton, dressmaking, dancing, community singing and bingo as well as the Silver Threads Club.

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There was sadness in Iffley at the looming closure of the village school – an inscription in Roman numerals over the door indicated that it had opened in 1838.

School manager Evelyn Banks said: “I keep meeting broken-hearted mothers who think we might keep it going somehow, but there is nothing we can do.

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“The children will have to go to Rose Hill or Donnington, or further afield if parents want them to go to a church school.”