[John Branston pictured in Bath Guildhall]
While Bath is celebrating 80 years of friendship with its Dutch twin town of Alkmaar, we mustn’t forget it’s not the only European connection we have.
John Branston has sent me a personal account of his association with another of our twin towns – this time Braunschweig in Germany.
He writes:
“It’s 40 years since I joined fellow students from Culverhay, Oldfield and Ralph Allen schools in Bath in welcoming our counterparts from the ‘Ricarda-Huch’ and ‘Kleine Burg’ schools in Braunschweig in Easter 1985.
In July/August of that year, we went on the return visit, making the long journey by train and ferry to enjoy two weeks in which we combined important cultural exchange with the simple pleasures of a fortnight’s holiday as a group of teenagers. It was my first trip abroad, and this was true for many of the group.
That first trip in 1985 pre-dated the reunification of Germany, and we had the unforgettable experience of a coach trip up the ‘Transit-Autobahn’ through East Germany to West Berlin, seeing the stark reality of the Berlin Wall in numerous places around the city and having its history explained. Seeing the inner-German border running through the countryside near Braunschweig was also memorable for the scale of ‘containment measures’ on the East German side, yet only a small warning sign faced west.
We were officially received in Braunschweig in 1985 by the Mayor’s Office. The local ‘Naval Youth’ troop threw a BBQ party for us, and there were nights out, most memorably in the cavernous and legendary ‘Jolly Joker’ Diskothek. Many of the German families opened their homes for soirees and arranged individual activities.
I benefited hugely from the experience, hitting it off very well with my exchange partner, Matthias Schroeder and his family. We repeated the exchange in 1986 and 1987 and have been in touch ever since.
Not only that, our parents also became friends! My parents drove to Braunschweig to meet the Schroeders in 1986 and received or met up with them on several holidays they made to southern England in the intervening years.
The exchange played a significant part in the development of my German at school, where I took it to A-Level. I later went to live in southern Germany for ten years, making trips up to Braunschweig on occasions during the 1990s to visit my exchange family. Since I moved back to Bath in 2003, Matthias and I have attended each other’s weddings (in 2008 and 2015), and Matthias came for a further visit in the interim.
It was back in February that I had the idea of marking the 40th anniversary of the 1985 exchange with a summer visit to Braunschweig, which I duly completed last weekend, honouring the spirit of the original journey by taking the same train/ferry route via Harwich and Hoek van Holland. I got a little more sleep on the ferry this time around!
Ahead of the trip, having recently joined the Bath-Braunschweig Twinning Association here in Bath, I was put in touch with representatives of the Stadt Braunschweig’s ‘International Relations’ team and of the Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft there. It was great to meet with them over a coffee at the weekend and to talk about keeping the relationship between the partner cities alive into the future.
The idea of city twinning gained considerable momentum in the shadow of WW2 and has been an important building block in building new relationships between countries. The context around young people experiencing foreign cultures has changed significantly and will continue to change, but I hope that the spirit of all such twinning arrangements will continue to live on, both between the civic entities and the citizens themselves. “
Thanks for that, John!
