Sir James Smith's Grammar School, located on the eastern edge of the town of Camelford in North Cornwall, offered quality education to pupils drawn from village Primary Schools scattered over a large rural catchment area. In the 1950s rural North Cornwall was marked by relative isolation and social deprivation, but right of attendance at Grammar School had come no longer to depend on class and social status, and was vested both in an annual cull of primary school pupils known as the "eleven-plus" examination and, more indispensably, in a little bit of luck. Many were called but few were...