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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fencing in Shakespeare's Swords takes place, in term time, on Mondays from 4-6 pm and Thursdays from 4-7.30pm, usually in the Levi Fox Hall at King Edward VI School, Chapel Lane, Stratford upon Avon. Sometimes KES needs its hall and we move to the gym or the lecture theatre; we are usually around somewhere in the school. Young novice fencing is from 4-6 pm each Monday in term-time. There are normally two sessions running in the evening, with the more serious session commencing at about 5 till 7pm. Individual lessons are normally available in the club sessions for those who want them. A typical evening might be: 4.00pm Start of novice session - warm up, games, footwork
Individual private lessons can be arranged with any of the coaches during the day or evening.
For tournaments there is a built-in PA system in the Hall, a refreshment area with kitchen and comfortable chairs and spectator balcony viewing, which allows uninterrupted view of any piste from anywhere on the spectators' stand. It has the facility for raised pistes in varying combinations for gala finals. The Levi Fox Hall is probably the finest fencing training venue in Britain. Back to top
In 2001, King Edward VI School fencing club registered their name "Shakespeare's Swords" with the British Fencing Association, finally absorbing all the fencers they had trained over the years into the family of KES. But it had begun a little before that. Fencing has been part of the sporting life of King Edward VI School for over 25 years. The present coach, David Kirby, began training the school fencers once a week for games for the upper school in 1987. In those days fencing was in the TA Drill Hall in Old Town. There were foilists and two particular sabreurs, Dhugal and Adrian Bedford. They encouraged a group of youngsters which included Adam Reece, who was the first to be selected for the England youth sabre team in 1989. The club grew, and an after-school club was added. This opened the sport to the junior school. Following Adam, were three musketeers, one foilist (Sam Stockley), one épéeist (Simon Reading) and one sabreur (Ambrose Cole). Ambrose had a very mixed fencing career. He started, as they all did, fencing foil. He was sucessful there making a National Age Group final (the precursor of the British Youth Championships). He was a member of the Stratford swimming club and a good rider, hated running, and was a mean shot with a pistol. So he took up modern pentathlon (MP) and trained with the Evesham based MP youngsters on a Tuesday. He was a member of the team that took every single prize on the table in the British Junior Championships in the early 90s . Later Ambrose saw the light and took up Sabre. He was pretty good there, too. He was the youngest winner of the Welsh Open (at 16) and won his national cap as a member of the British cadet sabre team in the Denver, USA, World Championships in 1995. Many KES fencers were now training a second night at the Evesham club. Being sabre fencers, they took up quite a lot of room and the foil and épée crowd felt a little at risk - at least their fighting did not take out fencers in the adjacent pistes! So after a lot of planning, the sabreurs took themselves off to KES, leaving the foil and épée at Evesham under Nick Chapman. Nick is still fêted as the coach who first put a sabre in the hand of Louise Bond-Williams. At the time, the top fencers were training at the West Midlands Centre of Excellence in Birmingham, where all three weapons were taught. However, there was a distinct lack of high grade sabre coaching and it seemed silly to drive all the way to Birmingham to be coached by your own instructor. So that group moved to KES as well, and the double club evening system was created, opening the doors for a couple of hours on both Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. Wednesday was special, however. This was "Squad" night. And was manned by a select bunch of enthusiastic sabre fencers (though we did allow the odd - very odd - other one in as well, if they asked nicely). The training was unashamedly aimed at international success. Getting properly fit was a priority. Being properly trained in our sport's disciplines was another. Adhering to a coherent plan a third. In Sep 2003 David was appointed Fencing Master at Eton College and Shakespeare's Swords was lead by Peter Rome, newly back from his diploma course in Hungary. Tom Olphin, a new assistant to help Peter, was appointed to look after the conditioning and fitness training of the fencers. David returned to take over Shakespeare's Swords again in addition to his work at Eton in 2007, when Peter left. The training days changed to Mondays and Thursdays. Because of our successes, many of the boys and girls (and grown-ups, too) who train at KES, are following an elite national squad training package without even realising it. With the modern academic pressure there is less formality to our squad nights now, but no dropping in the standard. At first KES had to import good fencers from the region to make the system viable. Now KES can run it from their own resources and outsiders attend by invitation only and are very welcome. The KES fencing club had 84 names on its register in the Autumn term 2001. 70 were from KES with 10 squad members. This dwindles over the year, naturally, and the summer sees only the dedicated fencers training through for the next season with the games players on a Tuesday afternoon. At the top level, the club has trained at least one British member of the youth world championships team in 1992, 93 and every year from 1996 (Reece, Cole, Johnson, Bond-Williams, Jones, Setchell, Kirby, with Rayner and Garrity passing on to LTFC, Jackson, R and T Brenda, N & K Rumney, Perry, Allen). In 2001 we had four KES produced fencers in Gdansk, Poland. At school level, KES have an envious match record being the West Midlands team foil champions on several occasions. When our "new" Headmaster arrived, a demonstration match was arranged against Eton College, where Prince William had just started. KES beat them soundly and seven of our twelve school team fencers put on national track suits to the amazement of the Eton scholars. In 2002 we held the silver medal for the region's u18 foil, the gold (of course) for sabre. In 1998, the entire England youth sabre team, all six fencers, were found from KES (Johnson, O'Dwyer, Croft, Beaven, Jessop and Joynes). That was the year that Shakespeare's Swords won every single national youth (and two senior) title available - 12 in all. We are the only club to hold the three BYC championship titles simultaneously, and the first to win the u16 and u18 together for nearly 20 years. | |||||||||
Our
fencing Salle is the Levi Fox Hall, a building purpose built for
fencing training and competitions. It has a £0.25M national standard
sprung floor marked with nine permanent pistes, which are used for
training and competitions. It has a 15m run of 2m high mirror to
practice techniques and skills and the hall itself is nearly 30mx20m.
As an acoustic hall it makes coaching easy as the clashing of blades
and sound of voices do not echo through the building. The Levi fox
Hall is prepared for football, basketball, cricket nets, badminton
and of course fencing. We have a further area in the gymnasium with
another three pistes and basketball court.
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