such as Camberwell and New Cross, which were experiencing social unrest and a rise in slum housing. After the rail line's electrification following the culmination of the First World War, speculative builders bought up cheap farmland around the town and by 1930 its population had risen to just short of 12,000, and would treble within the next two decades. Sidcup's dramatic population rise led to a strain on local schooling, with many boys having to travel several miles to Dartford and Erith to attend secondary school. This problem was exacerbated by the government's stated intention of raising the school leaving age to cut the number of unemployed in the midst of the Great Depression. For this reason, the Bexley and Sidcup Urban District Councils, and later the Bromley Rural and Chislehurst District Education Committee, requested that the Maidstone-centered Kent County Council finance the creation of a new school in the area. In April 1930, the council's Secondary and University Education Sub-Committee agreed to open up what they called the Sidcup County School for Boys on the old premises of the County School for Girls, which was then moving from its original site at 27 Station Road to a new, specially constructed site in Beaverwood Road. 27 Station Road: 1931–1935 The red-brick site at 27 Station Road had been built in 1900 to house the Sidcup High School for Girls and Kindergarten, although additional office space was added in 1930 to convert it into the boys school. In July, the Secondary Education Sub-Committee began advertising to find a headmaster for the school, and in the following Spring appointed Welshman C. R. McGregor Williams (1889–1954), who had formerly been the headmaster of the recently closed Uckfield Grammar School, Sussex. The son of a tailor, McGregor Williams was born in Newport and educated at Newport High School and Cardiff College, University of Wales, where he gained a degree in modern languages. Having fought for the British Army at the Battle of the Somme, he later taught at what would become Varndean School in Brighton. He spent his spare time studying for an MA with a thesis on Molière's religious philosophy from the University of Wales and in 1926 obtained a doctorate on the poetry of John Payne from the University of Paris. Williams chose the school's motto of "Abeunt Studia in Mores", which he had taken from Ovid's Heroides, in which it is