ULULA is the school magazine of The Manchester Grammar School. It has been published for well over 100 years. The image above shows the covers of Ulula for the year I started teaching at MGS (1976), the year I led my first Foreign Trek (1982) and the year I led my last one (2005).

In about 1998, with the Trekking Centenary on the horizon, I spent one library-supervision period per cycle for over a year researching old Ululas for all the articles about trekking that I could find. I photocopied each one, performed optical character recognition, and then tidied up the resulting text files. These files were used by Adrian Dobson in writing his main article for the Trekking Centenary Brochure, and by me for compiling some of the Appendices.

As noted in one of the appendices of the Centenary Brochure, accounts of Treks in Ululas vary considerably in the detail they contain. The appendix quotes from the 1948 Ulula Trek Review of the early decades of trekking.

The only authoritative source easily available for a study of trek is Ulula, and Ulula, as will be shown, is not always satisfactory. The 1920 trek in Brittany is excellently reported by—we presume—Mr. Louis Golding. But by 1922 we are down to ‘A Scotch trek was conducted by Messrs. Green, Lob, Heathcote, Smith and Radford.’ In 1923 under the umbrella heading ‘MGS Abroad’ Ulula reports a camping expedition to Norway and treks in France and Italy as: ‘There have been camps and treks to Norway, France, and Italy, and all have passed off in the best manner possible.’ There then follows just one paragraph about each of these major expeditions, with little in the way of detail.

Click on the file below to read the article.

For the purpose of this website have grouped the articles by years as shown below. I have corrected most OCR errors and done a brief tidy up and spell-check, but they have not had a full proof-read, and there will be many typographical errors remaining. If anyone has the time and inclination and would like to volunteer to do some proof-reading, I would much appreciate it and would be glad to hear from them. I still have the photocopies of the original articles. I don’t have time to do this myself yet as I have hundreds more images to scan and process to complete the Logs for my remaining Trek Logs. The groups can be viewed by clicking the files below.