There is a meeting tomorrow night at one of the area’s biggest rugby clubs, Old Mid-Whitgiftian RFC, to discuss changing the club’s name.

Tomorrow night, MidWives will tackle a far harder question: their name

The rugby club proposal comes a mere 65 years since the old boys’ school changed its name to Trinity.

The extraordinary general meeting takes place at the club house at Lime Meadow Avenue, where a note to the agenda, from club chairman Russell Jones, explains, “We were originally founded in 1926 by and for former pupils of Whitgift Middle School.

“The school however changed their name to Trinity School of John Whitgift in 1954 and more recently the school have started to refer to their former pupils as OTs.

“We are therefore proposing to vote on changing the name of the club to either ‘Trinity Croydon RFC’ or ‘Trinity RFC’.”

Trinity School is now in Shirley Park, but from 1931 until 1965 it occupied a grand, Gothic building in North End, which was torn down to make way for the Whitgift Shopping Centre.

George Chuter: a hooker from Croydon

Before becoming a fee-paying independent school, Whitgift Middle School – so named to distinguish it from Whitgift School – was a grammar school.

Its former pupils include two England rugby internationals, Alex Codling and George Chuter, as well as Surrey and England opening batsman Mark Butcher.

The school’s old boys’ association was still known as Old Mid-Whitgiftians until 2010, when a vote was taken to change its name to the Trinity Mid-Whitgiftian Association, so the rugby club, known as “the MidWives”, and whose first XV is enjoying a decent season at the top of the Surrey 1 division, is merely playing catch-up.

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