Yvette Craig Wedding Photography

By now you will have heard the dreadful story of the coach crash in France in the early hours of Sunday morning carrying school children home from a weeks sking trip in Italy back home to Alvechurch. For most it will have been a headline that will have stopped them for a moment and then they carried on with their day, thinking nothing more than it is someone else’s children or family and that it will never be something that will touch their lives! However on this given Sunday it was my families turn to feel the awful helplessness of having someone in the crash and knowing the teacher that died.

It was just a normal Sunday wedding fair when I got the call that you dread, my beautiful God Daughter Alia (above) was on the coach that crashed, that several children had injuries and that one person was dead. For the next few hours we waited to hear news that she was OK escaping with cuts and bruises, however her friends were not so lucky and have broken bones and one person was in a coma.

Then came the news that the teacher was Mr Rippington, or Peter as I knew him as, we grew up in the same village, he only ever wanted to be a teacher, I remember when he started at Alvechurch he was one of the nicest people that you would ever want to meet, he always wore shorts and you knew it was really cold if he had track suit bottoms on! To my own children he was ‘sir, or Mr Rip!! Having taught them Maths & PE and also been their football coach. He loved children and they in turn loved him back, he made school a nicer place to be.

For any school to have such a tragedy happen it would be sad, but to happen in a village such as Alvechurch it is harder, it is a village that is close knit, teachers start their careers here and never leave until they retire. What is so sad that Mr Rippington was on his last Ski trip before he was due to retire this summer, he wanted it to be a trip that everyone would remember, sadly it is for all the wrong reasons.

RIP Peter Rippington