AFTER more than 200 individual letters of protest, a petition with over 900 signatures and sales of car stickers at an all-time high, the Warboys witch is still not safe. Warboys Primary School said yesterday (Tuesday) it has still not reached a decision

AFTER more than 200 individual letters of protest, a petition with over 900 signatures and sales of car stickers at an all-time high, the Warboys witch is still not safe.

Warboys Primary School said yesterday (Tuesday) it has still not reached a decision about the future of the witch, a logo that has been on the school uniform for 60 years.

As reported by The Hunts Post, the school governors decided in March to "ditch the witch" from the school, causing uproar in the village, particularly from parents.

The logo, on the school sign, the sweatshirt, the fleece and the school bag, goes back to 1946 - when it was chosen by a schoolboy who won a competition to design it.

News on the future of the witch was expected following a governors' meeting on Monday, but the village and the children are still awaiting a decision.

One of the protesting parents, Amanda Searle, mother of Louis, eight and Theo, six, told The Hunts Post: "After all the fuss and furore, I am astounded, now they are wasting more time and effort."

Mrs Searle said that after the petition was rejected by the school - they would only count it as one document of protest - some 400 copies of a letter calling for the witch to be saved were printed out and delivered to homes in the village for people to add their own comments, names and addresses.

She said: "I hand-delivered 220 signed copies of this letter to the school and there would have been others sent too."

Meanwhile, at the village butcher's shop, T G Buddle in Statfold Green, butcher Trevor Buddle said people were buying witch car stickers 20 at a time. The stickers have been sold for the past three years at 50 pence each to raise money for the East Anglian Air Ambulance.

Last week, a cheque for £720 was handed over as the latest sum raised. The total so far is £1,690.

Asked if he thought that everyone in the village now had a witch sticker, Mr Buddle said: "It's not just the village, people from Peterborough have bought them. We have had people coming in from Yarmouth."

He added: "I still think they will go ahead and ditch the witch. I don't think they will take any notice of local feeling. The most annoying thing is that most of them (the school governors) will all be gone in five years."

Mr Buddle, who has traded in the village for 42 years, sent his daughter to the school and now his grandchildren go there.

"The witch is part of the school's history," he said.

A former pupil at the school, Janet Aldred (nee Adams) who had written the history of the Warboys witches in the Warboys County Primary School Christmas Magazine of 1946, contacted The Hunts Post to say that the headmaster at the time Horace Hyde would be "turning in his grave".

Mrs Aldred, who now lives in Chatteris, said: "I feel very strongly about this. The story goes back all those years ago. It was 1593, why are they worrying about it now? The logo was on coaches that did school trips. It is part of the history of Warboys."

INFORMATION: Warboys was the last place where people accused of being witches were hanged. On April 5, 1593, three people in one family, Alice and John Samuels and their daughter Agnes, were executed accused of causing the death of Lady Cromwell who had died two years after she had spoken to Alice accusing her of witchcraft. The allegations had begun four years earlier when a 10 year old girl said Alice Samuels, already in her 70s, had caused her to have fits. Alice's four sisters and their servants made similar accusations. Lady Cromwell, a friend of the girls' parents, The Throckmorton family, had tried to intervene.