A Delightful Inheritance by Peter LeRoy reviewed by David Warnes

Firmness and Elasticity

David Warnes reviews …

A Delightful Inheritance by Peter LeRoy. Monkton Print, 2017. ISBN 978-1-9998698-0-9

A reading of the history of any British independent school affords a reminder that each of those institutions is unique, both in the intentions of its founders and in the ways in which those intentions have been modified, distorted or undermined by social and economic factors and by changes in prevailing values and beliefs. A Delightful Inheritance, Peter LeRoy’s sesquicentennial history of Monkton Combe School, illustrates this truth. Monkton Combe began when in 1868 the local vicar, the Revd Francis Pocock, took on the education of a small number of sons of missionaries. It was an unpromising start - the first pupil died at the end of his first term – but progress was rapid, and within six years the school had achieved its first Oxbridge scholarship and held its first Sports Day. Backing from the Church Missionary Society helped to ensure its survival and expansion, and reinforced its Evangelical values. The first extant set of school rules, dating from 1883, helped to set that tone by ordering ‘No reading of novels. No intoxicating liquor…’ (though a rider to the latter prohibition suggests a more liberal outlook than that then prevailing at Kingswood School, just over the hill in Bath) … ‘except at meals’!

LeRoy’s account of Monkton Combe’s first century is based on the work of A.F. Lace, whose A Goodly Heritage was published in 1968, and his concise summary of Lace’s work will encourage readers to revisit that volume. The Revd John Kearns became, in 1902, the first Headmaster to be a member of the Headmasters’ Conference, and the school continued to expand and develop during the early decades of the twentieth century, acquiring new science laboratories, a chapel and library in the 1920s. On the outbreak of the Second World War there were 100 pupils in the Junior School and 147 in the Senior School.

The post-war era saw the school incorporated as a charitable trust ‘to provide education for boys combined with sound religious training on Protestant and Evangelical principles in accordance with the doctrine of the Church of England’. By the time of the centenary there were 307 pupils in the Senior School and 192 in the Junior School. A.F. Lace noted that 130 Monktonians had served overseas in the mission field during the school’s first hundred years and that there were currently no fewer than 127 OM clergy.

By 1968 both those Protestant and Evangelical principles and the very existence of independent schools were being called into question. At one of the centenary celebrations, Donald Coggan, then Archbishop of York and a governor of the school, felt it important to emphasise that it would be ‘the height of folly for any government so to organise its political affairs as to cripple a school like this.’

At the same time, social and cultural changes meant that the sex education offered by Head Master Derek Wigram, which LeRoy characterises as ‘somewhat limited and opaque’, was being overtaken by events. Wigram, who was Chairman of HMC from 1963-4, was credited by The Times obituarist with transforming ‘a small, inward-looking, Low Church foundation into a school which enjoyed a high reputation’. His successor, Dick Knight, who arrived from Oundle in 1968, saw a need to stand firm on fundamental values but to relax some of the stricter aspects of school life, including the rule about no sport on Sundays. Two girls joined the sixth form in 1971, and by the time Knight retired in 1978 their number had risen to sixteen. The rapid increase in fees in the 1970s and the trend away from boarding posed questions about the future of many schools.

Knight’s successor, Richard Meredith (1978-90), had the difficult job of trying to please both those parents whose mindset was Conservative Evangelical and those who were looking for a somewhat broader and more liberal Christian education. Monkton was one of the few schools with a Parents’ Prayer Fellowship, a body which was not always supportive of change. Meredith, who had already earned the tabloid sobriquet of ‘the man who put the giggle into Giggleswick’ by introducing co-education in that North Yorkshire school, increased the number of girls at Monkton Combe, as well as introducing 11+ entry and the recruitment of a small number of boarders from Hong Kong.

Michael Cuthbertson (1990-2005) inherited a school with better buildings and facilities, but declining pupil numbers.

Books LeRoy quotes a governor as saying that the new Head ‘had two years to save the School’ and adding that it was well worth saving. A move to full co-education and a merger with Clarendon School, which had a similar Evangelical ethos, were among Cuthbertson’s and the Governors’ creative responses to the situation. Another challenge, that of maintaining the Christian ethos at a time when it was increasingly difficult to recruit staff who were committed Christians, was clearly met. The ISIS report of 2000 noted that ‘…there is no sense of a religious line being imposed’ and added that ‘The Christian Union is strong…and... is regarded by numerous pupils as ‘cool’.’

Under Richard Backhouse (2005-15) and Chris Wheeler (2016- ) the school has continued to develop and to flourish. The 2010 edition of The Good Schools Guide commented that the school was ‘popular, of course, with evangelical Christians and those who want the values’, a judgement which goes some way to explaining Monkton Combe’s continuing success. There are many parents of no particular religious persuasion who nevertheless seek for their children an education which is rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. That yearning for a grounding in shared values can be seen as a reaction to the widespread view that values are a matter of individual choice, a view which is erosive of all communities, including school communities.

LeRoy’s love of the school (he is both an alumnus and a former Headmaster of the Junior School) is evident throughout this carefully researched book, which offers both the level of detail that will satisfy the most ardent of Old Monktonians and a clear sense of the broader historical context. He is occasionally inclined to hint that developments in the history of Monkton Combe are evidence of the workings of Divine Providence, an approach against which Herbert Butterfield warned when he argued that scholars could not uncover the hand of God in history. He makes clear that the school’s Christian ethos has fostered rather than hampered freedom of thought. A glance through the list of distinguished former pupils, including as it does Church leaders as different as Bishop Maurice Wood and Monsignor Graham Leonard, and lay people as diverse as Sir Richard Dearlove and Sir Richard Stilgoe supports that conclusion.

Butterfield understood that religious faith can foster freedom of thought in the way that Monkton Combe clearly does. His Christianity and History concludes thus:

‘There are times when we can never meet the future with sufficient elasticity of mind, especially if we are locked in the contemporary systems of thought. We can do worse than remember a principle which both gives us a firm Rock and leaves us the maximum elasticity for our minds: the principle: Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted.’

David Warnes was educated at Kingswood School and has recently retired as a priest in the Scottish Episcopalian Church.