HISTORY LESSON

A new book tells the iconic story of Elstree School from 1848 to today. Here the author picks out some past snippets

By HUGO VICKERS

Elstree School has been housed in the former Woolhampton House, not far from Reading. since 1939. It has thrived and developed beyond recognition in the last 84 years.

The original school was situated at Hill House, a mansion in Elstree, Hertfordshire from 1848 until the move. Built in 1779, it had a huge chestnut tree (said to be 1,000 years old) outside the front door. Years later, it became a rehabilitation centre for men su ering from emotional and nervous disorders. Today it is a residential care home.

School buildings were added to the Manor House. The lavatories were primitive – an outdoor shed housed two rows of sandtoilets. One pupil wrote that in winter these seemed to be ‘the world’s coldest and draftiest privies, and in summer its most distressingly odoriferous’.

At the beginning of the Second World War, the British Army took possession of the school buildings at Old Elstree and the school moved, almost overnight. The Headmaster, Commander Ian Sanderson, had his eye on Woolhampton, and negotiated with the recently widowed owner, Countess Gurowska. He secured a 21-year lease. The removal vans arrived on 14 September and all the school paraphernalia had gone by 22 September.

Classes were held in the dining room and around the house with three temporary classrooms built nearby. There was a distinct lack of facilities. Conditions were Spartan. The boys used to bathe in the larger of the two lakes, though only occasionally. Now of course it is a magnificent and fully running school.

Telling Tales

Ted Sanderson was the second of two generations of Sandersons who ran the school as Headmaster. He was at Harrow with a boy called Jack Galsworthy, who turned into the man who wrote The Forsyte Saga. Ted and Jack went to Australia together in 1892 hoping to meet Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous author. In that they failed, but on the sailing ship on the way back, Torrens, they made friends with the first mate – a thin, dark Polish man, with long arms and broad shoulders. He seemed to have tales to tell. Back home, Ted and his mother encouraged him. With their help, he published Alamayer’s Folly and Outcast of the Islands. When he published The Mirror of the Sea in 1906, he dedicated it to Ted’s mother, Katherine Sanderson. He became famous as Joseph Conrad.

Heroes One And All

In the school corridor there is a photograph of the cricket XI in 1910, a group of confident young men on the brink of life. Six of these pupils lost their lives whilst serving their country during the First World War.

• 2nd Lieutenant Arthur Cyril Lawson served with the British Expeditionary Force in France and Flanders from August 1915. He was wounded at Arras in March 1916 and died in No.4 London General Hospital on 6 July 1917.

• 2nd Lieutenant John Bell Hughes was sent to France on 20 August 1917. He went over in the attack of 20 September 1917 and was very soon killed.

• 2nd Lieutenant John Christopher Frederick Magnay was killed in action at Vimy Ridge on 23 April 1917, ten days after his cousin, Lieutenant Colonel Philip Magnay, also died there.

• 2nd Lieutenant Lionel St George Mordaunt-Smith joined his battalion in the trenches and remained there until he was killed gallantly leading his platoon against the German trenches during the Second Battle of Ypres at Richebourg-Saint Vaast, Pas de Calais, France on 15 May 1915.

• Cadet Guy Deane Thorley became a cadet in the Bedfordshire Regiment, attached to 19th O.C. Battalion. He died on 3 August 1918 in the Military War Hospital, Napsbury, St Albans.

• Lieutenant Cyril Arthur George Lutyens was in command of his company in the attack on Houthoulst Wood, Passchendaele on 9 October 1917. After gaining his objective, he was killed by a shell which burst in his company headquarters.

None of the First World War victims was mourned so widely as Major Robert Gregory, MC. He played cricket for Ireland, taking 8 for 80 with leg spin bowling in a first-class match against Scotland in 1912 (the fourth-best match for Ireland, and his bowling average of 10.22 was Ireland’s second-best record). He excelled at bowls, he boxed, and was a fine equestrian, both in the hunting field and racing point-to-point. He was accidentally killed on 23 January 1918, when an Italian pilot shot his plane down by mistake as he flew back from across Austrian lines. W.B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw mourned his loss.

The names of the dead were read out every year on Armistice Day until the practice was ceased in 1976. The reading of the names also had a profound e ect on young Sebastian Faulks, a pupil at the school, who was inspired by this to write Birdsong in 1993.

The school has produced many famous old boys, amongst them Field Marshal Lord Bramall, Sandy Wilson, who wrote The Boyfriend, while one of the choristers later shot into the charts as James Blunt. Andrew Birkin (brother of Jane) is remembered as the naughtiest boy at Elstree.

Elstree 175: Celebrating 175 Years of Elstree School by Hugo Vickers is out now, priced at £35 (hardback)