OLDEST ENGLISH PUBLIC SCHOOL

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22194, 10 September 1937, Page 7

OLDEST ENGLISH PUBLIC SCHOOL

TO THE EDITOR OF THE PRESS. Sir _in two of your issues last week a correspondent. Mr H. F. W. Brown, challenged a statement made by me in an interview with your reporter, when I said that Winchester College is the oldest public school in England. It would, perhaps, have been better for me to say “the oldest of the great public schools of England. That was the sense in which I was speaking. I admitted when Mr Browns letter was referred to me that “there were old foundations but a great many schools had been closed and revived at later periods," and I think that the King's School, Canterbury, must be one of these. The Public Schools’ Yearbook (1935) states: “It is called the Kings School because in the year 1541 it was refounded by Henry VIII, but it is the descendant and representative of a school existing in the seventh century.” The same record makes a contradiction later, in my opinion, when it refers to the “continuity" of the school: the former statement about “refounding” surely implies a break in the continuity. # There is considerable obscurity in the history of these old foundations, and if Mr Brown would communicate to me privately any information he may have on this particular matter 1 should be glad indeed. —Yours, etc., A. L. M. PERRY. September 9, 1937.

A Berlin message says that an exchange of German end Italian workmen has been agreed on. The agreement, it is explained, is not intended to te a new kind of Labour International. Two students from Nice were killed recently in the Alps on the FrancoItalian frontier near the Valley of Gordolaque, when they lost their way in a fog and fell into a ravine 150 feet deep.