ENGLAND’S WELLINGTON COLLEGE

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28938, 4 July 1959, Page 3

ENGLAND’S WELLINGTON COLLEGE

A History of Wellington College, 1859-1959. By David Newsome. Murray. 398 pp. Index.

This imposing history of the great English public school in Berkshire will interest educational

administrators as well as friends of the school. It illustrates the process by which such an institution may be brought into being and made to flourish in a very short time. Wellington College is now one of the leading schools of England. It is particularly associated with the armed forces, and enjoys the same kind of social prestige as the venerable foundations of Eton and Winchester.

When the great Duke of Wellington died in 1852, it was suggested that funds should be collected to endow a school or college. the perpetual life of which would preserve his memory for all time. The plan was eagerly taken up, with the proviso that the proposed school should be open in the first place to sons of army officers.

The Prince Consort was one of those who entered into the scheme with great enthusiasm. His influence was soon paramount, and, ■s a result, it seemed as if the college would bear a close resemblance to a Prussian cadet school, with an entirely “modern” curriculum (“small Latin and less Greek”). It appeared that what the Prince had in mind was a School as far removed from the spirit of Eton and Harrow as was possible.

After a prodigious effort of organisation, the school finally took shape according to the plan of the celebrated architect. John Shaw. Mr Newsome comments, “Cert tainly Wellington is not plain. ft is elaborate and rich in ornamental' detail; some people think vulgarly so. Ruddy, of course, It was; from its red brick, which has an Institutional flavour, and may give to the onlooker a fleeting impression of a barracks.” Seventy-six boys had just come into residence when the Queen herself arrived to open the school with great pomp and circumstance on January 29, 1859. The headmaster was Edward White Benson, one of the great figures of Victorian England, later first Bishop of Truro and Archbishop of Canterbury. Mr Benson was still a young man; but he had already made his mark as a master at Rugby. His years at Wellington were to reveal him as a powerful administrator and disciplinarian. Mr Newsome has the advantage here of being able to draw on Arthur Benson’s life of his father. In the first volume of this biography there is a memorable account of life at Wellington College in its more Spartan period. Although it was understood that the school was mainly intended for sons of officers (“heroum fllii” is the Wellington phrase), who would themselves proceed to Sandhurst or Woolwich, Benson was eager to work up a university connection. He therefore tended to depart from the original plan and favoured the classical studies which would bring Wellington Into line with other public schools. As a result Wellington has always been represented at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as at the Royal Military College.

Benson, however, was too masterful to agree with his board of governors. He resented comment, and his temper, as many Wellington boys had realised, was at times uncontrollable. But his strong , rule was just what : was Heeded ih-the first decade of the life of the school. “Sic crevit fortis Etruria”; and Wellington College has never forgotten him. It is perhaps inevitable that after the founding of the school, Mr Newsome should concentrate his attention upon the successive headmasters. The boys themselves (and 10,000 of them have passed through the school in the first century of its existence), add little that is individual to this book.

Benson was a difficult man to follow. E. C. Wickham seems to have been a scholarly nonentity and is now remembered as an editor and translator of Horace. Bertram Pollock was much more picturesque. He was something of a poseur and loved to organise royal visits to the school, in which it was hard to say who was the central figure, the Prince of Wales or the headmaster. In the fullness of time Pollock departed to adorn the Bench of Bishops.

It is, of course, true that few schools have been more in the public eye than Wellington. It attained to' a position of conspicuous prosperity in the Edwardian period; but the real tradition of the school has been shown when the nation is at war. It is not necessary to count Victoria Crosses. All that need be said is that more than 1300 sons of Wellington College have died on active service in all parts of the world.