Radley College - Books, Articles and Periodicals

Books, Articles and Periodicals

Foundation documents include the diary of Robert Corbet Singleton, co-founder and first Warden of Radley has now been published for the first time. It is available on the web at http://singletonsdiary.wordpress.com It is a primary resource for the history of educational reform in the mid-19th century and the Oxford Movement.

There have been three official histories of the College, commissioned to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation, the centenary and the sesquicentenary respectively.

‘’Sicut Columbae: fifty years of St Peter’s College, Radley.’’ By T.D. Raikes and other Old Radleians. James Parker & Co., Oxford and London, 1897. Raikes’ history of the first fifty years of the College is primarily based on reminiscences and first-hand accounts of the earliest years, informed by an author who had been schoolboy, prefect, teacher and close family member of several other Old Radleians. The sections on school sports are particularly valuable.

A second edition was produced by Ernest Bryans in 1925 under an amended title Sicut Columbae: a history of St Peter’s College, Radley, 1847–1924. Basil Blackwell, for the Radleian Society, Oxford . Bryans made a few corrections to the earlier text and added chapters which cover the intervening twenty-five years.

The history of Radley College, 1847–1947. By AK Boyd. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1948. Boyd’s history of Radley was written to celebrate the school’s centenary. Like TD Raikes, he had an unrivalled personal knowledge of the school, but he also sought to build on the earlier history with much more documentary material. To this end, he virtually created the school Archives by sourcing all of the extant material from anyone who had any past connection with the school, occasionally commissioning transcripts where the original was retained by the families who owned it. The strength of Raikes’ history was the depth of first-hand memoirs; Boyd’s in his use of, and extensive quotations from, the source material.

No ordinary place: Radley College and the public school system. By Christopher Hibbert. John Murray, London, 1997. ISBN 0-7195-5176-5 Christopher Hibbert’s history of the College was commissioned to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its foundation in 1997. Hibbert, himself a former Radleian, was described as ‘the leading popular historian now living in England.’ His approach was to place the school’s history within the context of public school education in the 19th and 20th centuries. This allows a thematic approach within each chronological section.