Westminster School - History

History

Although it is likely that schoolboys were taught by monks well beforehand, by 1179 Westminster School had certainly become a public school (i.e., a school available to members of the public from across the country, so long as they could pay their own costs, rather than private tuition provided to the nobility) as a decree of Pope Alexander III required the Benedictine monks of the Abbey at Westminster to provide a charity school to local boys. Parts of the school's buildings date back to the 11th century, older than the current Abbey.

This arrangement changed in 1540, when Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monasteries in England, but personally ensured the School's survival by his royal charter. The College of St. Peter carried on with forty "King's Scholars" financed from the royal purse. During Mary I's brief reign the Abbey was reinstated as a Roman Catholic monastery. The School occupies a number of the buildings vacated by the monks.

Elizabeth I re-founded the School in 1560, with new statutes to select 40 Queen's Scholars from boys who had already attended the school for a year. Queen Elizabeth frequently visited her scholars, although she never signed the statutes nor endowed her scholarships, and 1560 is now generally taken as the date that the school was "founded", although legal separation from the Abbey was only achieved with the Public Schools Act 1868. There followed a scandalous public and parliamentary dispute over a further 25 years, to settle the transfer of the properties from the Canons of the Abbey to the School. Under the Act, the Dean of Westminster Abbey is ex officio the Chairman of the Governors; and school statutes have been made by Order in Council of Queen Elizabeth II. Furthermore the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford and the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge are ex officio members of the school's governing body.

Camden was a headmaster, but Dr Busby, himself an Old Westminster, established the reputation of the school for several hundreds of years, as much by his classical learning as for his ruthless discipline of the birch, immortalised in Pope's Dunciad. Busby prayed publicly Up School for the safety of the Crown, on the very day of Charles I's execution, and then locked the boys inside to prevent their going to watch the spectacle a few hundred yards away. Regardless of politics, he thrashed Royalist and Puritan boys alike without fear or favour. Busby also took part in Oliver Cromwell's funeral procession in 1658; when Robert Uvedale, a Westminster schoolboy, succeeded in snatching the "Majesty Scutcheon" (white satin banner) draped on the coffin (it was given to the School by his family two hundred years later). Busby remained in office throughout the Civil War and the Commonwealth, when the school was governed by Parliamentary Commissioners, and well into the Restoration.

In 1679, a group of scholars killed a bailiff, ostensibly in defence of the Abbey's traditional right of sanctuary, but possibly because the man was trying to arrest a consort of the boys. Dr Busby obtained a royal pardon for his scholars from Charles II, and added the cost to the school bills.

During the 16th century the school educated writers including Ben Jonson and Richard Hakluyt; in the seventeenth, the poet John Dryden, philosopher John Locke, scientist Robert Hooke, composer Henry Purcell and architect Christopher Wren were pupils; and in the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham and several Whig Prime Ministers and other statesmen; recent Old Westminsters include prominent politicians of all parties, and many members of the arts and media.

Until the 19th century, the curriculum was made up of Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, all taught Up School. The Westminster boys were uncontrolled outside school hours and notoriously unruly about town, but the proximity of the School to the Palace of Westminster meant that politicians were well aware of the boys' exploits. After the Public Schools Act 1868, in response to the Clarendon Report on the financial and other malpractices at nine pre-eminent public schools, the school began to approach its modern form. Unusually among the leading public schools, however, Westminster did not adopt most of the broader changes associated with the Victorian ethos of Thomas Arnold, such as the emphasis on team over individual spirit, and the school retained much of its distinctive character. Despite many pressures, including evacuation and the destruction of the School roof during the Blitz, the school also refused to move out of central London along with other prominent schools such as Charterhouse and St. Paul's, and remains in its original location close by the centres of church and state.

Westminster Under School was formed in 1943 at the evacuated school, as a distinct preparatory school for day pupils between the ages of 8 to 13 (now 7 to 13). Only the separation is new: for example, in the 18th century, Edward Gibbon attended Westminster from the age of 11. The Under School has since moved to Vincent Square, overlooking the School's playing fields. Its current Master is Mrs. Elizabeth Hill.

In 1967, the first female pupil was admitted to the Upper School, with girls becoming full members in all houses from 1973 onwards. In 1981, a single-sex boarding house, Purcell's, was created again, for girls. In 1997 the school expanded further with the creation of a new day house, Milne's at 6a, Dean's Yard.

In 2005 the school was one of fifty leading private schools guilty of running an illegal price-fixing cartel, exposed by The Times, which had allowed them to drive up fees for thousands of customers. Each school agreed to pay a nominal penalty of £10,000 and ex-gratia payments totalling £3 million into a trust designed to benefit pupils who attended the schools during the period in respect of which fee information was shared. However, Mrs Jean Scott, the head of the Independent Schools Council, said that independent schools had always been exempt from anti-cartel rules applied to business, were following a long-established procedure in sharing the information with each other, and that they were unaware of the change to the law (on which they had not been consulted). She wrote to John Vickers, the OFT director-general, saying, "They are not a group of businessmen meeting behind closed doors to fix the price of their products to the disadvantage of the consumer. They are schools that have quite openly continued to follow a long-established practice because they were unaware that the law had changed."

In 2007, the school responded to an invitation to become the sponsor of Pimlico School, which was due to be rebuilt as an academy but decided not to go ahead. Westminster City Council chose John Nash, a businessman who owns the for-profit Alpha Plus schools group.

In 2010, the school and Westminster Abbey hosted an event to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the granting of the institution's Royal Charter. Queen Elizabeth II, a guest of the occasion, unveiled a statue of her namesake in Dean's Yard. The Statue of The School's Foundress was created by sculptor and Old Westminster Matthew Spender.