Information about Bedales School

Bedales School is a public school with a progressive ethos located in the village of Steep, near Petersfield, Hampshire, England.

Bedales was founded in 1893 by John Haden Badley in reaction to the limitations of the conventional Victorian Public School. It has been coeducational since 1898 and it was the first coeducational independent boarding school in England. Its school emblem is a Tudor rose with a bee at the centre. The school motto is "Work of each for weal of all".

Bedales is noted for its beautiful arts and crafts library (1920–1921) fitted out by Ernest Gimson, the Lupton Hall (1911) and its grounding in the arts and crafts movement.

The school is also renowned for its liberal ethos and relaxed attitude, which has been the subject of intermittent controversy through much of its recent history.

The school has established a reputation for high quality arts teaching and a dedication to drama, art and music. Bedales has an environmental award winning theatre which is also used by the local community.

Bedales is one of the most expensive schools in the UK. These fees have risen in recent years due to building projects, which have included a new PE department and a new academic block.

The current headmaster of Bedales is Keith Budge.

History

The school was started by Badley and his wife in a rented house called Bedales, just outside Lindfield, near Haywards Heath in 1893. In 1899 Badley purchased a country estate near Steep and constructed a purpose built school including state of the art electric light, which opened in 1900. The site has been extensively developed over the past century, including the relocation of a number of historic vernacular timber frame barns. A preparatory school, Dunhurst, was started in 1902 on Montessori principles (and was visited in 1919 by Dr Montessori herself), and a nursey school, Dunnannie, was added in the 1950s.

Badley took a non-denominational approach to religion and the school has never had a chapel: its relatively secular teaching made it attractive in its early days to non-conformists, agnostics, Quakers, Unitarians and liberal Jews, who formed a significant element of its early intake. The school was also well known and popular in some Cambridge and Fabian intellectual circles with connections to the Wedgwoods, Darwins, Huxleys, and Trevelyans. Books such A quoit tient la superiorité des Anglo-Saxons? and L'Education nouvelle popularised the school on the Continent, leading to a cosmopolitan intake of Russian and other European children in the 1920s.

Sixty-five out of the 250 Bedalians who served in the First World War were killed and the Memorial Library commemorates this sacrifice.

Bedales was originally a small and initimate school: the 1900 buildings were designed for 150 pupils. Under a necessary programme of expansion and modernisation in the 1960s and 1970s under the headmastership of Tim Slack, the senior school grew from 240 pupils in 1966 to 340, thereafter increasing to some 415 by 1990.

Curriculum and ethos

The early curriculum was remarkable for its modernity, with strong coverage of English and modern languages, science and design, as well having a strong "Carrot and Sandal" aspect; gardening, crafts and nature walks and drama taking the place of sports in a conventional public school. Academic standards in the early years oscillated through many phases of experimental syllabus.

In the first half of 20th century the progressive movement around Bedales attracted a community of artists, craftsmen and writers living in Steep. Edward Thomas - also killed in the First World war - and his wife moved to Steep in 1911. In the early 1920s Stanley Spencer made a number of drawings and paintings of activities at the schools while staying with Muirhead Bone at Steep. Other important artistic connections include Edward Barnsley, Ernest Gimson, Alfred Hoare Powell and Arnold Dolmetsch

Despite its coeducation and the "shocking" proximity of adolescent boys and girls in a boarding environment (albeit diligently segregated), a key element of the school's early success was its ability to engender a somewhat puritan and priggish attitude to physical sex and to discourage "silliness".

Co-education

The school's particular emphasis on arts, crafts and drama can be seen as a direct and deliberate legacy of early co-education theory, as explained by one of the school's most influential masters, Geoffrey Crump, in his book Bedales Since the War (1936):

"It is not enough to preach self control to a girl of fifteen who is just beginning to realise her power over the other sex, or to a boy of seventeen who is seriously disturbed by a girl of his own age. They don't want to be self-controlled. But one of the most valuable things that psychology has taught us is the importance of sublimation, and here is our chance. Adolescence is a time when it is natural to be active, and it is also an awakening to the power of beauty, beauty of all kinds - in colour form, movement, sound and spiritual aspiration. The boy and girl see these first in their human counterparts, and if left to themselves will hardly look anywhere else. But it is now that they are ready for the beauty of poetry, music, painting, drawing, and above all the earth around them, and these they must be given without stint...The tendency of modern civilisation is to hurry on the awakening of sexual consciousness - a fact that is much to be deplored, and that makes the tasks of all schoolmasters and schoolmistresses far more difficult. Children now see erotic films and posters and read erotic books at an age when we had not thought about such things. They hear erotic dance-music, with its imbecile sentimental words, wherever they go. The attitude of a city-bred boy of fourteen to a city-bred girl of fourteen is quite different from what it was ten years ago."

With the more liberal society of the 1960s, the coeducational Liberal Arts ethos of the school became extremely fashionable, attracting many literary and arts parents, including Lawrence Durrell, Simon Raven, Robert Graves, Cecil Day Lewis, Ted Hughes, Edna O'Brien, John and Penelope Mortimer, Frederick Raphael, Joseph Losey, Peter Hall, Peter Brook, Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Susan Hampshire, Jill Balcon, Mick Jagger, and Sandie Shaw,A.A Gill as well as minor British and European royalty.

Notable Old Bedalians

• Vice-Admiral Alfred Carpenter (1881–1955), World War I Victoria Cross recipient
• Battiscombe Gunn (1883–1950), Professor of Egyptology, University of Oxford, 1934–1950
• E. L. Grant Watson (1885–1970), writer and scientist
• Thomas Eckersley (1886–1959), theoretical physicist and electrical engineer
• Sadie Bonnell (1888–1993), World War I FANY ambulance driver, and first woman to win the Military Medal
• William Bridges-Adams (1889–1965), theatre director, and Director, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, 1919–1934
• Sir Laurence Collier (1890–1976), Ambassador to Norway, 1939–1950
• John Layard (1891–1974), anthropologist and psychologist
• Peter Eckersley (1892–1963), broadcasting engineer, and Chief Engineer, BBC, 1923–1929
• Allan Gwynne-Jones (1892–1982), painter
• Noel Olivier (1892–1969), an early female doctor; engaged to Rupert Brooke
• Alix Strachey (1892–1973), translator of Sigmund Freud's works
• Sir Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke (1893–1976), Director of Medical Services, Hong Kong, 1937–1943, and Governor of the Seychelles, 1947–1951
• Ivon Hitchens (1893–1979), painter
• Konni Zilliacus (1894–1967), writer and politician
• Grace Barnsley (1896–1975), pottery decorator
• Marjory Allen, Lady Allen of Hurtwood (1897–1976), landscape architect and child welfare promoter
• Roger Powell (1896–1990), bookbinder
• Douglas Hartree (1897–1958), Professor of Applied Mathematics, University of Manchester, 1929–1937, Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of Manchester, 1937–1945, and Plummer Professor of Mathematical Physics, University of Cambridge, 1946–1958
• Robin Hill (1899–1991), plant biochemist
• Joan Malleson (1899–1956), physician
• Josiah Wedgwood V (1899–1968), Managing Director, Wedgwoods, 1930–1961
• Edward Barnsley (1900–1987), designer and craftsman in wood
• Malcolm MacDonald (1901–1981), Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, 1935–1939, Minister of Health, 1940–1941, High Commissioner to Canada, 1941–1946, Governor-General of Malaya, 1946–1955, High Commissioner to India, 1955–1960, Governor of Kenya, 1963–1964, and High Commissioner to Kenya, 1964–1965
• Sir John Rothenstein (1901–1992), art historian, and Director, Tate Gallery, 1938–1964
• Camilla Wedgwood (1901–1955), anthropologist
• Bertram Bulmer (1902–1983), cider manufacturer
• Rolf Gardiner (1902–1971), ecological campaigner and youth leader
• Iris Lemare (1902–1997), conductor and concert organiser
• John Wyndham (1903–1969), novelist
• Stephen Bone (1904–1958), artist, writer and broadcaster
• Tom Conway (1904–1967), actor
• Raphael Salaman (1906–1993), engineer and tool collector
• George Sanders (1906–1972), actor
• Sir Frank Roberts (1907–1998), Minister Plenipotentiary to the Soviet Union, 1945–1947, Private Secretary to Ernest Bevin, 1947–1949, Ambassador to Yugoslavia, 1954–1957, Ambassador to NATO, 1957–1960, Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1960–1962, and Ambassador to West Germany, 1963–1968
• Jocelyn Brooke (1908–1966), writer and naturalist
• John Clapham (1908–1992), musicologist
• Julian Trevelyan (1910–1988), painter and printmaker
• Tess Rothschild (1915–1996), MI5 officer and penal reformer
• Alan Jay Lerner (1918–1986), lyricist
• Esmond Romilly (1918–1941), writer, husband of Jessica Mitford
• Wilfred Brown (1922–1971), tenor
• Richard Leacock (born 1921), documentary film director
• Bas Pease (1922–2004), physicist
• Sir Peter Wright, ballet dancer and director, Director, Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet, 1977–1990, and Director, Birmingham Royal Ballet, 1990–1999
• Gervase de Peyer (born 1926), clarinettist
• Sir Michael Harris Caine (1927–1999), Chief Executive, Booker Bros. McConnell, 1975–1984, and promoter of Booker Prize
• Bruce Bernard (1928–2000), photographer and picture editor
• Michael Wishart (1928–1996), painter
• Richard Livsey, Baron Livsey of Talgarth (born 1935), politician
• Tom Arnold (born 1947), politician
• Gyles Brandreth (born 1948), journalist, television presenter and former Conservative MP (City of Chester)
• Simon Cadell (1950–1996), actor
• Selina Cadell (born 1953), actress
• Jamie West-Oram (born 1954), guitarist for the Fixx
• Jane Mayer (born 1955), American Journalist and Writer
• Daniel Day-Lewis (born 1957), Oscar winning actor
• Amanda Craig (born 1959), novelist and journalist (her novel Private Places bears some resemblance to Bedales.
• Frieda Hughes (born 1960), poet and artist
• Sarah Raphael (1960–2001), painter
• David Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley (born 1961), cabinet-maker, son of Princess Margaret
• Lady Sarah Chatto (born 1964), daughter of Princess Margaret
• Alexis Rowell (born 1965), former BBC journalist
• Sebastian Bergne (born 1966), industrial designer
• Simon Hitchens (born 1967), sculptor
• Dominic Shiach, film director
• Minnie Driver (born 1970), actress
• Nina Murdoch (born 1970), painter
• Adrian Sack (born 1971), videogame designer
• Kirstie Allsopp (born 1971), TV presenter best known for presenting Channel 4 property programme Location, Location, Location
• Ceawlin Thynn, Viscount Weymouth (born 1974)
• Sophie Dahl (born 1977), model
• Bill Dunster, architect
• Ben Adams (born 1981), singer/songwriter
• Alice Eve (born 1982), actress
• Natalia Tena (born 1984), actress
• Luke Pritchard, lead singer of The Kooks
• Lily Allen (born 1985), singer^[1]

Footnotes

References

See also Bibliography for John Haden Badley.

• A quoit tient la superiorité des Anglo-Saxons? Edmond Demolins
• Bedales School; A School for Boys. Outline of its aims and system J H Badley; Cambridge University Press, 1892
• Notes and suggestions for Those who Join the staff at Bedales School J H Badley; Cambridge University Press, 1922.
• Bedales: A Pioneer School J H Badley; Methuen, 1923
• Bedales Since the War Geoffrey Crump; Chapman and Hall, 1936
• English Progressive Schools Robert Skidelsky; Penguin, 1969
• John Haden Badley 1865-1967 Giles Brandreth & Sally Henry; Bedales Society, 1967
• Irregularly Bold: A Study of Bedales School James Henderson; Andree Deutsch, 1978 .
• The Public School Phenomenon Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy; Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1977
• Bedales 1935-1965 Memories and Reflections of Fifteen Bedalians HB Jacks; The Bedales Society, 1978
• Bedales School - The First Hundred Years Roy Wake, Pennie Denton. Haggerston Press, London, 1993

External links

• Bedales School

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