Bearwood College
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bearwood College is a secondary public school situated at Sindlesham in the civil parish of Winnersh near Wokingham in the English county of Berkshire. Originally, the Royal Merchant Navy School, though originally co-educational, it became an all-boys school in the 1960's till in the 1990s it returned to being co-educational.
[edit] History
Founded in October 1827, a Merchant Seamen's Orphanage was instituted in the City of London to care for and educate the children of those lost at sea. With the support of the Prince Consort and Earl Russell in 1862 sufficient money had been raised to build new and imposing buildings at Snaresbrook near London.
In 1902 King Edward VII granted the title "Royal" to the establishment and King George V changed the name to that of the Royal Merchant Navy School (RMNS). Circumstances after the First World War dictated a move and Sir Thomas Devitt and Sir Alfred Yarrow bought the mansion of Bearwood to which the school moved in March 1921.
By 1961 the reduction in the British merchant fleet meant that the number of such orphans had fallen. The school accepted fee paying scholars and also became an independent school under its new name of Bearwood College. Only boys were then accepted, a position which reverted 35 years later. Bearwood College still has strong links with the Royal Merchant Navy Foundation and continues to take foundationers whose fees are paid for. The College is now a co-educational boarding and day school, taking pupils from 11 to 18.
[edit] The mansion
This is the home of the Times newspaper. John Walter II made his fortune from the great Victorian newspaper and bought the 5000 acre estate in 1830. His son, John Walter III, had the present Jacobethan mansion built as his country seat by Robert Kerr in 1864. It is a Grade II* listed building.
The mansion shows us two faces - the strong, masculine, grand appearance of the Northern façade and the more gentle, domestic South. The straight lines and rectangles of the front work against the curves of the back, where across last century's gardens the view sweeps down to the distant lake. Two towers dominate the two façades - on the North side the great entrance hall tower stands, solid and uncompromising, looking down the avenue of Wellingtonias. On the softer South front the water tower to the right of the almost 100m long terrace, while not so dominant, is no less definite in the mock seventeenth century façade.
A dam was built around the site from which the clay for bricks was extracted (there are over four and a half million in the mansion) and was then flooded to create the 47 acre lake. Some of the original grandeur of the house can still see be seen: the entrance hall with its leather-pressed and gilded wallpaper, the amazing principal staircase inside the main tower, the dining room with its portrait of John Walter III (now the teachers' common room), the morning room and drawing room (now the school's sixth form study room and library).
The Picture Gallery continues to link together the rooms that preserve something of the gracious atmosphere of life here in the past. The predominance of wood and its continued high quality still determines the atmosphere of the house. Perhaps the scale of the mansion can be gauged from the fact that this family house now is home to a school of several hundred scholars. One feels that the building has found a new and worthy purpose, brought to life by a modern community with a sense of tradition.
Here, not only does one feel the past, the different streams of culture from which Victorian England took its strength but one also senses the continuity of life through the present and on into the twenty-first century.
