Beaumont College

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Beaumont College was a Jesuit public school in Old Windsor, Berkshire, England. In 1967 the school closed. The property is now occupied by a conference centre.

[edit] History of the estate

The estate lies by the River Thames on the historic highway from Staines to Windsor, near Runnymede. It was originally known as Remenham, after Hugo de Remenham, who held the land at the end of the 14th century. The estate was then owned for a period by the Tyle family, and subsequently by John Morley, Francis Kibblewhite, William Christmas and Henry Frederick Thynne (clerk to the Privy Council under Charles II) in the 17th century.

18th century view of Beaumont Lodge - placed closer to the river Thames than it now is, whether because the river has moved or by artistic licence

In 1714 Thomas Thynne, 2nd Viscount Weymouth, inherited. In 1744 it was acquired by Sophia, Duchess of Kent. In 1751 the Duke of Roxburghe purchased the land for his eldest son, the Marquis of Beaumont (then a boy at Eton College), and renamed it Beaumont. In 1786 Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India, acquired Beaumont Lodge at the cost of £12,000. He lived at Beaumont for three years. In 1789 the estate was sold to Henry Griffith, an Anglo-Indian, who had Henry Emlyn rebuild the house in 1790 as a nine-bay mansion with a substantial portico.

[edit] History as a school

In 1805 the Beaumont property was bought for about £14,000 by Viscount Ashbrook, a friend of George IV. After his death in 1847, his widow continued to reside there until 1854, when she sold it to the Society of Jesus as a training college.

For seven years it housed Jesuit novices of the (then) English province and on 10 October 1861 became a Catholic boarding school for boys, with the title of St. Stanislaus College, Beaumont.

The 1901 census shows a John Lynch S.J. as headmaster. Resident at the date of the census were one other priest, three "clerks in minor orders" and a lay brother, 8 servants and 23 schoolboys including one American, one Canadian, one Mexican and two Spaniards; one of the latter was Luís Fernando de Orleans y Borbón^[1].

Joseph M. Bampton S.J., rector 1901-1908, replaced the traditional Jesuit arrangement of close supervision of pupils by masters of discipline with the so-called "Captain" system, or government of boys by boys - perhaps inspired by the reforms of Thomas Arnold at Rugby in the 1830s. So successful was Bampton that the Captain system was adopted also at Stonyhurst and at sister Jesuit schools in France and Spain, and in 1906 Beaumont was admitted to the Headmasters' Conference^[2]. Beaumont thus became, along with Stonyhurst College in Lancashire and St Aloysius' College, Glasgow, one of three public schools maintained by the British Province of the Jesuits.

Prominent men educated there included the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott OM FRIBA, the engineer Sir John Aspinall, and a number of members of the Spanish royal family. The Austrian monarchist intellectual Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn taught briefly at Beaumont in 1935-36, and from 1943 to 1946 A. H. Armstrong, later to become the world's leading authority on Plotinus, was a classics master at the college.

In 1948 John Sinnott S.J. was one of only two public school headmasters who detected a hoax letter from Humphry Berkeley, then a Cambridge student, purporting to come from a fellow-head H. Rochester Sneath (invited to lead an exorcism, Sinnott requested a packet of salt "capable of being taken up in pinches"). Sir Lewis Clifford S.J., a Jesuit holding a New Zealand baronetcy, was rector between 1950 and 1956, and in the early 1950s Gerard W. Hughes S.J., now a prominent writer on spirituality, taught there^[3]. On 15 May 1961 Queen Elizabeth II visited Beaumont to mark its centenary.

In 1888, a preparatory school was opened on Priest's Hill above the main school, in the direction of Englefield Green; the buildings were designed by John Francis Bentley in Tudor style with a Perpendicular chapel, and it was named St. John's, in honour of St. John Berchmans. After an initial period of uncertainty following the closure of Beaumont, in 1970 the governors of Stonyhurst College accepted responsibility for St. John's, which still serves as a preparatory school for Stonyhurst.

[edit] Character of the school

The buildings were laid out attractively, the main drive curving round an open field to a rendered 18th-century mansion known as the White House, and most of the ancillary buildings being concealed by trees. The science laboratories were a single-storey 1930s block to the left of the main house. Other outbuildings ran backward from there, including the ambulacrum and tuck shop, but without obtruding unduly on the agreeable garden dominated by two specimen cedar trees and a war memorial by Sir Edwin Lutyens.

Behind the war memorial, woodland ran down the edge of the estate, where there was a path leading to Windsor Great Park, much used by the pupils for walks and cross-country runs. In the angle between the woodland and the garden was the cricket pitch. A boathouse lay on the Thames just outside the gates, and playing fields for rugby football were a little further down river on Runnymede. Beyond the cricket pitch was a home farm which supplied the school with milk and other products, and beyond that St John's. As in other public schools, sport was important; indeed, an annual cricket match was played at Lord's against the Oratory until 1965^[4].

Beaumont was easy of access from London, and, being where it was, rapidly developed an awareness of being the "Catholic Eton": a tag at the school was "Beaumont is what Eton was: a school for the sons of Catholic gentlemen" (similar claims have been made for Stonyhurst and Ampleforth). Although all the boys at Beaumont were boarders, the school's nearness to London meant that, unlike at Stonyhurst or Ampleforth, many parents could fetch boys away for weekends during term; the number of such "exeats" was limited.

Beaumont was not organised in “houses” as many British boarding schools are (cf Winchester, Harrow, or the fictional Hogwarts), but in various other ways: in this respect it resembled the other English Jesuit public school, Stonyhurst, but not St Aloysius'. The main grouping was by year-class, the names of the classes being reminiscent of the medieval trivium: Rudiments, Grammar, Syntax, Poetry, and Rhetoric. There was also a broader age-division between the “Higher Line” and “Lower Line” (the cut-off being around the beginning of the sixth-form). Finally, all boys were on admission assigned either to be “Romans” or “Carthaginians”: these two groups earned points during each term on the basis of the academic progress and behaviour of their members, and at the end of term there was a day’s holiday at which the winning group earned a special tea (this last tradition lost force over the years and by the 1960s attracted little enthusiasm from the boys).

Inevitably the school had its own song, put together in the late Victorian period in rather poor Latin:

Concinamus gnaviter
Omnes Beaumontani
Vocem demus suaviter
Novi, veterani;
Etsi mox pugnavimus
Iam condamus enses,
Seu Romani fuimus,
Seu Carthaginenses.
Numquam sit per saecula
Decus istud vanum:
Vivat sine macula
Nomen Beaumontanum!

The school had its own arms, with the motto Æterna non Caduca (The eternal, not the earthly).

[edit] End of the school

After the Second World War, the English Province of the Jesuits (which also had responsibilities in Rhodesia and British Guiana) suffered from an increasing shortage of priests. The financial viability of a school of only 280 pupils became more and more precarious. Moreover, the atmosphere of the Second Vatican Council was also lending weight to a feeling that the Order ought not to devote so large a part of its resources to the education of the better-off of the First World.

11 November 2007: Remembrance Day service at Beaumont's Lutyens war memorial. The St John's choir are to the left, and a tree planted by Queen Elizabeth II to mark the College's centenary can be seen in brilliant autumn colours.

A decision was therefore made in 1965 to close the school. It finally shut in 1967, amid a storm of protest from parents and old boys who had been contributing to an appeal to fund extension of the laboratories. After the closure, most of the current pupils transferred to Stonyhurst.

Immediately thereafter the building was borrowed for one academic year by the Loreto Sisters on account of delays to their new teacher training college. By the early 1970s, the building was owned and used for many years as a training centre by a British computer company (ICL, which was eventually absorbed into Fujitsu). It is now a highly-specified commercial conference centre: there has been much new building on the site and very extensive extensions and alterations, including the complete conversion of the chapel and closure of the sweeping front drive. A memorial to the dead of the South African War survives in the former Lower Line refectory.

The old boys’ association, known as the Beaumont Union ^[5], continues, largely through the efforts of Guy Bailey, a member now resident in Monaco, with a bi-annual newsletter and an annual formal dinner at the East India Club in St. James' Square in London. The Beaumont Union also arranges an annual service each Remembrance Day at the Beaumont War Memorial. Members of the Beaumont Union and their families formed the London Beaumont Region of HCPT - The Pilgrimage Trust and are still involved with an annual pilgrimage to Lourdes, where the Beaumont crest hangs at the Le Cintra cafe in the rue Ste Marie.

[edit] Other notes

On 22 September 2007 cattle at Beaumont Farm were found with foot and mouth disease, in the course of the second outbreak following an escape of contamination from the Pirbright research establishment. The entire herd of 40 cattle was destroyed the same day.

[edit] Notable old boys

• Sir Giles Gilbert Scott OM FRIBA, architect
• Sir John Aspinall, engineer
• Bernard Capes, novelist
• Jaime de Borbón y de Borbón-Parma, called Duke of Madrid and known in France as Jacques de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou (b. 1870), the Carlist claimant to the throne of Spain under the name Jaime I and the Legitimist claimant to the throne of France under the name Jacques I.
• General Cuthbert Fuller, DSO, CMG (b. 1874).
• Lt-Col. Edward Lisle Strutt CBE, DSO (b. 1874), soldier and mountaineer
• John Bede Dalley (b. 1876), Australian journalist and writer ^[6]
• Bernard Howell Leach, CH, (1887-1979) world renowned potter based in St Ives, Cornwall
• In 1899 Alfonso de Orleans y Borbón, the Infante of Spain, and his younger brother Luís Fernando were sent to England to be educated at Beaumont^[7]. They remained there until 1904.
• Frederick Wolff, CBE, TD (b. 1910) Olympic gold medallist in 1936.
• Luis Federico Leloir, Argentine doctor and biochemist who received the 1970 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• Sir Reginald Secondé, KCMG, CVO, HM British Ambassador to Chile, Roumania and Venezuela.
• William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008), founder of the modern American conservative movement which laid the groundwork for the presidential candidacies of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
• Sergio Osmeña III (b. 1943), a Filipino politician.
• Peter Hammill (b. 1948), a founding member of the progressive rock band Van der Graaf Generator.

[edit] References

• David Hoy, SJ. The Story of St John's Beaumont 1888-1988, St. John's Beaumont, Old Windsor, 1987.