Allhallows College, previously known as Allhallows School, was an independent boys 'public school' in Devon, England, predominantly boarding.
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The school was founded circa 1515 in Honiton, most probably as a chantry school where priests taught boys to read Latin so they could sing in the choir. Later still it became a grammar school for the sons of the local gentry. Its origins in Honiton are the reason former pupils are still known as Old Honitonians, or OHs. The school was named for its neighbour All Hallows, a roadside chapel for travellers built sometime before 1327 and now the oldest existing secular building in Honiton.
By the 1930s with the increase in traffic through Honiton on the main route to the west this was becoming a serous hazard with school premises on both sides of the main road. The headmaster, George Shallow, found a large empty Victorian mansion with over 350 acres of private estate on the coast at Rousdon a few miles to the West of Lyme Regis on top of magnificent cliffs on what is now knows as the Jurassic Coast, which has recently been declared a World Heritage Site. Lyme is in Dorset but the school was well over the county boundary in Devon. However the postal address was Nr. Lyme Regis, Dorset, which has led to confusion.
The mansion had been built for Sir Henry Peek, Bt in the 1870s by the famous architect Sir Ernest George, who built Southwark Bridge in London. (Among Sir Ernest's pupils was the even more famous architect Sir Edwin Lutyens). In 1870 Sir Henry purchased the village of Rousdon, rebuilt the church and built the village school. He then commissioned Ernest George to design a mansion to take advantage of the superb position 152.4m/500 feet above the sea. Being a distance from the nearest town, the house had to be self-sufficient with laundry, coach houses, harness rooms, wine cellars, bowling alley, rifle range, china stores, bake houses, larders, museum, observatory, walled garden, tennis courts, farm buildings and numerous cottages to house the Estate population, which at the end of the 19th Century extended to about 600.
As well as being MP for Wimbledon, Sir Henry was a governor of Holloway prison and many of the floors were inlaid with mosaics created by the inmates. Sir Henry's famous collection of stuffed birds reputedly had an example of every bird to have landed on the British Isles. The building was a few hundred yards from the cliff-edge overlooking the massive landslip from 1839 and had extensive grounds, even if the location was remote. Inevitably not all the necessary facilities were there and though improvement work started this was brought to a halt by World War II. The school was not to acquire a proper gymnasium, swimming pool or cricket pavilion until some years after the war.
In the two decades after the war the school acquired a national reputation in shooting, attending Bisley on a regular basis and winning the inter-schools Asburton trophy several times. This was thanks to the work of James Turner who had been a pupil at the school and then after university joined the staff as chemistry master. During the war he had worked on ballistics and he used this knowledge to train a series of first-class shots. He stayed with the school all his life, ending up with a short spell in the headmaster's chair, and then in retirement raising funds. He was one of several masters who devoted their lives to the school including G.S Napier ('Nap') who spent over a hundred terms there after World War I.
Around 1970 the school became one of the first public schools to admit girls and it prospered into the 80s. However in the 90s it went into decline and the number of pupils decreased significantly from almost 300 to less than half that. A reason may have been the remote location at a time when parents expected to see a lot more of their children than had been traditional in the old public school era.
The school ran into financial difficulty in 1994. A group of Old Honitonians put together a plan and secured some financial backing to attempt a rescue. A new entity, Allhallows College was established as a company limited by guarantee and registered as a charity. The recession of the early 1990s proved severe and several West Country schools were closed; the same fate befell Allhallows College despite efforts of staff and board of directors. The college was closed in 1998. There is continuing controversy among Old Honitonians as to whether the closure was the best decision for the school or necessary. The argument has been bitter on both sides and is unlikely to be resolved at this distance.