Bedales School - Ethos

Ethos

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

With the more liberal society of the 1960s, the coeducational liberal arts ethos of the school became extremely fashionable, attracting many literary and artistic parents, including Lawrence Durrell, Simon Raven, Robert Graves, Cecil Day-Lewis, Peggy Guggenheim, 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, Jude Law, Pete Townshend, Sandie Shaw, Trevor Nunn, Jeremy Paxman, A. A. Gill, Colin Montgomerie, Roger Waters, Roger Meddows-Taylor, David Gilmour, Twiggy, Hayley Mills, Nick Knight, Kirsty MacColl and Boris Johnson, as well as minor British and European royalty.