Willoughby Cotton - School Years

School Years

Willoughby Cotton entered Rugby School at the age of 12 in 1795. Cotton, aged 14, was a ringleader in the “Great Rebellion” of November 1797. Aggrieved by the attitude of the Head Master, Dr. Henry Ingles (1794–1806), to the breaking of a window, students blew his classroom door off and followed this by burning desks and books upon the close, before retreating to the Island (a Bronze Age burial mound surrounded by a moat. Ingles called in the local militia, whereupon the Riot Act was read and the island taken. Soldiers stole round to the rear, and wading across the moat, drawn sword in hand, took the whole party prisoners. Cotton was among the students to be expelled as a result of this confrontation.

Read more about this topic:  Willoughby Cotton

Famous quotes containing the words school and/or years:

    Parental attitudes have greater correlation with pupil achievement than material home circumstances or variations in school and classroom organization, instructional materials, and particular teaching practices.
    —Children and Their Primary Schools, vol. 1, ch. 3, Central Advisory Council for Education, London (1967)

    We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)