Beaumont College - Character of The School

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. Moreover, Beaumont held a number of sporting and similar distinctions. Only two public schools, Eton and Beaumont, came to send both their First Eleven to Lord's and their First Eight to Henley; and the first black player at Lord's was a Beaumont boy. When Pierre de Coubertin visited England in the course of researching the basis of his new Olympic movement, the four schools he looked at were Eton, Harrow, Rugby and Beaumont.

The Beaumont school Combined Cadet Force was the only one in the country to be affiliated to the Household Division - and had a Garter Star in the cap badge awarded by King George VI in recognition of the school’s role in the Crown Land Battalion during WW2. The first motorist in England was the Hon Evelyn Ellis, who in 1885 drove a car from his home to Beaumont. Coco Chanel's nephew was a pupil, and the school blazer is said to have been the inspiration for the 1924 Chanel suit.

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 the Oratory, 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.

Prior to and during World War II, there were sufficient pupils to divide students into three separate Houses, Heathcote, Eccles and O'Hare, named after three previous Rectors. The respective 'House Colours' were brown, light blue and dark blue. However, Beaumont did not continue to be organised in such “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).