History
Bedford School was granted letters patent by King Edward VI in 1552, aided by the actions of Sir William Harpur, a Bedford merchant who would later become Lord Mayor of London. Evidence of the school dates back much further, however, with first mention made in the Domesday Book of 1085.
In 1891, the then headmaster James Surtees Phillpotts oversaw the moving of the school from St Paul's Square in the town centre to its present day site to the north of High Street. Many developments have occurred on the site over the past century, most recently the erection of two new buildings in the last five years: a £1 million library and a £3 million music school
In 2005 Bedford School was one of fifty of the country's leading private schools which were found guilty of running an illegal price-fixing cartel which had allowed them to drive up fees for thousands of parents. Each school was required to pay a nominal penalty of £10,000 and all agreed to make ex-gratia payments totalling three million pounds into a trust designed to benefit pupils who attended the schools during the period in respect of which fee information was shared.
The exterior of Bedford School was used to represent the fictional Brookfield School in both the 1969 film Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
Read more about this topic: Bedford School
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)