History
The school was first recorded in 1476 as a chantry school and was re-established as a Tudor grammar school between 1548 and 1553. The financial endowment of Sir Thomas Cookes in 1693 produced the first buildings on the present site and the historic link with Worcester College, Oxford which shares the same coat of arms and motto, based on those of Thomas Cookes of Norgrove. John Day Collis became head-master in December 1842. The tercentenary of the grammar school was celebrated on 31 March 1853. In 1856 Collis had the chapel and new school rooms built, and existing buildings enlarged and improved.
In 1869 Bromsgrove was one of the fourteen founding schools of the Headmasters' Conference. During the Second World War the school was moved temporarily to Llanwrtyd Wells in Wales, and its buildings used by British government departments. In 2002 the school established Bromsgrove International School Thailand (BIST) in Thailand.
In 2005 the school was one of fifty of the country's leading private schools which were found guilty of running an illegal price-fixing cartel, exposed by The Times, 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.
In 2007, the school was granted the Freedom of Llanwrtyd Wells. At the end of each summer term, a commemoration day takes place (known colloquially as Commem), in which a wreath is laid beneath Sir Thomas Cooke's portrait, followed by a service at St. John the Baptist church in Bromsgrove, with the day ending in pupils shaking hands with the headmaster and heads of school.
Read more about this topic: Bromsgrove School
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)