When was eton school founded

As a result, his birthday, the Fourth of June, became a major celebration at Eton and continues to be an important event in the school calendar, marked with speeches, cricket, and the procession of boats. By the mid th century, however, changes were long overdue. In , the first new subject had been added to the curriculum — mathematics, but many other areas needed improvements.

The Clarendon Commission of led to significant changes including better accommodation, a wider curriculum and better-qualified staff. As a result, by there were over a thousand boys in the school, who were all taught a wide variety of subjects in new purpose-built classrooms, laboratories and lecture halls, together with a museum and library. In the 20 th century, more changes were made. The value of extra-curricular activities was officially acknowledged, sports facilities were improved, and a theatre and concert hall added.

Instead, from , all boys have had to earn their place through interviews, tests and references. Actor James MacAvoy spoke about the risk that the wider population of Britain is not properly represented if over half of all its actors have been privately educated.

In , King Henry VI founded Eton College in order to prepare boys from poorer backgrounds to attend the University of Cambridge by providing them with a superior education. From then on the funding of the school relied much on donations from wealthy benefactors, many of whom built the buildings that we still see to this day. Early life at the school was minimalist and highly regimented, with the day starting at 6am, and not many holidays. Isabelle is a writer and blogger based in North London.

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While at the school, Gladstone joined a political faction known as the Canningites, named after their leader George Canning, later a Tory foreign secretary and briefly prime minister. Canning, who had himself attended Eton a generation earlier, is if anything an even greater advert than Gladstone for the political advancement the college can provide. This may look like a typo, since Eton is clearly not inclusive when compared with a state comprehensive, but it has often been more inclusive than other public schools.

No retail traders being under any circumstances to be considered. By contrast, Eton has tended historically to accept most children if their families had the money or the talent. William Sherlock, who after leaving Eton in eventually became chaplain to James II and then William III, making him a powerful figure at the court though not strictly speaking a politician , was the son of a tradesman living in the evocatively named Gravel Lane, Southwark.

Fellow Scholars include both our very latest prime minister who by the time he attended Eton had to pay fees and the very first one, Robert Walpole. However, in Eton announced that boys were on bursaries, where fees are reduced or waived altogether because parents cannot afford to pay them, with 70 boys among both Scholars and non-Scholars, known as Oppidans to receive an education for free in the coming year.

This enables the College to cast its net still wider in the search for talent. For most of its history Eton demanded scholarliness of its Scholars, but not of anyone else. Or take the case of Evelyn Waugh, the envious outside chronicler of the upper class, who probably wished he'd gone to Eton instead of the humbler Lancing College. And in a typical act of one-up-manship, he sent his character Sebastian Flyte there in his most nostalgic novel Brideshead Revisited.

Sebastian, significantly, starts the book as the epitome of glamour but undergoes a decline as the story proceeds. Waugh's mixed feelings about Eton may also have been coloured by the fact that his first wife, also called Evelyn, had an affair with an old Etonian.

As this parade of writers suggests, Eton has been a hothouse for literary development. Like Fleming and Orwell, Paul Watkins began writing at Eton, and he writes in Stand Before Your God that he tied a pencil to his bed frame so he could scribble ideas on the wall when he woke at night.

He wrote the first two drafts of his debut novel Night Over Day Over Night at Eton, when he was "The Eton library has the original draft, which I wrote by hand," he says. What did Eton teach him? When I got out into the world, nobody cared that I was writing books until those books got published. For Okwonga, it was a sense of meeting society's expectations — but also his own — from such a privileged education. And I think I've carried that my entire career, this sense of, 'I have to achieve something, I have to make my time worth it.

She said, 'you haven't wasted your talent'. Which is a very powerful thing to be told, because you go to a place like that, which is such a privilege, and you feel that keenly, every week you're there.

You go out into the world, going: 'I've got to do something with this'. Love books? If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.

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