Tonbridge School

Tonbridge School   (School)
Formation	1553
Headquarters	Kent, England
Type	•  public school •  boarding school
Kent boarding school for the British ruling class

Tonbridge School is a public school (English independent day and boarding school for boys 13 -18) in Tonbridge, Kent, England, founded in 1553 by Sir Andrew Judde (sometimes spelled Judd).

There are currently around 800 boys in the school, aged between 13 and 18.

History

In the mid-Fifties Tonbridge School had a reputation as being one of the harshest and most militaristic schools in the country. Tonbridge was still a largely Victorian institution; fagging and ritual caning were still in place, and sport was considered more important than academia. Over the next 40 years personal fagging was abolished (ending in 1965), and the intellectual life of the school was revitalised (particularly under the headmastership of Michael McCrum). McCrum, headmaster from 1962–70, abolished the right of senior boys to administer corporal punishment, taking over for himself the duty of administering routine canings.

EM Forster set his novel The Longest Journey (1907) around Tonbridge – called Sawston in the novel. He delivered the harshest of all one-liners about the products of the British public school. They go out into the world, he wrote in 1927, "with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts".

In 2005 the school was one of fifty leading independent schools 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 March 2021 the school was the first named in an open letter from Zan Moon concerning sexual abuse from Tonbridge students.. In an email to alumni and friends of the school, Tonbridge School head James Priory said that Ms Moon's letter contained "a number of historic allegations of sexual abuse and harassment against our students, all of which have been made anonymously."

The school is one of only a very few of the ancient public schools not to have turned co-educational, and there are no plans for this to happen.

 

Alumni on Wikispooks

Person	Born	Died	Nationality	Summary	Description
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon	September 1963			Author Soldier	UK soldier turned businessman and author
William Elliot	3 June 1896	27 June 1971	UK		RAF commander, Bilderberger
John Leahy	7 February 1928	17 November 2015	UK	Diplomat Deep state operative	UK diplomat with "a safe pair of hands"

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