1598 -Foundation by Sir Henry Lee
Sir Henry Lee KG (1533 – 1611) was one of the great courtier knights of the Elizabethan age. Born into a wealthy Buckinghamshire family already well-connected to leading members of the Tudor court. he was an accomplished and internationally renowned jouster, and as a young man spent long periods abroad competing in tournaments and possibly also spying for the Crown. He also gained real military experience when the opportunity arose, notably in Scotland in the 1570s.
Following the accession in 1558 of Queen Elizabeth I, Lee’s career started to take off as he established himself in the self-described role of ‘the Queen’s Knight’. As such, he was the organiser and master of ceremonies of the highly theatrical Accession Day tournaments held at Whitehall each year.
In 1570, Sir Henry was appointed to the important office of Master of the Armoury, which he held for over thirty years. In this role he was responsible for maintaining the stores of armour and weapons kept at the Tower of London in readiness for any outbreak of war.
Sir Henry married Anne Paget in 1551. The match was apparently unhappy, at least in later years when the couple became estranged. Anne died in 1590, but Sir Henry lived on into advanced old age, dying in February 1611..His elaborate (but now lost) tomb in Quarrendon eulogised his many great achievements, but made no mention of his foundation of Aylesbury Grammar School.
Lee’s endowment for the school comprised the provision of a school room within the parish church and the donation of to ‘messuages’ that provided a rental income of between £8 and £10 to support a schoolmaster in residence. It is possible that the endowment was influenced by the memory his late wife.
John Hampden (1595 – 1643)
John Hampden had no direct connection with AGS, yet his name was given to one of the school’s six houses in honour of his historical importance as a famous son of Aylesbury. Born into an affluent Buckinghamshire gentry family whose estates centred around Great Hampden, his reputation was established through his service as a committed puritan MP for Wendover and later Buckinghamshire. From the late 1620s onwards, he emerged as a key leader in Parliament’s opposition to King Charles I’s attempts to raise money without parliamentary approval. This expanded into a wider attempt to advance a puritan agenda in England that was at odds with the King’s catholic inclinations. Worsening relations ultimately resulted in Hampden being one of the five celebrated members of Parliament whom Charles attempted personally to arrest by invading the Commons chamber in January 1642, only to discover that ‘these birds had flown’.
John Hampden played a crucial role during the first year of the Civil War, both in terms of raising parliamentary troops in Aylesbury and in uniting Parliament’s many factions into an effective and unified opposition to the King. His death in June 1643 following the Battle of Chalgrove Field, robbed the parliamentary cause of one of its most talented leaders. It also meant that Hampden’s reputation was untainted by the controversies that surrounded the later execution of Charles I and the arbitrary government of Oliver Cromwell, who was Hampden’s cousin.
Partly for this reason, Hampden became a hero to later generations, including to the leaders of the American War of Independence in the 1770s, who viewed Hampden as a political martyr who died fighting in the cause of liberty, justice, and freedom from oppression.
1714 – Henry Phillips’ Legacy
In 1714, the fortunes of Aylesbury Grammar School were utterly transformed by an exceptional legacy gift of
£5,000 made by Mr Henry Phillips, a wealthy London linen draper. Without doubt this gift should be considered the single most significant example of alumnus philanthropy in the school’s history, since to all intents and purposes it led to its complete refoundation on an entirely new basis.
Henry Phillips is believed to have attended the grammar school, or the ‘free school’ as he referred to it in his will, as a boy in the late 1640s and early 1650s. He was childless and seemingly unmarried when he died at the age of 75 on 13 November 1714, leaving an estate that was valued at upwards of £15,000.
The legacy led to an acrimonious struggle between the old trustees wishing to maintain the status quo and the executors of Henry Phillips will, led by William Mead, seeking to impose wholesale changes to put Phillips’ wishes into action. The dispute would eventually only be resolved by Court of Chancery rulings in 1717 and 1720.
Among the areas of dispute was the practice of charging fees. Rev Gladman, the schoolmaster, regularly charged for tuition, but Phillips’ will stipulated that the education should be free. Money was clearly an issue – the Lee endowment was not sufficient to support a schoolmaster without additional fees – and the Phillips bequest £5,000 was such a gamechanger that it could not reasonably be ignored purely for the purposes of maintaining the position of the old trustees.
William Mead really deserves to be placed alongside Henry Phillips on a founder’s pedestal. While Phillips is rightly honoured for his vision and philanthropy, and it was his wealth that funded the transformation of the school, it is doubtful very much would have happened without Mead’s firm determination to see the job done.
1720 – The New School Building
New buildings for the school in St Mary’s Square were completed by the contractor, Matthew Dagnall, within two years at a final cost of £1,267 18s 2d, and officially opened in October 1720.
To put the construction costs into perspective, they were equivalent to more than four years of annual rents from the recently purchased estate at Broughton.
Unsurprisingly, the new charity did not have the financial wherewithal to pay for the building works in full, so it found itself indebted to William Mead for stepping into the breach as a cash financier of the project.
The new school was one of the most strikingly modern buildings in Aylesbury. It was built in newly fashionable brick, which was starting to emerge as the dominant building material in the town. The ensemble of buildings comprised a high-ceiling, single-storey schoolroom bookended by two houses, respectively the headmaster’s house at the western end, which still retains its fine entrance facing on to Church Street, and a smaller house for the usher or Latin master at the eastern end. The two masters’ houses were constructed with two storeys for accommodation plus a range of attics.
If viewed from the churchyard, the northern façade of the school buildings still retains much of its original early eighteenth-century character. The four large windows of the schoolhouse that frame the central entrance are original, although at an unknown date their windowsills were slightly raised, perhaps to block sightlines and thereby discourage the schoolboys from gazing distractedly out of the windows.
The windows of the usher’s house still preserve fine sashes, which were a new-fangled and highly fashionable window design at the time of construction. Several similar windows are now bricked up, having fallen victim at start of the nineteenth century to the window tax imposed by the Government.
Still visible above the central doorway is a recess which presumably once housed the inscription tablet honouring the school’s founders. This is known to have been erected in 1724 in accordance with the directions of the Court of Chancery, but its fate is unknown.
At this time, pupils were all taught in the single schoolroom space with the masters overseeing multiple lessons simultaneously from their desks at opposite ends of the room.
A problem of laxity
The late eighteenth century was a time of growing prosperity for Aylesbury, as the arrival of turnpike roads improved the speed of connection to the London markets and the town became an important stop on the London to Birmingham stagecoach route due to its plentiful supply of coaching inns.
The grandest of these hostelries, the fashionable White Hart inn on the marketplace, was the favoured meeting place of the school trustees. In 1793, they voted themselves an increased allowance of £3 to fund their dinners there at the conclusion of trust meetings. Often the leading tenants of the Broughton estate, and sometimes the schoolmaster too, were invited to join with the trustees for these convivial get-togethers.
With the agricultural economy booming the school charity had begun to accumulate growing profits from its rental income. While this allowed the trustees to give the masters their first pay rise in 1770, they determined that the greater part of any cash surplus generated should be invested in the stock market. A first investment of £150 in South Seas Old Annuity stock was made in 1775 and this practice continued with some regularity until the turn of the century.
In general, the minutes of trust meetings offer little evidence that the trustees seriously considered investing the trust’s money to support meaningful improvements to the school.
The casual ineffectiveness of the school trustees during much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries might seem surprising considering the care with which William Mead scoped out the trust’s remit and composition, requiring six-monthly meetings of his ten appointed trustees to be held on 14 March and 14 September each year.
Despite these formal regulations, trustee absenteeism quickly emerged as a serious problem and as early as 1721 it was agreed that only seven trustees needed to attend to achieve quorum.
Continued non-attendance soon led to this being further reduced to four, but even then many meetings were said to be “ineffectual”.
By the late 1750s, trustee meetings were rarely occurring more than once a year and eventually, in the early 1760s, a whole calendar year passed without a single meeting being held.
Dr Bell’s Method of Teaching
In April 1816, the school introduced Dr Bell’s mode of teaching. This method, also known as the “Madras method” was a monitorial system promoted by Reverend Andrew Bell based on his observations of primary teaching methods in India. After returning to England, Bell successfully advocated the merits of his system during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, being greatly helped by the enthusiastic backing he received from the established Church of England.
Bell’s method worked on the basis that masters would focus on teaching small groups of brighter or older pupils a series of basic lessons, which they in turn taught to larger groups of less able children in a form of cascaded peer-to-peer learning. The primary practical advantage of this was that it allowed a tiny number of masters to manage the teaching of very large numbers of pupils. The system held obvious appeal for schools that were poorly resourced and/or where there was a marked disinclination to expand the size of the teaching staff.
However, there were obvious and profound weaknesses in Dr Bell’s method. To be effective, it relied heavily on the masters’ close oversight of the pupil monitors, it virtually eliminated the direct contact masters had with most boys, and it placed considerable reliance on the understanding, teaching capabilities and general motivation of the brighter or senior boys in cascading their knowledge.
The Bell system was short-lived in popularity, beginning to fall from favour as early as the 1830s as its shortcomings were realised. The fact that the system was maintained in AGS into the late 1840s was a big factor in provoking the various crises that engulfed the school during the years 1849-51.
In the early 1900s, governors had decided that tinkering with the existing premises would be ineffective and that it was ‘far preferable that the school buildings should be removed to a new site’. A sub-committee established in November 1903 recommended that an approach be made to Lord Rothschild of Tring Park, the leading local landowner, to inquire whether he would be willing to sell six to eight acres of agricultural land on the outskirts of Aylesbury. The preferred option was two fields fronting onto Walton Road that were currently leased to Mr Walter Hazell, owner of the adjacent printing works. Happily, Lord Rothschild was prepared to sell this 7¾ acre site to the school Foundation at a generously discounted price of £170 per acre. This offer was readily accepted by the governors in May 1904 subject to planning permission and raising the requisite funds.
The County Education Committee promised to provide £2,000 towards the project costs, supplementing an unspent grant of £1,750 originally intended for modernising the old school buildings. A further £875 was provided by the Urban District Council
Various design were assessed by the governors, and after much debate the winning architectural design was that submitted by Mr Claude Pemberton Leach of Kensington, final approval of the plans was secured in November 1905, enabling tendering work for a building contractor to commence against a budget capped at £7,500.
The contract was awarded in May 1906 to the lowest bidder, Hackersley Brothers of Wellingborough, who had offered costs of £7,228. Construction of the new school progressed with remarkable speed and was completed in just under a year.
Monthly meetings of the governors were needed to make decisions on numerous urgent matters relating to fitting out the building – a long list of purchases included three clocks, a grand piano and a roller and mowing machine for the new cricket pitch.
The formal opening ceremony of the new buildings was held at 3pm on Thursday 23 May 1907. Lord Rothschild symbolically unlocked the school’s main entrance with a silver key which was subsequently presented to him. The invited guests then repaired to the school hall for several rounds of speeches and votes of thanks, all interspersed with songs sung by the pupils and wrapped up with a rousing rendition of the national anthem.
Appointment of KD Smith
At Easter 1967, few would have imagined that the school was on the cusp of one of the most revolutionary periods in its long history. Keith Smith (known universally as ‘KD’) came to AGS from a deputy headship at Theale Grammar School in Berkshire. His mid-year start provided him with the opportunity to take stock before making major decisions. What confronted him was a school which was stuck in its ways, for all that it had benefited recently from major investment in expanding and upgrading its physical fabric. As one former pupil recalled: ‘The school just ticked over; there was a sense of it being a grammar school, but the regime was tired and overly cluttered with old men shambling around in gowns’.
Keith Smith was the perfect man to lead the school through a badly needed programme of modernisation. He was relatively young, blessed with boundless reserves of energy, had great determination and self-belief, and seemed almost instinctively to know what needed to change to elevate AGS to the rank of a first-rate school. His achievement in masterminding the school’s transformation is readily evident in the remarkable record of success it enjoyed in the 1970s and 80s. In the words of a former colleague, ‘KD converted a small, sleepy, semi-rural, Buckinghamshire grammar school into something on the national stage’. Even today, AGS remains recognisably the school that Smith created. No other headmaster in the long history of AGS has had quite so profound an impact.
Keith Smith read Natural Sciences at Cambridge and trained as a science master specialising in Chemistry, but also took a second degree in theology. His Christian faith influenced his outlook and approach to education in various ways and underpinned his interest in encouraging young people to get actively involved in community service both locally and overseas.
In October 1964, a Labour Government was elected that had campaigned on a pledge to end school selection at 11 plus and introduce the comprehensive school model of secondary education throughout England. Within two years, outline plans for the ‘comprehensivisation’ of Buckinghamshire were emerging and being discussed by AGS’s governors, who recognised that ‘unpalatable decisions’ might need to be taken. When Keith Smith became headmaster, in April 1967, it was already widely understood that grammar schools were under acute pressure and their future survival looked doubtful.
Smith emerged arguably as the key player in the successful fight to preserve the county’s grammars, although he freely admitted ‘I wasn’t a diehard to keep grammar schools at all costs’. His approach to tackling difficult problems was rarely rooted in ideology, but instead tended to be based on a rigorous practical assessment of what was the best solution in the circumstances. Smith felt that Buckinghamshire did not lend itself well to ‘comprehensivisation’ because of its predominantly rural character. A network of modest- sized local comprehensive schools was expected to emerge, but individually these would struggle to match the resources enjoyed by the county’s existing large- catchment grammar schools. Some narrowing of the curriculum, to the detriment of bright children, would be unavoidable to ensure that school budgets could be balanced. In the circumstances, Smith concluded that the best interests of these children were served by keeping the current system but improving it to ensure that grammar schools were too good to be got rid of.
Matters came to a head in 1973 at a County Education Committee meeting at which Keith Smith provided a compelling argument for maintaining the status quo.
However, the battle to save grammar schools continued after Labour returned to power in 1974, as the new Government renewed the push to introduce a universal comprehensive school system. The 1976 Education Act, compelled LEAs to introduce comprehensivisation plans for the first time.
Buckinghamshire was told it must either submit a plan for Department of Education approval or face having one imposed. The plan it drew up under required AGS to become a co-educational sixth form college for over 1,000 pupils, while neighbouring AHS was required to become a co-educational secondary school. Implementation was to be delayed until 1983, but in the event comprehensivation was abandoned following the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979.
1992 – Appointment of Ian Roe
Ian Roe had first arrived at AGS in 1961, famously hitching a lift to the school in a brick lorry. His appointment as headmaster in 1992 was initially seen as a vote in favour of continuity; by then, Roe was the longest-serving member of staff and had been senior deputy head since 1980. He was hesitant about applying for the job despite being urged to do so by Keith Smith and his fellow deputy head, Chris Williams, to apply at the eleventh hour. Smith had a high opinion of Roe, whom he described as ‘the best schoolmaster I’ve ever worked with’. He had relied on him to spearhead the implementation of the numerous educational changes introduced by the Conservative Government and had found him to be brilliant, efficient and thorough. In Smith’s words, ‘he had all the qualities that you could want’. However, once appointed, Ian Roe quickly demonstrated that he did not intend simply to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor – he would very much be his own man.
Roe was full of new ideas, but he also actively encouraged an environment in which teachers felt more confident in proposing innovations. Perhaps his greatest achievement was to change the atmosphere of the school without damaging its fundamental ethos as a place in which character mattered. High expectations were placed on boys in terms of their academic performance, while considerable effort was put into raising standards, but there was also increased recognition that some boys had specific needs and required extra support.
Roe’s His teaching was inspirational, and he pioneered many new teaching methods in languages long before they were nationally accepted. He brought to the post seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasm and worked tirelessly to keep AGS at the forefront of education….
