The following details on the History of the School are taken from the work of Geoffrey Hart (COSA’s first Chairman) just before he died. These cover the first years of our School until Mr Cave succeeded Mr Pollard as Headmaster.
The Headmastership of A T Pollard
The School opened in the autumn of 1881 with forty-six pupils with much ceremony. Many dignitaries of town, gown, county and church were present and continued celebrations with a banquet in the evening in the Town Hall.
The first headmaster was A T Pollard, He clearly did some of the teaching and there were five assistant masters, some of whom were part-time. One of the first intake, Henry Wilkins, later penned his impressions of the early days, and this appeared in the March 1924 edition of the School magazine.
The main income of the School came from fees at £4/10/- (pounds and shillings) per term. Over the next sixty years these were to rise less than fifty percent. Boys from poorer homes needed to win scholarships, of which there were few at that time, despite the promises of the town council to provide fifty free admission scholarships each year.
In October 1881 Mr Pollard was given permission to take boarders at his house at a rate of £12 per term. The following year the Governors made provision for six admission scholarships for boys educated in public schools in the town. In the first year sixty boys from the town’s elementary schools sat the entrance examinations, so there was certainly a demand.
By 1882 the number of pupils had increased over 75% to eighty-one. The library now held 800 books. A field had been secured for football, two colleges made their cricket fields available for school use during the summer vacation. There was also a fives court and a gravelled tennis court.
The highest numbers achieved during the eighties were 115 in 1884, when the school was described as full, but then there was a decline to 96 in 1887. There was a consequent serious drop in income. There were promises of scholarships but few actually materialised.
During these early years academic successes were remarkable, both at school and university level. The School Register, covering the careers of those who were at the School between 1881 and 1925 showed, however, how much the School sought to fulfil the dual vision of the governors – academic success and social inclusivity. A survey of the Register shows a wide range of occupations of parents of the early intakes.
There were serious financial problems at this time. The estimate of £8,000 to build the School turned into an actual £10,000, and this debt plagued the School for a number of years. It was probably the reason why Headmaster Pollard stayed at the School for only six-and-a-half years. He later became Vice Master of Manchester Grammar School and finally Headmaster of the City of London School. An article written by him about his time at the School appeared some forty years later in the March 1928 edition of the school magazine.
The first 12 years of Mr A W Cave’s headmastership: 1888-1900
A T Pollard’s successor as Headmaster of Oxford High School was Arthur Wilson Cave, who had been senior assistant master at the School since 1886. He was appointed Headmaster in December 1888 and was to remain Headmaster of the School for thirty-seven years.
Following Mr Pollard’s foundation work in developing the School’s reputation as a respected educational establishment in the city, Mr Cave’s reign saw increased academic success, more pupils on the school roll and more new buildings. Alongside this, however, was growing dependence on the local education authority and the government’s Board of Education. This was particularly the case after the First World War, when the increased provision of secondary education became an important issue in the country.
Even in 1922, however, as evidenced in the Editorial of the December issue of the school magazine, the country’s drive for expansion of secondary education was still being questioned.
“Certain people are now demanding that all children shall have a ‘secondary’ education, and this, without considering the cost or the advantage [sic] to the nation. For our part we cannot see how this is to be done, unless the whole system of elementary education is changed, and all the schools in the country are put on a dead level. We hope the ‘German’ methods are not going to find supporters amongst responsible politicians.
“There is a very broad and easily climbed ladder already, by which any boy may gain as much as he desires, let us leave matters alone now for another decade or two before we change. This restless age no sooner gets a scheme built up, then there comes a desire to pull it all down and build something else before the scheme is fairly tried.”
Arthur Wilson Cave was born in Brackley, Northants in 1857. He first attended the Free Magdalen School in this small rural town before gaining a scholarship to the more prestigious sister school in Oxford. He then read Mathematics at Magdalen College, gaining his BA at the age of twenty-one.
His first teaching post was at St Thomas’ College in Colombo, Ceylon, and later he became an assistant master at the Colombo Academy there. The College of St Thomas the Apostle, founded in 1851, was, and still is, a private Anglican school, providing both primary and secondary education according to Christian values. The Colombo Academy was founded in 1836 as a private institution to educate the children of the upper classes and was apparently modeled on Eton College. When Mr Cave was there, it started to send pupils to Oxford University. It is now known as the Royal College, probably the foremost Public School in Sri Lanka.
In September 1886 Mr Cave returned to England to take up the post of senior assistant master at what was then called the Oxford High School. Two years later he was Headmaster. A meteoric rise, indeed.
Under his headmastership numbers began to increase again. Assets were generally in excess of liabilities, though initially by a very small margin. By1892 the financial position was much more stable. The number of pupils began to rise steadily, apart from a couple of years, and this trend continued until the turn of the century.
That growth might have been greater if there had been boarding facilities at the School, as had been originally intended. To the left of the railings in front of the School there is a blocked doorway, which was to have been the entrance to the Headmaster’s residence and the boarding quarters of the School. Not unusually at this time, boys from surrounding districts were boarded out, and so were able to attend the School. The first Headmaster A T Pollard was eventually given permission in 1881 to take in boarders at his home in Bradmore Road and later in 1891 the Rev H R Hall, for example, was given permission in 1891 to take 12 boarders, which increased to 18 a few years later.
Norman Baund Kent
One such boarder was a Norman Baund Kent. In a school magazine some 60 years later it was stated: “…he came to the school in September 1892, at the age of nine, the youngest of four brothers who all boarded with the Rev H R Hall”. Norman Baund Kent seems to have benefited from the education he received. He was a friend, fellow boarder and classmate of John Drinkwater, who wrote of him in his work “Inheritance”: “My particular friend at Hall’s was Norman Kent. We were both precariously in the Fifth under Belcher…Kent did more work than I …. He had an incomparable talent for covering himself with ink…” Kent went on to Brighton College, Christ’s College, Cambridge and Ripon Theological College. He became a Naval Chaplain during the First World War and was warded the OBE (Military Division) and was for a time Chaplain at the Royal Naval Hospital in Greenwich. He was a loyal Old Boy and his last official function for the School was to take the Commemoration Service in Oxford Cathedral in 1947 for those of the School who had fallen in the Second World War.
More scholarships became available and in 1991 Greek was again offered free to scholarship holders. Academic success continued: four scholarships and exhibitions to Oxford in 1888, two in 1889 and one in 1891. The results in the Oxford Local Examinations were also very good.
By 1892 the School was clearly in need of additional accommodation. This was identified as two classrooms, a Chemistry laboratory, Headmaster’s room and a Caretaker’s house. The School’s original architect estimated the cost to be £4,000, but the Governors considered this to be too much. In the end it was decided to ask the City Council for a grant of £2,500 maximum. A letter from a Mr Nicolls suggested that a gymnasium and a playing field were required, but this was rejected out of hand as funds were not available. A Special Committee was set up on the suggestion of one Hugh Hall, initially an opponent of the School, but increasingly becoming one of its supporters. The Committee confirmed the absolute necessity of building two more classrooms and a laboratory, at a cost of £2,400.There was the usual haggling. One criticism was that the School was attended by pupils from surrounding districts such as Witney, Abingdon, Islip and Yarnton, thus providing education for families who were not ratepayers of the City of Oxford, who were to raise the loan.
There was also the charge that the School was too middle-class. A staunch supporter of the School, Alderman Buckell sought to placate such objections by suggesting that the School provide six additional free scholarships, two each year for three years, from local elementary schools. This swayed the argument, but in fact it was later decided that the scholarships would be given to boys from elementary schools already at the School, so that they could stay for six years instead of possibly having to leave after only three years.
The Science laboratory was built in 1894. It was to be used for Physics and Chemistry as well as serving as a lecture theatre. The two new classrooms were built onto the existing building in 1895.
School numbers continued to rise. Eleven choristers were admitted from St John’s College. Following the demolition of Nixon’s School in 1894 some of its endowments were used to provide scholarships at the High School, and in 1895 the first three Nixon’s Scholars were duly recorded in the School Register.
Nixon’s Free Grammar School had been founded in 1658 for the sons of freemen by John Nixon (or Nickson) (1588–1662), a mercer who was three times Mayor of Oxford. The city council had first considered founding such a school in 1576, but only took action when Nixon offered £30 a year to pay a master’s stipend, provided that the city provided a suitable schoolroom. It was situated in the Town Hall Yard. It survived for 235 years until 1894, when it was closed, despite opposition by the Oxford freemen, following bad reports by the government inspector. [See Internet reference]
The story of Nixon’s School is recounted by Ian Taylor in more detail in the March 1964 edition of the School magazine, where there is a copy of an engraving by Thomas Riley of the school courtyard. There is also a photo of the Schoolroom in a very dilapidated condition in its closing years.
In 1896 there was further expansion. No 25 New Inn Hall Street was leased from the Corporation at £30 a year for use as the caretaker’s house and an additional classroom on the ground floor in the shed where the fire engine had been kept when the property previously formed part of the headquarters of the Oxford Fire Brigade. Necessary alterations to the property of over £100 meant that the rent was raised to £35 pa.
Sport and music flourished to an extent during this period of expansion, perhaps partly through the interests of the Headmaster who had been an oarsman in his university days and a keen musician. The annual athletics meeting became a regular feature, and by 1893 a ground at Osney was used for games, and Long Bridges bathing place was used for the swimming sports. In 1894 the prize giving ceremony was followed by instrumental recitals, literary recitations and songs. One such popular song was ‘Come into the garden, Maud’. Mr Cave’s daughter was Maud.
After prolonged negotiations with St John’s College the Governors leased land for 19 years from Lady Day 1898 and a cricket field was laid out, fences erected, paths realigned and a pavilion built for £281.11.10. Sport, however, remained an optional extra, and was charged for at the rate of 4/- per term for boys paying 12 guineas a year and 2/- for those paying 8 guineas.
Non-payment of fees became a problem from time to time. Reasons were often legitimate, such as sickness and temporary unemployment, but this was not always the case, and in 1898 the Governors stipulated that all fees should be paid within 14 days of the commencement of each term, and that the Headmaster should be instructed to refuse admission to any pupil whose fees for the previous term had not been paid.
At the turn of the century Governors became worried once again at the decreasing numbers of pupils and the resulting financial shortfall. In 1898 the average number of pupils was 165.