Charles’ former Scottish school eyes Nova Scotia campus
Prince Charles, heir to Queen Elizabeth’s throne, once summarized the years he spent as a teenager at the Gordonstoun boarding school in Scotland by likening the elite institution, where students were made to endure early-morning runs in the cold and the rain, to a castle where Nazi Germany incarcerated Allied prisoners of war. “Colditz in kilts,” were the Prince of Wales’ exact words — a damning stance he seemed to recant in a 1975 speech to Britain’s House of Lords, in which he said he was grateful for the chance to hone the mental and physical toughness the school demanded of him. “I am always astonished by the amount of rot talked about Gordonstoun,” the prince said. Gordonstoun, which also taught Charles’s father, Prince Philip, and numerous other British royals since it was founded in the Scottish countryside in 1934, generated headlines in Nova Scotia last weekend when an independent developer revealed the school’s desire to build its first international franchise in the Annapolis Valley.
The area has a spiritual connection to Gordonstoun that dates back nearly five centuries: the Scottish courtier Sir Robert Gordon, who owned the seaside estate in northern Scotland where the school is now situated, became his country’s first baronet of Nova Scotia in 1625. Like Gordonstoun, the Annapolis Valley school’s classrooms and dormitories would border a waterbody and other nature sites. New Brunswick businessman Edward Farren was on hand in Bridgetown, N.S., to announce plans to open in 2020 a $62-million outpost of Gordonstoun somewhere between Bridgetown and Annapolis Royal, financed largely by European investors and pending a $7.2-million loan guarantee from the Annapolis County municipal government.
The location range is a two-hour ferry ride across the Bay of Fundy from Saint John, N.B., where Farren’s development company, E.A. Farren Ltd., is based.
In a business plan that details their hope to attract 600 secondary students per year — 200 from Canada and the U.S., 200 from Europe and 200 from the rest of the world — at an annual enrolment fee of $67,800, Farren extols Annapolis County’s proximity to beaches, campsites and provincial parks and the surrounding valley’s “internationally competitive hillside vineyards and wineries, ancient river valleys, historic towns and villages," and other amenities. Elsewhere in the business plan, the development company says it wants its franchise to follow the scholastic philosophy of Kurt Hahn, the German Jewish educator who was briefly imprisoned by the Nazis in 1933, fled to Britain after his release and founded Gordonstoun a year later.
Hahn, the plan notes, wanted to instil in his students five important qualities — curiosity, spirit, tenacity, selflessness and, “above all, understanding and compassion for others” — through a broad, experiential curriculum that directed students to perform community service activities; train in running, jumping and throwing every morning; and embark on the occasional canoeing, climbing or sailing expedition. Peers and biographers of Prince Charles, Gordonstoun’s best-known alumnus next to his father, have said he disdained the school’s exacting curriculum when he was sent to study there in the 1960s. A classmate, the Scottish novelist William Boyd, told the Daily Mail in 2013 that Charles “utterly detested” the experience. Author Sally Bedell Smith wrote in a 2017 biography that Charles, who turned 70 last month, complained of how unhappy he was at Gordonstoun “well into his 60s.” Today, character-building exercises are still very much a part of Gordonstoun’s DNA. On its website, the school says its present-day syllabus is “unbridled in breadth,” featuring sports, the performing arts and outdoor education. It also salutes Hahn in explaining how its staff help students from more than 40 countries develop life skills outside of the classroom. The school’s motto is “Plus est en vous” — there is more in you.
The N.S. project’s key players have all kept mum since last weekend’s announcement. Gordonstoun officials declined to be interviewed. At the announcement, Annapolis County’s chief administrative officer, John Ferguson, said Gordonstoun might be the world’s premier private school. But the Annapolis County government “has stepped back from public comment to allow discussions between Mr. Farren and Gordonstoun to continue in private,” a spokesperson for the municipality said in an email. Farren, for his part, said he won’t speak publicly about the development until “key milestones approach,” starting with the local government guaranteeing the loan. Gordonstoun had considered establishing its first international campus in China or India, Scotland’s Press and Journal newspaper reported. A “large number” of developers around the world have expressed in the past few years their interest in launching a Gordonstoun franchise, a school spokesperson told that publication. “Discussions have taken place with a group in Nova Scotia, whose enthusiasm and commitment to our unique educational ethos have been encouraging,” the spokesperson said.
DISCUSSIONS HAVE TAKEN PLACE WITH A GROUP IN NOVA SCOTIA,
WHOSE ENTHUSIASM AND COMMITMENT TO OUR UNIQUE
EDUCATIONAL ETHOS HAVE BEEN ENCOURAGING. — SPOKESPERSON FOR SCOTLAND’S GORDONSTOUN BOARDING SCHOOL