Education and inspiration
In 1862, the empty buildings of an Imperial training college were occupied by one of a new generation of public schools. John Goodall looks at the story and development of the site
IN October 1805, the East India Company bought a small estate outside Hertford, once owned by a surgeon, William Walker, who had worked in its service. The intention was that Hailey Bury, as it was then, would be the site of a college for young men destined to serve in the administration of the Company’s territories. Established in 1600 as a trading monopoly, ‘John Company’, as it was popularly known, had laid the foundation for 18th-century British Imperial expansion in India and then into China. Managed from London, it maintained all the trappings of a sovereign power, even a standing army. The quality of recruits to the Company’s service was not high and the issue of training them had been of concern for some time. In 1787, the writer of one report caustically
observed that he ‘did not think Britain could have furnished such a set of wretched objects’. East India College was established in 1805 and, for the first years of its existence, occupied temporary premises in Hertford Castle, close to its intended future home. The Company turned to its surveyor, Henry Holland, to repair the castle and plan the new college. To Holland’s considerable annoyance, his plans for the new institution were almost immediately set aside in favour of those devised by the 27-year-old William Wilkins of Cambridge, the son of a builder and university educated. As a young man, his interest in architecture had been expressed in accomplished drawings and surveys of medieval buildings. One thread of his subsequent career—as a domestic architect—drew on this knowledge of Gothic, but it was not the style of his public buildings. In 1801, Wilkins had received a scholarship that enabled him to travel for four years in Greece, Asia Minor and Italy. With faultless professional timing, he returned to England in 1804, ideally equipped not only to design in the severe and archaeologically informed neo-grecian style that was newly fashionable, but to take advantage of a generational change in the ranks of the architectural profession that helped advance this new aesthetic. In the spring of 1805, Wilkins presented his first designs for a large-scale building project, a neo-grecian scheme for the longplanned Downing College, Cambridge. It was one of three rival schemes viewed by the college authorities, all successors to an abandoned plan by George III’S favourite architect, James Wyatt. In March 1806, a panel of three architects—with particular experience in institutional buildings such as prisons, hospitals and schools—declared for Wilkins’s scheme. The first stone of Downing was laid on May 18, 1807, but building work ran on in fits and starts for decades. Wilkins’s designs for Haileybury are distinct from—but directly related to—his Downing College plans. They were submitted only a few months later, in November 1805, merely
weeks after the East India Company purchase of Hailey Bury. Such speed of action suggests a connection with someone closely involved with the project, almost certainly the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell, one of the Downing judges. Cockerell was also the designer (for his brother) of the IndoSaracenic Sezincote House, Gloucestershire, and the successor to the disappointed Holland as Company surveyor in 1806. Haileybury was planned around a huge courtyard, 360ft by 340ft (Fig 5). This was enclosed to the south by the two most important institutional interiors—the dining hall, incorporating a common room (Fig 3), and chapel—placed end to end, with the library at right angles between them. The library gable was set over a columned portico that formed the centrepiece of the façade. Further extending this composition, forming bookends to a massive 425ft-long range, were the kitchens and the principal’s house. Both the latter blocks incorporate two tiers of windows —in contrast to the single windows that light the main rooms—and are demarcated from the central body of the block by passages opening through the full depth of the range. At the insistence of the Company directors, this southern range was expensively faced in Portland stone. It overlooked falling ground, which was remodelled from 1808 on the advice of the fashionable landscape designer Humphry Repton (who had worked with Wilkins’s father). This was the principal façade, but, confusingly, was not the main entrance to the college. Indeed, bizarrely, the portico below the library gable did not feature a door at all. Instead, the gateway to the college, termed the Propylaeum, occupied the centre of the western courtyard range and faced a double drive laid out by Repton with lodges to frame the view from the passing road to London. The Propylaeum opened into a college court enclosed by long, low blocks of study bedrooms and classrooms interspersed with houses for professors, linked by walls. The spaces between the buildings have now been infilled, but their original configuration is apparent from the pattern of pitched roofs. The neo-grecian style of the college was one of the qualities that appealed to Wilkins’s contemporaries. He went on to design more public buildings in the same stylistic vein for Cambridge University, University College London and his last major commission, in 1834–38, the National Gallery, London. The scale and visual order of the Haileybury composition, not to mention its landscaped setting, resonated with Britain’s image of herself as a global power at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. It cost the huge sum of £56,000. It’s worth observing, however, that the idea of the picturesque academic college was anticipated by James Wyatt in his original designs for the military college of Sandhurst, Berkshire, in 1802. The bones of the Haileybury plan—a hall and chapel range enclosed by lower residential ranges to form a quadrangle—look back to medieval Oxford collegiate planning and its source, Edward III’S Upper Ward at Windsor Castle (Country Life, October 16, 2019). Indeed, the latter bears striking formal comparison to Haileybury. As Company surveyor, Cockerell advised Wilkins on his plans and work advanced rapidly. East India College took up residence in 1809, offering a two-year course for 16- to 18-year-old boys, with a curriculum divided into two ‘departments’, one European— encompassing political economy, experimental philosophy, languages, maths and drawing—the other Oriental, with coverage of Persian as an administrative language, plus Islamic law, Hindu customs and Indian languages, including Sanskrit. It initially possessed professors of the stature of the political economist Revd Thomas Malthus. Entrance was through the recommendation of a director of the Company and the fee substantial. In return, students received certificates of competence and, more importantly, a place in the listing of the Company hierarchy, which promised gradual, but inexorable promotion. By the 1850s, this system of appointment by patronage was a cause for concern and, in 1855, the government declared that Haileybury would close.
The scale and visual order resonated with Britain’s image of herself as a global power
It is a coincidence, but a significant one, that the last classes were held in December 1857, at the height of the Indian uprising familiarly known in Britain as the Indian Mutiny. After a short period as a barracks, the buildings were purchased in 1862 for £18,000 by a group of local philanthropists. Their intention was to found a public school to equip boys for university, the civil service, the Armed Forces and business, with reference to the examples of other recent foundations of the 1840s and 1850s, such as Rossall, Marlborough, Lancing and Wellington. Under the leadership of its first headmaster, Revd A. G. Butler, who had himself been educated by Dr Arnold at Rugby, it opened in 1862 with 54 pupils. Numbers grew rapidly and, by the 1870s, it accommodated nearly 500 boys. Other schools began to open up in and around Hertfordshire, too, many moving to escape the congestion of London. The college buildings required adaptation for school use, including the conversion of the bedrooms into dormitories, but these were merely practical changes. The first architectural evidence of the school’s success was the commission of a grand new chapel on the site of the library by Arthur Blomfield in 1876–77. The structure, with a huge dome and later given an entrance via Wilkins’s portico, was intended to underline the importance of the school’s Christian ethos and to give visual emphasis to the low south range (Fig 1). As Blomfield observed: ‘You need raising up, the whole place grovels on the ground.’ Haileybury now began to expand steadily, with further buildings erected by Blomfield’s nephew, Reginald Blomfield, in the 1880s and 1890s. He was educated at Haileybury and designed the first of these new buildings— the cricket pavilion—without charging fees. His Bradby Hall of 1888 is a masterpiece of its time, with delightful fixtures and fittings (Fig 6). In the early 20th century, the architectural practice Simpson and Ayrton made several neo-classical additions to the school. The most accomplished of these was a threesided courtyard added just outside Wilkins’ Propylaeum in 1907–08 (Fig 7). Later, in 1912–14, the firm added a central block to the west courtyard range, known as Big School. The next big expansion came in the 1930s and was bound up with the construction of Memorial Hall, a new dining room that was also intended as a war memorial to old boys killed in the First World War. Herbert Baker —who had served on the Imperial War Graves Commission and undertaken such educational commissions as Rhodes House, Oxford —was chosen for the work and, although he was uncomfortable with this combination of functions, created a superb, centralised chamber, covered by a low dome (Fig 4). To one side is a small projecting apse, which contains the college prefects’ high table (furnished by ‘Mouseman’ Thompson of Kilburn) and a Book of Remembrance in a special stand. On the exterior of this apse is carved a stone memorial to the Fallen (Fig 2). Baker was then approached to reconfigure the chapel, a commission that quieted his concerns about creating a secular memorial to the fallen. He was able to extend the building with an apse corresponding to—and on axis with—that of the dining hall and to transform the internal proportions of the dome (Fig 8). Many of the plaques belonging to Blomfield’s remodelling were stripped away and the interior, which had been damaged by fire, simplified. In addition, he created new fittings and pews, the latter incorporating one of his signature details of butterfly joints. The five generations of buildings created by Wilkins, both Blomfields, Ayrton and Simpson and Baker still form the skeleton around which this co-educational boarding school continues to develop and modernise. Aware of the cumulative damage inflicted to historic buildings by cheap fixes, insensitive adaptation and unsympathetic practical arrangements—such as poorly organised parking—the school has far-sightedly commissioned a 15-year estate masterplan that aims to balance the needs of modernisation and expansion with conservation. One valuable offshoot of this has been a publication on the buildings: Haileybury: a short architectural guide (2020). At the heart of this masterplan is the idea that the old and new should complement each other and that the remarkable inherited buildings continue—as good institutional architecture should—to lend character to the school, inspire its pupils and lend dignity to their everyday life. Acknowledgements: Toby Parker For a prospectus, telephone 01992 706200 or visit www.haileybury.com