Fury as Rugby School flogs treasure trove of classic books

THIS was the place where Rupert Brooke and Matthew Arnold penned their first verses, and has spawned literary talents such as Alice In Wonderland author Lewis Carroll, Salman Rushdie and Foyle’s War creator Anthony Horowitz.

But Rugby School — setting for Thomas Hughes’s Victorian classic, Tom Brown’s School Days — has appalled alumni and academics alike by announcing that it is to sell off a treasury of nearly 300 books, including four Shakespeare folios, which are estimated to fetch £100,000.

Acclaimed novelist A.N. Wilson, who was at Rugby in the 1960s, is reduced to apoplexy, describing governors at the £ 37,000- a- year school as ‘complete vandals’.

‘It’s terrible. I would never dream now of leaving anything to that school because they would just flog it,’ he assures me, pointing out that next month’s auction follows the sale of much of the school’s glorious art collection at Christie’s, which raised nearly £15 million.

His horror is shared by Professor Michael Dobson, director of Birmingham University’s Shakespeare Institute. ‘From being living books, housed in an institution with a strong Shakespearean heritage, in Shakespeare’s home region, they are likely to dwindle now into being mere investments,’ he tells me, pointing out that museum and university library budgets are currently under immense pressure because of the Covid pandemic.

Professor Dobson adds that the Rugby School collection, which includes first editions of such classics as Robinson Crusoe and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, is now ‘more likely to vanish into private collections than to be consulted by experts’.

Peter Green, Rugby’s head — or Executive Head Master, as he is designated — explains the decision to sell the books by saying that the money raised will help fund ‘bursary support’.

The point is reiterated by a school spokeswoman. ‘Obviously, Rugby is a school, not a museum. The paintings were becoming impossible to look after and insure, and the Governing Body decided then — as they have now about these books — that they should be sold to benefit the current and future students by way of making bursary provision greater.’

Wilson is unconvinced. ‘They say it will be spent on a bursary, but how do you know?’ he asks. ‘Who can you trust?’

Not, evidently, the Royal Opera House, which controversially sold its David Hockney portrait of former chairman Sir David Webster last week for £12.8 million.

‘To sell is to betray a previous generation’s generosity,’ reflects another distraught Old Rugbeian.