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Hawtreys

{{Short description|Independent preparatory school in England}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=September 2019}}

{{Use British English|date=February 2023}}

{{Infobox school

| name = Hawtreys School

| image =

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| motto =

| established = 1869

| closed = 1990s

| type = Private preparatory school

| religious_affiliation =

| president =

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| head =

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| chair =

| founder = Reverend John Hawtrey

| specialist =

| address =

| city = Slough, later Westgate-on-Sea, then Oswestry, and lastly Savernake Forest, Wiltshire

| country = England

| postcode =

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| ofsted =

| staff =

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| lower_age = 7

| upper_age = 13

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| free_label_1 = Merged with

| free_1 = Cheam School

| free_label_2 = Alumni

| free_2 = Old Hawtreyans

| free_label_3 =

| free_3 =

| coordinates = {{coord|51.377|-1.644|type:edu_region:GB|display=title}}

| website = {{URL|https://www.cheamschool.com/}}

}}

Hawtreys Preparatory School was a private boys' preparatory school in England. First established in Slough, it later moved to Westgate-on-Sea, then to Oswestry, and finally to Tottenham House near Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire. Until 1916 it was known as St Michael's School.

In 1994, the school merged into Cheam School, near Newbury, Berkshire.

History

The school was founded in 1869 by the Reverend John Hawtrey. He had been a boy at Eton, from the age of eight. In later life he became a master at Eton and was offered his own house of boys. He decided to remove all of the younger boys from the school. With the permission of Eton College, he took the lowest two forms out to a separate school in Slough and housed them in what is now St Bernard's Catholic Grammar School. The new school was known as St Michael's School and was opened on 29 September 1869 (Michaelmas).

John Hawtrey's son, Edward, removed the school to Westgate-on-Sea early in 1883.Maxwell Fraser, The History of Slough, Slough Corporation, 1973, p. 94 After Edward Hawtrey died in 1916, the name of the school was changed to Hawtreys.

The school buildings were requisitioned during the Second World War and the school moved to Oswestry in Shropshire, to the home of Sir William Wynn-Williams. In 1946 it moved again to Tottenham House, a large Palladian country house near the village of Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire, in the heart of Savernake Forest, when the last private owner, George Brudenell-Bruce, 6th Marquess of Ailesbury, retired to Jersey.Margaret H. Wharton, Marlborough Revisited and the War Remembered (Alan Sutton, 1987), p. 22

Throughout the history of the school, a close connection was maintained with Eton College, to which many boys moved at the age of thirteen.A. C. Benson, Fasti Etonenses: A Biographical History of Eton (1899), p. 380

Gerald Watts was headmaster from 1975 to 1990. When he left Hawtreys, numbers fell fast, falling from 128 to 50 in two years. Those taking their sons out of the school included Kanga Tryon, who complained that the atmosphere was "no longer as it ought to be".[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1427303/Gerald-Watts.html "Gerald Watts"] (obituary), The Daily Telegraph, 12 April 2003 {{subscription}}; [https://archive.today/20241225035620/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1427303/Gerald-Watts.html archived] at archive.ph, accessed 25 December 2024 In 1994, unable to survive, Hawtreys merged with Cheam School,

which is formally called Cheam Hawtreys, but generally known simply as Cheam. [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/transfer-fees-wheeze-cuts-old-school-ties-1412897.html "Transfer Fees Wheeze Cuts Old School Ties"], The Independent, 10 July 1994, accessed on 15 October 2011

"Hawtreys School Staff and Pupils" were listed in the credits of A Feast at Midnight (1994), a British comedy film about a prep school, made in the last operational year of Hawtreys."A Feast at Midnight" in Sight and Sound, Vol. 5, Issues 7-12, p. 48: "Hawtreys School Staff and Pupils"

Old Hawtreyans

:And see :Category:People educated at Hawtreys

File:Tottenham House front.jpg, Wiltshire, final home of Hawtreys]]

Notable staff

  • G. Wilson Knight taught at the school from 1923 to 1925"Knight, George Edward Wilson" in Contemporary Literary Critics (Springer, 2015), [https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eYiwCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA307 p. 307]

Notes

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External links

  • [https://www.cheamschool.com/ Cheam School]

{{WiltshireSchools}}

{{authority control}}

Category:1994 disestablishments in England

Category:1869 establishments in England

Category:Boarding schools in Berkshire

Category:Boarding schools in Kent

Category:Boarding schools in Wiltshire

Category:Boys' schools in Berkshire

Category:Boys' schools in Kent

Category:Boys' schools in Wiltshire

Category:Defunct schools in Berkshire

Category:Defunct schools in Kent

Category:Defunct schools in Wiltshire

Category:Educational institutions disestablished in 1994

Category:Educational institutions established in 1869

Category:Defunct boarding schools in England