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Hawtreys

Coordinates: 51°22′37″N 1°38′38″W / 51.377°N 1.644°W / 51.377; -1.644
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Hawtreys School
Location
Map
Slough, later Westgate-on-Sea, then Oswestry, and lastly Savernake Forest, Wiltshire

Coordinates51°22′37″N 1°38′38″W / 51.377°N 1.644°W / 51.377; -1.644
Information
TypePrivate preparatory school
Established1869
FounderReverend John Hawtrey
Closed1990s
Age7 to 13
Merged withCheam School
AlumniOld Hawtreyans
Websitewww.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

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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.[1] 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.[2]

Throughout the history of the school, a close connection was maintained with Eton College, to which many boys moved at the age of thirteen.[3]

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".[4] In 1994, unable to survive, Hawtreys merged with Cheam School,[4] which is formally called Cheam Hawtreys, but generally known simply as Cheam.[5]

"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.[6]

Old Hawtreyans

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And see Category:People educated at Hawtreys
Tottenham House, Wiltshire, final home of Hawtreys

Notable staff

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Notes

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  1. ^ Maxwell Fraser, The History of Slough, Slough Corporation, 1973, p. 94
  2. ^ Margaret H. Wharton, Marlborough Revisited and the War Remembered (Alan Sutton, 1987), p. 22
  3. ^ A. C. Benson, Fasti Etonenses: A Biographical History of Eton (1899), p. 380
  4. ^ a b "Gerald Watts" (obituary), The Daily Telegraph, 12 April 2003 (subscription required); archived at archive.ph, accessed 25 December 2024
  5. ^ a b c "Transfer Fees Wheeze Cuts Old School Ties", The Independent, 10 July 1994, accessed on 15 October 2011
  6. ^ "A Feast at Midnight" in Sight and Sound, Vol. 5, Issues 7-12, p. 48: "Hawtreys School Staff and Pupils"
  7. ^ "ANSTRUTHER-GOUGH-CALTHORPE, Sir Euan (Hamilton), 3rd Bt cr 1929" in Who's Who online at xreferplus.com, accessed 28 November 2007
  8. ^ "Roddy Llewellyn" in English Princesses (Lulu, 2012), p. 68
  9. ^ MILBURN, Sir Anthony (Rupert), 5th Bt cr 1905[permanent dead link] in Who's Who online at xreferplus.com (accessed 28 November 2007)
  10. ^ Dorian Williams, Travels of a Commentator (1985), p. 65
  11. ^ "Knight, George Edward Wilson" in Contemporary Literary Critics (Springer, 2015), p. 307
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