Giggleswick School

History

Foundation

Giggleswick School began as a chantry school and, unusually among English grammar schools, existed before it was endowed. Its founder was James Carr, chantry priest of the Rood Chantry at the parish church of St Alkelda, whose presence in the parish is documented from 1499. Carr took boarders and taught alongside his chantry duties, and the educational historian A. F. Leach regarded the school as the only recorded example of a "private adventure school" of its kind. On 12 November 1507 the Prior and Convent of Durham leased Carr half an acre of land near the churchyard, on which he undertook to build and maintain "one gramer scole" at his own expense. The schoolhouse was completed in 1512, a date recorded by a Latin inscription later preserved in the school. Carr died in 1518, having endowed the chantry with land, and the chantry priests carried on his teaching.

Royal charter, 1553

When the chantries were dissolved under Edward VI, the school survived: the founder's nephew Richard Carr, described by the commissioners of 1548 as "well learned", was kept on as schoolmaster by a crown stipend. On 26 May 1553, at the petition of the vicar John Nowell, Henry Tennant and other inhabitants, Edward VI granted the school a royal charter and endowed it with property formerly belonging to the dissolved St Andrew's College, Acaster. The charter named it the Free Grammar School of King Edward the Sixth of Giggleswick and provided for one headmaster and one usher. "Free" denoted exemption from fees rather than freedom from ecclesiastical control. The first surviving statutes, drawn up at the instance of the vicar Christopher Shute and confirmed by the Archbishop of York in 1592, vested government in eight local governors, required instruction in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and set out the duties of master, usher and scholars.

Links with Cambridge

A series of early seventeenth-century bequests — by William Clapham, Henry Tennant and, in 1616, Richard Carr — endowed scholarships and fellowships at Christ's College, Cambridge for boys from the school. For about a century and a half Giggleswick sent a steady stream of pupils to Christ's, most of whom entered the Church. Among them was Richard Frankland, later founder of the Rathmell Academy, the earliest dissenting academy in the north of England.

The Paleys and the eighteenth century

The mastership passed in 1744 to William Paley of Langcliffe, who held it until his death in 1799 while also serving as vicar of Helpston. His son, the theologian William Paley, was educated at the school before going up to Christ's College. Rising estate revenues allowed the staff to be enlarged and new statutes obtained in 1795; the medieval schoolhouse was demolished and a second school built on the site in 1790.

Nineteenth-century reform

Rowland Ingram was headmaster from 1799 to 1844, the Charity Commissioners recording 63 boys in 1825. Under his successor George Ash Butterton (1845–1858) the governors adopted a new scheme of management and the school was rebuilt from its foundations in 1851.

Under John Richard Blakiston (1858–1866) pupil numbers fell sharply — from over ninety in the 1850s to about thirty-seven by 1864 — and the school's difficulties exposed the unworkable 1844 scheme, under which the headmaster could neither admit nor exclude boys nor appoint his own staff. A reconstituted governing body in 1864 brought in Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth and the local landowner Walter Morrison, who drove a wider reform; the governors resolved to build a boarding house, the Hostel, and to lay out playing fields. The Hostel, completed in 1869, together with classrooms built beside it from the 1870s, drew the school from its cramped site by the parish church up the hill to its present position.

A new era: George Style

George Style, headmaster from 1869 to 1904, presided over the school's transformation. Following the Endowed Schools Act 1869, a new scheme of management in 1872 ended the headmaster's freehold and the vicar's ex-officio governorship, removed the Archbishop of York's jurisdiction, and ended free tuition, substituting fees while creating the Shute Exhibitions for local elementary-school boys. Natural science was introduced under Dr W. Marshall Watts from 1872 and a chemical laboratory built; the school became noted nationally for its science teaching. Pupil numbers, which had never previously reached a hundred, passed that mark in 1873 and exceeded two hundred by 1894. By the late nineteenth century the school was well established among the country's endowed schools, and it was among those listed in the Public Schools Year Book from its first edition in 1889. Morrison's gift of a domed chapel, built between 1897 and 1901, completed the hillside campus (see Chapel).

Twentieth century onwards

William Wyamar Vaughan succeeded Style in 1904 — the first permanent headmaster not in holy orders — and reorganised teaching around the study of English; in 1910 an Officers' Training Corps contingent was formed, the origin of the school's later cadet force. Vaughan's wife, Margaret ("Madge"), was a daughter of John Addington Symonds and a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who stayed with the Vaughans at Giggleswick and wrote some of her earliest published articles there. Vaughan was followed as headmaster in 1910 by the cricketer Robert Noel Douglas.

In 1927 the school grounds near the chapel were chosen as the official observation post for that year's total solar eclipse, from which the Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Watson Dyson, observed the corona. A preparatory school, Catteral Hall, was added in 1934. The school became coeducational in the 1980s. In the 2000s the senior school, Catteral Hall and a pre-preparatory department were reorganised into Giggleswick Junior School (ages 2–11) and Giggleswick School (ages 11–18) under a single identity. The school marked its quincentenary in 2012. Sam Hart became headmaster in January 2022, succeeding Mark Turnbull.

Chapel

In 1897 Walter Morrison offered to fund a school chapel as a Diamond Jubilee memorial, commissioning the architect T. G. Jackson to build a Gothic structure crowned by a dome — an experiment inspired by the domes Morrison had seen in the East. Built between 1897 and 1901, with the foundation stone laid by the Duke of Devonshire in October 1897, it was opened in October 1901 by Edmond Warre, headmaster of Eton. The chapel, of banded millstone-grit sandstone and limestone on a Latin-cross plan, is a grade II* listed structure. Its pews, choir stalls and pulpit are of Argentine cedar imported from Tucumán, the floor inlaid with marble, and the interior decorated throughout with Italian sgraffito work. Above the west entrance stand bronze statues of Edward VI and Queen Victoria by George Frampton; the west window was designed by Jackson and the chancel glass is by Burlison and Grylls. The dome, of interlocking terracotta blocks covered externally in copper and capped by an octagonal lantern, is lined inside with mosaics of sixteen angels playing instruments, with the Four Evangelists in the pendentives. The organ was the last instrument built under Henry Willis; it was rebuilt in 2005. The copper dome, which had weathered to a green verdigris, was returned to a bronze colour during restoration around 1990.

Academic

The senior school teaches GCSEs followed by A-levels, BTECs and the Extended Project Qualification in the sixth form. The three sciences are taught separately, mathematics and science are set from the first year of the senior school, and French, Spanish and German are offered among the modern languages. In its 2023 inspection the Independent Schools Inspectorate judged the quality of pupils' academic achievement and their personal development to be "excellent", the highest grade under the framework then in use; the previous full inspection, in 2015, had rated the school "good" with areas of excellence. The Good Schools Guide describes the school as a small, close-knit all-through boarding and day school in which outdoor life and academic ambition are given comparable weight.

Houses

Pupils belong to a house system that forms the basis of pastoral care and internal competition. Four of the houses take their names from benefactors and figures in the school's history — Carr (after the founder, James Carr), Nowell (after John Nowell), Paley (after the master William Paley) and Shute (after Josias Shute) — while Morrison commemorates the donor of the chapel and Style the reforming headmaster. The four senior dormitories had been renamed after Paley, Nowell, Carr and Shute in 1907. A junior boarding house, Catteral House, accommodates younger pupils.

Co-curricular activities

Music and drama

Music and drama have a long place in the school's life; Bell records music as one of its distinguishing features under Style, with a resident director of music from 1886. The assembly hall known as Big School, built in 1884, long served as the principal performance space. A bequest from the broadcaster and former pupil Richard Whiteley, a governor of the school who died in 2005, helped fund the Richard Whiteley Theatre, a professional-standard venue on the school site that opened in 2010; the actress Judi Dench became its patron.

Sport

The school's grounds extend to around 250 acres and include rugby, cricket, hockey, netball and football pitches, an all-weather floodlit pitch, tennis, Fives and squash courts, cross-country and mountain-bike routes, and access to the adjacent Settle and Giggleswick golf course. Indoor facilities include a sports hall, a swimming pool, a climbing wall and a fitness centre, the last opened in 2018 by the Olympic triathlon medallist Jonny Brownlee. Pupils from the school have helped operate the manual scoreboards at The Open Championship golf tournament since 1987.

Outdoor education

The school makes extensive use of its Yorkshire Dales setting for outdoor pursuits. Two of its masters, J. R. Wynne-Edwards and D. R. Smith, are generally credited with the first recorded round of what became the Yorkshire Three Peaks walk — Pen-y-ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough — which they completed in about ten hours in 1887. The route later developed into a popular endurance walk and, from 1954, the annual Three Peaks Race.

Cadet force

The school has a Combined Cadet Force contingent with Army, RAF and Royal Marines sections. It descends from the Officers' Training Corps contingent formed in 1910.

Admissions and transport

The school draws day pupils from a wide rural catchment across the Yorkshire Dales and into Lancashire and Cumbria, operating a daily bus network and lying close to Settle railway station on the Settle–Carlisle line and Giggleswick railway station on the Leeds–Morecambe line.

Notable people

Headmasters

(For masters before 1869, see Bell 1912, p. 283.)

Old Giggleswickians

Former pupils are known as Old Giggleswickians. They include:

A fuller list is given at Category:People educated at Giggleswick School.

Staff

Russell Harty (1934–1988), broadcaster, taught English at the school in the 1960s, when Richard Whiteley was a pupil.

C. F. Mott (1874–1938), educationist, was senior science master from 1904.