Boys under 12 only – Innes was making a fresh start after the disasters of the 18th century. One or two day boys and no boarders at the start. “Writing, French, Dancing, Drawing and Musick” were all offered – but were they actually taught? Innes himself taught Classics.

Headmaster 1792-1842.

The only archive which has survived from Innes's time.

A series of inquisitions was held in 1833 into the state of education, and local charities in Warwick, which eventually brought about whole-scale change – but not before Innes died, in office, at the age of 82. He didn’t come out particularly well from the 1833 inquisition, but his was a royal appointment, and he was untouchable.

The College was east of St Mary’s Church, in the mediaeval College of the Vicars Choral. It was totally unsuitable for a school!

The gateway and steps on the left are all that survive.

The school closed for a year in 1842, for essential work on the buildings, and in 1843 re-started under Rev Herbert Hill.

He was the first to have a board of governors. His salary was £200 pa. He had also taught at Rugby School before coming to Warwick.

Hill “used to keep a list of boys admitted”, but later confessed to having lost it. Present pupil admission records date from 1871, and full teaching staff records from 1906.

The school room and the privies are clearly visible. Hill was “little given to punishment”. He was also chaplain Warwick Castle. On retirement he became Master of the Lord Leycester Hospital.

Pupil numbers were down to 28 at this time, mostly between the ages of 11 and 14. There were two other members of the teaching staff.

The appointment was by Queen Victoria, since the school was a royal foundation dating from 1545. This seal and parchment, in a very fragile state, is in Warwickshire County Records Office, and was discovered, from the catalogue, with great glee about 18 years ago by some U5th boys who were helping me at the time.

He came from Cheltenham College to Warwick in 1876. He was extremely high church, and in constant conflict with the governors about religion and corporal punishment. He oversaw the move of the school from St Mary’s to its present site in 1879, but resigned in 1880 and eventually became a vicar in Devon. We do not have his portrait hanging in the Pyne Room.

Leach, the first historian of the school, described these carvings as “disappearing” in 1906 – but they are still there, and some may be very ancient. Presumably carved by the boys who were assumed to be doing their lessons at home?!

The Henry VIII Charity was ordered to supply the land on the Myton Road for the new school, designed by John Cundall. It opened in 1879 with about 50 boys and possibly 3 or 4 staff.

He came to Warwick, aged 31, in January 1881. He was highly energetic, and was “a merciless flogger of boys.” He instituted school sports, a magazine, debating, a tuck shop, the Rifle Corps, science teaching – and school rules. He had a teaching staff of three, plus he himself who taught Classics, and two drawing masters and an organist from Leamington. There were 30 or 40 boys in the school.

This is the oldest surviving Form Order – every boy in the school arranged in descending order of academic achievement. Gibson (2nd on the list) was 14, but already in the sixth form.

What to wear?

The extraordinary “pistols and cannons” rule – a response to an actual incident? The Victorian pupils’ weapon of choice was the catapult. There were 135 boys in the school by 1885, with 6 staff.

This clearly shows the main school buildings, the Sanatorium and Bridge House.

Unquestionably the school’s best 19th century headmaster. Re-named the school “Warwick School” – blatantly illegally. Tried to draw up a school crest, but failed. He did, however, come up with “Altiora Peto”.

There were six forms in J. P. Way’s time, and promotion was based solely on academic performance, and not age. So there were slow 17-year-olds in junior forms, and bright 13-year-olds in the sixth form.

He planned to surround the school with a Victorian suburb, thus halting any further expansion of the school.

This map clearly shows the new King’s Middle School and King’s High School, and the site of the old grammar school on the other side of The Butts.

J. P. Way presented silver gilt communion ware to the school in 1893, and it is still in use.

The fields were mown by a horse-drawn mower until a tractor was purchased in 1937. The dormitory windows were described as “prison-like” in the 1920s.

J. P. Way was frustrated by the refusal of the governors to expand the school, so he paid for this house himself. When he left the school in 1896, he sold it back to the governors at a very good profit. It is now called Way House.

The Corps (now called the CCF) was founded in 1884, and became attached to the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. In 1887 the uniform was scarlet, with blue facings. Most boys in the school joined the corps. In 1899 the rifles, or carbines, were hung on the wall of Big School (now the Pyne Room), until a fatal accident occurred on camp in 1897. The chapel altar is that boy’s memorial.

One way of putting all the boys in the school into descending academic order was to set the whole school the same test. This one is an extremely difficult one, translating English into Latin, and was set in the summer of 1891.

John Masefield, later Poet Laureate, was an orphan when he attended Warwick School from 1888 to 1891, between the ages of 9 and 12. He sat the famous Latin test, and scored 9 marks out of 85 – approximately 10%. Perhaps it was this test which convinced him that the school was not the place for him – he ran away a few days later to Liverpool, to join the training ship Conway.

This headmaster was a disaster, and was severely unpopular with parents. The ran down the number of boys in the school to a level from which it didn’t ever recover, and indirectly led to the merger with the King’s Middle School in 1906.

This was the largest room in the school, and in 1900 it was set up for four classes to be held in there at the same time. In the 1970s it became the school library, and 30 years later the Pyne Room – an extension dining room.

The tables in the old dining room (sometimes called the Panel Room), shown in this photograph brand new, were made in the school’s carpentry workshop in 1901, and are still in use 120 years later.

Left to right are the original pavilion, the main school buildings, the chapel without its vestry, the original gymnasium and the Junior School.

. The east window shows only Holliday’s central light. The original pipe organ is there (pumping it was a punishment), gas lighting, wrought iron-work (two small lecterns survive of this). Rigid seating plans were in place, which were used for registration of boys.

Visible are the dangerous boiler, Indian clubs, and the gallery, which was the changing room. Much later it became the sixth form centre, and now has been re-named the Gibson Building, for careers, a clothing shop, and so on.