In April 2026 St Lawrence College in Ramsgate, Kent, went bankrupt. It is a cause for sadness.
In September 1968 my mother and father left me at Cameron House, a junior house for St Lawrence College. I was ten. Fifty-eight years later I can still remember waving good bye to them as they drove away, passed the head-master’s house on the left, and the tennis courts on the right.
I walked back into Cameron, where a bevy of boys, all suited, and wearing ties, were jostling around the snooker table. And so my days at St Lawrence began. I was there till I was eighteen.
The days were dominated by bells. Bells to get you up, bells to send you to meals, bells for chapel, bells for lessons, bells for prep (home-work).
And rules. There were the usual ones - about the uniform, hair length, bed times, smoking - but there were others, about character. In Cameron, there was a sheet pinned up in both the two main class-rooms. This was the report sheet where a prefect or a school master could write your name, and next to it the misdemeanour. There were two words that always risked a caning from the house-master, Mr Lilley: cheek and disobedience.
There was a lot of physical exercise. In Cameron, the first thing Mr Lilley made us do when we got up was to go on a ten minute run. On three days of the week there were organised games in the afternoon for at least two hours: rugby in the Michaelmas Term; hockey in the Lent Term, cricket in the Summer Term. There were PE classes two or three times a week.
And prefects. You immediately knew who they were. These older boys sat at the end of the meal table, they presided over prep, they were there to put the lights out at bed-time. They had some power and needed to be handled carefully. It was the prefects who checked the ‘fagging’, a strange word only used in public schools. In your first year in the senior school, after two weeks of grace, you were then a fag, and had to do menial tasks like taking round the milk, or sweeping the common room floor.
And there was the CCF (Combined Cadet Force). Every Wednesday afternoon we all changed out of our school suits and put on military uniforms – army, navy, or RAF. Then classes about military matters, or marching around the quad being shouted at. And once a year there was a full parade with a band. We were inspected by some senior military figure, watched by our parents.
And Christianity1. There was a shortish chapel service every week-day before the morning classes, a longer one on Sunday. Attendance was compulsory. Mid-week there were house prayers. We all gathered with our particular house, (after Cameron, mine was Grange) and there would be a reading and prayers, led by the house-master. There were confirmation classes, RE classes, and Christian Union meetings. The school motto, was ‘In Bono Vince’, overcome evil with good, which comes directly from the Bible. And many of the teachers were committed Christians. At least four, when I was there, were ordained: Rev Peter Goodwin-Hudson, Rev Martin Harvey, Rev Bridges, and Rev David Blackwell. And my old Grange house-master, Robin Garden, was later ordained.
This was St Lawrence College – a school. But the bells, rules, sport, prefects, the fagging system, the CCF and the chapel, they had nothing directly to do with what a school is actually for – learning things in a classroom. This of course happened, but only as a part of a this much larger context.
That larger context was our own world for our teenage years. It was our home. And if our actual family-life was messy, which it was for some, then St Lawrence with its bells and rules, gave us stability. And credit should go to the teachers, who were always simply there, most of them engaging and kind-hearted. Of course we all had difficult days, there was sometimes some roughness, but at St Lawrence we made life-long friends, turned from being children into young adults, and often had our first experiences of the good and not so good things of life.
Till April 2026 this old home had always been there to visit. There is nothing logical about this pull to go back and see somewhere you used to live, but it’s real. I remember when one of my best friends from school, John Vernon, was diagnosed with the disease that would kill him, John was determined to go back to visit St Lawrence. He wanted to see his old home again. So we went together for one of those OL. Dinners. And of course, the memories flowed. Now there is no St Lawrence to visit, no St Lawrence to show our children or grand-children. That is sad.
And then when we were there, St Lawrence was so vibrant and strong. The dining room loud, the chapel full, the corridors heaving between lessons, sport everywhere. And those big events – the school play, speech day, the summer concert, the carol service. The thought never crossed anyone’s mind that such a place could ever close. But it has. This is what an old friend, John Baillie, wrote to me: ‘What seemed rock solid and permanent, if flawed, has proven to be sand, escaping from a broken hourglass.’
And that sand was money, millions of pounds of debt. That makes the pain worse. Of course St Lawrence was always a sort of business, but when there the school was somehow beyond mere money.
The college stood for something greater and grander than money, literally. The solid North Gate, the imposing main building, the chapel – they did not speak of elitist luxury (OL s will remember the spartan changing alleys), but of an invitation to a particular way of life. That is also what the bells, the rules, the prefects, the CCF, the Christianity were all about. Enter North Gate, and wherever you turned there was this regimented world saying that young lives could be shaped to make the world a better place. That was the vision. And whatever you think about this vision, it is painful that now, in Ramsgate, it is buried under a tacky tombstone with the one word epithet, ‘Bankrupt.’
This vision is closely connected to what happened at Rugby School in the early part of the 19th C. The school was reformed by the pioneering head-master Thomas Arnold. He came there in 1828, when the school was full of drunkenness, bullying and appalling teaching. By the time he left in 1841, the school was a beacon of orderliness and the public school ethos had been born.
This ethos put great emphasis on the spiritual and moral development of students, indeed, in Arnold’s mind this was much more important than intellectual ability. So, the centrality of Christianity. Pupils at Rugby were to be future leaders. So, Arnold brought in the prefect system, where the older boys took on some of the responsibility for running the school. Later there was a strong emphasis on team sports, which was not just about a game, but about building character, and playing fairly. Soon too there was a strong connection to the armed forces. So in1869, Rugby had the Volunteer Rifle Corps, a forerunner to the CCF.
St Lawrence, founded in 1879, was one of scores of public schools in the 19th C which followed the example set by Arnold at Rugby. And with Britain’s ever-growing economy in the 19th C. and vast overseas empire there were plenty of families who could afford the fees of these schools, and plenty of demand for the sort of leaders these schools were moulding.
You would think that by 1968 when I went to St Lawrence that ethos should have withered away, like the empire and Britain’s economy. But that world of bells and rules and sport and the CCF and the prefects and the Christianity, the pillars of the public school ethos had not withered away at all. Moreover, I think that most of the teachers there in 1968 believed in the Arnold vision of what a public school was for. No doubt Britain’s victory in the war had bolstered their belief in the vision, because the majority of officers had come from the public schools. Some, like Mr Wheeler, then came to teach us. The ethos had been severely tested, and held firm. And while Suez had shown how limited Britain’s actual power was, nevertheless it was surely difficult for that generation of teachers to shake off the idea that Britain had a special role in the world that needed the public school ethos.
Belief in the ethos was weakening even while I was there in the 1970s, attacked by films like ‘If’, and all the other anti establishment fervour of that decade. No doubt it weakened further. Now, in Ramsgate it has gone. As a university friend wrote, ‘With this closure this conception of life has disappeared, not just the buildings.’
Some might say good riddance to this public school ethos. It was always bankrupt. Just a respectable veneer over a system that manipulated young lives to fit in to the establishment. And worse: it gave pupils a poisonous sense of entitlement, and strengthened class divisions. On the latter the figures have been stubborn for many years: 7% go to public schools, but that 7% take 40% of the best jobs. So, public schools are an unpleasant mix of tribalism (keeping middle class children separate from working class children), and buying privilege. There’s an argument that a robust government which believed in the equality of opportunity should have nationalised these schools decades ago.
There is some truth in some of the above; but it is wrong to call the public school ethos bankrupt. The bells for punctuality, the rules for orderliness, the sport for physical fitness, the prefect system to learn responsibility, the CCF for military discipline, and the daily reminder of God and Christ’s moral code, none of this is bankrupt.
There should be discussion over the impact of the private school system on wider society; but there should be none over the public school ethos. In essence it is good and honourable.
So, the closing of St Lawrence is much more than the closing down of a school. It is the end of place that was our home, a place that was full of vibrancy, and it is the ending – in Ramsgate – of this grander cause of preparing young lives to make a difference in the world, of asking them to fight for - ‘In Bono Vince’.
Tom Hawksley, OL 1968 - 1976
1 People often call Christianity, ‘religion’. Christianity is a religion, but to say Christianity is religion puts it out of focus. At St Lawrence College we were not taught religion; we were taught Christianity.
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