Gresham's School

Gresham's School was founded in 1555 by Sir John Gresham, a Tudor merchant and Lord Mayor of London, in the coastal North Norfolk village of Holt. The school operated under the trusteeship of Sir John's family for over three centuries before passing in 1900 to the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers — the great medieval livery company of London — which has remained the school's trustee body ever since. The school is co-educational ages 2-18, with around 894 pupils across an integrated Nursery, Pre-Prep, Prep, Senior and Sixth Form structure, and a substantial boarding population. The Headmaster is Douglas Robb.

The school is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association and is inspected by the ISI. The school sits in the coastal village of Holt, immediately inland of the Norfolk Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, with extensive sports facilities and a strong music and outdoor programme reflecting the maritime location.

Gresham's is unusual among British schools in having produced two figures of unquestioned twentieth-century cultural pre-eminence in adjacent generations: the composer Sir Benjamin Britten OM (1913-1976) — whose Peter Grimes, The Turn of the Screw, A Midsummer Night's Dream and War Requiem are widely regarded as the principal British operatic works of the twentieth century, and who founded the Aldeburgh Festival on the Suffolk coast — and the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973), the leading English-language poet of his generation, author of "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone" (used famously in Four Weddings and a Funeral) and "September 1, 1939", winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Auden and Britten met at Gresham's and collaborated throughout the 1930s on the GPO Film Unit documentaries Night Mail and Coal Face.

In the sciences, Sir Alan Hodgkin OM, who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the ionic mechanisms of nerve-impulse transmission (the Hodgkin-Huxley model of the action potential is the foundation of modern neurophysiology), was a Gresham's boy. The industrial designer Sir James Dyson OM — founder of Dyson, inventor of the cyclonic vacuum cleaner, the Airblade hand dryer and the bladeless fan, and one of the wealthiest self-made British industrialists — was educated at Gresham's. The engineer Sir Christopher Cockerell CBE — inventor of the hovercraft in 1955 — was at Gresham's.

In film, the actor Sir John Hurt CBE (A Man for All Seasons, The Elephant Man, Alien — "the chestburster", Mr Ollivander in Harry Potter) was an Old Greshamian. The director Stephen Frears (The Queen, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity) was at Gresham's. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Gresham's School Foundation.