Ipswich School

Ipswich School is one of the oldest schools in England, with origins traceable to c. 1399. The school was formally re-endowed by Queen Elizabeth I in 1565 and has occupied its present site on Ivry Street, north of the Ipswich town centre, since 1852. It is co-educational and educates around 1,132 pupils aged 3-18 across an integrated Pre-Prep, Preparatory School, Senior School and Sixth Form. The Headmaster is Nicholas Weaver. The school is a member of the HMC and the BSA, and its principal Victorian buildings, in distinctive Tudor-style red brick, are a defining feature of north Ipswich.

Ipswich School's most internationally significant scientific alumnus is Sir Charles Scott Sherrington OM PRS, who shared the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his foundational work on the synapse and the functioning of the nervous system. Sherrington coined the term "synapse" and his Integrative Action of the Nervous System (1906) defined the early-twentieth-century framework for neurophysiology. The Bristol physicist and Royal Society Fellow Sir Charles Frank FRS — co-developer of dislocation theory in crystals — was another distinguished Old Ipswichian.

In statecraft, the school's most famous alumnus is Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, born around 1473 in Ipswich, who as Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII became the most powerful figure in the English government before his fall from grace in 1529 over his failure to secure the royal divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Wolsey's birthplace is commemorated near the school. In Victorian literature, Sir H. Rider Haggard — author of King Solomon's Mines, She: A History of Adventure, and Allan Quatermain — was educated at Ipswich.

The school's art alumni include Sir Edward Poynter Bt, who served as President of the Royal Academy from 1896 to 1918; the children's book illustrator and war artist Edward Ardizzone (the Little Tim books); and the Punch artist Charles Keene. In imperial and military history: Sir John Gordon Sprigg, who served four times as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in South Africa; Lieutenant-General Sir Edwin Alderson, the first commander of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War I; and Rear Admiral Sir Philip Broke, whose victory over the USS Chesapeake in 1813 is commemorated by the Broke Hall family seat near Ipswich. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Old Ipswichian Foundation.