Radley College

Radley College — formally St Peter's College, Radley — was founded in 1847 by the Reverend William Sewell, a Tractarian Anglican High Churchman of the Oxford Movement, as an Anglo-Catholic boys' boarding school. The school sits today on an 800-acre rural campus in the Oxfordshire village of Radley, just south of Oxford and adjacent to the Thames. The school remains boys-only, boarding only, ages 13-18 — among only two or three remaining substantial boys-only boarding HMC schools in England (with Eton and Harrow). The Warden is John Moule. Around 770 boys, all boarders, are educated.

Radley is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association. The school's distinctive co-curricular tradition is rowing — Radley boats compete consistently at Henley Royal Regatta and the school has produced multiple GB Olympic oarsmen across the past century. The school's geographic position adjacent to the Thames provides extensive river access.

The school's most internationally significant alumnus is Sir Anthony Powell — the novelist whose 12-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-75) is widely regarded as the greatest English novel sequence since Trollope's Barchester Chronicles, and the canonical literary portrait of the English upper-middle classes from the inter-war period to the 1970s. Powell was at Radley before Eton. The comedian Peter Cook — co-founder of Beyond the Fringe (with Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller), founder of Private Eye magazine and co-creator with Dudley Moore of the Pete and Dud sketches — was a Radleian.

Christopher Robin Milne — the son of A. A. Milne and the real-life Christopher Robin of the Winnie-the-Pooh books, who attended Radley in the 1930s — went on to run a Devon bookshop and to write his memoirs of his complicated relationship with his father's fictional version of him in The Enchanted Places (1974).

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Radley Foundation.