Repton School

Repton School was founded in 1557 following the will of Sir John Port of Etwall, who left funds for the establishment of a grammar school on the dissolved site of Repton Priory in the Derbyshire village of Repton — once the seat of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. The school took possession of the Augustinian priory buildings in 1559. Repton is a co-educational HMC and BSA boarding and day school of around 700+ Senior School pupils aged 13-18, with The Preparatory School (Foremarke Hall) educating another 400 boys and girls aged 3-13. Girls were first admitted to Repton in the 1970s; the school became fully co-educational in 1991. The Headmaster is Mark Semmence.

Repton's most internationally famous alumnus is Roald Dahl — the children's writer whose Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches and The BFG are among the defining English-language children's books of the twentieth century, and whose adult Tales of the Unexpected became a long-running ITV series. Dahl attended Repton in the early 1930s and bitterly disliked the school's culture of corporal punishment and prefectorial bullying; his memoir Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984) contains a chapter on Repton that is one of the most uncomfortable descriptions of an English public-school childhood in any twentieth-century English memoir. The school has subsequently acknowledged the validity of Dahl's criticisms.

Other literary alumni include Christopher Isherwood, whose Goodbye to Berlin became the source material for Cabaret; the cartoonist Ralph Steadman, whose ink-and-blot illustrations defined Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and gonzo journalism more broadly; and the Victorian humorous poet Charles Stuart Calverley.

In comedy and broadcasting: Adrian Edmondson, the Young Ones and Bottom star and now author; Jeremy Clarkson, the long-running Top Gear and Grand Tour presenter. In sport: Andrew Strauss, Baron Strauss — England Test cricket captain through 2009-12, including the 2010-11 Ashes-winning tour of Australia — was a Reptonian, as was the earlier England Test cricketer Donald Carr; the Wimbledon finalist Bunny Austin and the Davis Cup champion of 1933, 1935 and 1936; and the Lions rugby player Donald Carr (the same name, a coincidence). In military and architectural history: Field Marshal Earl Haig, the British commander on the Western Front in World War I, was a Reptonian, as was Sir Basil Spence OM, the architect of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Repton School Foundation.