St John's School, Leatherhead

St John's School Leatherhead was founded in 1851 by the Reverend Ashby Haslewood specifically to provide affordable boarding-school education for the sons of poor Anglican clergymen — a category of family that struggled to afford the public-school fees of the mid-Victorian period despite the clerical social standing of the parents. The school operated initially at Walthamstow and relocated in 1872 to its present 50-acre rural campus at Leatherhead, Surrey. The school became co-educational in 1989 and today educates around 870 pupils ages 10-18 with a substantial boarding population. The Head is Rowena Cole.

St John's is a member of the HMC and the Boarding Schools Association and is inspected by the ISI. The school maintains its founding Anglican connection, with a substantial chapel and a strong choral tradition. The clergy-bursary programme that funded the school's original 1851 foundation continues today, with reserved places and substantial fee remissions for the children of Anglican clergy.

The school's most distinguished alumnus is the Edwardian war poet Edward Thomas, who wrote Adlestrop, As the team's head-brass and the canonical English pastoral poetry of the early twentieth century. Encouraged into poetry by his friend Robert Frost during a 1914 Gloucestershire visit, Thomas enlisted in 1915 and was killed by a German shell on the first day of the Battle of Arras, 9 April 1917. He is among the most beloved of the English Edwardian poets, alongside Hardy and the Georgians.

The novelist Anthony Hope — pen name of Anthony Hope Hawkins — was an Old Johnian. Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) defined the genre of Ruritanian romance (the fictional kingdom of Ruritania has become an English-language byword) and was filmed multiple times in Hollywood. In politics, Sir Iain Macleod — Conservative Colonial Secretary from 1959 to 1961 (who oversaw the rapid decolonisation of British Africa, including the independence of Tanganyika, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Cyprus), and briefly Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1970 under Edward Heath, dying thirty days into the role — was a St John's boy.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme intended to maintain the founder's intent of providing educational access for clergy and modest-income families regardless of means.