Stonyhurst College

Stonyhurst College is the oldest English Roman Catholic Jesuit school, founded in 1593 by the Society of Jesus at Saint-Omer in the Spanish Netherlands (now northern France) to provide Catholic education for the sons of English Recusant families at a time when Catholic education was illegal in England. The Saint-Omer school operated continuously through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, surviving the suppression of the Jesuit order by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 (as a school under different management) and the French Revolution — which finally forced the relocation. In 1794 the school accepted the offer of Thomas Weld of Stonyhurst Hall to relocate to his family seat in the Ribble Valley of Lancashire, where it has been ever since. The Lancashire Stonyhurst Hall is a Grade I listed sixteenth-century Tudor mansion at the centre of a 2,500-acre rural estate.

Stonyhurst became co-educational in 1999 and today educates around 661 pupils with a substantial boarding population. The Headmaster is John Browne. The school is a member of the HMC, the Boarding Schools Association and the CISC. The school continues to be operated under the spiritual direction of the Society of Jesus, with the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises remaining at the heart of the school's pastoral and educational ethos.

The school's most internationally famous alumnus is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — the Edinburgh-trained physician whose creation of the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes (A Study in Scarlet, 1887; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892; The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1901) produced the most internationally famous fictional character in any English-language literature. Conan Doyle attended Stonyhurst from 1868 to 1875 and his subsequent autobiographical writings record substantial influence from his Stonyhurst Jesuit education. The Oscar-winning actor Charles Laughton (The Private Life of Henry VIII won him the 1933 Academy Award for Best Actor; The Hunchback of Notre Dame; Mutiny on the Bounty; Witness for the Prosecution) was a Stonyhurst boy. The Conservative Prime Minister Bonar Law (PM 1922-23) was at Stonyhurst.

The Catholic priest Father Thomas Byles — who died refusing to leave the Titanic in April 1912, hearing confessions and giving absolution to dying passengers as the ship sank — was a Stonyhurst boy. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Stonyhurst Trust.