My Prep School – Woolpit

I went to Woolpit School in the September of 1958 when I was seven years old. My birthday is on the 30th of October, so I was eight very soon after arriving.

At that time, Woolpit was a private preparatory boarding school catering for boys from seven to thirteen.

“Yeats, Browne, Wallis and Reeks, Beidas, Fortune and Roache” were the boys in my first class. I’ve never forgotten their names in all these years.

The Building

In the early 1880s, Henry Doulton leased, and then bought, land in the parish of Ewhurst in the county of Surrey. The area was called ‘Woolpit’ which has been said was derived from the words ‘wolf pit’ of early Saxon origin.

Henry, later Sir Henry Doulton (1820 – 1897), the son of the founder of the Royal Doulton pottery business, decided to have a summer house built on it.

The beautiful building was built between 1886 and 1888 by  Ernest George and Harold Peto in the Gothic Revival style and was called ‘Woolpit House’. 

The house was built of red brick with terracotta dressings, especially on the chimneys, made at the Doulton factory in Lambeth and the interior was decorated with specially commissioned works from the Doulton Studio. including a panel of terracotta, ‘Abraham receiving the Angel’s visit’ by George Tinworth, which was placed above the porch.

The small tower is balanced by the three sharp gables. We always said this tower, which was ‘out of bounds’, was haunted!

The house on the hill, halfway up Pitch Hill, was then surrounded by extensive formal gardens. 

It is now a Grade II listed building.

Here, in the peace of the picturesque countryside, Sir Henry Doulton would spend what time he could. Sir Henry’s biographer, Edmund Gosse, wrote that he had been “permanently bewitched” by the beauty of the spot in which he chose to build his house. “He announced, with a conviction which he maintained to the last, that there was more beauty of scenery in the parish of Ewhurst than was to be found, equally composed and combined, in any other parish in England.” When gently reminded that he had not seen all the English parishes, he admitted it, and said that, “after seeing Ewhurst, one would not want to see them.”

After the Second World War, in 1949, the house was sold and became a boarding school, St Thomas of Canterbury School. By October 1951, pupil numbers had grown to more than 70.

It was then renamed Woolpit School. It was privately owned and run by Mr & Mrs Hall.

In 1976, the school amalgamated with Vanbrugh Castle School, which had been founded by the Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund to provide an education for the sons of airmen killed on active service. The new school was named the Duke of Kent School, after George, Duke of Kent.

Initially a boys-only boarding school, it became co-educational two years later. In 1995, there were around 100 boys (of whom 60 were boarders) and 60 girls (of whom 50 were boarders) between the ages of 4 and 13 attending the school. GCSE courses were first taught in October 2008 and the first cohort of Year 11 pupils left the school in the summer of 2011. Since September 2014, the Duke of Kent School has operated solely as a day school with no boarders.