When Elizabeth I became Queen of England in 1558, she was well aware of the disastrous effects that the Dissolution of the Monasteries perpetrated by her father King Henry VIII between 1536 and 1541 had had on the educational establishments of the country. She was anxious to make redress, and there followed a wave of foundations and re-foundations of schools. One of them was Harrow School, to whose founder she granted a royal charter in 1572. The founder was John Lyon, a local landowner whose school was to provide education for thirty poor scholars of the parish. The charter also permitted the schoolmaster to admit “foreigners”—boys resident outside the parish—upon payment of fees.
Under the guidance of some influential governors and the appointment of a succession of headmasters from Eton, the school grew in prominence. With the arrival of the railways, it became increasingly popular for sons of the nobility to be sent away to boarding school. Pupils were attracted to Harrow from far and wide, and the number of “foreigners” soon far outnumbered the local scholars. In 1800 there were just 220 boys in the school. By 1860, at the end of the successful headmastership of Dr. Charles Vaughan (himself a former pupil of the famous Dr. Thomas Arnold at Rugby), the numbers had risen to 477. Moreover, the school could already boast of five prime ministers emerging from its ranks.
When the Clarendon Commission was appointed to investigate the affairs of the “great public schools” in 1861, Harrow was included along with Eton, Winchester and Westminster. The small country grammar school had come of age.
The Churchill Family
Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill (as he was then known) was the elder son of Lord Randolph Churchill, third son of the seventh Duke Jerome, a wealthy American from New York. Winston was born at Blenheim Palace, the home of his grandfather. Lord Randolph was a forceful, even belligerent, Conservative MP who rose to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Marquess of Salisbury’s government of 1886. Jenny was a socialite primarily interested in the London social scene, access to which probably had something to do with why she had married her husband. Neither parent took much interest in their children, Winston and Jack, whose care was largely delegated to their nanny, Mrs Everest.
