Qualla: Clifton College

Clifton College: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anonymous101, CC BY 2.0. In June 1899, a thirteen-year-old boy named A. E. J. Collins walked out to bat on a school cricket pitch in Bristol and, over the course of a four-afternoon house match, scored 628 not out. The total stood as the highest cricket score ever recorded for 116 years, finally surpassed in 2016 by a fifteen-year-old in Mumbai. Collins himself was killed in the First World War. His pitch at Clifton College is now called Collins' Piece, and his record is commemorated on a small plaque on the side of the ceramics building. The story is suitably Cliftonian: a feat of slightly absurd Victorian schoolboy ambition, attached to a young life that ended early, recorded with quiet care by an institution that has been keeping its own records since 1862.

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Image: Anonymous101 | CC BY 2.0

Clifton College: Science, Day Boys, and Polack's House

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adam Jones Adam63, CC BY-SA 3.0. When the Reverend John Percival opened Clifton College in 1862 with sixty-nine boys, he ran it on principles that other public schools found mildly disturbing. The curriculum emphasised science over classics. Day boys were admitted on equal terms with boarders, rather than treate...

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Image: Adam Jones Adam63 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Clifton College: Four Nobel Laureates

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Hallam-Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. For a school of fewer than 800 pupils, Clifton's haul of Nobel Prizes is remarkable. Sir John Kendrew won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962 for unravelling the structure of myoglobin. Sir John Hicks won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1972 for his contributions to general equi...

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Image: David Hallam-Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Clifton College: D-Day Planning Rooms

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 14GTR, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1942, with Bristol's docks being hammered by the Luftwaffe and the pupils evacuated to Bude in Cornwall, the United States Army moved in. Clifton became the headquarters of US V Corps and then First Army. The classrooms where boys had studied Latin were now planning rooms for ...

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Image: 14GTR | CC BY-SA 4.0

Clifton College: The Close, and Newbolt's Hush

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Hallam-Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. The cricket field, known as the Close, watched W. G. Grace score thirteen first-class hundreds for Gloucestershire. Grace's own children attended the school. Henry Newbolt, an Old Cliftonian poet, immortalised the ground in 'Vitai Lampada': 'There's a breathless hush in the Close...

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Image: David Hallam-Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0