James Nesbitt acted in school plays here. Richard Rogers, who would later design the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Millennium Dome in London, sat in these classrooms as an unmotivated teenager. Two golfers from Coleraine Inst - Graeme McDowell and Darren Clarke - went on to win the U.S. Open and the Open Championship respectively. Three rowers - Alan Campbell, Richard Archibald, and Richard Chambers - won Olympic medals. Jonathan Rea, who would become the most successful World Superbike rider in history, learned to read here. For 155 years a single voluntary boys' grammar school in a market town of 24,000 people produced one of the most remarkable alumni rosters in the British Isles. Then, in 2015, it was merged out of existence.
Coleraine Academical Institution was founded in 1860 on a 70-acre site along the Castlerock Road. Its origins lay in the Plantation of Ulster, two and a half centuries earlier - the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, one of the twelve Great Livery Companies of London, had been granted estates around Coleraine in the 1610s and remained the landlords. CAI was their educational endowment to the town, and the school's land and finances stayed tied to the Clothworkers' Company throughout its existence. For most of its history Coleraine Inst was a boarding school as well as a day school, drawing pupils from across Northern Ireland and beyond. The boarding department closed in 1999. The school then catered for around 778 boys aged 11-19, with extensive playing fields, an indoor swimming pool, a boathouse, a rugby pavilion, a sports pavilion, and a gymnasium. The Templeton Auditorium lights, visible from Harpurs Hill, were a Coleraine landmark.
The Ulster Schools Cup is the second-oldest rugby competition in the world. Coleraine Inst competed in it every single year since 1876 - winning the trophy nine times across the school's history. Rugby was the centre of school identity. The 1st XV pitch, the medallion XV competitions, the long traditions of muddy boots and orange teas - this was the texture of school life for generations. The school was one of only eight Northern Irish schools represented on the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, the body that brings together Britain's leading independent and selective schools. By the 2010s Coleraine Inst's reputation rested on a combination of high academic standards, sporting excellence, and a strong alumni network that maintained branches around the world.
Across 155 years CAI had only nine headmasters - an extraordinary stability. Thomas Galway Houston served for 45 of those years, from 1870 to 1915, and lived in Portstewart until his death in 1939 aged 96. Houston also served as a member of the Stormont Parliament's Senate representing Queen's University, Belfast. R. Stanley Forsythe arrived in 1984 from the Royal School Dungannon and remained until retirement in 2003. The other six headmasters between Houston and Forsythe each left their own architectural or cultural imprint - George Humphreys, who guided the major physical expansion in the 1960s and 70s, and brought the school into the HMC, was perhaps the most influential. Leonard Quigg, who became headmaster in 2004, was the first in the school's history promoted from within the ranks.
Beyond Nesbitt, Rogers, McDowell, Clarke, Rea, and the rowers, Coleraine Inst's old boys include Air Marshal Sir George Beamish and his brother Victor Beamish, an RAF ace fighter pilot killed in 1942. There was Sir Dawson Bates, Northern Ireland's first Home Affairs Minister. Edward H. Simpson, the statistician who discovered Simpson's paradox, was a pupil here. So was Colin Bateman, the comic novelist behind the Dan Starkey crime series. Major General Ed Davis became Commandant General of the Royal Marines and later Governor of Gibraltar. Tommy Sheppard sat in the House of Commons as the SNP MP for Edinburgh East. The list of footballers, rugby players, darts champions, MPs, and academics could fill its own article. Few schools of comparable size in the British Isles have produced such a varied alumni roster.
By the 2010s the demographic and educational landscape of County Londonderry had shifted. Coleraine had two single-sex selective grammar schools - Coleraine Inst for boys, Coleraine High School for girls - and falling rolls in both. The Northern Ireland Department of Education encouraged consolidation. In September 2015 the two schools merged. The combined institution, called Coleraine Grammar School, took both sites and went co-educational for the first time. Coleraine Inst, as a separate entity, ceased to exist. The Old Boys' Association still meets. Reunions still happen. The blue-and-white colours still appear on rugby shirts at Old Boys' matches. The school's pupils now study within walls that have not lost their history - just expanded their definition of who belongs inside them.
Located at 55.14°N, 6.69°W in Coleraine, County Londonderry, on the Castlerock Road on the southwestern edge of the town. The 70-acre school site is visible from cruising altitude. Nearest airports: City of Derry (EGAE) 22 nm west; Belfast International (EGAA) 30 nm east-south-east. The River Bann flows immediately east of the site; the North West 200 race circuit runs through Coleraine and connects to nearby Portstewart and Portrush. Castlerock and Mussenden Temple lie 5 miles to the west on the Antrim coast.