Qualla: Coleraine Academical Institution

Coleraine Academical Institution: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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: The Clothworkers' School

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 g...

Coleraine Academical Institution: The Rugby Dynasty

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 competit...

Coleraine Academical Institution: Nine Headmasters

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 repres...

Coleraine Academical Institution: The Alumni Roster

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. Edw...

Coleraine Academical Institution: Merger and Memory

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 en...