Sir William Fettes was a wine merchant who became Lord Provost of Edinburgh. In 1815 his only son William died, and that loss shaped the rest of the father's life. Fettes set aside the then-extraordinary sum of 166,000 pounds, to be invested and used after his death for the education of poor children and orphans. He died in 1836, but the money kept working. In 1870 the accumulated bequest was used to buy 350 acres in Edinburgh's northern suburbs, commission David Bryce's chateau, and open the school with 53 pupils - forty of them Foundation Scholars, the orphans Fettes had wanted to help. The bee on the family seal became the school crest, and the motto Industria. Sir William Fettes had grieved for one son and ended up educating thousands.

By the late twentieth century journalists liked to call Fettes the Eton of the North. A former headmaster, Michael Spens, fired back on a BBC documentary that Eton was actually the Fettes of the South. The school has produced four winners of the Victoria Cross and one of the George Cross, a 2015 Nobel laureate in the economist Sir Angus Deaton, and the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Its rugby team won the Scottish Schools U18 Cup at Murrayfield in 2009. In 1979 the school admitted female pupils to the upper year, and in 1983 went fully co-educational. Today around two-thirds of its 700-plus pupils board on campus, in nine houses named for the estates of the original trustees - Carrington, Glencorse, Kimmerghame, Moredun, Arniston, Dalmeny, and the rest.

Two of the most famous people associated with Fettes never enrolled there. In the mid-1940s a Saint Cuthbert's Co-operative dairyman named Sean Connery delivered milk to the school each morning, years before he became James Bond. Then Ian Fleming, in his 1964 novel You Only Live Twice, wrote that Bond himself had attended Fettes after being expelled from Eton, modelling the schooldays on his friend Sir Alexander Glen, an Old Fettesian who had been Churchill's envoy to Belgrade during the Second World War. The school register lists no actual Bond before 1954, when a Commander James Bond RNVR turned up by pure coincidence. His Who's Who entry was framed and hung over the Second Master's office door for years before being quietly removed. Marvel Comics later sent the future Captain Britain, Brian Braddock, to Fettes as well. The school keeps acquiring fictional alumni.

Two thousand former pupils had passed through Fettes by 1914. Of them, 1,094 served in the First World War, and 246 did not come home. Birnie Rhind's 1919 bronze war memorial shows a fallen officer telling his men to carry on. Another 118 former boys died in the Second World War. In October 1939 a German Junkers Ju 88 flew low over the playing fields on its way to bomb Rosyth Dockyard - the school's first taste of the new war. Kimmerghame House was requisitioned as part of HMS Vernon, the Royal Navy's mine-research establishment. Through it all the bees stayed put: beehives carved over the now-disused East and West doors, a stone bee watching the front of Malcolm House, a large bee on Kimmerghame, an original lead bee in the porch of the Headmaster's Lodge. Industria, the founder said. The bees have kept the appointment for over 150 years.

Fettes has also had to face a darker accounting. In 2022 and 2023, BBC investigations including the Panorama documentary My Teacher the Abuser: Fighting for Justice gave voice to former pupils who alleged they had been sexually and physically abused at the school and at Edinburgh Academy by a teacher named Iain Wares, who had moved to South Africa. Other former pupils came forward through Alex Renton's BBC Radio 4 series In Dark Corners. One survivor was awarded record damages of 450,000 pounds in 2022. South Africa eventually approved an extradition request, and Wares faced multiple charges. The reckoning at Fettes is part of a wider one across British private schools - boys who were children when the harm was done, telling stories the institutions had not been listening for. The chateau on the hill still looks magnificent from the air. What goes on inside is a longer story than any building can tell.