Qualla: Fettes College

Fettes College: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Stewart, CC BY-SA 2.0. The skyline announces it before you can name it. From the air, Fettes College looks like a French chateau that drifted across the Channel, picked up a Scottish accent, and settled on a forested hill in Edinburgh's Craigleith district. Architect David Bryce designed it that way on purpose - half Loire Valley, half Scots Baronial - and the result has been called one of Scotland's greatest buildings. The bees on the crest above the door are even older. Sir William Fettes used a bee as his personal seal, and when he died in 1836 he left enough money to put one over every door he would never see built.

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Image: Alan Stewart | CC BY-SA 2.0

Fettes College: A Father's Grief

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 educa...

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Image: Kim Traynor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fettes College: The Eton of the North

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 Geor...

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Image: Kim Traynor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fettes College: A Milkman and a Spy

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 ...

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Image: Kim Traynor | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fettes College: Wartime, Memorial, Bee

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ArchaicW, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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....

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Image: ArchaicW | CC BY-SA 4.0

Fettes College: The Reckoning

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pawel Gieralt, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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...

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Image: Pawel Gieralt | CC BY-SA 4.0