Lady Laura Buchan started a school for girls in Castletown in 1875 because she could. Her father, Colonel Mark Wilks, had spent his career in the East India Company and ended it as governor of St Helena during Napoleon's exile - a man who knew what it cost to keep an empire educated. The High School for Girls, as Lady Laura first called it, opened at a moment when the Victorian campaign to educate young women was finally translating itself into bricks and timetables across the British Isles. A century and a half later her school still exists, renamed for her, on the same small island, attached now to a boys' college that took longer than her own to learn that girls might profit from school as easily as boys.
Castletown in 1875 was still the old capital of the Isle of Man, even though the political weight had been shifting steadily north to Douglas for years. King William's College, the boys' boarding school for sons of the Manx and English gentry, had been operating just outside the town since 1833. A school for the gentry's daughters, by contrast, did not yet exist. Lady Laura - daughter of Colonel Mark Wilks, married into the Buchan family - established her school on Douglas Road, on the Castletown promenade, with a curriculum modelled on the better English girls' schools of the period. The original name, The High School for Girls, signalled the seriousness of the intention: not a finishing school, not an accomplishment factory, but a high school in the proper sense, with academic ambition for its pupils.
The school outgrew its first premises almost immediately and moved to a Victorian house called Westhill on Arbory Road, about a mile inland. As enrolment kept rising, the senior department - girls aged 11 to 18 - was eventually relocated again, this time to three terraced houses on Bowling Green Road, which had been Lady Laura's own house. The junior school and the boarders stayed at Westhill. The arrangement produced one of those daily Victorian rituals that survive in school histories: the older girls walked across Castletown between the two campuses, and walked further along the promenade to King William's College for swimming lessons in the boys' pool. The geography of a small Manx capital, in other words, became part of the timetable.
The Buchan was reorganised around four houses, each named for one of the Norse-Gaelic kings who had ruled the Isle of Man between the 11th and 13th centuries: Magnus in green, Olaf in red, Lagman in blue, Godred in yellow. In the 1970s, when the boarding side of the school still operated, two further houses were added for the boarders - Ivar in gold and Somerled in purple - and discontinued when the boarding closed in 1999. The names matter on this island. Magnus, Olaf, Godred and Lagman are not abstract historical figures here but the actual founders and rulers of the medieval Manx kingdom, buried in places like Rushen Abbey just up the road. The school motto is Fortior Qui Melior - The Braver The Better - and the Buchan Badge, modelled on the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, asks each pupil in Prep years 3 to 6 to complete sections in physical activity, country or field craft, and service. The Victorian intention - serious education for girls - finds itself still legible in the modern syllabus.
In 1991, after more than a century as an independent girls' school, The Buchan merged with King William's College and became its co-educational prep school. The merger reflected the realities of running independent education on a small island - keeping two parallel institutions for the same Manx and English families had become harder to justify - and reflected, too, the cultural shift that had finally caught up to Lady Laura's original ambition. Boys now learn at The Buchan alongside girls. The school today has approximately 250 pupils aged 3 to 11. It remains the only independent primary school on the Isle of Man. The boarding house that operated for over a century closed in 1999.
Two former pupils stand out as far as the school's published record allows. Jennifer Kewley Draskau, a historian, linguist and political candidate, did important work on Manx Gaelic and the broader history of the Isle of Man - the kind of scholarship that keeps a small national culture alive when the people writing it down come from inside it. Amina J. Mohammed, a Nigerian diplomat and politician, attended The Buchan in her youth and went on to become Minister of Environment of Nigeria, and from 2017 Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations - the second-highest position in the UN system. A girls' school in a Manx market town that produced a UN Deputy Secretary-General is a useful corrective to anyone tempted to underestimate the scale of what Victorian education for women was always trying to do. Lady Laura would have been pleased.
The Buchan School sits at 54.074N, 4.663W on Arbory Road in Castletown, on the south coast of the Isle of Man. From the air, look for the Victorian Westhill house just inland from the Castletown promenade, with King William's College a short distance to the east. The Castletown harbour and the medieval Castle Rushen are clearly visible to the southwest. Cruising altitude 2,000-3,000 ft gives a good view of the whole town and its position relative to Isle of Man Airport. Nearest airport: Isle of Man Airport (Ronaldsway, EGNS) approximately 1.5 nm northeast.