Eric Stuart Dougall already had a Military Cross when he returned to the Western Front in 1918. He was a Tonbridge boy - Old Tonbridgian, in the school's particular language - and the war was nearly over. On 14 April 1918 near Messines, he commanded a battery of the Royal Field Artillery against a German assault that overran his position. He kept firing. When his guns were finally lost, he led his men in close combat with rifles and revolvers. He died four days later. The Victoria Cross was awarded posthumously. Of the 415 Old Tonbridgians who died in the Great War, his is the name on the chapel wall most likely to be pointed out. Three Tonbridge boys won the VC in the world wars. The school is older than the country's most expensive: founded 1553.
Sir Andrew Judde was a London Skinner - a member of one of the oldest livery companies of the City - and a successful merchant. In 1553 he secured a royal charter from the boy king Edward VI to found a free grammar school in his hometown of Tonbridge. The first headmaster was the Reverend John Proctor, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Judde framed the school's statutes himself and served as its sole governor until his death in 1558. The dispute over succession was settled by handing the school to the Worshipful Company of Skinners, which has governed it ever since. Tonbridge is one of the very few ancient public schools that has not gone co-educational - it remains a boys' boarding and day school of around 800 pupils, and there are no plans to change that.
George Austen attended Tonbridge as a boy, returned later as Second Master, and went on to become a country clergyman in Hampshire. He is best remembered now as the father of Jane Austen, whose precise observation of English provincial society was shaped in part by her father's Tonbridge-trained classical education. He was one of the school's distinguished products. Under the Reverend Richard Spencer, who took over in 1714, Tonbridge produced a future Lord Mayor of London and a vice-chancellor of Cambridge. The Reverend Vicesimus Knox the Younger raised numbers from a low of seventeen in his father's day to eighty-five, drawing pupils from across England and abroad. The Knox family ran Tonbridge for seventy-one years across two generations. Thomas Knox levelled the cricket pitch known as the Head in 1838, using labour and earth from the new railway workings nearby.
James Brindley Nicolson, Old Tonbridgian and RAF fighter pilot, was already burning when he saw the Messerschmitt 110. It was 16 August 1940. His Hawker Hurricane had been hit by cannon fire over Southampton, and the cockpit was on fire. Nicolson was about to bail out. Instead he climbed back into the burning aircraft, lined up on the German fighter, and shot it down before finally jumping clear. He received third-degree burns. He became the only Fighter Command pilot to be awarded the Victoria Cross during the Battle of Britain. Tonbridge produced one more wartime cross: Harold Newgass won the George Cross in November 1940 for spending two days defusing a parachute mine that had embedded itself in the gasometer at Walton Hill. The school lost 301 Old Tonbridgians in the Second World War.
Lawrence Waddy took over as headmaster in 1949 and inherited a Tonbridge that still practised fagging - the system of junior boys serving senior boys - and corporal punishment by prefect. Over the next forty years, that world was dismantled. Michael McCrum, headmaster from 1962 to 1970, abolished the right of senior boys to administer canings and took the punishment duties on himself. Personal fagging ended in 1965. The straw boater hats called barges stopped being compulsory uniform after a major town-gown brawl in the 1970s. The chapel, which had been the spiritual centre of the school, burned almost completely in September 1988 - everything destroyed except a 15th-century stone sculpture. Restoration took seven years. The chapel was reconsecrated in 1995. It now houses a tracker-action pipe organ by Marcussen and Son with 4,830 pipes.
Tonbridge is a cricket school. Colin Cowdrey is arguably its most famous alumnus - the long career, the elegant batting, the captaincy of Kent and England, the eventual peerage. Seven Old Tonbridgians have played Test cricket for England: Kenneth Hutchings, Cowdrey himself, Roger Prideaux, Chris Cowdrey, Richard Ellison, Ed Smith, and Zak Crawley. All seven played for Kent County Cricket Club too, an unusual association between school and county. The school is also Steinway certified - over ninety per cent of its pianos are built by Steinway and Sons. In 2005, Tonbridge was caught in the same fee-fixing scandal that exposed fifty leading independent schools. The Office of Fair Trading imposed nominal penalties. Three million pounds went into a trust for affected pupils. Jean Scott, head of the Independent Schools Council, defended the practice as a long-established procedure that the schools had been following in ignorance of the law. The schools paid up. The headmasters moved on.
Located at 51.20 degrees N, 0.28 degrees E, in the town of Tonbridge, Kent, occupying a 150-acre site on the edge of town. The campus sits north of the High Street, with playing fields visible from the air as large green rectangles. Nearest airports: London Biggin Hill (EGKB) sixteen miles north, London Gatwick (EGKK) twenty miles west-southwest. Best viewed at 3,000-5,000 feet on clear days, with the River Medway and Tonbridge Castle keep just to the south.