Qualla: Uppingham School

Uppingham School: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poliphilo, CC0. When Edward Thring became headmaster of Uppingham School in 1853, the institution had been ticking along for two hundred and sixty-nine years with the same approximate enrollment it had started with: between thirty and sixty boys, taught by two masters, in a small stone building beside the parish church. Latin and Greek dominated the lessons, as they had since the school was founded by Archdeacon Robert Johnson in 1584. Thring was thirty-two years old, a Cambridge-educated cleric with strong opinions about almost everything, and over the next thirty-four years he turned this provincial grammar school into something genuinely new in English education - a place where music, science, carpentry, gymnasium exercise and the study of modern languages were treated as serious subjects rather than as distractions from the classics. By the time he died in 1887, the school had over 400 pupils. The transformation made him famous on both sides of the Atlantic. It also, more quietly, set the template for what an English public school could be.

Read more: Uppingham School on Qualla

Image: Poliphilo | CC0

Uppingham School: Thring's Quiet Revolution

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Thacker, CC BY-SA 2.0. Thring was not a flamboyant reformer. He did not write manifestos or pick public fights. He simply built, year by year, the buildings the school needed for the kind of education he wanted to offer. He opened the first gymnasium in any English school, a long thin building where bo...

Read more: Uppingham School on Qualla

Image: Jonathan Thacker | CC BY-SA 2.0

Uppingham School: The Borth Exile

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lorraine Cornwell, Public domain. In 1875, an outbreak of typhoid forced Thring to do something no English headmaster had attempted before: he moved the entire school - boys, masters, books and equipment - to the Welsh coastal town of Borth, more than a hundred and fifty miles away. For just over a year, Uppingha...

Read more: Uppingham School on Qualla

Image: Lorraine Cornwell | Public domain

Uppingham School: The War Memorials and the Carolling Class

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Immanuel Giel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Uppingham's First World War cost it 450 former pupils, an enormous number for a school its size. The school hall was built as their memorial, and the cricket pavilion - a graceful Walter Tapper building from 1923, now Grade II listed - also dates from the early 1920s and carries ...

Read more: Uppingham School on Qualla

Image: Immanuel Giel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Uppingham School: The 2005 Fee-Fixing Embarrassment

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Trolove, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 2005, Uppingham found itself caught up in one of the more awkward news cycles in modern British independent-school history. The Times revealed that fifty of the country's leading fee-charging schools - Uppingham among them - had been quietly exchanging information about planne...

Read more: Uppingham School on Qualla

Image: Michael Trolove | CC BY-SA 2.0

Uppingham School: Music, Sport and the Quiet Brand

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kate Jewell, CC BY-SA 2.0. Uppingham's musical tradition - founded on work by Paul David and Robert Sterndale Bennett - is unusually deep for an English boarding school. Two large three-manual pipe organs sit in the memorial hall and the chapel; the chapel organ was rebuilt in 2007 by Nicholson Organs of M...

Read more: Uppingham School on Qualla

Image: Kate Jewell | CC BY-SA 2.0