Founder Theodore Wilcox

When Theodore and Ruth Wilcox opened Alleyn Court in September 1904, only four boys attended at the start of that first Autumn term. The numbers swiftly rose, such that by 1920 there were 80 pupils. Theodore, himself a pupil at King’s Canterbury and then a student at Selwyn College Cambridge, was inspired to found a preparatory school during his time teaching at Dulwich College Prep School; hence the name Alleyn Court. Thanks to the help of his cousin, Charles Dodgson, better known to the world as Lewis Carroll, who had financially supported him throughout his own education, he was finally in a position to set up his own school.

In this eclectic and entertaining collection of papers, poems, articles and correspondence, John Wilcox gives voice to a century of schoolboys (now girls also), former pupils and teachers who, at one time or another, shared the vicissitudes of life at Alleyn Court, a family run prep school in Essex.

More than a conventional history, Impressions of a Family School is an evocation of an age seen through the eyes of children and their teachers: their enthusiasms, innocence and anxieties, their observations of a changing world and their cricket...

From a generation which sacrificed its innocence on the Somme to the present day, the contributors report moments in one hundred years of Alleyn Court - a school founded by the author's grandfather - and provide a commentary on the wider world. There are entertaining (and not always reverential) reports of former pupils, some of whom have achieved celebrity status in later life, some who will be known only to their friends.

Many items from the school magazine are included as they would have appealed, (and no doubt still appeal) to the humour of a pupil readership, the parents and predecessors.

Above all Impressions of a Family School is an affectionate tribute to schooldays, which will delight anyone who reads it.

Stephen Morris

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