‘The college of God’s gift’

The only man from Dulwich College I have ever known, or met, was a master at my school, M. H. Bushby. A distinguished cricketer at Dulwich, he went on to captain Cambridge. Here he is described, in later life, as a ‘much respected and much loved housemaster’, so my attitude to Dulwich has always been entirely favourable, though all I knew of it was its vague outline on the edge of the South Circular road, a distant palazzo surrounded by extensive playing fields.

This monumental volume, beautifully produced by the college, leaves nothing out. Old boys of Dulwich are known as Old Alleynians because of its founder in 1619, Edward Alleyn, who played all those ‘over-reaching’ heroes in Marlowe’s plays. Alleyn’s presence on the stage might even have prompted Marlowe to write these parts. It was Alleyn who first declaimed, ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships …?’ Some say that a vision of the devil in this play so frightened him that he resolved to abandon his rakish past and devote the rest of his life to helping the poor.