Another of my ageing Bedales school cohort has died and so there’s an ad hoc reunion in his honour at the pub in Steep, the bucolic village near Petersfield, scene of our youth, where we used to sneak out to smoke and drink when the teachers weren’t looking. Which they often weren’t.
Bedales implanted itself here in deepest Hampshire in 1900, a pioneering co-educational boarding school, quickly patronised by British and European progressivist-bourgeois-bohemian-leftist artists, writers and intellectuals. It has been chi-chi ever since.
Since the place was co-educational, plenty of sex education went on behind the bike sheds
From its rustic origins, the school has grown and grown and now dominates the no longer quite so sleepy village. The school has 400 employees, 700 students from all over the world in its reception, elementary and secondary schools, helicopters landing on the football pitch, royal and celebrity connections and an annual turnover of £22 million.
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