Brentwood Preparatory School Magazine

6 Brentwood School Preparatory In the year 1891 Edwin Bean became Headmaster of Brentwood School and one of the first things that he did was to found the Preparatory School in 1892 and appoint a certain Miss Brimley as Headmistress. It is believed that this was because he wanted somewhere to educate his young son, Monty, together with a few of his friends. Beginning its life in one room, the Preparatory School has made a number of ‘moves’, including being housed in Roden House (now the Headmaster’s residence), the Hermitage and finally, in the year 1949, by stages to its present home, Middleton Hall, where it has continued to grow and expand ever since. Indeed the school was extremely fortunate in securing the building as the County Fire Brigade had also wanted to purchase the building! The Preparatory School has enjoyed a rich and varied heritage through its now 125 years of existence and it is impossible to give full justice to its history and achievements of the pupils who have gone through this phase of their development. Vitally important to the very existence of the school is its values and ideals, first summed up in the statutes of 1622 as: “Virtue, Learning and Manners” by John Donne, the Dean of St. Pauls’ Cathedral, this now forming part of the school prayer : “Give us grace so to order our lives that Virtue, Learning and Manners may here forever flourish and abound…………” For a large number of years the Preparatory School was only for boys, both day and boarders (the day boys being known as Parrots and the boarders as Rodents!). The boarding facility eventually finished in the early 1990’s and, after the Pre-Preparatory School was founded in 1996, girls were admitted to the Prep and now form about 50% of our total numbers. Highlights in the school’s history include the visit of the Queen in 1957 to officially open the Science Laboratories in the Senior School as part of the 400th Anniversary of the founding of the school. It is said that she greatly enjoyed an arranged display of the school’s activities, especially the scenes depicting a day in the life of a boy in the Preparatory School. The Prep. School was also included in the celebrations of the 400th Anniversary by attending a service at St Paul’s Cathedral. The Main School went by special train, whilst the Prep. went from playground almost to portal in buses! A magnificent Service of Thanksgiving was also attended by the Prep., again in St. Paul’s Cathedral, to mark Brentwood School’s 450th Anniversary in 2007. In the same year there also took place an exchange with a school in Belgrade, this being the first ever exchange between an English and a Communist school. It lasted a whole month, during which time each boy stayed with a Yugoslav family and attended school each morning. In the following year, a group of Yugoslav boys spent three weeks at the Prep. Apparently they found cricket baffling, but enjoyed the food. Continuing on the theme of food, there is the story of the boy who said of a meal on a special occasion “It was super; the best thing was you were allowed to leave it”. A History of Brentwood Preparatory School A painting of the school by Mr J Garratt