Today, we’ve be wondering how many Old Bloxhamists are aware of the significance of today’s date for Bloxham School?
Well, 31st January was the day that Bloxham School first opened in 1860, and at subsequent Old Bloxhamist reunions the school’s Founder and first Headmaster loved to recount the story of how the school started its life.
One afternoon in the autumn of 1859, Philip Reginald Egerton, a clergyman with little money or prospects, was walking back from Banbury to Deddington, where he was a curate, when he and his companion decided to take a diversion through the village of Bloxham. There he saw the derelict school building which had been left by the failure of the school started five years earlier by another clergyman, John Hewitt. After obtaining the keys to look over the building and learning that it was to be sold at auction three days later, Egerton decided, seemingly out of the blue, to bid for the building and open a new school, having never before considered a career as a schoolmaster: ‘I at last began to think that it would be a work to which I might devote my life and do some good in.’
Having turned up to the Red Lion in Bloxham for the auction, Egerton’s bid of £1,615 was successful and on 31st January 1860 his new school opened in the farmhouse which now houses the school reception and the Wilson House studies overlooking the Headmaster’s lawn. Egerton later recalled in 1898 that ‘the walls of the rooms were stained with damp. I had one room for sitting room and schoolroom combined’. He started with the grand total of one pupil, William Pearce, the son of a local farmer, to be followed within a fortnight by a second, Arthur Hodgson. A further five pupils joined the school after Easter, including the first boarder, Charles Wilson from Tamworth in Staffordshire, who would remain involved in the school for the next 76 years and is now commemorated by Wilson House. Within two years the school had grown to 50 pupils and was on the long road to its current state of health, with over ten times that number in the school today. So the London Reunion seems a highly appropriate occasion to raise a toast to Philip Reginald Egerton and his remarkable display of faith and sense of mission 165 years ago.