The Alex Fitch Room, built in 1918 with Elizabethan panelling and Jacobean furniture.
Harrow School, a boys’ independent public school known usually just as ‘Harrow’, is located at Harrow on the Hill High Street, in north-west London. Although a school seems to have existed in the locale since 1243, it was not until 1572 that Harrow School was officially founded by a yeoman-farmer John Lyon, under a Royal Charter of Elizabeth I, and the schoolhouse was completed in 1615. One of the nine public schools reformed and regulated by the Public School Act (1868), Harrow usually has around 800 students, who live in a dozen boarding houses on a full-time basis, and whose school uniform features morning suits, top hats, straw hats and canes.
A roll call of celebrated alumni includes eight British Prime Ministers, including Palmerston, Baldwin and Churchill, and also Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, along with two kings, and members of both houses of the UK Parliament. The literary world is represented by Trollope and Byron, and Harrow School’s theatrical talent includes Edward and James Fox, and Benedict Cumberbatch. Old soldiers include Field Marshall Alexander, as well as the 7th Earl of Cardigan (who disgraced himself at Balaclava), twenty recipients of the VC, and the entrepreneurial founder of Pret a Manger, Julian Metcalfe.
Rackets court. Harrow also has courts for squash and fives, and of course tennis. The school claims that squash was invented there some time after 1830, when boys discovered that a punctured rubber ball that squashed on impact produced a game with a great variety of shots. Rackets is a faster game, using a hard white rubber ball.
Harrow School’s famous Fourth Form occupies the entire ground floor of the original seventeenth-century schoolhouse. The internal walls of the room are lined with moulded and fielded black panelling rising to a height of 7 ft (2 m), and, beginning with a T. Basil in 1701, generations of boys have carved their names into the wood. Standing in the middle of the west wall is a stone fireplace of the same era, with an eared surround, a central panel in the head and a cornice with carved brackets. Seventeenth-century chairs with flat-topped desks were positioned in tiers on both sides of the room, with a canopied Headmaster’s seat at one end from where enthroned ‘beaks’ – teachers – could survey their pupils, while an usher seated in an armchair at the other end likely did his best to maintain order. On an outside wall is a plaque honouring the future Earl of Shaftesbury, who, the story goes, upon seeing a pauper’s funeral, burned with ‘shame and indignation’, and was inspired to serve the poor and oppressed.
The famous Fourth Form, with boys’ names carved throughout, and birching block in right-hand corner.
Pupils’ chairs in the Alex Fitch Room.
With so many former pupils undeniably associated with the uppermost levels of the British establishment, and its association with power and leadership, Harrow may seem a lofty hidden establishment, but it also has a human scale. Despite the magnificence of the panels, chandeliers, stained glass windows and Jacobean furniture of the Alex Fitch Room, a poignant story lies behind its creation. Alex Fitch was killed in the First World War at the age of nineteen, shortly after leaving Harrow. Given his happy days at the school his mother used the family wealth to construct a memorial in memory of her son. Initially, she suggested building an indoor swimming pool (a rarity at that time). Harrow, however, courteously declined, reportedly on the grounds her idea was a touch vulgar. Undeterred, Mrs Fitch proposed a grand room for entertaining, with that suggestion being accepted. Constructed from floorboards and wood panelling formerly from an Tudor ship, the room’s serenity seems magnified by an aura of elegance from a bygone age. Stained glass windows depict Queen Elizabeth I granting the school’s charter to John Lyon, while another window displays the arms of sovereigns who have been to the school, including those of Queen Victoria, who visited in 1848 and Queen Elizabeth II in 1971. But taking precedence over these monarchs is a portrait of the young Alex Fitch hanging above the stone fireplace. The light illuminating his portrait has never been extinguished.
In what is called Old School’s Building, the Old Speech Room was built between 1819 and 1821. By 1871, however, the school governors and headmaster resolved to celebrate the tercentenary of John Lyon’s charter with the construction of a hall capable of seating entire school. Designed by the architect William Burges, the red brick building has a semi-circular shape whose straight eastern front runs parallel to the High Street. A north tower was added in 1919, before the attachment of a south tower in 1925, the bell of which summons the school to the chapel and the speech room. With its tiered seating, the room’s interior resembles an amphitheatre, with a timber boarding ceiling, the vaulting of which is supported on pointed arches at the top of fourteen paired columns, decorated in red, blue and gold. The principal windows in the auditorium are grand in scale, with semi-circular heads and an intricate design of arches and roundels. The chamber’s purpose was imbuing pupils with confidence through the art of public speaking, with many an aspirant orator later making his mark in parliament. As Lord Byron wrote of the Speech Room in his poem, ‘On a Distant View of the Village and School of Harrow on the Hill’: ‘I once more view the room with spectators surrounded.’
