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Later Buildings

Apart from the Percival years, when the nucleus of the school buildings was created, there have been three major periods of building: the 1880s, the 1920s and the 1980s. In 1880, the East Wing was completed as far as the staircase (not yet linked to the library by the Wilson Tower). This provided a science lecture-room (hence the 'stepped' windows), a laboratory and several classrooms.

In 1886, the porters' lodge and what is now the staff common room were added by enlarging what had been the first science school. On the ground floor was a tuck-shop and above it (in what is now the Upper Common Room) a drawing-school. The Town Rooms for North Town and South Town in Guthrie Road were also built - though the horizontal sub-division and the creation of studies did not take place until 1973. The East Wing was completed by carrying it beyond the staircase, towards Guthrie Road and creating an additional classroom at each. The ground-floor classroom (Room 12) has now become the "Newbolt Room" and been appropriately furnished through the generosity of the Old Cliftonian Society.

In 1887 all the buildings completed in the previous year were formally opened, and the first quarter of a century of the school's existence was celebrated at Commemoration with a reception and a concert, and with the cloisters carpeted and hung with Chinese lanterns. Before Canon Wilson left Clifton in December 1890 he had the satisfaction of seeing the completion of the Wilson Tower. In the same year, the New Field was purchased.

Between 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War, the principal building projects were the new Music School (1897) and the rebuilding of the Chapel (1910). The turn of the century saw falling numbers, and although these began to revive after Augustus David succeeded Glazebrook in 1905, David stayed only four years before moving on to Rugby. As the Cliftonian sadly commented, "We have not only lost our headmaster, but the Marlborough match as well."

Dr John King, an Old Cliftonian, whose headmastership spanned the war years, had little scope for building after 1914. But his term of office did see the development of the fields at Beggar's Bush, master-minded by A.D. Imlay, a member of the teaching staff and the first Old Cliftonian to keep wicket for Cambridge. King's headmastership also saw the building of the Memorial Arch and the neo-classical pavilion, and the opening of the new Sanatorium in Worcester Road - a practical form of war memorial.

On 3rd December, 1918, a few weeks after the Armistice, John Percival died. He was buried in the vault of Clifton Chapel and in 1921 a special memorial chapel was created and consecrated to enfold his tomb (see images below). The following year it was decreed that the names of the Houses should revert to the names they had carried at the end of Percival's reign. Writing from Mesopotamia in 1915, Sir George Younghusband had warned of the confusion that would prevail in 500 years time if the names of the houses continued to change every time there was a change of headmaster: "The first or last pages of the Cliftonian will read like that chapter in the Bible where everybody was the son of somebody with a long and difficult name, and begat in his turn an offspring with an even longer and more difficult one." The commomsense solution now adopted was probably not a conscious tribute to Percival, but it was an appropriate gesture nevertheless.

Norman Whatley, who was the headmaster from 1923 to 1938, is second only to Percival in length of service to Clifton. His "reign" saw the building of the Science School (on the site of the previous Junior School) and the opening of the Preparatory School. They are among Clifton's most soundly constructed buildings and, like Big School itself, seem to promise permanence. But, as after the building activity of the 1880s, so in the 1930s members fell at Clifton as at all public schools, and the closing years of Whatley's headmasterships were not altogether happy ones for the school.

Besides the solidity of the new buildings, the Whatley years bequeathed a blaze of colour to the Chapel, where Hugh Easton's new east windows can still startle the newcomer. They even contain the hint of a joke. Beneath a representation of the heavenly Jerusalem is depicted a game of cricket on the Close - with one of Whatley's sons taking part.

This brief study cannot encompass the history of cricket on the Close, immortalised by the poetry of Newbolt - "There's a breathless hush in the Close tonight...". Nor can we follow the fortunes of the XVs that have played there since Clifton and Marlborough met in the first-ever inter-school rugby match in 1864. But the greatest improvement in games facilities since the purchase of Beggar's Bush came in 1982, with the construction, on the site of the old swimming pools, of a Sports Hall, remedial gymnasium and covered swimming pool, neatly fitting alongside the 1867 gymnasium and 1884 rackets court.

The other major building project of the 1980s was the Coulson Centre which linked together two previously separate classroom blocks, Muir and Birdwood, thus providing fifteen modern classrooms, besides the Technical Activities Centre, computing laboratory and engineering drawing office which are its prime components. The centre has done pioneering work in robotics and in the downloading of meteorological data from weather satellites on to the school's own computers. And as a result of the improvements in preventive medicine, the war memorial Sanitorium in Worcester Road is now too large for the school's needs, and so the pre-1921 Sanatorium on the Close has been refitted to provide more appropriate facilities.

The Chapel: (left) before, (top) during and (right) after englargement by Nicholson.

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