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Science at Clifton

In 1877 a survey of science teaching in 24 leading schools revealed that only eight taught science for more than four periods a week. One of the eight was Clifton, where 90% of the boys studied science for up to ten hours a week. The first science laboratory at Clifton was opened in 1867 - the same year as the opening of the Chapel. This first laboratory, on the ground floor, was for physics and chemistry. Biology laboratories were added in 1869, and the same year saw the inaugural meeting of the school's Scientific Society.

Percival had read mathematics and physics as well as classics and history at Oxford, and his two immediate successors, James Wilson and Michael Glazebrook, had both read mathematics and classics. Seven of the staff appointed by Percival to teach science at Clifton went on to university professorships. Four of them became Fellows of the Royal Society, though none of them equalled the feat of William Shenstone, Wilson's head of science, who was elected to the Royal Society on the strength of research carried out in the Clifton chemistry laboratories.

The first of Percival's Clifton pupils to be appointed to the staff was a mathematician, H.S. Hall, who taught mathematics from 1873 to 1899 and was co-author of a school algebra textbook that sold two million copies. Other successful textbook writers were E.J. Holmyear (chemisty) and W.C. Badcock (physics) who were responsible for Clifton's science teaching between the world wars. Both were on the science staff in 1927 when the Prince of Wales opened the new Science School (pictured below). Holmyard, writing of the Stone Science Library (which he considered to be as important a focus of scientific activity as the laboratories) claimed that "if our new science school is one of the best in the kingdom, our science library - young though it is - has, we believe, no rival in any school in the world." It was not an extravagant claim to make of a library that contains autographed letters or documents of many famous scientists, and first editions of Newton's Opticks and Darwin's Origin of Species besides several first editions of works by Robert Boyle.

Extended in the 1950s with grants from the Industrial Fund, and adapted for the teaching of Nuffield science courses which Clifton helped to pioneer, the Science School remains an object of envy in the public school world. The complexity of modern science makes it unlikely that any serving schoolmaster will again be elected to the Royal Society, but in 1986 a team of Clifton sixth-form scientists was chosen to exhibit a research project of their own before the Fellows of the Royal Society.

Two of Cifton's three Nobel prizewinners (Sir Nevill Mott, the physicist, and Sir John Hicks, the economist) had completed their Clifton careers before the new Science School was opened. But the third Nobel prizewinner, the molecular biologist Sir John Kendrew, was taught in the new building in the 1930s. A near-contemporary, Charles Coulson, was present at the opening ceremony in 1927. Coulson later achieved the unusual feat of holding professorships in three different subjects: he successively held the chairs of mathematics at Oxford, physics at London and theoretical chemistry at Oxford, where a chair is now named after him.

He has also given his name to Clifton's mathematics and technical centre, dedicated to the aim expressed by John Perry, one of Percival's early appointments, of getting "the engineers to think scientifically and the mathematicians to convert their formulae into concrete facts." Sir Roy Fedden, one of Clifton's first engineer apprentices and from 1920 to 1942 responsible for the design and development of all Bristol aero engines, was an early exemplar of this ambition.

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