Public School Photographs

Hunting about on the internet for pictures to illustrate this blog I found Mark Draisley's pictures. He is a photographer who undertook a study of a number of public schools - including Haileybury - in the later 1980s. He writes of himself:

I began work on the British Public Schools project in my final year at Brighton Polytechnic by approaching Hurstpierpoint College to ask if I could photograph a day in the life of the school. From that moment on I was hooked on the subject. Fascinated by the history, architecture, and traditions of the independent school system, I decided to expand my study. With a publisher on board, the number of schools nationwide was increased to twenty-five over a five year period. Unfortunately, good timing was not on my side and the recession hit just as I was completing the study in 1990. The publishers pulled out due to the high expense of producing such a large volume and I was unable to bring a new company on board. With over 2000 medium format high quality colour transparencies, I believe that this is the largest such collection, undertaken by an individual, in the World. Hopefully the book will one day see the light of day as the images are now of historic interest due to recent modernization of many independent schools to bring them into line with the twenty-first Century, as well as, in many cases, the introduction of co-education into this once bastion of British masculinity.


His home page has a picture of Haileybury, and the pictures are here. 

Here is a picture from the site of the College Prefects. Younger readers will be shocked to discover that in those days there were only a few CPs and they had the great privilege of being allowed an umbrella. Beaks (teachers to you) carried brightly coloured golf umbrellas, while CPs affected plain black rolled city gents' brollies. If you are in this picture do be in touch to tell us the background.