Living the dream

To enter Wellington College, in Crowthorne, Berkshire, is as if to arrive at a stately home that’s open to the public. There are the smart signposts, the security box, the manicured lawns (with the requisite ‘keep off the grass’ signs). When I visit, it is the summer holidays, so there are no children littering the playing fields. Instead, the mower keeps on mowing, and the buildings enjoy their last bit of peace and quiet before term starts.

But that is where the stately similarities end. Wellington’s headmaster, Julian Thomas, is not of that ilk, he is proud to say. Thomas, 50, the former head of Caterham School in Surrey, was appointed the 14th Master of Wellington in 2015, after the departure of Sir Anthony Seldon. The two men are very different, something that has not passed Thomas by. When I ask him about Seldon, he looks slightly pained at being questioned yet again about his predecessor. ‘Look,’ he sighs, ‘Anthony and I are vastly different, and very similar. I suspect people would say there are some differences in some aspects of our personalities.’

Thomas, the son of a printer from east London, was educated at a state primary school before attending Bancroft’s School in Woodford Green, and then King’s College London, where he read computing. His early career was spent in the City working for BP. One morning, coming up the escalator at Liverpool Street station, he had his lightbulb moment, and decided there and then to switch careers.

‘It was the defining moment of my entire life, the realisation that I couldn’t do this for another 40 years,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t feeling fulfilled. I thought there had to be more that I could do, more impact that I could make.’