The cult of Bedales

Another of my ageing Bedales school cohort has died and so there’s an ad hoc reunion in his honour at the pub in Steep, the bucolic village near Petersfield, scene of our youth, where we used to sneak out to smoke and drink when the teachers weren’t looking. Which they often weren’t.

Bedales implanted itself here in deepest Hampshire in 1900, a pioneering co-educational boarding school, quickly patronised by British and European progressivist-bourgeois-bohemian-leftist artists, writers and intellectuals. It has been chi-chi ever since.

From its rustic origins, the school has grown and grown and now dominates the no longer quite so sleepy village. The school has 400 employees, 700 students from all over the world in its reception, elementary and secondary schools, helicopters landing on the football pitch, royal and celebrity connections and an annual turnover of £22 million. Fees are £45,000 a year and will soon rise sharply if the Labour government makes good on its pledge to impose VAT.

The Bedales campus is magnificent. This is the country memorialised by the poet and Steep resident Edward Thomas. It is in Hampshire but not really of this world: a utopian vision materialised, a safe space for the stinking rich who prefer to think of themselves as freethinkers. It may be as much a cult as a school.

Many Old Bedalians, although not me, seem compulsively drawn to return to Steep for years after leaving. It’s a madeleine. Many have taken up residence nearby.

When I was there, the school was shabby, even squalid and my memories are decidedly ambivalent. For all the pretended doctrine of freethinking non-conformity (or maybe because of it), Bedales wasn’t especially effective at teaching pupils, or preparing them for life outside its Arcadia. But the 1960s were an age when inspections were perfunctory.