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.

Since the place was co-educational, plenty of sex education went on behind the bike sheds

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. If nothing else, it was an alternative to even grimmer traditional public schools, which seemed modelled on Colditz.

The traditions were certainly distinctive. Teachers and pupils addressed each other by their first names (and still do). There was no chapel, no uniform, no corporal punishment. Everybody did ‘Outdoor Work’ on the school farm and since the place was co-educational, plenty of wholesome sex education went on behind the bike sheds. Bedales today, or at least the digital version that I have been browsing, is a school I hardly recognise – luxurious dormitories and immersive learning, magnificent facilities, baking organic bread, heritage craft weeks, open to other schools. There are exquisite photographs of beaming, studious, athletic, racially diverse, beautiful and happy pupils.

But who is kidding whom? Bedales is not diverse. As a top-tier independent school it is the quintessence of privilege. A few bursaries and scholarships for select students of non-millionaire families doesn’t change that. The school motto is ‘Work of Each for Weal of All’. And it’s ridiculous.

Nor is the history of the place as straightforward as the apologists would have you believe. From the earliest days there is evidence of transgressive behaviour by John Haden Badley, who co-founded Bedales with his wife Amy and who remains revered there today for pioneering mixed, progressivist, secular education. He was, frankly, extremely weird.

In his memoir, the French writer Jacques Benoist-Méchin recalls Bedales in 1910, when he was sent there by his father to perfect his English. Bedales was already attracting pupils from wealthy and/or progressive European families interested in an alternative to the rigid tradition of separate
education of girls and boys. Benoist-Méchin describes being starved on a diet of thin porridge and sent running in the rain bare-chested, before he was finally withdrawn, feeling ill with neglect. (Benoist-Méchin is not celebrated today as a distinguished alumnus: after the second world war he was sentenced to death in France for collaborating with the Nazis, although this was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment and later reduced further.)

We smoked Players No.6 in the common room: a dirty tumbledown shack in an apple orchard

The school when I arrived, miserably, aged 13, was hardly paradisiacal. The fees were then modest, but the faculty was largely mediocre and the discipline chaotic. We smoked Players No.6 in the common room for our year: a dirty, tumbledown shack in an apple orchard. We were fed turnips and, as a treat, a pudding called dead man’s arm, since that’s what it resembled. We were so hungry we ate anything they put in front of us.

Amanda Craig was at Bedales a few years after me. Her novel A Private Place is the definitive attack on the school, recounting misery, sex discrimination and psychological bullying. Since leaving the school and embarking on a brilliant writing career, Craig has never forgotten Bedales and resumes her attacks on it at every provocation. ‘Frankly, I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been cornered by rich, famous parents, asking if they should send their children to Bedales,’ she says. ‘My response is always the same: don’t. Just don’t. I went there for the five worst years of my life in the 1970s, and though I am now happy, sane and moderately successful, it scarred me deeply.’

When my Spectator colleague Zoe Strimpel arrived at the school in 1998, much had changed since my time, although the desperation to seem creative and freethinking remained. As Zoe puts it: ‘I found myself in a sea of terrifyingly glamorous and sexually experienced teens who all promptly got on with the main business of the school: allocating power based on who fancied whom. There were many binge-drinking sessions in the fields, jaunts on Wednesdays and Saturday afternoons into Petersfield for smoking, drinking, having curries and other mischief. Back at school, for those whose alcohol needs had not been met, there was a bar for sixth formers open on Fridays and Saturdays. I can’t remember exactly, but I think we could all have three drinks, which at 16 and fresh from America seemed extraordinary.’

Bedales’s reputation as a school for royalty and celebs has made it honey for the tabloids. Princess Margaret sent David Armstrong-Jones to the school where he was taught carpentry by the legendary David Butcher. Gyles Brandreth, who was my ‘dorm boss’, remains exactly as I remember him as a teenager. Lily Allen was expelled. Cara Delevingne has done well, never out of the gossip columns. Alalia Chetwynd, a descendent of the 6th Viscount Chetwynd, changed her name to Spartacus, then Monster, and was nominated for the Turner prize.

Near contemporaries of mine included the novelist Patricia Duncker, Daniel Day-Lewis and his sister Tamasin. The late actor Simon Caddell was in my year. Our headboy Andrew Cahn became a big shot in the civil service and was subsequently knighted – twice, I believe. Polly Toynbee sent her kids to Bedales.

But looking back, there were plenty of casualties too. For every Bedales celeb there is more than one Old Bedalian who has crashed. Often the cool kids fizzled out once ejected into the wider world.

So did I learn anything there? I failed most of my exams and went off to university in America where they didn’t appear to care. But Bedales certainly kindled a lifelong hatred of authority, a refusal to do what I’m told and a boundless cynicism for approved narratives.

These days, Bedales seems to have metamorphosed again, but retained its cachet and indeed notoriety. Eton is still posher, but with its celebrity pupils and parents and often scandalous alumni, Bedales is rarely out of the headlines – most recently making the news for its tolerance of transgender identities. Boys who think they’re girls can live in the girls’ dorms, and girls who think they’re boys can join the boys.

Bedales probably won’t suffer greatly from the imposition of VAT on school fees. It already costs more than £200,000 to send a child through four years at the senior school, and what’s another £50,000?

I phoned Will Goldsmith, the head since February 2022 (and acting head for five months before that). I liked him. He speaks French which is always a plus for me. He is passionate in his challenge to the orthodoxies of education and in the school prospectus professes ‘a profoundly communitarian approach and an understanding of the importance of the natural world’ which make the school ‘very special indeed’. The trouble is that this sounds like gobbledygook to someone like me, trained to spot such things at Bedales. Goldsmith denies he is woke – saying he hates the word – but admits to being ‘liberal’.

Goldsmith understands the Bedales vision is utopian but defends the aspiration. And he points out that even if the place still struggles with inequities and inequalities, then so does the state sector. At least Bedales can ask some questions about what education is for, he says, and offer some examples of a kindlier, best-practice experience.

Curriculum reform is the area he’s chosen to assert his school’s role as a laboratory for a more general rethink of education. He is sure that authoritarian schooling produces degraded outcomes – a controversial opinion given the breakdown of discipline in many bog-standard comprehensives.

In a letter to the Times in May, Goldsmith declared that GCSEs ‘are not fit for purpose’ and described the efforts at Bedales to replace them with more humane assessed course work. ‘In a time when the value of independent schools is being questioned,’ he wrote, ‘surely this is an example of the sector having the freedom to develop new approaches that can then be scaled up to the benefit of pupils in all schools?’

That is Goldsmith’s pitch for relevancy outside the campus bubble – but while it may sound superficially compelling it is by no means uncontested. Katharine Birbalsingh, the disciplinarian head of the Michaela school in Brent, hails her students’ achievements at GCSE as a key metric of their success. She says schools such as Bedales are against GCSE exams because they don’t get enough top grades. Goldsmith has visited Michaela and invited Birbalsingh to visit Bedales. She has not responded to the invitation.

So is the solution Michaela’s tough love or Bedales’ progressive touchy-feely? Is touchy-feely even relevant to kids from the inner city? Most parents, I suggest, would vote for Birbalsingh.

Bedales is a far better school now than when I was there. In fact, from what I hear, it is probably the best it has ever been. For many children fortunate enough to go there, it’s a nirvana. A lot of good teachers apparently want to work in the place. (The pay isn’t great but a student is unlikely to pull a knife.) The food is doubtless much improved. But the basic problem, now as then, is that Bedales remains a bubble, a micro-society, that struggles to justify its wider relevance – and seems unlikely ever to learn its lessons.