The nineteenth-century English preparatory school: cradle and crèche of Empire?

It is one of the ironies of the history of the English public school that Haileybury, founded to provide recruits for service in India four years after the East India College closed in 1858, ¹ should have as one of its most famous old boys, if not the most famous old boy, ² Earl Attlee. As Prime Minister in 1947, Attlee presided over (pace Lord Mountbatten) the granting of independence to India and Pakistan. Earl Attlee was to Haileybury what Sir Winston Churchill was to Harrow: the school's most favoured twentieth-century son. Winston Churchill was also a pupil at Brunswick House dame preparatory school, so too, Clement Attlee was a prep-school boy at the less fashionable school of Northaw Place at Potters Bar. ³ This point is stressed because so often it is overlooked that, before boys attend public school, they first learn life-skills at their prep school.