History and gratitude to our founders and benefactors

The theme of the week at Bradford Grammar School is Gratitude, which ties neatly into our Founders’ Day tomorrow at Bradford Cathedral.

This is how we woke up the gathered masses in the Price Hall earlier today, bleary eyes in assembly, with a little bit of BGS history from me. Old Bradfordians might reflect that whilst some things change, other aspects of our School abide down the generations:

“Ours is an iconic school.

We know BGS existed long before 1548 but, honestly, we don’t know how far back our history goes. It could be the mid-1200s when the earliest Latin grammar schools were established in our region. We do know that the infant BGS was part of St Peter’s Church, which is now Bradford Cathedral. So, the early school and St Peter’s Parish Church were one and the same located adjacently where the Cathedral stands today.

This week we celebrate Founders’ Day at the Cathedral because it was our ancestral home.

The school nearly closed on many occasions during its early history, including the English Civil War and you can still see damage in the Cathedral walls caused by cannon balls fired in battle. A degree of security came to the school by dint of Royal Charter in 1662. From that date we have gone forwards as the Free School of King Charles II in Bradford, our true name. Bradford Grammar School, BGS, this is just an abbreviation really, although some historians would argue it’s a bit more sophisticated than that.

In 1820 The Free School of King Charles II left its Cathedral location and moved to a new home, still in Bradford city centre, at Manor Row near Forster Square railway station. Change came with the Forster Acts of 1869 and 1870 and this took control of BGS away from the church and the cathedral and put it firmly into the hands of the state. We stopped being a religious school and became a secular one under the umbrella of the local board of education.

We moved home again and took up residence here in Manningham in 1949, but only after our building had been used by the army during the Second World War.

This is our history. This is what our Founders’ Day is all about. History and our gratitude to our founders and benefactors.

This week we remember key people in the school’s past without whom BGS would not exist as it does today. The school has a long history of benefaction, it goes back to our earliest days. Benefactors are people who have given money, land, service and other forms of support to the school so that it can educate people like you. So that it can employ your teachers and support colleagues, people like me.

In the Founders’ Day service, we say thank you to our earliest benefactors, local families like the Snowden’s, Lacey’s, Grave’s, Rawson’s, Banks’s, Northrop’s and Wade’s who paid rent on local farmland, when all around here was woodland and fields, to cover the cost of a schoolmaster during the reign of King Henry 8^th in the early 1500s. We say thank you to people like 19th century industrialist Sir Titus Salt and Sir Henry Price who gave money in 1936 for the construction of this magnificent hall.

The school continues to receive the support of its modern-day benefactors, like Sovereign Health Care – the BGS Concert Band played at their 150^th anniversary at St George’s Hall last week. Roughly one in ten pupils receive financial support to attend our school. At BGS this support is called an Assisted Place, in other schools they are called bursaries. This helps BGS to stay true to our mission, one that has been carried down the generations, to open our doors to the widest possible cross section of society.

We are grateful to be able to still do this today.

And the benefactors of the future are sat in the Price Hall right now. I’m talking about you. Some of you will want to give back to our school in future so that others can benefit from the advantages you enjoy today. Some of you will walk in the footsteps of Samuel Lister, William Keeling, Douglas Hamilton, Sir Ken Morrison and others.

We attend our Founders’ Day service at the Cathedral with gratitude and say thank you to those visionary benefactors and supporters who make BGS the school it is today.”