Christ's Hospital

Christ's Hospital — universally abbreviated as "CH" — was founded in 1552 by King Edward VI under royal charter as a charitable boarding school for orphaned and impoverished London children. The young king (then fifteen years old, dying of tuberculosis the following year) endowed Christ's Hospital along with St Thomas's Hospital and St Bartholomew's Hospital as the three principal royal foundations to care for London's poor — the "three royal hospitals". The school operated in the City of London for over 350 years before relocating in 1902 to its present 1,200-acre rural campus at Horsham, West Sussex. The Head Master is Simon Reid.

Christ's Hospital is unique among English boarding schools in two respects. First, it has been co-educational since 1563 — the first English school to educate both boys and girls together — and has continued to do so for over four hundred years. Second, the school is substantially fee-remission-funded by the Christ's Hospital Foundation: around 70% of pupils receive some form of bursary support, often providing free or substantially subsidised boarding education to children of families who could not otherwise afford it. This is by far the most generous bursary programme of any UK independent school and preserves the founding 1552 royal philanthropic intent.

The school's pupils wear the distinctive Christ's Hospital uniform — long blue coats, yellow stockings, white linen bands at the neck and a leather belt — unchanged since 1552. The blue-coat uniform has given Christ's Hospital its colloquial name of "the Bluecoat School". The school maintains the Christ's Hospital Marching Band, which leads the annual Lord Mayor's Show parade through the City of London every November.

Christ's Hospital's literary alumni list spans the founding figures of English Romanticism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge — co-founder with Wordsworth of English Romantic poetry, author of Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and the central literary critic of his generation — was a Christ's Hospital boy in the 1780s and was a close school friend of Charles Lamb (the essayist of Essays of Elia and co-author of Tales from Shakespeare). The Romantic essayist Leigh Hunt — friend of Byron, Shelley and Keats, editor of The Examiner, and the original of Harold Skimpole in Dickens's Bleak House — was at Christ's Hospital.

In the sciences, the astronomer Edmund Halley — whose name is preserved in the comet whose return he predicted, and who succeeded Newton's contemporary John Flamsteed as Astronomer Royal in 1720 — was a Christ's Hospital boy in the 1670s. The engineer Sir Barnes Wallis CBE FRS — the inventor of the bouncing bomb used by the RAF Dam Busters in the 1943 raids on the Mohne, Eder and Sorpe dams, and the designer of the Wellington bomber and the R100 airship — was a Christ's Hospital boy in the Edwardian period. Sir George Thomson, who shared the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the wave properties of the electron, was the son of Sir J. J. Thomson (himself a Nobel Laureate for discovering the electron itself) and was educated at Christ's Hospital.