Eltham College

Eltham College was founded in 1842 as the School for the Sons of Missionaries by the London Missionary Society — an Evangelical Christian organisation engaged in foreign mission work across China, India, Africa and the South Pacific. The school's original purpose was to provide a free boarding education to the sons of British missionaries serving overseas, who would otherwise have been without an English education. The school operated under this missionary remit through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; many Old Elthamians of the period subsequently followed their fathers into Christian missionary service. The school broadened to general fee-paying admission in the post-war period and became fully co-educational in the 1970s. It is now an HMC day school of around 1,075 pupils aged 7-18 on a 70-acre campus at Mottingham, south-east London. The Headmaster is Guy Sanderson.

Eltham's most internationally famous alumnus is Eric Liddell — the Scottish athlete who, at the 1924 Paris Olympics, won gold in the 400 metres on a Sunday despite his Christian convictions about Sabbath observance. The story is told in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire, which dramatises Liddell's refusal to run his preferred event (the 100 metres) when its heats were scheduled for a Sunday, his switch to the 400 metres, and his subsequent gold medal. Liddell was the son of a London Missionary Society missionary in China; he attended Eltham as a boarder during his parents' missionary service, then read science at Edinburgh University, then returned to China as a missionary. He died in a Japanese internment camp in 1945. Eltham continues to commemorate Liddell with the Eric Liddell Sports Centre.

In literature, Mervyn Peake — the author of the Gormenghast trilogy (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone), one of the foundational works of mid-twentieth-century English fantasy and the precursor to the work of Tolkien, Susanna Clarke and Mervyn Wall — attended Eltham in the 1920s before training at the Royal Academy Schools. Peake was the son of London Missionary Society missionaries in China and his Eltham education was paid for by the school's missionary endowment.

In music: Sir Henry Wood, the founder of the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts ("The Proms"), one of the great institutions of British concert music, was an Old Elthamian. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Eltham College Foundation.