Hymers College

Hymers College was founded in 1893 under the terms of the will of the Reverend Dr John Hymers — the Rector of Brandesburton in the East Riding of Yorkshire and a Cambridge mathematician — who left a substantial sum for the founding of a school in Kingston upon Hull "for the training of intelligence in whatever social rank." Hymers's posthumous bequest of 1887 was used to establish the school on the site of the former Hull Botanical Gardens, where the principal buildings still stand. The school is co-educational, ages 4-18, with around 1,029 pupils and is a member of the HMC. The Headmaster is Justin Stanley.

Hymers's most internationally significant alumnus is Ralph Hooper CBE, the aeronautical engineer who served as the chief designer of two of the defining post-war British military aircraft: the Hawker Siddeley Harrier 'Jump Jet' (the world's first practical vertical/short take-off and landing fighter, used by the Royal Navy and the US Marine Corps for decades) and the BAE Hawk advanced jet trainer (still used by the Red Arrows display team and air forces around the world). In science, the Oxford cosmologist Edward Arthur Milne FRS — pioneer of kinematic relativity and the theory of stellar atmospheres in the inter-war period — was a Hymers pupil; and the cognitive neuroscientist Jon Driver FRS, who served as Director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience until his death in 2011, was an Old Hymerian.

The historian A. G. Dickens, whose The English Reformation (1964) defined a generation of Tudor historical scholarship, was educated at Hymers. The Tory politician John Townend, the former British Ambassador Sir Ian MacLennan KCMG, the Guardian parliamentary sketch-writer Simon Hoggart and the Oxford mathematician Peter M. Neumann (whose obituary appeared in The Times in 2020) are also Old Hymerians. In sport: the Olympic swimmer Kevin Boyd; the former England U21 footballer David Prutton; the England Rugby Sevens player Rob Vickerman; and the tennis professionals Katie O'Brien. The RAF pilot John Fancy — famous for his multiple escapes from German POW camps during the Second World War — was a Hymers boy. The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the John Hymers Foundation.