Kimbolton School

Kimbolton School traces its earliest origins to the 1531 endowment of a school in the Cambridgeshire village of Kimbolton, and was formally re-founded in 1600 by Henry Balye and William Dawson. The school has operated continuously in Kimbolton ever since. In 1950 it took possession of Kimbolton Castle — one of the great houses of Cambridgeshire and historically the seat of the Dukes of Manchester. Kimbolton Castle is most famous as the residence of Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of King Henry VIII, after the annulment of her marriage; she died at the Castle in January 1536. The school today is co-educational, ages 4-18, with around 1,082 pupils, of whom approximately 700 are in the Senior School and 300 in the Preparatory School. The Headmaster is Will Chuter.

Kimbolton is a member of the HMC and the BSA. Day and limited boarding (including flexi-boarding from age 11) are offered. The Castle setting gives the school an unusual architectural and historical character: pupils walk through Catherine of Aragon's former apartments to lessons, and the school's Great Hall is the same room in which the Tudor queen lived out her final years.

Notable past masters of Kimbolton have included Henry Peacham, a writer who served as an assistant master in the early seventeenth century and who wrote The Compleat Gentleman (1622) — a foundational treatise on the English gentry's education; the leading Welsh-language poet Waldo Williams, who taught at Kimbolton during the Second World War; the BBC Sport radio commentator Peter Jones; and the Reverend Ronald Lancaster MBE, who was Chemistry master and School Chaplain from 1963 to 1988 and who founded Kimbolton Fireworks in 1964 — the company that has subsequently designed the firework displays for major British state and royal events. The Commonwealth Games gold-medal hammer-thrower Howard Payne (1962, 1966 and 1970) also served on the school staff.

In the school's alumni list: Edward Maria Wingfield — the Elizabethan colonist who served as the first governor of the Jamestown colony in Virginia in 1607 — was an Old Kimboltonian. The school operates a substantial bursary programme.