Hackney Downs School

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Hackney Downs School was a comprehensive secondary school, located near Hackney Downs, in the London Borough of Hackney. It was founded in 1876 as The Grocers' Company's School (official website).

History

The south side of Hackney Downs in London was once the site of the ill-fated Hackney Downs School, controversially described in the 1990s as the "worst school in Britain". The school started out in 1876 as the Worshipful Company of Grocers Hackney Downs Boys' School, later shortened to plain Hackney Downs, though it remained an all-boys school. As a grammar school, it won an excellent reputation, with alumni including Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, fellow playwright and actor Steven Berkoff and 60s tycoon John Bloom.

In 1974, it became a comprehensive school, and inherited more than its share of the problems of this deprived inner-city borough. Just before its closure, over 70 percent of the boys spoke English as a second language, half came from households with no-one in employment, and half the intake had reading ages three years below average. Things came to a head in the 1990s, when the school made national news by being described by the then Conservative government as the 'worst school in Britain'. Eventually, as a result of direct government pressure, the school was forced to close in 1995.

The decision remains controversial to this day, opponents of the closure pointing out that Hackney Downs was singled out for special treatment by the government (presumably pour encourager les autres) and that its academic results were not significantly worse than many other inner-city comprehensives, especially considering the problems it had inherited, including the steady 'decanting' of problem pupils—who had frequently been expelled from their original schools—to Hackney Downs. Ironically, this process may have started because of the school's good reputation.

The site of the old school is now occupied by Mossbourne Community Academy, founded by Sir Clive Bourne, which opened in 2004.

While the school buildings of both the original Grocers Company School and Hackney Downs School have been replaced by the new Mossbourne Academy, the Old Boys of Hackney Downs continue their interactions as alumni through The Clove Club, which meets regularly, has its own website, and sponsors a very active "e-mail list" called "The Clove eGroup", maintained by Chris Barrett (on Yahoo), and featured on The Clove Club website.^[1]

An official history of the school, written by the historian Professor Geoffrey Alderman (who was a pupil there 1955-62) was published by the Clove Club in 1971.

Notable alumni

• Steven Berkoff, actor, playwright, director
• John Bloom, 60s tycoon
• Eric Bristow, World Champion Darts Player
• Sir Michael Caine (Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, Jr.), CBE, Actor (attended in 1944-1945, when he was evacuated to King's Lynn during World War II)
• Cyril Domb, physicist
• Dalton Grant, British High Jumper
• Jerry Pam, Hollywood Agent and Member of the Finance Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; publicist of Sir Michael Caine^[2]
• Maurice Peston, Baron Peston of Mile End, English economist
• Harold Pinter, CBE, CH, and 2005 Nobel Laureate (attended from 1944 to 1948; evacuated to Cornwall during World War Two)
• Lt. Col. F. J. Roberts, Editor of the "Wipers Times"
• Norman Rose, Biographer of Sir Winston Churchill
• Barry Supple, Emeritus Professor of Economic History, University of Cambridge, and a former Director of the Leverhulme Trust (attended from 1942 to 1949)

Notes

References

External links

• The Clove Club ("Founded in 1884") – Official website of "The Clove Club: The Old Boys of Hackney Downs School, formerly The Grocers' Company's School – founded by The Company in its corporate right, in 1876."
• Obituary of former headmaster John Kemp