Uppingham and the Borth Exile

Every year in the Chapel, the Uppingham community gathers to celebrate a key episode in the School’s history. It is a story of exile and return; rejection and welcome; disaster and triumph. It is a story which continues to inspire the School today and has an extraordinary resonance with our current situation.

In the winter of 1875, Uppingham found itself awash with filth. Monsoon conditions (eight times normal rainfall) brought flooding in June and October, and severe frosts badly damaged what was, in any case, a pretty ramshackle drainage system. There was a lengthy stand-off between School and town authorities, both of whom thought the other should pay for repairs. Meanwhile, the air on The Middle playing fields was almost unbreathable for the stench of rot and decay.

From the upper slope of the Arboretum, up by West Deyne, broken pipework leached raw sewage into the soil, and polluted the wells from which much of the water for washing and cooking was drawn. The Lower School cesspits (into which toilet buckets and the like were emptied) stood on a site now occupied by The Lodge. At the end of every term, they would be pumped out, and the fertile liquid tipped onto the School celery beds. Ultimately, everything drained down the hill into the brook that runs across the Cinder Track – the same water in which the school would go swimming, a little further downstream.

Unsurprisingly, typhoid arrived. Symptoms: stomach cramps, unstoppable diarrhoea, fever; and, for some, delirium, blood-poisoning, death. The first case was a young boy in Lower School. It was June. After the Summer holidays, five more– including the son of the Housemaster of West Deyne – and a further 45 non-fatal cases. In January 1876, after the Christmas break, further deaths: West Deyne again, Redgate, School House.

Headmaster, Edward Thring and his masters realised that the school was on the point of collapse. Alarmed parents threatened to take their boys away. New parents were deciding not to send their children to Uppingham. It was even hard to get people to work in the boarding House. Faced with the ruin of everything Thring and his staff opted for one, last throw of the dice: it was decided to evacuate the entire school. 

And so, Uppingham took flight to Wales, not to return until April 1877.  After rapid research, Thring settled on the small seaside town of Borth – about seven miles from Aberystwyth, and 180 from Rutland. Contracts were hurriedly signed with the Cambrian Hotel (fortunately empty of paying guests) and countless elderly ladies who had a spare front room in their cottage. A large wooden classroom began to be built and, within days, chartered trains were hauling tons of iron bedstead, desks, and even a cricket roller to Borth Station; followed a month later by the boys.

On first arrival, it must have felt like some terrible exile. Thring’s deputy, John Huntley Skrine describes how, when the Uppingham masters alighted at Borth Station they found themselves unable to communicate with the locals, who could only speak Welsh. Uppingham boys hit the same problem with their landladies. One of them complained to Thring that his “very wicked boys” had been making fun of her. They hadn’t – but their enthusiastic miming had been misinterpreted. One of Borth town’s leaders later admitted that the locals had feared Uppingham’s invasion, just like ancient Rome had feared the invasion of the barbarian hordes.

After two years of political wrangling, brinksmanship and appeals, a start was finally made on renewing the town drainage system and Thring agreed it was safe for the School to return home.

The remarkable thing – indeed, one of the minor miracles of the flight to Borth – was that this strange, remote place rapidly became a place of welcome. A poor, working-class fishing community, many of whose inhabitants did not even have a language in common with Uppingham, came genuinely to love the upper-class English boys and their Oxford-educated masters; and Uppingham came to love the people of Borth in return. In speeches made on the evening before the School returned to Rutland, Mr Jones (who ran Borth’s Public Baths) admitted that his opinion of Uppingham boys had been transformed  within a week ‘for’, he said, ‘instead of laughing at the quaintness of some of the Welsh costumes or the peculiarities of the nation, they had obtained the goodwill of the inhabitants by their gentleness of demeanour, and completely won their hearts’. Thring, replying on behalf of Uppingham, said something even more meaningful. “We came among you as strangers … [but] we part from you as friends.”

Against all the odds, the story of Uppingham’s ‘Borth exile’ became a narrative of hope.  Even now, in its annual commemoration, the School remembers that it is possible to go through times of great trouble, and emerge not destroyed but strengthened. The School stepped into the unknown with faith, and the School did not fail.