Hugh Walpole
Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE was an English novelist. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, intended for a career in the church but drawn instead to writing. Among those who encouraged him were Arnold Bennett, his skill at scene-setting and vivid plots, as well as his high profile as a lecturer, brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s but has been neglected since his death. After his first novel, The Wooden Horse, in 1909, Walpole wrote prolifically, producing at least one book every year, he was a spontaneous story-teller, writing to get all his ideas on paper revising. His first novel to achieve major success was his third, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, a tragicomic story of a fatal clash between two schoolmasters. During the First World War he served in the Red Cross on the Russian-Austrian front, worked in British propaganda in Petrograd and London. In the 1920s and 1930s Walpole was much in demand not only as a novelist but as a lecturer on literature, making four exceptionally well-paid tours of North America.
As a gay man at a time when homosexual practices were illegal for men in Britain, Walpole conducted a succession of intense but discreet relationships with other men, was for much of his life in search of what he saw as "the perfect friend". He found one, a married policeman, with whom he settled in the English Lake District. Having as a young man eagerly sought the support of established authors, he was in his years a generous sponsor of many younger writers, he was a patron of the visual arts and bequeathed a substantial legacy of paintings to the Tate Gallery and other British institutions. Walpole's output was large and varied. Between 1909 and 1941 he wrote thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two original plays and three volumes of memoirs, his range included disturbing studies of the macabre, children's stories and historical fiction, most notably his Herries Chronicle series, set in the Lake District. He worked in Hollywood writing scenarios for two Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films in the 1930s, played a cameo in the 1935 version of David Copperfield.
Walpole was born in Auckland, New Zealand, the eldest of three children of the Rev Somerset Walpole and his wife, Mildred Helen, née Barham. Somerset Walpole had been an assistant to the Bishop of Truro, Edward White Benson, from 1877 until 1882, when he was offered the incumbency of St Mary's Cathedral Church, Auckland. Mildred Walpole found it hard to settle in New Zealand, something of her restlessness and insecurity affected the character of her eldest child. In 1889, two years after the birth of the couple's daughter, Somerset Walpole accepted a prominent and well-paid academic post at the General Theological Seminary, New York. Robert, the third of the couple's children, was born in New York in 1892. Hugh and Dorothy were taught by a governess until the middle of 1893, when the parents decided that he needed an English education. Walpole was sent to England, where according to his biographer Rupert Hart-Davis the next ten years were the unhappiest time of Walpole's life, he first attended a preparatory school in Truro.
Though he missed his family and felt lonely he was reasonably happy, but he moved to Sir William Borlase's Grammar School in Marlow in 1895, where he was bullied and miserable. He said, "The food was inadequate, the morality was'twisted', Terror – sheer, stark unblinking Terror – stared down every one of its passages... The excessive desire to be loved that has always played so enormous a part in my life was bred I think, from the neglect I suffered there". In 1896 Somerset Walpole discovered his son's horror of the Marlow school and he moved him to the King's School, Canterbury. For two years he was a content, though undistinguished, pupil there. In 1897 Walpole senior was appointed principal of Bede College and Hugh was moved again, to be a day boy for four years at Durham School, he found that day boys were looked down on by boarders, that Bede College was the subject of snobbery within the university. His sense of isolation increased, he continually took refuge in the local library, where he read all the novels of Jane Austen, Henry Fielding and Dickens and many of the works of Trollope, Wilkie Collins and Henry Kingsley.
Walpole wrote in 1924: I grew up... discontented, abnormally sensitive, excessively conceited. No one liked me – not masters, friends of the family, nor relations who came to stay. I was untidy, excessively gauche. I believed that I was profoundly misunderstood, that people took my pale and pimpled countenance for the mirror of my soul, that I had marvellous things of interest in me that would one day be discovered. Though Walpole was no admirer of the schools he had attended there, the cathedral cities of Truro and Durham made a strong impression on him, he drew on aspects of them for his fictional cathedral city of Polchester in Glebeshire, the setting of many of his books. Walpole's memories of his time at Canterbury grew mellower over the years. From 1903 to 1906 Walpole studied history at Cambridge. While there he had his first work published, the critical essay "Two Meredithian Heroes", printed in the college magazine in autumn 1905; as an undergraduate he met and fell under the spell of A. C.
Benson a loved master at Eton, by this time a don at Magdalene College. Walpole's religious beliefs, hitherto an unquestioned part of his life, were fad
Jonathan Cape
Jonathan Cape is a London publishing firm founded in 1921 by Herbert Jonathan Cape, head of the firm until his death in 1960. Cape and his business partner Wren Howard set up the publishing house in 1921, they established a reputation for high quality design and production and a fine list of English-language authors, fostered by the firm's editor and reader Edward Garnett. Cape's list of writers ranged from poets including Robert Frost and C. Day Lewis, to children's authors such as Hugh Lofting and Arthur Ransome, to James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, to heavyweight fiction by James Joyce and T. E. Lawrence. After Cape's death, the firm merged successively with three other London publishing houses. In 1987 it was taken over by Random House, its name continues as one of Random House's British imprints. Herbert Jonathan Cape was born in London on 15 November 1879, the youngest of the seven children of Jonathan Cape, a clerk from Ireby in what is now Cumbria, his wife Caroline, née Page, he received a basic schooling and in his early teens he was taken on by Hatchards bookshop in Piccadilly as an errand-boy.
Four years in 1899, Cape joined the London office of the American publishers Harper and Brothers, where he worked, successively, as clerk, general utility man and travelling salesman, first in the provinces and in London. In 1904 he joined the publishing house of Duckworth as London traveller, from 1911 as manager. In 1914, on the outbreak of the Great War, he took over the sole charge of the business when the proprietor, Gerald Duckworth, was absent on war duties. In 1915 Duckworth returned. In December of that year Cape joined the army. Cape returned to Duckworth in 1918. In 1920 he was appointed manager of the Medici Society, known for publishing prints of paintings but with a small list of books. While in this post he met George Wren Howard, 14 years his junior, learning the publishing trade at the Medici Society. Cape's biographer Rupert Hart-Davis writes: Cape saw that Howard had a fine sense of design in book production, as well as a good business head. After some months they decided that there was no future for them where they were, that they had better start a new firm of their own.
Howard was able to raise money from his family. Cape, with no such option, raised his share of the starting capital by selling cheap paperback reprints of novels by Elinor Glyn. Duckworth did not wish to issue cut-price editions. With just enough starting capital, the firm of Jonathan Cape began trading on 1 January 1921 at 11 Gower Street, Bloomsbury. Cape and Howard recruited Edward Garnett as their reader. Garnett, described by The Times as "the prince of publisher's readers," remained with the firm until his death in 1937; each of the three principals brought his own contribution to the firm's success: Cape was experienced in publishing. Hart-Davis credits Garnett's literary judgment and Howard's production with gaining the firm an "outstanding reputation for quality during the next two decades"; the firm's first publication was regarded as a gamble: Cape published a new two-volume edition, at the high price of nine guineas, of C. M. Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta; the book, first published in 1888 with no success, had been out of print for 30 years.
The Cape edition had to be reprinted several times. Among those who admired it was T. E. Lawrence, who became friendly with Cape, wrote an introduction to the firm's 1926 single-volume edition of the book. Jonathan Cape Ltd became Lawrence's publishers, issuing Revolt in the Desert, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The Mint. In 1922 Cape took over the small publishing house A. C. Fifield, acquiring the rights to works by such authors as H. G. Wells, W. H. Davies, Sidney Webb and Samuel Butler. Cape was among the first British publishers to seek out American authors. Hart-Davis notes that the firm recruited three future Nobel prize-winners – Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill – as well as many other American writers including H. L. Mencken, Robert Frost, Margaret Mead. British and other European authors published by Cape included H. E. Bates, Peter Fleming, Robert Graves, Christopher Isherwood, James Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, André Maurois, Henry Williamson; the firm's best-sellers included Arthur Ransome's adventure books, Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle stories, most profitable of all, Ian Fleming's James Bond series.
Cape opened an American publishing house in 1929, first in partnership with Harrison Smith and with Robert Ballou. The firm was not successful and went bankrupt in 1932. Cape was three times widowed. In 1907 he married Edith Louisa Creak. Edith Cape died in 1919. In 1927 Cape married Olyve Vida James, with whom he had a daughter. In 1941 he married Kathleen Mary Webb. Cape suffered two strokes in 1954, which impaired his speech, he was still running the firm when he celebrated his 80th birthday in November 1959. He died at his London flat three months later, he was buried at Petersham. As the 1960s progressed, the firm courted and published authors who were representative of the age, including the Beatle John Lennon, the former "angry young man" Kingsley Amis. Cape signed up Len Deighton, whose series of s
David Garnett
David Garnett was a British writer and publisher. As a child, he had a cloak made of rabbit skin and thus received the nickname "Bunny", by which he was known to friends and intimates all his life. Garnett was born in Brighton, East Sussex, the only child of writer and publisher Edward Garnett and his wife Constance Clara Black, a translator of Russian. Through his father, he was descended from a writer and a philologist who both worked at what is now the British Library within the British Museum. Bloomsbury and the life of letters were embedded in David; as a conscientious objector in the First World War, Garnett worked on fruit farms in Suffolk and Sussex with his lover Duncan Grant. A prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group, Garnett received literary recognition when his novel Lady into Fox, an allegorical fantasy, was awarded the 1922 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, he ran a bookshop near the British Museum with Francis Birrell during the 1920s. He founded the Nonesuch Press.
He wrote the novel Aspects of Love, on which the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical of the same name was based. His first wife was the illustrator Rachel "Ray" Marshall, sister of the translator and diarist Frances Partridge, he and Ray, whose woodcuts appear in some of Garnett's books, had two sons, the older of, Richard Garnett, the writer. Ray died young of breast cancer. Garnett was bisexual, as were several members of the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group, he had affairs with Francis Birrell and Duncan Grant. On 25 December 1918 he was present at the birth of Grant's daughter by Vanessa Bell, accepted by Vanessa's husband Clive Bell. Shortly afterwards he wrote to a friend: "I think of marrying it; when she is 20, I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?" On 8 May 1942, when Angelica was in her early twenties, they did marry, to the horror of her parents. She did not find out until much that her husband had been a lover of her father; the Garnetts lived at Hilton Hall, near St Ives in Huntingdonshire, where David Garnett kept a herd of Jersey cows.
They had four daughters: in order, Amaryllis and the twins Nerissa and Frances. Amaryllis Virginia Garnett was an actress who had a small part in Harold Pinter's film adaptation of The Go-Between, she drowned in the Thames, aged 29. Henrietta Garnett married Lytton Burgo Partridge, her father's nephew by his first wife Ray, but was left a widow with a newborn infant when she was 18. Nerissa Garnett was an artist and photographer. Fanny Garnett moved to France. After his separation from Angelica, Garnett moved to France and lived in the grounds at the Château de Charry, Montcuq, in a house leased to him by the owners, Jo and Angela d'Urville. Garnett continued to write and lived there until his death in 1981. Liz Hodgkinson, "Poisoned Legacy of the Bloomsbury Group", Daily Mail, May 2012. Works by David Garnett at Project Gutenberg Works by or about David Garnett at Internet Archive Works by David Garnett at LibriVox
Macmillan Publishers
Macmillan Publishers Ltd is an international publishing company owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It operates in more than thirty others. Macmillan was founded in 1843 by Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, two brothers from the Isle of Arran, Scotland. Daniel was the business brain, while Alexander laid the literary foundations, publishing such notable authors as Charles Kingsley, Thomas Hughes, Francis Turner Palgrave, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold and Lewis Carroll. Alfred Tennyson joined the list in 1884, Thomas Hardy in 1886 and Rudyard Kipling in 1890. Other major writers published by Macmillan included W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Seán O'Casey, John Maynard Keynes, Charles Morgan, Hugh Walpole, Margaret Mitchell, C. P. Snow, Rumer Godden and Ram Sharan Sharma. Beyond literature, the company created such enduring titles as Nature, the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Sir Robert Harry Inglis Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy. George Edward Brett opened the first Macmillan office in the United States in 1869 and Macmillan sold its U.
S. operations to the Brett family, George Platt Brett, Sr. and George Platt Brett, Jr. in 1896, resulting in the creation of an American company, Macmillan Publishing called the Macmillan Company. With the split of the American company from its parent company in England, George Brett, Jr. and Harold Macmillan remained close personal friends. Macmillan Publishers re-entered the American market in 1954 under the name St. Martin's Press. Macmillan of Canada was founded in 1905. After retiring from politics in 1964, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Harold Macmillan became chairman of the company, serving until his death in December 1986, he had been with the family firm as a junior partner from 1920 to 1940, from 1945 to 1951 while he was in the opposition in Parliament. Holtzbrinck Publishing Group purchased the company in 1999. Pearson acquired the Macmillan name in America in 1998, following its purchase of the Simon & Schuster educational and professional group. Holtzbrinck purchased it from them in 2001.
McGraw-Hill continues to market its pre-kindergarten through elementary school titles under its Macmillan/McGraw-Hill brand. The US operations of Holtzbrinck Publishing changed its name to Macmillan in October 2017, its audio publishing imprint changed its name from Audio Renaissance to Macmillan Audio, while its distribution arm was renamed from Von Holtzbrinck Publishers Services to Macmillan Publishers Services. With Pan Macmillan's purchase of Kingfisher, a British children's publisher, Roaring Brook Press publisher Simon Boughton would take oversee Kingfisher's US business in October 2007. By some estimates, as of 2009 e-books account for three to five per cent of total book sales, are the fastest growing segment of the market. According to The New York Times and other major publishers "fear that massive discounting by retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Sony could devalue what consumers are willing to pay for books." In response, the publisher introduced a new boilerplate contract for its authors that established a royalty of 20 per cent of net proceeds on e-book sales, a rate five per cent lower than most other major publishers.
Following the announcement of the Apple iPad on 27 January 2010—a product that comes with access to the iBookstore—Macmillan gave Amazon.com two options: continue to sell e-books based on a price of the retailer's choice, with the e-book edition released several months after the hardcover edition is released, or switch to the agency model introduced to the industry by Apple, in which both are released and the price is set by the publisher. In the latter case, Amazon.com would receive a 30 per cent commission. Amazon responded by pulling all Macmillan books, both physical, from their website. On 31 January 2010, Amazon chose the agency model preferred by Macmillan. In April 2012, the United States Department of Justice filed United States v. Apple Inc. naming Apple and four other major publishers as defendants. The suit alleged that they conspired to fix prices for e-books, weaken Amazon.com's position in the market, in violation of antitrust law. In December 2013, a federal judge approved a settlement of the antitrust claims, in which Macmillan and the other publishers paid into a fund that provided credits to customers who had overpaid for books due to the price-fixing.
In 2010, Macmillan Education submitted to an investigation on grounds of fraudulent practices. The Macmillan division admitted to bribery in an attempt to secure a contract for an education project in southern Sudan; as a direct result of the investigation, sanctions were applied by the World Bank Group, namely a 6-year debarment declaring the company ineligible to be awarded Bank-financed contracts. In December 2011, Bedford and Worth Publishing Group, Macmillan's higher education group, changed its name to Macmillan Higher Education while retaining the Bedford and Worth name for its k–12 educational unit; that month, Brian Napack resigned as Macmillan president while staying on for transitional purposes. In May 2015, London-based Macmillan Science and Education merged with Berlin-based Springer Science+Business Media to form Springer Nature, jointly controlled by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group and BC Partners. US publishing divis
Geoffrey Keynes
Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes was an English surgeon and author. He began his career as a medic in World War I, before becoming a doctor at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where he made notable innovations in the fields of blood transfusion and breast cancer surgery. Keynes was a publishing scholar and bibliographer of English literature and English medical history, focussing on William Blake and William Harvey. Geoffrey Keynes was born on 25 March 1887 in England, his father was John Neville Keynes, an economics lecturer at the University of Cambridge and his mother was Florence Ada Brown, a successful author and a social reformer. Geoffrey Keynes was the third child, after his older brother, the prominent economist John Maynard Keynes, his sister Margaret, who married the Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Hill, he was educated at Rugby School. He was appointed literary executor for the estate of Brooke's death in 1915, he graduated from Pembroke College, where he earned a first-class degree in the Natural Sciences Tripos.
He was made an honorary fellow of Pembroke College. Keynes qualified for a scholarship to become a surgeon with the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Geoffrey Keynes delayed his medical education in order to serve in World War I, where he served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps and worked as a consultant surgeon, becoming an expert in blood transfusion, his experience in the First World War led him to publish Blood Transfusion, the first book on the subject written by a British author. Keynes founded the London Blood Transfusion Service with P. L. Oliver. Keynes was affected by the brutality and gore that he witnessed in the field, which may have influenced his dislike for radical surgery in his career. Keynes enlisted to be a consulting surgeon to the Royal Air Force at the outbreak of World War II. In 1944 he was promoted to the rank of acting air vice-marshal. Keynes began working full-time at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where he worked under George Gask and Sir Thomas Dunhill, after returning from World War I.
Keynes used his influence as an assistant surgeon to advocate for limited surgery instead of the invasive radical mastectomy. Frustrated with the mortality rate and gruesomeness of the radical mastectomy, Keynes experimented by inserting fifty milligrams of radium in a patient's tumor, he observed that, "The ulcer healed... and the whole mass became smaller and less fixed."Keynes pursued his new idea through a number of trials, observing the effectiveness of injecting radium chloride into breast cancer tumors compared with the effectiveness of the radical mastectomy. The promising results of these trials led Keynes to be cautiously optimistic, writing in 1927 that the "extension of operation beyond a local removal might sometimes be unnecessary." Keynes' outlook was considered a radical break from the medical consensus at the time. Keynes wrote in his autobiography that his work with radium "was regarded with some interest by American surgeons," but that the concept of a limited mastectomy failed to gain significant traction in the medical community at the time.
His doubts regarding the radical mastectomy were vindicated some fifty years when innovators like Bernard Fisher and others revisited his data and pursued what became known as a lumpectomy. Limited surgeries, like the lumpectomy, accompanied by radiation are now the status quo in breast cancer treatment. Keynes a pioneer in the treatment of myasthenia gravis. Much like with breast cancer, the medical community knew little about how to treat the disease at the time. Keynes pioneered the removal of the Thymus Gland, now the norm in treatment of myasthenia gravis. Keynes was knighted for his work in the field of medicine in 1955. Keynes maintained a passionate interest in English literature all his life and devoted a large amount of his time to literary scholarship and the science of bibliography, he was a leading authority on the artistic work of William Blake. He produced biographies and bibliographies of English writers such as Sir Thomas Browne, John Evelyn, Siegfried Sassoon, John Donne and Jane Austen.
He was a pioneer in the history of science, with studies of John Ray, William Harvey and Robert Hooke. His biography The Life of William Harvey was awarded the 1966 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Keynes collected books, with a personal library with around four thousand works, his autobiography The Gates of Memory was published in 1981, he died the following year, aged 95. The Gates of Memory includes anecdotes of Keynes' numerous run-ins and friendships with other famous public figures. For example, Keynes went climbing with George Mallory, the renowned British mountaineer. On 12 May 1917 Keynes married Margaret Elizabeth Darwin, the daughter of Sir George Howard Darwin and granddaughter of Charles Darwin, they had one daughter and four sons: Harriet Frances Keynes Richard Darwin Keynes Quentin George Keynes William Milo Keynes Stephen John Keynes Keynes dedicated his life to his work, but was very sociable and had no problem making friends. He took pride in never having been drunk, was known by most as an affable, well-mannered man.
Geoffrey Keynes' contributions profoundly influenced the fields of surgery and English literature. He pioneered limited breast cancer surgery accompanied by radiation, a strategy that has endured the test of time, his work on William Blake had an larger impact, as Keynes "
The Old Vic
The Old Vic is a 1,000-seat, not-for-profit producing theatre, located just south-east of Waterloo station on the corner of the Cut and Waterloo Road in Lambeth, England. Established in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, renamed in 1833 the Royal Victoria Theatre, in 1871 it was rebuilt and reopened as the Royal Victoria Palace, it was taken over by Emma Cons in 1880 and formally named the Royal Victoria Hall, although by that time it was known as the "Old Vic". In 1898, a niece of Cons, Lilian Baylis, assumed management and began a series of Shakespeare productions in 1914; the building was damaged in 1940 during air raids and it became a Grade II* listed building in 1951 after it reopened. The Old Vic is the crucible of theatres in London today, it was the name of a repertory company, based at the theatre and formed the core of the National Theatre of Great Britain on its formation in 1963, under Laurence Olivier. The National Theatre remained at the Old Vic until new premises were constructed on the South Bank, opening in 1976.
The Old Vic became the home of Prospect Theatre Company, at that time a successful touring company which staged such acclaimed productions as Derek Jacobi's Hamlet. However, with the withdrawal of funding for the company by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1980 for breaching its touring obligations, Prospect disbanded in 1981; the theatre underwent complete refurbishment in 1985. In 2003, Kevin Spacey was appointed artistic director. Spacey served as artistic director until 2015. In 2015, Matthew Warchus succeeded Spacey as artistic director; the theatre was founded in 1818 by James King and Daniel Dunn, John Thomas Serres the marine painter to the King. Serres managed to secure the formal patronage of Princess Charlotte and her husband Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, named the theatre the Royal Coburg Theatre; the theatre was thus technically forbidden to show serious drama. When the theatre passed to George Bolwell Davidge in 1824 he succeeded in bringing legendary actor Edmund Kean south of the river to play six Shakespeare plays in six nights.
The theatre's role in bringing high art to the masses was confirmed when Kean addressed the audience during his curtain call saying "I have never acted to such a set of ignorant, unmitigated brutes as I see before me." More popular staples in the repertoire were "sensational and violent" melodramas demonstrating the evils of drink, "churned out by the house dramatist", confirmed teetotaller Douglas Jerrold. When Davidge left to take over the Surrey Theatre in 1833, the theatre was bought by Daniel Egerton and William Abbot, who tried to capitalise on the abolition of the legal distinction between patent and minor theatres, enacted in Parliament earlier that year. On 1 July 1833, the theatre was renamed the Royal Victoria Theatre, under the "protection and patronage" of Victoria, Duchess of Kent, mother to Princess Victoria, the 14-year-old heir presumptive to the British throne; the duchess and the princess visited only once, on 28 November of that year, but enjoyed the performance, of light opera and dance, in the "pretty...clean and comfortable" theatre.
The single visit scarcely justified the "Old Vic" its billing as "Queen Victoria's Own Theayter". By 1835, the theatre was advertising itself as the Victoria Theatre. In 1841, David Osbaldiston took over as lessee, was succeeded on his death in 1850 by his lover and the theatre's leading lady, Eliza Vincent, until her death in 1856. Under their management, the theatre remained devoted to melodrama. In 1858, sixteen people were crushed to death inside the theatre after mass panic caused while an actor's clothing caught fire. In 1867, Joseph Arnold Cave took over as lessee. In 1871 he transferred the lease to Romaine Delatorre, who raised funds for the theatre to be rebuilt in the style of the Alhambra Music Hall. Jethro Thomas Robinson was engaged as the architect. In September 1871 the old theatre closed, the new building opened as the Royal Victoria Palace in December of the same year, with Cave staying on as manager. By 1873, Cave had left and Delatorre's venture failed. In 1880, under the ownership of Emma Cons it became the Royal Victoria Hall and Coffee Tavern and was run on "strict temperance lines".
The "penny lectures" given in the hall led to the foundation of Morley College. An endowment from the estate of Samuel Morley led to the creation of the Morley Memorial College for Working Men and Women on the premises, which were shared; the adult education college moved to its own premises nearby in the 1920s. With Emma Cons's death in 1912 the theatre passed to her niece Lilian Baylis, who emphasised the Shakespearean repertoire; the Old Vic Company was established in 1929, led by Sir John Gielgud. Between 1925 and 1931, Lilian Baylis championed the re-building of the then-derelict Sadler's Wells Theatre, established a ballet company under the direction of Dame Ninette de Valois. For a few years the drama and ballet companies rotated between the two theatres, with the ballet becoming permanently based at Sadler's Wells in 1935; the Old Vic was damaged badly during the Blitz, the war-depleted company spent all its time touring, based in Burnley, Lancashire at the Victoria Theatre during the years 1940 to 1943.
In 1944
Eton College
Eton College is an English 13–18 independent boarding school and sixth form for boys in the parish of Eton, near Windsor in Berkshire. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor, as a sister institution to King's College, making it the 18th-oldest Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference school. Eton is one of the original nine public schools as defined by the Public Schools Act 1868; the others are Harrow, Rugby, Westminster, Merchant Taylors' and St Paul's. Following the public school tradition, Eton is a full boarding school, which means pupils live at the school seven days a week, it is one of only five such remaining single-sex boys' public schools in the United Kingdom; the remainder have since become co-educational: Rugby, Charterhouse and Shrewsbury and Merchant Taylors', now a day school. Eton has educated 19 British prime ministers and generations of the aristocracy and has been referred to as "the chief nurse of England's statesmen".
Eton charges up to £12,910 per term, with three terms per academic year, in 2017/18. Eton was noted as being the sixth most expensive HMC boarding school in the UK in 2013/14, however the school admits some boys with modest parental income: in 2011 it was reported that around 250 boys received "significant" financial help from the school, with the figure rising to 263 pupils in 2014, receiving the equivalent of around 60% of school fee assistance, whilst a further 63 received their education free of charge. Eton has announced plans to increase the figure to around 320 pupils, with 70 educated free of charge, with the intention that the number of pupils receiving financial assistance from the school continues to increase. Eton College was founded by King Henry VI as a charity school to provide free education to 70 poor boys who would go on to King's College, founded by the same King in 1441. Henry took Winchester College as his model, visiting on many occasions, borrowing its statutes and removing its headmaster and some of the scholars to start his new school.
When Henry VI founded the school, he granted it a large number of endowments, including much valuable land. The group of feoffees appointed by the king to receive forfeited lands of the Alien Priories for the endowment of Eton were as follows: Archbishop Chichele Bishop Stafford Bishop Lowe Bishop Ayscough William de la Pole, 1st Marquess of Suffolk John Somerset, Chancellor of the Exchequer and the king's doctor Thomas Beckington, Archdeacon of Buckingham, the king's secretary and Keeper of the Privy Seal Richard Andrew, first Warden of All Souls College, Oxford the king's secretary Adam Moleyns, Clerk of the Council John Hampton of Kniver, Staffordshire, an Esquire of the Body James Fiennes, another member of the Royal Household William Tresham, another member of the Royal HouseholdIt was intended to have formidable buildings and several religious relics including a part of the True Cross and the Crown of Thorns, he persuaded the Pope, Eugene IV, to grant him a privilege unparalleled anywhere in England: the right to grant indulgences to penitents on the Feast of the Assumption.
The college came into possession of one of England's Apocalypse manuscripts. However, when Henry was deposed by King Edward IV in 1461, the new King annulled all grants to the school and removed most of its assets and treasures to St George's Chapel, Windsor, on the other side of the River Thames. Legend has it that Jane Shore, intervened on the school's behalf, she was able to save a good part of the school, although the royal bequest and the number of staff were much reduced. Construction of the chapel intended to be over twice as long, with 18, or 17, bays was stopped when Henry VI was deposed. Only the Quire of the intended building was completed. Eton's first Headmaster, William Waynflete, founder of Magdalen College and Head Master of Winchester College, built the ante-chapel that completed the chapel; the important wall paintings in the chapel and the brick north range of the present School Yard date from the 1480s. As the school suffered reduced income while still under construction, the completion and further development of the school has since depended to some extent on wealthy benefactors.
Building resumed when Roger Lupton was Provost, around 1517. His name is borne by the big gatehouse in the west range of the cloisters, fronting School Yard the most famous image of the school; this range includes the important interiors of the Parlour, Election Hall, Election Chamber, where most of the 18th century "leaving portraits" are kept. "After Lupton's time nothing important was built until about 1670, when Provost Allestree gave a range to close the west side of School Yard between Lower School and Chapel". This was remodelled and completed in 1694 by Matthew Bankes, Master Carpenter of the Royal Works; the last important addition to the central college buildings was the College Library, in the south range of the cloister, 1725–29, by Thomas Rowland. It has a important collection of books and manuscripts. In the 19th century, the architect John Shaw Jr became surveyor to Eton, he designed New Buildings, Provost Francis Hodgson's addition to provide better accommodation for collegers, who until had lived in Long Chamber, a long f
