“A CERTAINE SCHOOL”
The speaker Gwerfyl Gardner The Cowbridge u3a History meeting in November 2022 was scheduled to consist of three talks by members, but circumstances unfortunately conspired to reduce this to a single presentation by Gwerfyl Gardner. Her subject was entitled “A Certaine School”*, an illustrated history of Cowbridge Grammar School, which her husband had attended in the 1950s.
The school is not, as erroneously claimed by Iolo Morganwg, the oldest educational foundation in the western world, but its origins do date back to the early 1600s when it was founded in Cowbridge by the Stradling family and was located in Friar’s Tower near the North Gate. The school later moved to a house within the town walls, when it was established as an endowed municipal school, with an obligation to give free education to the sons of poor burgesses of Cowbridge. The master of the school was, however, expected to attract fee-paying pupils to subsidise the free ones.
Sir Leoline Jenkins claimed he had walked barefoot from Llantrisant to the Cowbridge school as a pupil. He obviously prospered there educationally, going up to Jesus College in 1641. He was a Royalist and left for the safety of the Continent during the Civil War. After the Restoration, Jenkins was made a Fellow of Jesus College and served as Principal between 1661 and 1672. In a glittering career, he was made Secretary of State in 1680 and also served as a Member of Parliament.
It was Sir Leoline who purchased his old alma mater, Cowbridge Grammar School, by then down to 30 pupils, and re-established it as an educational centre of significance. The three cockerels on his coat of arms were to be replicated on that of the school.
| Sir Leoline Jenkins | Cowbridge Grammar School |
On his death in 1685, Sir Leoline bequeathed the school to Jesus College, who owned it until 1918. Construction commenced in 1848 of a new building, in the style of an Oxford College, in Church Road, Cowbridge. This housed three dormitories for boarders and has been converted into residential units since it became surplus to requirement.
As the school grew, other buildings in the town were used, among them Ramoth school room, the ballroom above the Pavilion Cinema, Great House and the family home of the Edmondes family, Old Hall (acquired in 1932). There was even a tuck shop on the High Street. The present Physic Garden was the Grammar School’s kitchen garden. A new school block was constructed on Mill Lane.
Idwal Rees was the long-serving headmaster of Cowbridge Grammar School, being appointed at the age of 27 in 1938, before retiring in 1971. He played club rugby for Swansea and Cambridge University, and was capped 14 times for Wales. Not surprisingly, rugby became an important part of the curriculum, along with Latin.
The actor Sir Anthony Hopkins was apparently an unhappy boarder at the Grammar School in the 1950s, as he did not excel at Latin or rugby!
The Grammar School was replaced in 1974 by the comprehensive school, which is now housed on a single site in Aberthin Road.
Steve Monaghan
* from "A Certaine School: a History of Cowbridge Grammar School" by Iolo Davies
