Stonyhurst Saint Mary's Hall

SMH logo, introduced in 2010

Stonyhurst College was founded in 1593 as the English Jesuit College at St Omers in present-day France, at a time when Catholic education was prohibited by law in England. Having moved to Bruges in 1762 and then Liège in 1773, due to the persecution of the Jesuit order which ran the school, it finally settled at Stonyhurst in 1794. An attempt had been made to found a preparatory school to the College at St Omers, which would have been based in Boulogne, but this was abandoned and ultimately thwarted by the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1762.[2] In 1768 new buildings were erected for a preparatory school at Bruges; this 'Little College' was closed in 1775, two years after the migration of the College to Liège.[3] Thirteen years after the settlement in England the preparatory school was finally established in 1807.[4]

Hodder Place, former Jesuit novitiate and preparatory school

The Stonyhurst Estate donated by an old boy of the College at St Omers, Thomas Weld, included the Shireburn family Hall and a large building on the edge of the River Hodder, Hodder Place. The latter opened as a Jesuit novitiate when the Jesuits were formally re-established in Britain in 1803. Four years later, preparatory, the youngest pupils in the school, which had settled in the Hall, were transferred to Hodder Place. It was not until 1855, however, that the preparatory school was formally opened. The building underwent extension in 1836 and again in 1869 when two towers were constructed on either side.[5]

Hodder Place continued to function as the preparatory school to the College until 1970 when it was shut and converted into residential flats. A rugby pitch still remains adjacent to the building and is very occasionally used today by St Mary's Hall both for sports and, during the summer, as a campsite for boarding pupils, under the supervision of the boarding staff.

SMH from across the sports pitches

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Between 1828 and 1830, a new building in Georgian style was constructed closer to the college and opened as the new novitiate, St Mary's Hall. In the nineteenth century, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins trained as a priest there, and in the twentieth century John Tolkien, son of J.R.R. Tolkien, also trained there.

The building was extended with two symmetrical wings on either side in the 1850s when the symmetry of the College's south front was also finally completed.

St Mary's Hall continued to function as a seminary until 1926 when the seminarians were moved to Heythrop Hall in Oxfordshire. The building lay derelict until the English College moved in for the duration of the War. After their return to Rome, Figures Playroom was transferred from the College to St Mary's Hall, which opened as a middle school to Stonyhurst in 1946. When Hodder Place was closed in 1970, the pupils were moved across to St Mary's Hall to form Hodder Playroom. As successor to Hodder Place, SMH has a claim to be the oldest surviving preparatory school in Britain.[1]

Since the addition of wings and the chapel extension in the nineteenth century, the buildings of St Mary's Hall changed comparatively little, except due to extensive fire damage in the 1980s, which destroyed much of the building's wooden panelling. In 1993, as part of the Stonyhurst Centenaries, celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of the school's founding and the two-hundredth anniversary of its settlement at Stonyhurst the year later, a new state-of-the-art theatre was built in the grounds, the Centenaries Theatre. Since then, the old theatre has been transformed into a new entrance and library, and, with the transition to co-education in 1997, girls' dormitories have been created in the old craft, design, and technology attic, and new changing facilities for girls created at the back of the Sports Hall.[1]

In 2004, the old gymnasium was converted into new Foundation Stage and KS1 facility, and named Hodder House. It educates children ages 3–7, making it now possible to undergo fifteen years of education at Stonyhurst.

Until 2007, SMH was officially known as "St Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst". The new Headmaster of the College, Andrew Johnson, insisted that a new name was necessary to bring the Stonyhurst campus closer together; SMH is now officially known as "Stonyhurst St Mary's Hall".[6]

Unlike most English public schools, Stonyhurst is organised horizontally by year groups (known as playrooms) rather than vertically by houses. Each playroom has an assigned playroom master, with each cohort moving through the playrooms, having a sequence of playroom masters (rather than being allocated into a house with housemaster for their whole time in the college, as happens in other schools).

Hodder House

• Pre-Nursery (2–3)
• Nursery (3–4)
• Pre-Prep (4–5)
• PP 1 (5–6)
• PP 2 (6–7)

Preparatory Playroom

• Lower Preparatory ('Lower Prep', 7–8)
• Upper Preparatory ('Upper Prep', 8–9)

Elements Playroom (formerly Hodder Playroom along with Preparatory)

• Lower Elements (9–10)
• Upper Elements (10–11)

Figures Playroom

• Figures (11–12)

Rudiments Playroom

• Rudiments ('Ruds', 12–13)[8]

Stonyhurst Park Cross.

In addition to the playrooms, there is also a system which cuts through the year groups, the "Lines", which are used mostly for sports and competitions. The Lines and colours are as follows:

• Campion (Red) (after St Edmund Campion)
• St Omers (Yellow, though some brown rugby shirts as yellow shows too much dirt) (after St Omer, the French town where the school was founded)
• Shireburn (Green) (after the Shireburn family that built Stonyhurst Hall)
• Weld (Blue) (after the Weld family that donated Stonyhurst)

Pupils remain in the same Line throughout their time at the school, and if their parents, older siblings, or grandparents etc. were also pupils, automatically enter the same Line

St Mary's Hall has a head boy and head girl, whose responsibilities include showing round prospective parents, and speech-giving. Various duties are also assigned to a staff-elected committee of Rudiments pupils.

At St Mary's Hall, behaviour is typically rewarded or punished through the use of "Line Cards". Each pupil carries their card at all times. It is signed on the left-hand side with a brief explanation by the teacher as a punishment, or "debit". It is signed on the right-hand side with an explanation as a reward or "credit". The cards are coloured according to Line membership. The total number of credits and debits, in part, determines which line is awarded a special Line Supper.

Line points are allotted for academic work and also contribute to the Line Supper allocation.

As at the college, the most severe punishment is permanent expulsion, and below that, temporary suspension.[9]

• Boys wear grey shorts and grey knee-length socks (except Rudiments and Figures who wear trousers), white shirt, green tie, green jumper, and green blazers.
• Girls wear white blouses, green ties, green jumpers, green blazers and skirts in the College tartan, known as Lady Borrowdale's gift and based on a fragment of tartan worn by Bonnie Prince Charlie on his journey from Culloden across to Skye. This was also worn on Queen Elizabeth II's visit to the College in 1990.[10]

Special ties are awarded for excellence in sport or for other achievements. Rudiments wear special ties with the school emblem repeated. Furthermore, the committee wear similar ties with red sections.

Drama classes are compulsory at St Mary's Hall, where additional classes may be taken in preparation for LAMDA examinations and entry into the Blackburn Festival. Plays are a regular fixture on the calendar, as are dramatic performances by pupils at the "Friday Presentations", when the school gathers on a Friday evening to be entertained by a talk or production in the Centenaries Theatre. Each year, the staff also stage the school pantomime; pupils are asked to gather in the theatre under the guise of a "staff announcement".[6]

SMH had until recently a small, rare-breeds farm with pigs, hens, rabbits, sheep, fish, and birds. Known as "The Ark", it was looked after by the children, under the supervision of staff. The Ark was closed due to animal welfare concerns.

• 
  A classroom at SMH, 2003
• 
  The Centenaries Theatre, 2003
• 
  The small farm at SMH, 'The Ark', 2003
• 
  The sports pitch at Hodder Place, 2003