Showing 13 results

A series of letters from Henry Mordaunt Clavering to John Benn, written between April 1846 and May 1850; Clavering was by then blind, so the hand is that of an amanuensis. There are many reminiscences about the school in the late 1770s and early 1780s, and many references to Old Westminsters both then and now. HMC is also interested in the current state of the school – the numbers, the curriculum (changing under Liddell), the physical environs and the Latin Play. Each correspondent had clearly kept up his classics, for there are numerous Latin quotations. Medical matters feature prominently, both ailments and their treatment (hardly surprising, according to HMC, given their age). The letters show a keen and wide-ranging interest in other matters – food prices, the impact of the new rail roads, Ireland and the Irish rebellion, religion, literature (but he abominates fiction), and social and political issues (e.g. the make-up of the government, the Chartist Riots, rebellious movements both at home and in Europe, the Repeal of the Corn Laws).

The personal papers of Sir Nicholas Bevan, a pupil at Westminster School between 1955 and 1960. The papers include documents from his time at the school, such as: reports, a press clipping, a telegraph, an order of prayer, correspondence from the Head Master and his entry for the Latin prose prize. The papers also include copies of The Elizabethan acquired as an Old Westminster.

Letters to John Peter Winckworth (1908-1986), solicitor and author, 1931-1969

John Peter Winckworth was born on 2 November 1908, youngest of the three children of Lewis Herbert Winckworth (1864-1940), solicitor, and Ruthella Theodora, elder daughter of the Revd Herbert Clementi-Smith of Holland Park Avenue, Kensington, chaplain to the Mercers’ Company. In September 1922 he entered Grants House at Westminster School (also attended by his father and three uncles) and left in July 1927.

Admitted as a solicitor in October 1932, he practised in London, in 1947 with Messrs Trollope and Winckworth of 21 Old Queen Street, Westminster. Winckworth was one of the originators of the Seven Years’ Association, established at the 1933 Anglo-Catholic Congress to form ‘a youth auxiliary to the Church Union’. In 1948 he became Registrar of the Diocese of Oxford, and subsequently served as a Church Commissioner, Master of the Worshipful Company of Mercers 1961-2, a governor of St Paul’s School and Secretary of the Church Union.

He joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in August 1940, and was transferred to the Training Progress Section of the Air Ministry in 1941.

Winckworth was author of Does Religion Cause War? (1934); Sensible Christians (1935); The Way of War: Verses (1939); A Simple Approach to Canon Law (1951); The Seal of the Confessional and the Law of Evidence (1952); A Verification of the Faculty Jurisdiction (1953); and A History of the Gresham Lectures (1966).

He died at Eastbourne on 28 April 1986, and a requiem mass was held at St Matthew’s Church Westminster on 23 June.

His portrait, by Richard Aylmer Frost (1905-1995), a Westminster contemporary, 1924, is among the collections of the school (GB 2014 WS-03-PIC-002/29).

Some of the letters were sold at Messrs Gorringes of Lewes on 30 October 2023, and others were sold by private treaty to the archive of St Paul’s School; all have been replaced by copies.