Stonyhurst Saint Mary's Hall


Stonyhurst St Mary's Hall is the preparatory school to Stonyhurst College. It is an independent co-educational Catholic school, for ages 3–11, founded by the Society of Jesus. It is adjacent to Stonyhurst College, outside the small village of Hurst Green, near Clitheroe in Lancashire, England. It is primarily a day school but has some boarders. Its building was constructed in 1830 and it is a Grade II Iisted building. Close by was Hodder Place School and in 1970 the pupils were transferred from Hodder Place to St Mary's Hall, giving St Mary's a claim to be the oldest preparatory school in the country.

History

Jesuit College

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 ended by the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1762. 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. Thirteen years after the settlement in England, the preparatory school was established in 1807.

Hodder Place

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, in 1807, preparatory schooling started when 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. Hodder Place continued to function as the preparatory school to the college until 1970 when it was shut and converted into residential flats.

St Mary's Hall

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 formation centre for Jesuits until 1926 when they were moved to Heythrop Hall in Oxfordshire. During World War Two, the building lay derelict until the English College moved in for the war's duration. After their return to Rome, the 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 the Hodder Playroom. As successor to Hodder Place, the school has a claim to be the oldest surviving preparatory school in Britain.
In the 1980s, a fire 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, the Centenaries Theatre was built. In 1997, the transition to becoming a fully co-educational school started. In 2004, with the opening of Hodder House, the pre-school for 3-year-olds, was created.
Until 2007, the school was officially known as "St Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst". That year, the school officially became known as "Stonyhurst St Mary's Hall".
In September 2024, the education of pupils aged 11 to 13 was transferred from St Mary's Hall to Stonyhurst College.

Religious life

St Mary's Hall is a Catholic school, overseen by the Jesuits. As such, the Jesuit ethos pervades the life of the school, with emphasis upon spiritual development, reasoning skills, and the creation of "Men and Women for Others", with focuses on prayer and charity.
St Mary's Hall has its own chapel where Mass is celebrated.
As at the college, pupils write AMDG in the top, left-hand corner of any piece of work they do. It stands for the Latin phrase Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam which means "To the Greater Glory of God". At the end of a piece of work they write L.D.S. in the centre of the page. It stands for Laus Deo Semper which means "Praise be to God Always". These are both traditional Jesuit mottoes.

School organisation

The playroom system

Unlike most English public schools, Stonyhurst is organised horizontally by year groups rather than vertically by houses.

Lines

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
  • St Omers
  • Shireburn
  • Weld
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.

Academic

In Rudiments, pupils sit the Common Entrance and/or the 11+ Scholarship examinations in preparation for entry to the college. The Common Entrance examinations were only a recent addition to the school. Before that, pupils leaving St Mary's Hall took the Stonyhurst entrance exams, which were internally set.

Alumni

Notable Alumni:

Headmasters

Hodder Place

Superiors
  • 1856 George Lambert SJ
  • 1857 George Tickell SJ
  • 1858 John Laurenson
  • 1865 Francis Brownbill SJ
  • 1869 Matthew Newsham SJ
  • 1875 Walter Bridge SJ
  • 1876 Francis Cassidy SJ
  • 1878 William Kerr SJ
  • 1880 Francis Scholes SJ
  • 1882 William Burns SJ
  • 1884 Charles Clarke SJ
  • 1885 Francis Cassidy SJ
  • 1916 Edward King SJ
  • 1916 Walter Weld SJ
  • 1925 Aloysius Parkinson SJ
  • 1927 Leo Belton SJ
  • 1939 Hubert McEvoy SJ
  • 1942-9 Walter Weld SJ
Ministers
Headmasters
  • 1965 Denis Unsworth
  • 1968 Mr. Earle
  • 1970 Rob Sinclair
  • 1971 John Mallinson

St Mary's Hall

Ministers
  • 1946 Dermot Whyte SJ
  • 1948 Philip Prime SJ
  • 1954 William Maher SJ
  • 1959 Anthony Powell SJ
Headmasters
  • 1965 R Vaughan Rigby OS
  • 1968 Rae Carter
  • 1978 Peter Anwyl
  • 1990 Rory O'Brien
  • 1999 Michael Higgins
  • 2004 Laurence Crouch
  • 2014 Ian Murphy
  • 2022 Fr Christopher Cann