By J Miller
Parents want their children to lead happy, fulfilling lives, filled with joy and positive experiences. Investing in a child’s education for those who can, forms part of a parents' aspirations to give their child the very best start in life.
When choosing a school, lower-priority criteria might include the achievements of past pupils, especially recent leavers – the universities they attended and the careers they pursued.
A school’s ethos can be enduring. The alumni a school highlights reveals the character it aims to embody. An affinity with the life of a former pupil, and the alma mater’s celebration of that pupil's achievements, may influence your decision. This is particularly true of schools that boast of their sporting alumni and musical prodigies.
This article was not written with input from the schools mentioned; any representation of their ethos is coincidental. This article explores the diverse achievements of these lesser-known individuals out of curiosity, looking back through history to remember some interesting lives of Edinburgh school alumni.
Belhaven Hill – Hugh Trevor-Roper
Hugh Trevor-Roper was arguably the most brilliant historian of his generation. Later Baron Dacre, he was born in Northumberland in 1914. His early life was marked by cold parenting and illness, both of which he overcame after attending Belhaven Hill, where he discovered a love for Latin, Greek, and French.
Like many brilliant men of his generation, he pursued multiple notable careers. During World War II, while an officer in the Radio Security Service (operating from Wormwood Scrubs), his team broke the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence Agency) code. This achievement, far from celebrated, nearly resulted in his court-martial for overstepping MI6's authority and led to his transfer to that same service.
In the Secret Service, Trevor-Roper encountered members of the Cambridge Five spy ring. He was friendly with Kim Philby but grew suspicious of him and considered Anthony Blunt "an intellectual snob of a particularly Cambridge kind." After the war, his superiors tasked him with investigating Hitler's death, which he detailed in his commercially successful book, The Last Days of Hitler.
A career in academia followed, distinguished by a prose style that inspired admiration and jealousy. Evelyn Waugh loathed him, and fellow historian A.J.P. Taylor once said one of Trevor-Roper's essays brought him to tears.
His illustrious career was later tarnished by his hasty authentication of alleged Hitler diaries while national director of The Times newspaper, earning him the Private Eye nickname "Hugh Trevor-Ropey." He learned to accept criticism, reflecting that despite the incident, he remained the same person.
He is remembered as one of the finest polemicists of his generation and significantly shrewder in his historical judgments than his rivals. He believed history should be understood as an art, with imagination as the historian's most valuable tool.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (1914-2003)
Cargilfield – James Kennaway
James Kennaway is often remembered for his tumultuous relationship with his wife, Susan Kennaway, and the writer David Cornwell (John le Carré). However, as a writer, he remains unjustly forgotten.
Born in Auchterarder to a father who died young and a doctor mother, he attended Cargilfield from age eight. He was head boy, then attended Glenalmond before national service, where he was commissioned into the 1st Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders.
After earning a PPE degree from Oxford, he drew inspiration from his Highlander experience for his first and most successful novel, Tunes of Glory. The screenplay, starring Alec Guinness, earned Kennaway an Oscar nomination in 1961. Posthumously, he received an Oscar in 1981 for the adaptation of his short story, "The Dollar Bottom."
His early writing is compared to Hemingway's—supple, muscular, with sharp, humorous dialogue. Later, he favored more experimental prose that retained the humor and self-criticism. His acute depiction of class and relationships keeps his work contemporary and readable. His platonic love affair with le Carré and its disintegration is chronicled in Some Gorgeous Accident.
Kennaway died in a car crash after a heart attack in 1968. A leading figure in a literary generation that challenged stuffy propriety, he should be remembered as a brilliant writer whose abilities were cut short by his untimely death.
James Peeble Ewing Kennaway (1928-1968)
Clifton Hall – Jim Clark
Jim Clark was one of the greatest racing drivers. This is evidenced not only by his followers but also by statistics. Clark won two F1 World Championship titles and, at the time of his death, held the record for most wins, pole positions, and fastest laps. His 71-year record for the highest percentage of laps in the lead was only broken by Max Verstappen in 2023. Three-time F1 champion Jackie Stewart considered Clark the best ever.
Born in Fife in 1936 and raised in the Borders, he attended Clifton Hall for three years before going to Loretto. He entered local races and, by 1958, was racing for the Border Reivers team in national events. A year later, he competed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, beginning his path to stardom.
Clark's first World Championship title (1963) was a remarkable recovery from one of F1's worst accidents (1961), which killed driver Wolfgang Von Trips and 13 spectators, highlighting the sport's extreme danger.
In 1964, Clark narrowly missed retaining his title due to an oil leak. However, he won again in 1965, also winning the Indianapolis 500, cementing his legacy as an elite all-around racer.
His career ended tragically in 1968 when his Lotus car crashed. Clark is remembered for his immense talent and his victories across various racing disciplines. He is buried in Chirnside, Berwickshire, with a memorial stone at the Hockenheimring circuit where he last raced.
James Clark (1936-1968)
Edinburgh Academy – Richard Haldane
Who was Richard Haldane? If he is remembered at all it is an overweight, Germanophile, dismissed from high office for, allegedly, an excess of those sympathies. That analysis may well bear some truth. However, the conclusions drawn by popular memory, or not drawn, miss the relevance of the man. He was a Germanophile – but it was his first-rate philosopher’s intellect that drew him to Hegel and his stint at a German university that invigorated his passion for improving the industry and quality of British education. And he was overweight – but because he enjoyed the pleasures of life. He was a great reformer in the 19th century liberal tradition and one whose legacy can be strongly felt today.
Born on Charlotte Square, in Edinburgh, Haldane received education at the Edinburgh Academy. He was enrolled at the University of Edinburgh at 16 years old and then rebuffed his parents attempts to send him to Balliol College, Oxford, out of dread for the “Anglican Church atmosphere”. He instead travelled to the University of Gottingen in Lower-Saxony where he not only encountered German thought but a superior system of learning.
He was called to the English Bar and started practising in the slightly dreary conveyancing courts, swiftly taking instruction in the highest court in the land. Before taking Silk, as was almost inevitable for senior advocates in the late 19th century, he entered politics.
He sided with the Liberal Imperialists, followers of Lord Roseberry, and formed a not always faithful triumvirate with Asquith and Edward Grey. Roseberry, whose family seat is situated on the outskirts of Edinburgh, was publicly supported by Haldane, but privately signified to him the “rot” in the Liberal party. He was appointed Secretary of State for War and held that position from 1905 to 1912.
It was in this capacity that he was instrumental in founding MI5, MI6, the Territorial army, the British Expeditionary Force and the Royal Air Force. He unsuccessfully led negotiations with Kaiser Wilhelm II as continental conflict beckoned and, despite Germany being his spiritual home, played a larger role than anyone else in preparing the British Empire for war.
Asquith’s political and personal betrayal, spurred on by, amongst other factors a Daily Mail campaign to cast Haldane as a German sympathiser, resulted in Haldane’s removal from the cabinet in 1915. It was from this point that he dedicated his career to emulating the brilliance of his German education in British institutions. His role in founding the “red brick” universities of LSE and Imperial was a practical implementation of his faith in applying scientific methods to human relations. His name is still frequently invoked in the “Haldane Principle” – that the aims of research should be separate from government – and is the underpinning of all modern institutions.
Richard Haldane was a philosopher-statesmen. His bright mind was able to perceive necessary change, and his practical skills of persuasion were able to affect them. Testament to this, on his death in 1928, The Times eulogised his effect on modern Britain. He was described as “one of the most powerful, subtle and encyclopaedic intellects ever devoted to the public service of this country.” Richard Haldane the person might be forgotten, but the results of his work should not be.
Richard Haldane (1856 – 1928)
George Watsons – Rebecca West
“It was the last two days of the Nuremberg trial that I went abroad to see. Those men who had wanted to kill me and my kind and who had nearly had their wish were to be told whether I and my kind were to kill them and why. Quite an occasion.” So start her dispatches from the closing session of the trial of Nazi leaders.
Dame Rebecca West was one of Britain’s foremost writers. Fundamentally, she was a critic. Professionally, a critic of other writers, but also of every system of thought that presented itself to her, whether that be fascism, communism, Fabian socialism, pacifism, liberal-democracy, feminism, Christianity or any other creed that tended to conformity. Her writing was inflammatory, funny, ferocious and inquisitive. Consequently, she cannot be herded into any category: she was searingly independent and a brilliant writer.
Born Cecily Isabelle Fairfield in 1892, she abandoned this name as she claimed it evoked a woman with blond ringlets and bright blue eyes, and that was not her. Her mother was a musician and her biological father had been a confederate stretcher bearer in the US civil war and later a journalist. She spent a year at Watsons Ladies College but had to retire because of tuberculosis. She did not like school, but little blame can be laid at the door of the turn of the century establishment. She despised all formal education, disregarded all teachers as prisoners of a restrictive education system and criticised even the most prestigious universities as places that force women to “renounce the gift of personal vividness”.
Her first article was published in the feminist paper Free Woman, when West was aged just 18. Her subject was the public denunciation of the women’s suffrage movement by novelist Mary Ward, designed to give the writer “a good going over”. Rebecca West was an ardent supporter of women’s rights but was not a doctrinaire of the popular movements. As she once put it: “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute”.
In her later career, she is better remembered for her investigations into mankind’s propensity to inflict violent injustice on itself. Her assignment to cover the Nuremberg trials for the New Yorker were turned into a book A Train of Powder and is the most powerful written relation of those events.
Her prowess was recognised by leading figures with whom she overlapped. George Bernard Shaw said in 1916 that "Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely." HG Wells, with whom she had an intermittent relationship and a son, said that she wrote like God.
Cecily Isabel Fairfield took her nom de geurre from the rebellious young heroine in Rosmersholm, a Norwegian play. It was with similar outrageous bravery and individual responsibility that she conducted her work. It was with this freedom from the moorings of political and social conformity that allowed her to become one of Britain’s most brilliant and important writers.
Rebecca West (1892 – 1983)
George Heriots School – Hippolyte Blanc
The buildings we live in not only provide us with functional spaces for living or working. The design of our physical environment is the most obvious form of cultural expression. A loud declaration of our interests, made through millions of tonnes of building material, lots of money and heard for decades to come. The greater the size, the more ornate the exterior, the more thoughtful shape of the interior are all ways in which society can reflect the values that are held dear to it.
His numerous church buildings adorn all of Scotland, with notable Edinburgh examples, and his restoration work helps to define the city. He was the son of French parents and his parenthood was a dominant influence in his Gothic revivalist style. Blanc attended Heriot’s, winning the dux medal in 1859 and immediately started his career as an architect.
In 1875 he won his first architectural competition to design Christ Church, In Morningside, followed by a second, to design what is now the Mayfield Salisbury Church, in Newington. Many of the contemporary features are still prominent today.
It is the mark Blanc left as an antiquarian and restorer of Edinburgh’s great monuments, however, that deserve the most recognition. The Edinburgh Castle so loved today, not least by the tourist board and Royal Mile tat shops, in its current image, is largely credited to Blanc’s hand. In the late 1880’s Blanc carried out significant restorations to the Portcullis house and the Great Hall, after centuries of use as a barracks. Blanc was also instrumental in the preservation of John Knox’s house and the rebuilding of St Cuthbert’s church.
While, maybe not the most interesting figure produced by Heriot’s, Blanc’s interventions to the face of the city are revealing of what, to Edinburgh, was considered important and what still is today: the Church, its long, fluctuating association with the English and enlightenment principles.
Hipployte Blanc ( 1844 - 1917)
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