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Concordia Winter 2022

Merchant Taylors’ School and the Royal Family

A lthough the late Queen never visited Merchant Taylors’ School, many members of her family did and this served to maintain a close relationship between the school and the House of Windsor. Boys who cast their eyes around the Inner Quad note a faded stone that alludes to the first link to the late Queen’s family – her uncle, EdwardVIII who, when he was Prince of Wales, laid the foundation stone of the new Science building at the Charterhouse Square site in July 1926. When the school moved to Sandy Lodge the stone was one of the items of historical significance relocated. The Queen’s father (and EdwardVIII’s brother) was one of the earliest

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visitors to the new school site at Sandy Lodge. In 1931, when Princess Elizabeth was just five years old, he laid the foundation stone of the new school building. He was accompanied by his wife when, of course, they were the Duke and Duchess of York, presumably with little idea of what fate had in store for them. The school’s archive has tickets and a programme from the day, which was clearly quite an occasion as the tickets suggest there were several stands for guests. Amongst the instructions for guests was the request to “keep off the young grass, and particularly not to walk on the cricket squares.” The programme went into detail about the ceremony itself; the Duke of York filled a trowel with mortar, tapped the stone down into its bed

and finally checked it with a level before declaring the stone “well and truly laid.” Generations of MTS boys have subsequently investigated the commemoration stone, which is on the end of the Great Hall opposite the Head Master’s house, as part of their history trail around the school. What they don’t know is that the foundation stone incorporated a copy of the Duke of York’s address, a copy of the Times for 11th June 1931, the School Roll and the Merchant Taylors’ Company Pocket Book. As an aside, it is worth noting that the Duke of York gave an address in reply to the Master of the Company’s welcome. The Duke of York did not find speaking easy due to his stammer and it is interesting to speculate on how the speech went. The Taylorian reported the speech in full, the

The foundation stone of the new Science building at Charterhouse Square, laid by HRH The Prince of Wales in 1926