Biography | Colin Marshall — The Scholarship School on Frognal He Left at Sixteen

People treat a British Airways chief as a product of a boardroom and a business school.

Colin Marsh Marshall was neither.

He was born in Edgware, Middlesex, on 16 November 1933, the son of Leslie and Florence Marshall.

His father worked in London car hire, later as managing director of a Daimler hire firm — a trade that would hand the son his first American introduction.

The place that shaped the boy sits on Frognal in Hampstead: University College School, an independent day school founded in 1830 by University College London.

The present Frognal buildings opened in 1907.

Marshall won a scholarship here.

He left in his mid-teens and did not take a university place.

Obituaries differ on whether that exit came at sixteen or seventeen.

What they agree on is the next move: he signed as a cadet purser with the Orient Line rather than sit another exam.

The school still occupies this Grade II listed block on the east side of Frognal.

A statue of Edward VII sits above the main door, put there when the monarch opened the new site.

Alumni are still called Old Gowers, after the school's first home on Gower Street.

Marshall's name is not the one the school puts on its public roll of fame.

The useful fact is smaller.

A scholarship boy from a car-hire family walked out of this gate and onto a liner, then into Hertz, Avis, Sears, and the state airline Lord King wanted made saleable.

The pin is the Frognal entrance, not a vanished Edgware house.

The house where he was born is not a public site, and this page does not pretend it is.

Photo: Jim Osley, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons / Geograph