Biography | Jim Ratcliffe — The Queensgate School Where He Took Chemistry and Captained Football

At ten, the Ratcliffe family left Failsworth for the East Riding of Yorkshire.

Jim Ratcliffe spent the rest of his schooldays at Beverley Grammar School on Queensgate, just north of Hull.

The boys' school sits between Queensgate and Sloe Lane. Its main building, whose foundation stone was laid in 1936, is still the face of the site.

A 1971 issue of the school magazine, the Beverlonian, recorded what he left with. A-levels in mathematics, physics and chemistry. Joint organiser of the Industrial Society. A prefect. Captain of the school football team.

The school still lists him among notable alumni, in the same column as the England goalkeeper Paul Robinson.

That combination — chemistry plus football — is the least surprising line in the later career. The chemicals company and the Manchester United stake both start from a pitch and a lab bench in Beverley, not from a City office.

Hull reporting later treated those playing fields as the place his sporting habit took hold.

The documented record is thinner and clearer: he left in 1971 with the three sciences the university would need, and with the captain's armband already worn.

From here he went to the University of Birmingham to read chemical engineering. The grammar school on Queensgate was the last Yorkshire address before that move.

The building a visitor sees now is not a museum. It is a working academy.

The football pitch in front of the brick block is still a pitch.

He learned the subjects here. He did not leave a shrine.

Photo: Ian S, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons / Geograph. Portrait: staff photographer, PET, 25 March 2013, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.