Biography | Winston Churchill — He Entered This Hill School on 17 April 1888

People treat Harrow as the school that made Churchill a speaker.

What it actually did, first, was take in a thirteen-year-old who had just scraped the entrance exam and put him in H. O. D. Davidson's House.

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill arrived on 17 April 1888.

The exam had been on 15 March. His later story of a blank Latin paper is famous, and Harrow historians have never found the sheet.

Head Master James Welldon admitted him anyway.

The Churchill men usually went to Eton. His parents sent him here, on the hill north of London, because the air was thought better for a boy who had been ill.

He was listed under Spencer Churchill and sorted with the S's. He wrote home asking to be Winston S. Churchill.

Within weeks he joined the Harrow Rifle Corps.

He later moved into the Army Class that prepared boys for Sandhurst, with French, geometrical drawing, and a Shakespeare prize on the side.

The skill the school could measure was memory. He won a prize for reciting twelve hundred lines of Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.

In December 1892 he became school fencing champion.

The chapel on High Street is the public room that still holds him. A bust by Basil Gotto stands in the Lady Chapel. Churchill was confirmed here, and later said this was almost the only stretch of orthodox churchgoing in his life.

He was not happy. Letters home in the second year told his parents not to imagine that he was.

He left for Sandhurst in 1893, then came back to the hill for the rest of his life, including the wartime visit of 29 October 1941.

The buildings are still a working school. The chapel is listed. Stand on the slope and the point is not the later speech. It is the date a poorly examined boy was allowed onto the hill.

Photo: Harrow School, via Wikimedia Commons