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| The ring, led by politics teacher Michael Densham, pictured, was sensationally exposed in 2004 |
An exclusive institution, with Edwardian architecture and picturesque games pitches, it admitted only the brightest boys, and was rightly famed for creative, sporting and academic prowess.
The ranks of ‘Old Gowers’, as alumni are known, included a host of the great and good, from athlete Roger Bannister to film star Dirk Bogarde and the celebrated mountaineer Chris Bonnington.
Despite its fee-paying status, UCS was (and still is) run according to a liberal philosophy that included a statutory ban on religious education and a refusal to acknowledge, in any formal way, differences of ethnic or cultural background.
This made it the favourite public school of the local area’s social elite, who — in time-honoured tradition — were happy to overlook any principled opposition to private education when it came to the treatment of their own children.
The roster of pupils duly contained the offspring of many Labour grandees, including both sons of the party’s former Prime Minister, Harold
A few years later, UCS would educate the likes of Tristram Hunt, the son of a Labour peer (and now Shadow Education Secretary), Jonathan Freedland, the Left-wing commentator, and Ian Katz, a former Guardian journalist who is editor of BBC2’s Newsnight.
Yet behind its historic red-brick facade there lay a troubling secret. For throughout this heady era, the UCS staff room was home to four paedophile teachers, who used their positions of authority to prey on teenage pupils. (more...)
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