A HISTORY OF DURHAM 



Surtees Society in memory of Robert Surtees, became first secretary of it 27 May 1834, and himself 

 edited its first nine volumes and no less than ten others before his death in 1858. Not the least of 

 his works was the training of his son the late James Raine, a Durham Grammar School boy, canon 

 and chancellor of York Minster, who succeeded him as secretary of the Surtees Society, and did even 

 more for the history and antiquities of York than his father had done for those of Durham. 



Another Grammar School boy whom James Raine I. trained, though not while at the 

 school, was William Greenwell, minor canon and Raine's successor as librarian. He has made 

 his name a name of fame in walks so diverse as trout-fishing, where ' Greenwell's glory ' keeps it 

 green ; archaeology, where a great work on British barrows is the chief authority on the subject ; 

 history, in the course of his local studies in which he has demonstrated that nearly the whole of the 

 so-called foundation charters of Durham were forgeries, for the sake of establishing the priority of the 

 prior to the archdeacon of Durham ; and numismatics, in pursuit of which he accumulated a unique 

 collection of Greek coins. 



From 1832 to 1836, the Rev. Matthew H. G. Buckle, who had been a fellow of 

 Wadham College, Oxford, was headmaster. Of the early days of Buckle, it is stated 

 in a local history l that ' for some years this school has been advancing in celebrity, and 

 is generally attended by about eighty scholars.' In 1834 there were about forty boys 

 altogether. The only playground was the churchyard ; but cricket and football were played 

 in a field out of the town. In this time, however, the first four-oared boat, appropriately yclept 

 the Argo, was started. Many old Dunelmians have since worn the blue on the Cam thanks 

 to the early practice they had on the Wear. Dr. Edward Elder, a former scholar of Balliol College, 

 Oxford, came as headmaster in 1839. He quickly restored the prestige of the school; so much so, 

 that to relieve the overcrowding of the one large room in summer, a contingent had to be sent to 

 study nature in Castle Eden woods. He promoted therefore the removal of the school from 

 the cathedral yard to its present commanding site on the opposite side of the river Wear, where, 

 far above the smoke and stir of the dim spot which man calls Durham, it looks on to woods 

 and green hills on one side, and on the other across wood and river to the towering masses of ' the 

 Abbey.' The nucleus of the present buildings was a private house, called Bellasyse, bought 

 in 1842 from Dr. Cook, a physician, the father of Cook, who claimed to have invented the electric 

 telegraph in that very house. It was an old possession of the monastery. Mention is made of it in the 

 Bursars' Roll in 15367 as being in the 'old borough,' when 3 acres of meadow in the field 

 of ' Bellacis ' called Goosecroft (goose-croft) is returned as paying no rent because it is in the 

 cellarer's hands. The name, which means ' Fair Seat,' or beautifully situated, ' Bel Assise,' much 

 after the model of Beaurepaire, Belvoir, and Beaulieu, is still most appropriate. 



The house became the headmaster's house and was adapted to receive boarders. A big school 

 was built on it at right angles, a fine room, of a rather too Gothic (as Gothic was understood 

 in 1844) darkness. It is panelled, and the names of the past headmasters from 1557 (with a good 

 many mistakes) are inscribed round the room, in bad Latin ; Gulielmus for William and Gualterus 

 for Walter, though our ancestors had the good sense to write Willelmus and Walterus. Dr. Elder 

 was most successful in his administration, and with some exaggeration is sometimes spoken of as 

 a second founder. 



In 1853 ne was ca lled on by acclamation to return to his own old school, the Charterhouse, then 

 in London, as headmaster, and took with him a large contingent of Dunelmians, including Henry 

 Nettleship, who made his mark in the history of Oxford scholarship in his Corpus Professorship of Latin. 



The Rev. Henry Holden, who succeeded him, was a Shrewsbury boy of that brilliant epoch 

 when Shrewsbury scholars led the van in classical scholarship. A scholar of Balliol College, Oxford, 

 1832-7, he had been headmaster of Uppingham Grammar School from 1848 to 1853, where he 

 saw the school grow from twenty to seventy boys, when he was promoted to Durham. It is to be 

 feared that a headmaster of Uppingham nowadays would not consider it promotion. A brilliant 

 scholar, contributing largely to the famous Foliarum Silvulae of his brother, the headmaster of 

 Ipswich, nothing intellectual was alien to him. He was an eminent photographer half-a-century 

 ago, when there were no Kodaks to make photography easy, but a man had to be something of a 

 chemist and also something of an artist to be successful. He is described by a boy who was there 

 from 1859 to 1864 as great as a fisherman and a skater, as well as a conversationalist at the dinner- 

 table of the boys; and, above all, as a scholar and the creator of scholars. Brilliant successes 

 marked his reign, of whom Mandell Creighton, the late bishop of London, was perhaps the most 

 distinguished. Dunelmians of this time proudly recall the year 1863,* in which there was a Sixth 



1 View of the County Palatine of Durham, ii. 413, by E. Mackenzie and M. Ross, Newcastle, 1834. 



8 Article by R. H. J. Poole, a scholar of B.N.C. Oxford, who rowed in the University eight, now an 

 assistant-master at the school, quoting article by W. L. Hetherington in the Dunelmian, in the County Monthly 

 (now extinct), October, 1 902. We are bound to say that two of the scholarships were at Worcester College, Oxford, 

 and one at Durham University, and that the double Blue got a third in 'Mods' and a pass in the Final Schools. 



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