Charles John Vaughan, 1845–1859

Abstract

On January 22, 1845, the Easter Term began at Harrow School under a new Head Master, a twenty-eight-year-old clergyman and former Cambridge don with no previous experience of being a schoolmaster. The school he inherited was close to extinction; the few remaining boys so riotous and vicious that the new Head was advised to sack the lot of them and begin again. Fifteen years later, the same Head retired to national regret and applause having re-established Harrow, now boasting its longest roll ever, with sure foundations at the forefront of the esteem of the Victorian Establishment, an eminence on which the school basked for the next three generations. The scale of the achievement of Charles Vaughan has never been doubted. For his favourite pupil and successor, Montagu Butler, he was ‘almost the refounder of Harrow’. Another pupil, Charles Dalrymple, scanning the half century after Vaughan's arrival, called him ‘the restorer of Harrow…he recreated the school’. Vaughan was also praised by two Head Masters, James Welldon and Ralph Moore.