If there’s one thing to be said about graduates of Manchester Grammar School, it’s that they know how to paint a picture (with words, though possibly also paint). I’ve never set foot in the school, but from the many interviews I’ve conducted with alumni I can tell you that, at least in the 1970s and ‘80s, it was an echoey and desolate building, where the floors and the edges were hard, where children carried briefcases, and parents kept large libraries at home and listened to Schubert. Many of the pupils apparently had a lot of fondness for the Lake District.
Over the past 510 years the school has amassed a near-masonic reputation, admired by many for its knack for funnelling Mancunians into Oxbridge, derided by others for students' reputation for being, as one ex-pupil put it, “quite snobbish, and honestly, pricks, for lack of a better word.”
Regardless, the school has earned itself a reputation for producing the men who run Manchester: the bankers, the lawyers, the policy makers, the lords, the Sacha Lords. Mohammed Amin – a businessman and longtime Miller whose two sons went to MGS in the 90s, tells me that “MGS has been an integral part of Manchester since it was founded. It’s educated the children of the top people in Manchester, and even if they weren’t top people, by virtue of going there they became more successful.”
But is this still true? In modern Manchester, whose universities and companies recruit talent from around the world and which prides itself on being fantastically dynamic and meritocratic, does the school for so long associated with the Mancunian elite still have its hold over the city? Within minutes of posting a call out on The Mill’s Instagram account and our Monday briefing newsletter, I had a very long list of Old Mancunians who wanted to have their say.
‘Horrible boys’
Manchester Grammar School (from here on, MGS) is not actually a grammar school at all, but a highly-selective fee-paying school for boys, the largest of its kind in the UK. Founded in 1515 “to educate the poor boys of Manchester in Godliness and good learning” (in their own words), it now costs £18,666 a year to attend the school — though MGS prides itself on giving out bursaries, with over 200 current recipients of full and partial grants.
Initially situated next to Manchester Cathedral, it now stands just off Birchfields Park in Fallowfield — a pale-red and tall-windowed building, designed on the cusp of the Great Depression. Every July, its arched doorway graduates around 200 new alumni into the city streets: Old Mancunians, as they are known.
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