Did Alan Rickman win a 'scholarship'? Or was it something else?

A few words on the story of Alan Rickman, the great actor who died last week. I had no idea, until I read his obituaries, that he had grown up as the son of a factory worker on a council estate in Acton, a pretty bleak and basic area of West London, well beyond the Olive Oil and Polenta zone now, before or later.

This made me search the same obituaries for the thing I thought I would find, especially given that he was born in 1946, the dawn of the great era of social mobility which culminated in the 1960s.

I expected to find a selective grammar school education, of the kind that used to offer such children opportunities they are now denied by supposedly egalitarian ���comprehensives��� which select their pupils on their parents��� wealth or (often feigned) religious faith.

But no, all the obituaries said he had won a ���scholarship���, to Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, now a private co-educational school which does what it can to offer bursaries to children from poor homes.

But in the 1950s, when Alan Rickman went to it, Latymer Upper was an all-boys Direct Grant School (I checked this with the school���s resident historian) , a now-forgotten type of school which took huge numbers of state school pupils, whose fees were paid by the local authority, solely on the basis of merit. At the same time, it continued to take some fee-paying pupils.

Another example of such a  school is Manchester Grammar School, whose head in the 1960s, Eric James, was one of the principal opponents of the comprehensive movement, because he believed (rightly) that comprehensives would destroy the opportunities provided by grammars and direct grants (which were, effectively, grammar schools which admitted some private pupils). The direct grants have almost all (I suspect all, but there may possibly have been exceptions.**NB Wikipedia says 45 went comprehensive - almost all Roman Catholic schools) now gone private rather than accept comprehensive entry. Three such schools in and around Oxford, where I live, are now fee-paying, though all do their limited best to give bursaries where they can.

 Eric James became Lord James of Rusholme and was the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of York which, when I attended it in the early 1970s, had plainly sought to admit as many grammar-school products as possible. It was the last late flowering of the grammar school revolution, as I failed to realise at the time. One misses so much when one is self-absorbed.

As their products headed off to university in the thousands,  the grammar schools were closing down all over the country. This revolution was over and would not happen again.  The direct grants survived a few years longer, until the undistinguished Labour Education Secretary, Fred Mulley slammed this door of opportunity in 1975. (He's mostly remembered, not wholly unjustly, for being photographed  asleep while sitting next to the Queen at an air display, when he was Defence Secretary). 

One has to wonder if the selective school had something to do with the more fiery and troublesome behaviour of that generation, by giving the freedom of university life to so many who had no privileges and knew the hard underside of the world from personal experience. But my own recollection is that most of my generation just got on with life, and that the hot winds of revolution stirred only a minority, most of them from comfortable homes like my own.

Anyway, what about Alan Rickman���s supposed ���scholarship���? I am almost wholly certain that he got no such thing (though he might have done in the pre-war years). I think he passed the eleven plus at a high grade, and was awarded a place at one of the best schools in England on merit, and proved in his life that he richly deserved it, giving back to the rest of us a hundred times the investment an enlightened country made in him. But I think most modern journalists have no idea that such a system existed, or how widespread it was, or how good the schools were to which it gave access. So they naturally assumed it was some sort of special individual breakthrough, and called it a ���scholarship��� . I���d be grateful for any specific information, either way.

Those who write in here ( as many do, often) to say that selective education didn���t benefit the real poor will have a problem with this case. And they will also struggle with the account of the school in the biography of Alan Rickman by my one-time colleague Maureen Paton, (http://www.amazon.com/Alan-Rickman-The-Unauthorized-Biography/dp/1852276304

Which says that 80% of the boys were from poor homes, and that the school had the social mix of a comprehensive (plus the educational power of a good private school, surely the ideal combination) .

We won���t return to this as long as so many informed people never even knew that such a system existed, worked and produced people such as Alan Rickman.