It is the 18th century.  

You are a Portsmouth Grammar School boy, walking along the pavement in Penny Street.  

You open the school gate and walk down a narrow passageway that separates the Master’s house from his neighbour’s on the south side of Penny Street. The school is in a respectable part of Old Portsmouth and you know you are lucky, because you are one of very few local boys whose fathers can afford the fees.  

You reach the end of the passageway and enter the courtyard which is where you and your friends play in fine weather. Facing you, on the other side of the small courtyard, is the schoolhouse, a sight which you feel anything but lucky. Your heart is full of dread and fear at the prospect of another day spent memorising Greek and Latin, and the possibility of being thrashed by the Master or his Usher.   

Under the terms of Dr William Smith’s will, made shortly before his death in 1732, Great East Standen Farm at Arreton on the Isle of Wight was left in trust to the Deans and Canons of Christ Church, Oxford, with the intention that the rent from the property would fund his new grammar school. It took over twenty years for enough capital to accumulate to enable the trustees to purchase a run-down house in Penny Street, behind which the first grammar school was built. The house was repaired for the first Master, the Reverend J. Evans, and the schoolroom erected at a total cost of £717 16 s 9d (£717 84p) plus 5% commission to the builder, John Turner.  

The new schoolroom, Master’s and Second Master’s (Usher’s) studies were built above a covered play area. The room was nine metres long by seven wide and, according to one Old Portmuthian, was “more like a church than a school”. It was “a fine, lofty room”, lit on the west side by large “diamond-leaded windows” with hard oak floors and beams. “I remember we used to try to burn holes in the oak with the (fire) poker, but we never got far…it got cold before we made much effect on the wood.” It was a brave or foolhardy boy who attempted such vandalism. The Master had his desk directly by the fireplace at the north end, and his study was a few metres away. 

The play area directly below the schoolroom was exposed to the elements, through three archways, and so, while the Master would have basked in the warmth from the fire, the schoolroom itself was undoubtedly cold in winter. Above the fireplace there was a stone slab with the inscription “Virtuti et literis sacrum” – Virtue (or courage) and scholarship are sacred. In the four corners of the room stood busts of Homer, Cicero, Virgil and Plato, their ever-watchful presence reflecting a traditional but increasingly outmoded curriculum of Latin and Greek overseen by academics of Christ Church who knew what was needed to progress to university. Perhaps unsurprisingly, from the very beginning, the school struggled to compete with rivals that offered a broader curriculum more suitable for careers in business.  

By the 1810s, the Master’s house had become uninhabitable and the schoolhouse was in a state of disrepair. Those hard oak beams had rotted, the lead on the roof was at risk from thieves and the building was in danger of collapse. In 1818, pupils were relocated to the vestry hall at St George’s Church (near the Gunwharf) where the Master, Robert Cumyns, who was Vicar of Portsea, ran another school. By 1822 the buildings were made safe. It took over fifty years and two closures before a new school was built largely due to the energy and passion of the Vicar of Portsmouth, Canon Edward Grant, who helped raise the funds. (see the new Opus 27 to read about the refounded school)