The Life and Times Of A Victorian Country Doctor - A Portrait of Reginald Grove Volume 2; Life at Boarding School - Peter Flower

The Life and Times Of A Victorian Country Doctor - A Portrait of Reginald Grove Volume 2; Life at Boarding School - Peter Flower

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This is the second volume of a trilogy describing the life of Reginald Grove, a country GP, who began his medical career in the late Victorian period after training at Guy’s Hospital, London.

It vividly describes his life at boarding school from aged eight to eighteen. The fictional life of  Victorian boarding schools is well known from Dicken’s description of  Dotheboys Hall, in ‘Nicolas Nickleby’ featuring the sadistic Headmaster, Wackford Squeers to Thomas Hughes’s ‘Tom Brown’s School Days’, remembered chiefly for the brutish bully, the infamous Harry Flashman, at Rugby School.

But there are very few accounts based on true life. This is one of them.

Using his diaries and other contemporary documents, it portrays his life as a chorister at King’s College Chapel Cambridge, and then at Uppingham School under the great Victorian Headmaster, Edward Thring.  The brutality described in the fictious accounts is replaced by a more balanced portrait of school life describing lessons in the classics, sports and games, punishments, the battle for moral purity, sixth form privileges and the friendships that he made. He left Uppingham  a good all-rounder, presented with a medal by Thring ‘for good work and unblemished character’. On  the last day of the summer term 1887 ‘all the house came to my dormitory very early to say goodbye to me’.

It was an emotional end to his school life.

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This handsomely produced 360 page, well-illustrated paperback is one of the trilogy produced by Peter Flower. ……it is a publication of considerable significance to those interested in the development of Victorian public schools and of Uppingham in particular.

Rutland Local History and Record Society

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Peter Flower’s labour of love is a treasure chest for the historian and a delight for all who wish to know more about life at Thring’s Uppingham. It was a school like no other.

Malcom Tozer, former housemaster at Uppingham and Headmaster of Wellow House School. He is the author of Edward Thring’s Theory, Practice and Legacy: Physical Education in Britain since 1800, The Ideal of Manliness  and other publications

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The second volume of Peter Flower's trilogy is a fine mixture of authoritative research and vivid anecdote, providing a fascinating insight into two famous late-Victorian schools: King's College School, Cambridge and Uppingham. 

It is especially valuable in giving us a pupil's-eye view of everyday life the final years of Edward Thring, Uppingham's individualist and pioneering headmaster.

Nigel Richardson, former second master at Uppingham, former Head of the Perse School and past Chairman of the Headmasters and Headmistress’ Conference, author of Thring of Uppingham, Victorian Educator and other publications.