A school for girls
Education was William John Butler’s great interest, and after twenty-five years improving schools in his parish he founded St Mary’s School in 1873 as a Church of England boarding school for girls. It was run by the sisters of the Community of St Mary the Virgin, the order Butler had founded in the town in 1848. The sisters’ first home had been in cottages in Newbury Street, and the school grew up on the same street.
The Victoria County History, written in the early 1920s, describes it as a good early eighteenth-century house with extensive modern buildings and an apsidal chapel. It sat alongside other schools run by the sisters in Wantage, among them St Michael’s and St Katharine’s. Over the twentieth century the school added a science wing and turned an old barn into a gymnasium, and it became a well-known girls’ school with pupils from across Britain and abroad.
Pupils
Former pupils include the writer Candida Lycett Green, daughter of John and Penelope Betjeman, who went to the school while the family lived at The Mead; the actor Diana Churchill; the three-day event rider Lucinda Green; and Judith Keppel, the first million-pound winner of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.
Closure
Like many small boarding schools, St Mary’s struggled with falling numbers at the start of the twenty-first century. In 2005 the site on Newbury Street was sold to a property developer, and in 2007 the school closed, merging with Heathfield School at Ascot, which traded for a time as Heathfield St Mary’s before going back to its old name.
What to see
The former school buildings stand on Newbury Street in the town centre. Their present use should be checked locally; they are not open to the public.