A childhood under the White Horse
Thomas Hughes was born at Uffington on 20 October 1822, the second son of John Hughes, a scholar and editor. He spent his early childhood in the village below White Horse Hill before going to Twyford School in Hampshire and then, from 1834, to Rugby School under its famous headmaster Thomas Arnold. He went on to Oriel College, Oxford, where he was better known as a cricketer than a scholar, and was called to the bar in 1848.
Tom Brown and the Vale
Hughes’s first and most famous book, Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), is remembered as a Rugby school story, but its opening chapters are a portrait of the Vale of White Horse. Young Tom grows up in a thinly disguised Uffington, plays with village boys, watches the ‘veast’ and back-sword play, and is taught his letters in the village schoolroom. That schoolroom was real: it was founded in 1617 by Thomas Saunders for twelve poor boys, and still stands by the churchyard.
Hughes returned to the Vale in The Scouring of the White Horse (1859), a light-hearted account, told through a visiting London clerk, of the festival held in 1857 when the villagers cleaned the chalk figure on the hill, with games, cheese-rolling, wrestling and back-swording. The book also gathers local legends about Alfred, Wayland’s Smithy and the Blowing Stone, and it remains a valuable record of how the scourings were celebrated.
Reformer and politician
Hughes was a committed Christian Socialist. He helped found the Working Men’s College in London in 1854 and was its principal from 1872 to 1883, and he championed co-operative societies and trade unions. He sat as Liberal MP for Lambeth from 1865 to 1868 and for Frome from 1868 to 1874, became a QC in 1869 and a county court judge in 1882. In 1880 he founded a settlement for younger sons of English families at Rugby, Tennessee, which still exists as a small historic community. He died in Brighton on 22 March 1896.
What to see locally
- Uffington Museum, Uffington: housed in the 1617 schoolroom described in the novel, with displays on Hughes, the village and the White Horse. Open at weekends in summer; check before visiting.
- St Mary’s Church, Uffington, which features in the novel.
- White Horse Hill (National Trust), scene of the scourings.