The Clacken and the Slate: The story of the Edinburgh Academy, 1824-1974

UK: Collins, 1974. 1st Edition . Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches. H/B 416 pages, condition is very good, the DJ has been price clipped. When Sir Walter Scott took a morning off to open a handsome new school in Edinburgh, Britain was just settling down after the Napoleonic Wars. Edinburgh was still in its Golden Age, an extraordinary blend of brilliance and squalor and social under-privilege. It was being wrested from its overcrowded perch on the Royal Mile by the building of gracious terraces on the other side of what is now Princes Street; and Lord Cockburn and Leonard Horner believed that a great classical school in the New Town to supplement the famous old High School would enable Scots to compete on equal terms with the English for leading places in expanding empire and affairs of state. They proved to be more successful than they could have hoped. In the ranks of the schoolboys at the Opening Ceremony of the Edinburgh Academy in 1824 sat a future Archbishop of Canterbury and the father of another one; to be followed down the years by two Lord Chancellors, countless statesmen, lawyers and judges, great scientists, doctors, inventors, soldiers, and writers; men like Robert Louis Stevenson and James Clerk Maxwell (who ranks with Newton and Einstein as one of the world's greatest physicists). It has provided a long line of headmasters to the most famous schools in Britain, churchmen, generals, explorers, artists, poets, song-writers - and the man who was the prototype for Sherlock Holmes. Magnus Magnusson, just one of the 15,600 boys who have sat in the superb old School Hall over the past 150 years, uses all the skill and enthusiasm of the journalist, the meticulous- ness of a historian, his own special feeling for people, and his love for his old school to make a warm and enthralling story of how a school was born and how it is run. Against a background of world events, he has created a memorable gallery of people - the characters, the beloved teachers, the famous and the funny; but above all he has captured the irrepressible spirit, the unchanging freshness, of everyone's schooldays.