The New International Encyclopædia/Haileybury College

HAILEYBURY COLLEGE. An English public school situated at Hailey, Hertfordshire, nineteen miles north of London. This school is often called New Haileybury, in distinction from the older and more famous school which it succeeded. Old Haileybury, or more properly the East India College, was a training-school for young men entering the service of the East India Company. It was founded by the Company in 1806, and occupying first Hertford Castle, moved to the building erected for it at Hailey by Wilkins, in 1809. Here it carried on its work till, after a career of almost exactly half a century, it ceased to exist, January 31, 1858. During that time many of the most distinguished men connected with Indian history and administration were members of the college. Among the professors are to be found the names of Malthus, the political economist; Sir James Stephen, Sir James Mackintosh, and William Empson, master of the college and later editor of the Edinburgh Review. Lord Lawrence, Sir Bartle Frere, Sir Charles Trevelyan, Sir William Muir, John Muir, Dean Merivale, Sir Richard Temple, and Sir M. Monier-Williams may be instanced among its students. The great days of the school seem to have been in the principalship of Dr. Batten, 1815-37, when many of those most famous in the Mutiny days were in Haileybury. It was indeed in that trying time that the value of the school and its training was best seen, and the proud tradition of the school is the part its men took in the suppression of that rising. Its importance rests on even broader grounds than this. In the influence it has had on Indian administration by its spirit and traditions; in the model which it set for the training of men for both Indian and colonial service, now carried on elsewhere; in the impetus it gave to Oriental studies in England, as well as in the vigorous and varied intellectual life it enjoyed during the greater part of its career — the East India College deserves a high place among English educational forces of the nineteenth century. The fall of the East India Company after the Sepoy Mutiny brought with it the suspension of its great training-school. The Indian Civil Service was reorganized under Government control, and the training of men for that service fell into other hands. For some four years the buildings at Haileybury stood vacant.

New Haileybury. Owing to the exertions of certain gentlemen of Hertfordshire, chief among whom was the publisher Stephen Austin of Hertford, a sum was subscribed to buy the estate and found a public school on the premises. This was accordingly done, and the school was incorporated by royal charter, and was opened in September, 1862, as Haileybury College. This foundation, beginning with an enrollment of some fifty scholars, was successful from the start. The estate has increased from the original 55 acres of the East India College to nearly double that area; the number of students has grown to nearly 600, and many new and handsome buildings have been added to the great quadrangle of the old school. Of that earlier foundation more has been inherited by the new than the estate and buildings; for while it is no longer a training-school for the Indian service, much of the old atmosphere and tradition remains, giving it a tone and character which mark it off to some extent from other schools. For the East India College, consult Monier-Williams, Memorials of Old Haileybury College (Westminster, 1894); for the new school, consult handbooks of Public Schools. A. L. Lowell, Colonial Civil Service (New York, 1900), devotes more than 100 pages to Haileybury College to show its value in securing good and fit men for colonial offices.