Some School History .....

The first Greenwich Hospital pupils were sent to Weston’s Academy in Greenwich in 1712, where they received an excellent and highly valued education under the tutelage of Thomas Weston, the Assistant to the Astronomer Royal (John Flamsteed). At this time the boys were accommodated in the attic of the Hospital buildings. Soon the number of Greenwich Hospital pupils grew to such an extent that it became economical to provide their own school and teachers. The school became a great success through its teaching of mathematics, navigation and nautical astronomy, providing its pupils with sufficient knowledge for them to become navigators and ships’ officers in the Royal and Merchant Navies where they joined directly as Masters’ Mates.

The boys would have been taught to use such navigational instruments as the magnetic compass,Nocturnal, Back-staff, Cross-staff, Quadrant, and Sextant, and would have been familiar with map projections such as Mercator. They would have participated fully in the propagation of techniques for determining longitude, especially after Harrison’s construction, and Cook’s demonstration of the sea-going chronometer. Such education was highly prized, but extremely unusual, in those times when hardly any mathematics was taught in schools, let alone universities, and grammar schools concentrated upon the “practicalities” of speaking the dead language Latin!

Bernard de Neumann