What Happens When That Which Is Sacred Is Turned Into A Brand?

It was a time of early September coolness like we’re experiencing at the moment.

46 years ago I faced the most dramatic transition of my life.

On a Monday evening of torrential rain, my father drove me from a three-bedroom house on an estate in a small village in Wiltshire to School House at Magdalen College School on Cowley Place by the Plain.

I was directed to a spartan dormitory with rows of cast iron beds with red bedspreads and starched white sheets. At the very end was one with my name on it. My life went from tranquilty to chaos with a matter of hours. After lights out, my new school chums welcomed me with insults and whacked me with pillows.

The first few weeks involved coping with loneliness, separation from parents, an overwhelming timetable, terrible food and the news that I would not be able to have toast and marmalade for tea for two years. I had to eat plain bread from the packet (2nd formers were not allowed to use the grill until the Lower Fourth.)

That was the meaning of  ‘education’ in those days. Suffering was what our parents were paying for. I had to learn to deal with my fellow boarders day after day for seven years with the only privacy available in a locked cubicle.

During that time I had dealings with probably a dozen women at the school. That’s how few were on the staff during that period.

Of course that’s all a thing of the past now. But I have a theory nothing has changed.

Bullying just has a new name: progress, safeguarding, the market, modernisation or HR.

The difference is that a traditional boarding school education, like the one I got, taught me how to fight back: how to hold authority to account, identify bullies, subvert them and undermine their power.

I was strongly influenced by the religiosity of the school.

Years later, when I was walking through a shopping centre in Bracknell on a Saturday afternoon, I woke up to the fact that I had lived for 12 years in a landscape touched by the divine: Magdalen Bridge, Christ Church Meadows, the Radcliffe Camera – we had grace with meals, chapel every morning and Eucharist on Sunday. I vividly remember my first a visit to the cloisters and the chapel in Magdalen College. It was an enchanted place.

In the first few weeks we rehearsed and sang the school song, which was in Latin:

Miles Christi/ Suciepisti/ Fronte qui puerulus/ Crucem signum triste lignum..’

Translated it means:

‘As a soldier of Christ, you received [the sign] on your forehead, even as a little boy. The cross, a sign, a sad wood.’

In my adult life, I’ve developed an interest in religious mysticism and spirituality.

Whoever made that the school song was doing something dangerous. His idea was to conscript every boy at MCS as a soldier for Christ, equipped to wage spiritual warfare. Not something you get in your average state school.

There was also a school hymn offering an elegiac commentary on the passage in the Sermon on the Mount about the lillies of the field. Time passes, we grow and bloom then youth fades, our bodies die and our souls move on to Paradise.

The school’s motto was ‘like the lilies’. Could anything be more effeminate? But the message was clear, we were not at MCS to prepare for worldly success: we were there to reflect on the vanity of worldly success.

I was also strongly influenced by the school’s charismatic Welsh Chaplain Rev Ev.

Rev Ev had flown Lancaster bombers during the Second World War (presumably his work had resulted in the deaths of thousands of German men, women and children). Though he never talked about it. We might speculate afresh why.

His classes, however, were overflowing with joy. His homilies on the ‘phonies’ in The Catcher in the Rye had us roaring with laughter. It was English as stand-up comedy.

At other times he was a melancholy man. He would complain about the forces that seeked to secularise the school. He’d tell us about the student riots in Oxford in the 1970s and he warned that when that generation got into power it would be a disaster for the country. (Looking at you Tony Blair!)

Magdalen College School was part of Magdalen College when I arrived. The original purpose was to just teach the choristers who performed evensong. Over the years the school expanded until it moved over to Cowley Place to include the sons of Oxford professionals.

In the 1980s the Communists in the Senior Common Room at Magdalen College had plans to shut the school down. It was running out of money. The school site was a model of austerity with prefabricated buildings, dour 60s teaching blocks and a poky gym that dated from before the Second World War.

The facilities may have been primitive, but the spirit of the boys was not. There were ball games, magazines, debates. With about 500 pupils (including 65 boarders), it was small and friendly, with eccentric teachers, idle teachers and some brilliant teachers.

It was not noticeable at the time, and maybe this was what Rev Ev was getting depressed about, but a dramatic change occurred in the status of the school in 1987. It separated from Magdalen College

The foundation that had been steeped in the medieval Christianity and ritual of Magdalen College, became independent. The school can legitimately trace its foundation to Waynflete in 1480, but the legal entity which operates MCS today dates only from 1987, when the school became independent of Magdalen College.

With so many religious rituals going on, it was not surprising that a dreamy adolescent like yours truly might have a spiritual experience.

I have a vivid memory of the headmaster on Sunday morning in full academic robes reading the parable of Dives and Lazarus from Luke’s Gospel, a story told by Jesus about the reversal of fortunes between a wealthy man and a poor beggar in this life and the next.

It talks about Lazarus being urged to ‘dip the tip of his finger in water’ to cool Dives’ tongue. And the description of the ‘great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot’.

It was all the more terrifying because I’d never heard it before.

After a couple of years of boarding, the emotional intensity becomes addictive. It was a wonderful life of fierce academic rivalry, fellowship, music, playing sport, reading literature and enjoying the cinema and arts in one of the world’s finest university towns.

When it came to the Upper Sixth I really didn’t want to leave. The esprit de corps is so strong that 35 years later 7 out of 8 of my ‘A’ level German class turned up for a reunion meal with our teacher and interacted as if hardly a day had passed.

–

After leaving, I lost interest in going back to Oxford for over 20 years.

During my time at MCS, I had been inspired by the Renaissance humanist tradition of Magdalen College, in particular the esotericism of the rhetorical curriculum.

My hero was William Tyndale, the Bible translator, who we claim as an alumnus.

I became a speechwriter and then the founder of the UK Speechwriters’ Guild and European Speechwriter Network.

Where better to host one of our conferences than an Oxford college?

In 2014 Trinity College was still quite unworldly and we moved our three-day conference there.

We’ve continued to alternate between Oxford and Cambridge colleges every year since.

There have been big changes. Almost every college has built its own conference theatre paid for with donations from alumni.

And yet, if you know about these things, you know that individual Oxford colleges don’t need lecture theatres (or at least the undergraduates don’t). The colleges are where you live: you go to the faculties to listen to lectures.

The conference theatres are a way of showing the alumni where their money has gone. When you’ve raised that money you can raise more money. The conference theatres are useful to rent out to external suppliers to make more money, they aren’t necessary to the fabric of the university.

Oxford is less and less about scholarship and more and more about raising money. Take the new Schwarzman Centre. It’s just an opportunity for a rich man to turn his money into academic status. Other perfectly serviceable facilities in the city will suffer because there is now an overcapacity.

Magdalen College School has also undergone dramatic changes over the last 35 years reflecting social change, the market and the modernisation of the independent schools.

First the boarding school closed. The Gothic mysteries of the boarding house were replaced by the busy IKEA comfort of a prep school. Saturday school came to an end. They admitted girls to sixth form.

Suddenly the school had money. It built shiny new buildings. Using the internet, like every other academic institution in Oxford, they could employ staff and build up a vibrant alumni network to rinse.

A few months ago I found myself in St Hilda’s College. I climbed to the top of the tower overlooking the MCS campus. I looked around and saw how dramatically it had changed.

The modest and unpretentious facilities had been replaced by multimillion pound blocks. Humility had been replaced by vacuity. It made me feel sad. MCS used to be an unworldly institution where family wealth never mattered.

It has become the school for Dives and his brothers (and now presumably sisters).

–

Every year I get the glossy magazine for Old Waynfletes the name they give to former members of the school. With its relentless focus on success, raising money and other achievements, I find myself moved to suggest I gather news on the alcoholics, bankrupts and other failures that also make up the cohort of MCS old boys (and now girls). The obituaries are the only things I read, reflecting the humbler trajectories in previous eras.

The education I received was based on a way of life that no longer exists. And yet a couple of years ago I found myself in a Chabad yeshiva in Vienna. I met the Orthodox Jews. And I felt it. You guys with your weird looks, your male culture, emotional intensity and love of the book, underneath that garb, you’re just like me and my North Oxford friends used to be.

The Jews, of course, make Torah the focus of their education, in the same way that Bible reading, choral music, Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost, CS Lewis, the prayer book, worship and organ music made MCS a formidable Anglican madrasa.

MCS was a place where a way of being English was communicated by one generation of Englishmen to the next.

–

So what of all this nostalgia? Why am I telling you all this?

Because I sense we’ve reached a political turning point. The capital that has fuelled Oxford’s relentless expansion over the past 30 years is threatened by global instability and domestic political policy. In other words, the chickens are coming home to roost.

While on holiday, I put Magdalen College School into Google. I came across a website announcing the imminent opening of Magdalen College School, Bangkok.

What fresh hell is this? I thought.

Why haven’t we heard about this? How on earth could a school that unconsciously prepared its pupils for Christian spiritual warfare replant its ethos in the Far East?

–

At last year’s LibDem conference in Bournemouth I found myself sitting in a lecture room where a debate was going on about VAT on school fees.

The head of a top public school was there to lobby against. He had an MBA.

The Master of MCS in my day studied Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge.

He made us learn collects from the Prayer Book in Divinity lessons.

That’s class.

I’m not sure what this trend in private school heads having MBAs means. Nothing good, I suspect.

The tenor of the debate irritated me.

I found myself making an intervention. I drew breath and said I thought the public schools very much deserved to pay the VAT because they had betrayed the principles of their founders.

They had taken the money from the Chinese and Russian students. They had introduced Michelin chefs to cook school dinners. They had introduced girls and duvets and elite sports coaches.

Did I feel hate in the room? Actually no. A woman squealed that they had far fewer Chinese and Russian students than they used to, but otherwise I was heard in silence.

The head chuckled nervously and invited me to come and have a tour to see how things had changed for the better. For some reason, he didn’t follow up.

–

When I started researching Magdalen College School, Bangkok, I remembered an encounter I had at the Wellington Festival of Education a few years ago.

As I  was contemplating melancholically my years of patient suffering at MCS, which paradoxically make me the austere and unworldly man I am today, I said to the lady, who was representing Wellington’s overseas campuses in Asia:

‘How do you replicate the unique mystical Wellington experience of English architecture, religion and culture within these huge modern glass and steel campuses?’

I remember her reply as follows: ‘Oh we don’t bother with that any longer. We just give them the uniform and the brand and away they go.’

Hmm. Is that exactly how the former headmaster of Wellington College and champion of these multimillion pound projects, Sir Anthony Seldon, would describe it?

–

I remember uncovering a rather grubby money-making scheme at Magdalen College School when I was there.

They offered a careers’ aptitude test from a branded organisation for a fee and they told all the boys to take it. But I discovered if you refused, the school offered a perfectly adequate alternative which they produced themselves, which cost nothing. I wrote to the school magazine about this.

It must have caused a bit of embarrassment because I remember a few weeks later the careers master commented wryly that ‘Jenner might have a future in investigative journalism.’

–

So to the purpose. Who authorised this new project in Bangkok? And how have the consultations with, dread word, stakeholders been managed? Who are the governors of Magdalen College School, Oxford?

There was just a list of names with initials. This was rather odd given the modern passion for profilicity.

And how did the school square its Christian heritage and identity with a satellite school in Thailand, which they would not own or run?

I took the perilous step (if I ever wanted to be invited back to give a lecture) of emailing the secretary of the governing body to ask if Christianity was still the core feature of the school.

I got a reply forwarded to me within 24 hours. The head of the governors assured me that yes Christianity was very much still in the character of the school, mentioned in the charter and the article of associations and enacted in prayers and chapel led by a chaplain.

The only problem was that, with the help of AI, I could find no mention of any such guarantees in the articles of association.

Then I really ruined any chance of being invited to award the prizes at prize giving by requesting him to point out where I could find these statements in the texts.

I got a very warm and friendly email that led me to a more interesting discovery. Christianity certainly survives in the life of the school. What no longer survives is the explicit institutional promise.

There was a commitment to the school’s ‘Christian framework’ mentioned in the accounts 2016, but it was erased in 2017.

When I received this news I felt pain. Those Christian humanist grammarians lit a chariot of fire that sustained MCS for centuries. Have those fires now been extinguished?

–

I noticed the chronology. Helen Pike was appointed the Master of Magdalen College School in September 2016. A new company Magdalen College School International Limited was registered at Companies House on 27 January 2017 with Helen Pike as a director.

And in the 2017 Governors’ Report the explicit commitment to preserve the Christian framework disappeared. Were these developments connected? I don’t know. But I’d like to know why the governors changed the aims.

Magdalen College School International Limited registered small losses in 2017, 2018, 2019, a bigger loss in 2020, and then, wait for it, a £2,204,690 profit with £295,310 in administrative expenses in 2021.

That’s an operating margin of about 88%. As Colonel Hans Landa puts it in Inglourious Basterds – ‘That’s a bingo!’.

Then in 2022, we have a profit of £227,266. And in 2023, we have a £105,120 loss, followed by in 2024 a £48,521 loss, followed by another £769,760 profit in 2025 with a whopping £416,613 worth of administrative expenses.

The accounts do not tell an ordinary reader what generated the £2.5 million of turnover or precisely what MCS International was contracted to provide.

I have been told that it related to plans for MCS-branded schools in China which did not ultimately open. If that account is correct, I’d be interested to know what the payment purchased and what became of the project.

One person who was at MCS at the time has told me that there was considerable unease among staff and parents about the China project.

Were the OWs ever consulted?

I’m not suggesting any of this was improper, it just seems to me that it’s not what my beloved alma mater should be doing.

My question to Helen Pike is:

‘Did you ever feel uncomfortable campaigning publicly against VAT on school fees while serving as a director of an MCS subsidiary which had generated £2.2 million profit in 2021 on turnover of £2.5 million?’

You suggested that the imposition of VAT had the ‘whiff of class war’.

I’m not sure about that. My own view is that the independent-school sector had for many years stretched the spirit of charitable status remarkably far.

When an MCS subsidiary was capable of generating profits on this scale, I think it is reasonable to ask how MCS’s own financial position related to the arguments being made publicly against VAT?

It doesn’t seem right to me. And when I explain it to other OWs it doesn’t feel right to them either.

MCS was Oxford’s grammar school for boys, it did that very well. Now it fundraises, hosts an Oxford Arts Festival and employs staff to work on international partnerships.

And other things don’t seem right to me. According to Charity Commission-derived data, employee numbers increased from 114 in 2010 to 298 in 2025. The current staffing figures also appear to show well over a hundred employees who are not teaching staff.

MCS is supposed to be an intimate and humble school on Cowley Place, not a global Behemoth.

–

And what, out of curiosity, were the founding wishes of William of Waynflete in the Magdalen College statutes?

It required the grammar master and usher to teach pupils free of charge. The usher was subject to the same requirement. Their salaries and commons were paid from the common funds of Magdalen College.

The most worrying aspect of the swashbuckling success of MCS under Helen Pike is how many of today’s MCS teachers could afford to send two children to their own school, even with the staff discount?

Also can Oxford’s dons afford the fees, especially as many of them now have to live in places like Bicester.

Here’s an MCS secret from my era.

It has always got terrific Oxbridge results because a significant number of pupils were the sons of Oxford academics. In households saturated with books, scholarship and university expectations, many arrived with formidable educational advantages before a master had taught them anything.

The other problem is that for decades, MCS was for the brightest boys, Oxford High was for the brightest girls. That way they didn’t have to compete or do marketing to attract pupils. There was a tradition.

When they started introducing girls into the sixth form at MCS, they upset that tradition and started competing for pupils that might previously have gone to Oxford High. This increases risks.

Here’s an idea. Why doesn’t MCS make drastic cuts in staff and the provision of its services to make fees more affordable?

The lower the fees the more closely the school would align with William of Waynflete’s vision.

–

Rhetoric is a mechanism for investigating truth.

It was the esoteric knowledge that Magdalen College School inspired me to go in search of.

The study of rhetoric requires a method of making arguments in utramque partem. That means listening to both sides.

Oxford doesn’t do that any longer.

Where, within institutional Oxford, is the serious advocate for Brexit? Where is the man or woman who is going to stand up to discredit the bogus science of ‘anti-depressants’?

Where is the voice urging the restoration of single-sex colleges? Or the college principal who will announce the university should award fewer Firsts and more Thirds?

Such positions are just institutionally unintelligible.

Where everyone thinks the same, nobody thinks very much.

An extreme liberal iconoclasm has dominated Oxford over the past 40 years.

There is no tradition that this moneyed, well-educated and exclusive class will not wreck, no ritual they will not subvert and no sacred order they will not profane.

They will find a singularly inappropriate candidate for every office in the land.

You can identify them because they’re the principals of colleges and heads of independent schools who hate talking about ‘tradition’ – the thing that gave Oxford its divine character.

For the last 30 years a torrent of capital has flooded down Headington Hill driven by cheap debt and the Mephistophelian momentum of globalisation.

This seemingly inexhaustible supply of money has enabled radical and meretricious social change.

The question is, what happens when that money dries up?

–

The School’s present trajectory risks taking it to a place that bears little resemblance to the school that I attended. And yet the School’s PR operation encourages us to give money as if it still upheld the old values.

As a birthday treat a few years ago, my wife and I made a trip to see my old MCS U13s cricket coach direct a play called The Lehman Trilogy at the National Theatre.

It explained the process of how a vision of three men combining religious ritual with tradition and commercial acumen build a formidable business.

What I took from it was, over time the traditions and rituals are gradually eased out by the compulsion to make larger profits.

Sam Mendes’s play asks the question: Can an institution continue trading successfully under an inherited name after the culture that created the value of that name has disappeared?

Can you export an ethos whose meaning came from suffering, vulnerability, male intimacy, Chavasse,  Magdalen Bridge, Anglican worship, peculiar school games, Latin, ancient songs and generations of accumulated memory?

Or, once transported into a purpose-built campus thousands of miles away, does the inheritance inevitably become a collection of vacuous assets: curriculum, uniform, admissions expertise, university preparation and a prestigious Oxford name?

Suddenly at the end of The Lehman Trilogy, something happens and a business that lasted for over a hundred years completely disappears. And in the last scene, religion returns and the actors recite the Kaddish.

Post Script 16 September 2026

The financial information gathered in this article has been gathered through public information available from Companies House and the Charity Commission, with the help of ChatGPT.

Before publishing this article, I wrote to Bob Price, Chairman of Governors, giving the School an opportunity to correct my understanding of the facts and to explain the international activities discussed above.

In particular, I asked what generated the £2.5 million turnover reported by MCS International in 2021; what became of the proposed schools in China; what generated the company’s more recent income; how international agreements are approved by the Governing Body; and why the explicit commitment to preserving the School’s ‘Christian framework’ disappeared from its published aims during 2016–17.

I sent those questions two weeks ago. I have not received a response.

For transparency, my email containing the questions can be read here.

If MCS subsequently responds, I will be happy to publish its explanation and to correct any factual error in this article.

If you believe this is a conversation worth pursuing and you’re an Old Waynflete or associated with the school, send me an email and we’ll organise a public meeting in Oxford.  Email me here.