It was on October 27, 1935 that the Viceroy of India — lord Willingdon — formally inaugurated the Doon School, the first residential public school of the country. The rest, as they say, is history.
In his inaugural speech, lord Willingdon, the British Viceroy to India, expressed the feelings of all those who had worked for the School when he said that he was pleased to participate “at this important ceremony of formally opening the first public school in India, to start on its way an educational experiment which I sincerely believe will be of immense value to this country in future years”.
The British Board of Education selected Arthur Foot, a master at Eton College and also a keen climber, as The Doon School’s first Headmaster. Arthur Edward Foot was married on January 5, 1935 and in the same month, he sailed for India on the SS Narkanda. He was not yet 34 years old.
Foot, who had never visited India before accepting the position, once explained how it all happened for him:“When I first heard that there was to be a school at Dehradun.... I took out my Times Atlas and looked up Dehradun. I found it an area that was light brown and capped by some patches of white. I at once applied for the post of Headmaster, knowing that I would be able to arrange my timetable so that I could motor up to the foot of a glacier on Friday after school, climb a peak on Saturday and return comfortably on Sunday....”
But running a new school left him with little or no time to climb. He recruited John Martyn, a master at Harrow and also a lover of mountains, as his deputy, and later brought in Jack Gibson in 1937, and Rl Holdsworth (Holdie) in 1940. This trinity was to take The Doon School to dizzying heights — literally! And in many other ways too.
Extracting the best that was offered at each of the great English public schools, Foot brought to the Doon School the teaching of science which had been started at Harrow; the good teacher-student relationship and the high academic standard developed at Shrewsbury; the system of organized games which had started at Marlborough and the concept of offering a vast number of subjects from Uppingham. He believed that the men who leave the Doon School must be those who were going to lead the nation in all departments of life. Doon School is still seen as the nursery for the nation’s leaders.
The Doon School has retained its ethos over the past seventy eight years of its existence . It recently celebrated its founder’s day.The school’s headmaster, Dr. Peter Mclaughlin, told The Pioneer that though a lot of the school’s five hundred students were from northern States of the country, the school was now making a fresh effort to attract a wider geographical, social and economic base.
“Our mission has always been to serve a meritocratic and democratic India. Over the past 30 years, more and more Doscos have gone to other countries as ambassadors, corporate personnel or business persons. India is now going to the world and the world is coming to India. We have also gone global in that sense.”
He said there were many old boys who were working in NGOs in the hills or working as archaeologists and in places where perhaps they were not “rich and famous” but hopefully “would be carrying on living with the values imbibed at the school.”
“We believe in giving an all-round education. At this age, youngsters can look at endless possibilities. We encourage them to learn as many skills as is possible. We don’t believe in making them specialists or experts in one field,” said the headmaster.
Athar Hussain was the very first student to join the school and he arrived on the picturesque Chandbagh (garden of the moon) campus on September 9, 1935. On September 10, the first 72 students of the school entered the beautiful ivy-covered, red brick buildings memories of which are part of every Dosco’s life and consciousness. This building had earlier housed the Imperial Forest College and Research Institute in the Chandbagh Estate at Dehra Dun. The school was set up as the realisation of a dream of Mr Satish Ranjan Das, one of pre-independent India’s most eminent barristers and a member of the Executive Council of the Viceroy of India.
With support from a wide range of eminent Indians of that time the Indian Public Schools Society was registered as a non-profit making body under the Indian Companies Act in 1929. Unfortunately, SR Das passed away in 1928. Thereafter, his wife and friends collected funds to start the school in September 1935.