page_title: The Doon School
section_title: Early years:1935–1970
hierarchical_section_title: The Doon School / History / Early years:1935–1970
caption_attribution_description: English: Lord Mountbatten with Arthur Foot and his wife, Sylvia Hartell, at The Doon School on 13 February, 1948.
context_page_description: The Doon School is a boys-only private non-profit, academically selective boarding school in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India, established in 1935. It was envisioned by Satish Ranjan Das, a Kolkata lawyer, who prevised a school modelled on the British public school, but conscious of Indian ambitions and desires. Soon after initiating the funding scheme for Doon, Das, considered the school's founder, died in 1928. His efforts were carried forward by a team led by Sir Joseph Bhore and Sir Frank Noyce, who canvassed for funds and arranged for a school campus by acquiring the former site of the Forest Research Institute from the Government of India. The school admitted its first pupils on 10 September, 1935, and formally opened on 27 October, 1935, with Lord Willingdon presiding over the ceremony. The school's first headmaster was Arthur E. Foot, an Englishman who had spent nine years as a science master at Eton College, England.
  The school houses roughly 500 pupils aged 12 to 18, and admission is based on a competitive entrance examination and an interview with the headmaster. Every year boys are admitted in only two year groups: seventh grade in January and eighth grade in April.
context_section_description: Foot had never visited India before accepting the position of headmaster. He noted that the school appeared to be surrounded by forests and close to mountains, and the possibilities of outdoor recreation and mountaineering seem to have influenced his decision as much as the chance to create a completely new type of school in India. Foot's first action upon being offered the position was to recruit J.A.K. (John) Martyn from Harrow School as his deputy. Although Martyn had not visited India before, he took up the offer because of the opportunity it afforded him to implement the ideas of German educator Kurt Hahn at Doon; it was something he had not been able to do at Harrow. Doon's ethos and guiding principles were determined early in its life by Foot, Martyn, R.L. Holdsworth and Jack Gibson, who went on to become principal of Mayo College, and Martyn acknowledged the influence of Hahn's ideas in the development of the school's ethos. They were soon joined in their efforts by Indians such as the artist Sudhir Khastgir (the school's first art teacher, who had trained previously in Santiniketan) and Gurdial Singh, a noted mountaineer who taught at Doon for several decades. In an essay entitled The Objects of Education published in the school magazine, Foot offered a template for a complete education for boys, which included teaching them to form a habit of choosing good over evil, think logically, express their thoughts and views clearly, and maintain a healthy body. At the opening of the school, he said, "Our boys should leave The Doon School as members of an aristocracy, but it must be an aristocracy of service inspired by the ideals of unselfishness, not one of privilege, wealth or position". The annual school fees in 1935 was ₹1,375, and by September 1946, it had risen to ₹1,800. The per-capita income of India, then largely an agricultural society, in 1947 has been recorded as ₹252. 
  In 1947, there were around 300 boys studying at Doon, out of which 50-60 were Muslims, 15-20 Sikhs, 15-20 Parsees, 6-7 Christians, and the remaining two-thirds Hindu.The first cohort of students left school in 1938, and during the Second World War, about 65 Doon students served in the Army, Navy or Air Force. In 1948, Foot returned to England for "family reasons", and John Martyn became the second headmaster.  After the Indian Independence, Martyn's friends suggested it would be a mistake to stay on in India, but he later wrote: "They could not have been more wrong. I have found my life much pleasanter than before...although no one had previously ever done or said anything to make me feel at all unwelcome, from now on it was often made quite explicit that I was very welcome." While Foot and Martyn were determined to model Doon on Eton and Harrow, they both agreed that Doon should cater primarily for Indian boys—and not the sons of British expatriates—in order to create a uniquely Indian public school rather than a transplanted British institution. Foot did not want Doon to be considered elitist. In a paper surveying the new school, presented to the Royal Society of Arts, London in 1947, Foot wrote: "In language we have never intended to base our instruction on the Classics in the way that Latin is still the centre pin of the English Public School. The great majority of boys take Urdu or Hindi." Martyn retired as headmaster in 1966 and became a managing trustee of Indian Cheshire Homes.
caption: Arthur Foot and his wife Sylvia Hartell with Lord Mountbatten, during the latter's visit to the school on 13 February, 1948.[30]
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