page_title: Gilbertfield House School
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Gilbertfield House School / History
caption_attribution_description: English: A photograph of pupils at Gilbertfield House School, 1873. Andrew Bonar Law appears in the middle row, second from left.
context_page_description: Gilbertfield House School was an academy at Hamilton, Lanarkshire, which between 1863 and 1878 prepared boys for entrance to universities, the Civil Service and commerce. Among its pupils were the statesman Bonar Law, the philosopher John Henry Muirhead and the sons of David Livingstone.
context_section_description: Early examination success for the school came when its pupils John Mackintosh and John Wallace Kidston were placed high in the Edinburgh University Local Examinations of 1865. Kidston and his brother William Hamilton Kidston were cousins of Bonar Law, and the quality of education they received at Gilbertfield resulted in Bonar Law being placed there in 1871. He won prizes for Greek and English in 1873, and Adams recorded him as being “a boy of great mental power”. Law’s fellow prizeman in Greek in 1873 was William Lewis Robertson, who served as General Secretary of the Presbyterian Church in England, 1918–30, and was its Moderator in 1931.
  Among other siblings who attended Gilbertfield were John Henry Muirhead and his three gifted brothers and David Livingstone’s sons Thomas, who captained the school’s cricket eleven, and Oswell, who won numerous academic prizes. Livingstone himself was present at the school’s 1865 prize-giving when he addressed the pupils, telling them to “Fear God, and Work Hard”. This was his last public speech in Scotland, credited by Frederick Stanley Arnot as the inspiration for his own missionary work in Africa.
  By the early 1870s, particular emphasis was given at Gilbertfield to the teaching of Classics and arrangements were in hand for awarding annual Classics scholarships at examinations to be overseen by Glasgow University professors. In 1872 it was reported that “owing to the school’s increasing prosperity, large additions have been made to the schoolrooms, which are now more than ever admirable in their internal arrangements, perfect in ventilation”. But in 1874, against the background of the Hamilton School Board proposing to make Hamilton Academy the “Higher Class School” of the Burgh under the 1872 Education Act, Adams elected to withdraw from his role at Gilbertfield and transferred the conduct of the school to William Wood, formerly of Dollar Academy. Wood ran the school from the Gilbertfield House premises for four years.
caption: A photograph of pupils at Gilbertfield House School, 1873. Bonar Law appears in the middle row, second from left.
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