John Haden Badley

John Haden Badley (21 February 1865 – 6 March 1967), author, educator, and founder of Bedales School, which claims to have become the first coeducational public boarding school in England in 1893.

Born in Dudley, Worcestershire, West Midlands, England, son of Dr. James Payton Badley and Laura Elizabeth Best his wife. He was the grandson of John Badley, one of the original 300 fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons. Early in life he saw the poverty and squalor of many working class in the Midlands. When fifteen he entered the Upper School at Rugby.

These early experiences were very influential in shaping his ideas of what education should not be. While a student at Trinity College Cambridge he gained the appreciation of a standard of music and theatre and he described King's Chapel as providing "a standard of loveliness of trained voices in that architectural setting of something near perfection." His autobiography describes a tea with Oscar Wilde at which they discussed the English Poets. Here too his friendship with Edmund Garrett encouraged him to join the small minority of men who supported the women's movement for socio-political equality. In 1892 he married Garrett's sister Amy who would be a strong partner until her death in 1956, and the drive behind one of Bedales's most important innovations - successful co-education. A school, he felt, should be organized like a family, with willing cooperation for common ends as the main motive rather than on the basis of mere competition. He felt that the training for social usefulness held equal importance with the fullest possible development of the individual.

At Cambridge Badley became a lifelong socialist, influenced by the ideals of William Morris about art and community life. But the decisive influence on the direction these ideas should take was Cecil Reddie founder of Abbotsholme School and arguably the originator of the 'modern' British progressive school. Graduating from Cambridge with a first class classics degree in 1887, Badley heard about the plans for Reddie's school through his university friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson when he came down in 1888, went there and was instantly fascinated. He was, at the age of twenty-four, one of the first masters appointed, but it is probable that from the start he had secret plans to found a school of his own. In 1893, after two and a half years Reddie's increasingly autocratic temperament - and the fact that Badley wanted to marry and Reddie said he could not - gave him the impetus to leave and start Bedales.

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