Uckfield School

Uckfield School, founded in 1718, later called Uckfield Grammar School, grew from a small local charity school at Uckfield into a grammar school with about 160 boys, including boarders. It closed in 1930.

At various times the school was also called Dr Saunders's School and the Saunders Foundation School.

The school was founded by the Rev. Dr Anthony Saunders, Rector of Buxted (died 1719) to teach reading, writing, arithmetic, and the elements of the church catechism to "six poor boys of Buxted and six poor boys of Uckfield". The first Master of the school was the Rev. John Lloyd. In his Will dated 31 October 1718, Saunders left a house in Church Street, Uckfield, which provided a house for the schoolmaster, his library of some six hundred books, and an income of £10 a year charged on Rocks Farm, Buxted. He also left bequests for founding a separate school for girls at Buxted and for providing apprenticeships for local boys.

In the middle and second half of the 18th century, Uckfield School flourished under the mastership of the Rev. Robert Gerison, formerly Margerison, who probably held the mastership from 1738 until his death in the late 1790s. Born about 1712, he was a scholar from Peterhouse, Cambridge, who had graduated MA in 1737. There is some obscurity about who attended the school under the Will of Dr Saunders and who was a private pupil, but Gerison's pupils at Uckfield included James Stanier Clarke and Edward Daniel Clarke. Early in the next century, under the Rev. William Rose, curate of Little Horsted, who became Master of the school in 1800, boys were again taught to a high standard, including Rose's sons Hugh and Henry Rose.

In a Charity Commissioners' report of 1819, it was noted that the schoolmaster of the day had invested about £1,000 of his own money in improving the school and had transferred the twelve scholars provided for under the Will of Dr Saunders to a recently-established National School, paying it £20 a year to educate them.

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