Lt-Col Stuart Townend

"A CHILD'S mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled" was the motto that Stuart Townend – "the Colonel" – chose for Hill House, the pre-prep (and later preparatory) school which he founded with his wife, Beatrice, in London in 1951. More than 50 years later, he was still in charge. The school which had only 112 pupils when its most famous boy, Prince Charles, arrived in 1956, now has over 1,032.

Henry Stewart ("Stuart") Townend, athlete, soldier, schoolmaster and administrator: born Shrawardine, Shropshire 24 April 1909; OBE 1948; Headmaster, Hill House School 1951-2002; married 1936 Beatrice Lord (died 1984; one son); died London 26 October 2002.

"A child's mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled" was the motto that Stuart Townend – "the Colonel" – chose for Hill House, the pre-prep (and later preparatory) school which he founded with his wife, Beatrice, in London in 1951. More than 50 years later, he was still in charge. The school which had only 112 pupils when its most famous boy, Prince Charles, arrived in 1956, now has over 1,032.

"Our principles are back to front," declared the Colonel in 1999, when he was 90:

We put safety first – any teacher who leaves a child unsupervised is sacked on the spot – and then the child's happiness. If a child's happy and loves coming to school, he or she can do anything. Discipline and good manners come next and, last of all, preparation for the next school.

Townend had started the school from nothing. He sold his car; his wife sold most of her jewellery. They raised £600 to get the enterprise going, calling it Hill House after the house, La Colline, in Lausanne where they had for two years run a school for 16-year-olds in skiing and climbing. From the first it was international – in the aftermath of the Second World War, Townend believed that the best way to keep the peace was by bringing the world's young together at school age.

The Townends took a property in Hans Place, targeting a mixture of English (two-thirds) and foreign children (one-third – many the offspring of diplomats, but some coming from as far away as South America). It was soon a feature of the daily round in Knightsbridge to see a procession of small boys in conker-coloured uniforms, doffing their caps to motorists who stopped to allow them over the pedestrian crossings on their way to games at the Duke of York's Headquarters in the King's Road.

Stuart Townend did not emerge from the world of academe. His skill was rather that of organisation. The son of a clergyman, he attended St Edmund's School, Canterbury. "Everything I've done in my life I owe to my own school," he said. There

a great games master . . . discovered my talent for athletics and drove me on. He gave me this great urge to achieve things.

A schoolboy hockey international, he went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1928, where he was President of Oxford University Athletic Club and said to have won six blues. In 1930 he was a gold medallist at the British Empire Games (for the 4x400 yards relay). Nominally he read maths and science, but his pass degree, eventually taken in 1933, involved just three papers, in French language and literature, "a branch of legal study" and military history.

By then he had already joined the Royal Artillery, serving in the Army for 16 years, representing it in athletics and football (he also won numerous medals for ski-jumping and downhill skiing) and being mentioned in despatches during the Second World War for his part in the North-West Europe campaign. He retired as Assistant Adjutant-General, World Wide Air Movements, at the War Office to chair the Housing Committee for the London Olympic Games in 1948. His forte was always to adopt a plan and follow it through.

The Colonel could have walked straight out of a novel by Evelyn Waugh. Blustery, eternally optimistic, he advocated old-fashioned values, and ran his school on individualistic lines which achieved notable success, in the dual fields of academia and sport. "This is not a normal school – we do things differently, and if people don't like it, they don't have to come," he asserted proudly.

Doors were fitted with automatic devices to prevent trapped fingers and all the furniture had their hard edges rounded. He was "Sir" to the point of messages such as "Sir says you are to do this". He lived on the property and lunched alone in a dining-room no bigger than a small corridor. But, as the school prospered, he allowed himself the luxury of a Rolls-Royce, and every weekend, well into old age, he headed to Switzerland to ski, taking a group of his boys with him.

He chose as the school song a hymn, "Schooldays", by the 18th-century composer Jonathan Battishill:

Help us that with eager mind

We may learn both fact and rule

Patient, diligent and kind

In the comradeship of school.

Born in 1909, he married Beatrice Lord, five years his senior, in 1936. A key figure at the school, she was a trained SRN and had been a theatre sister at Guy's Hospital, working with Sir John Weir. She designed the school uniform and attempted to introduce pupils to the principle of artificial respiration by lying on the floor as they pummelled her chest. She was zealous in giving her support to those boys who were occasionally to be found looking forlorn in a corner. Equally she used to say that she frequently suffered shins bruised black and blue by the kicks of the flustered.

The school was given a lift when the Queen and Prince Philip decided that Prince Charles should progress from the palace schoolroom to Hill House. It was the first time that the heir to the throne had ever gone to school. He was there for nine months between November 1956 (the week before his eighth birthday) and the end of the summer term of 1957. The choice said much for the reputation the school had gained within the few years since its foundation. It is not impossible that the Duke of Edinburgh detected in Townend an admiration for the educational values of Kurt Hahn, the inspired founder of Gordonstoun.

The plan was to give the Prince as normal an education as possible. That said, it was a privileged one. Not every pupil was greeted at the door by Mrs Townend as he emerged from a chauffeur-driven Ford Zephyr, nor seen off personally by the Headmaster. His privacy was zealously protected. The Colonel hired two black cabs on a regular basis to take the Prince and his class-mates to swim in the pool at Buckingham Palace. (Despite this, a photographer tried to sell a picture – obtained after a long sojourn on the roof – of a putative Prince Charles swimming in the Seymour Baths.)

The Palace was keen to have as little publicity as possible about the Prince's schooldays at Hill House. The Colonel handled the press well. He never complained about false stories, and he occasionally allowed them a harmless snippet of inside information. When Prince Charles arrived, the Colonel summoned the press corps to a briefing and listed the guidelines by which he would be taught. He said (consistent with his dicta 40 years on):

The most important thing is that a boy should be happy. This is a very happy school. The next thing is the safety of the boy because he is the most precious possession of his parents and at these ages is not old enough to look after himself. The third thing is that boys should be taught to get on well together and to give way if it is in the interests of their form or team.

The journalists were given a tour of the classrooms and exhorted not to identify the school by name or in photographs, which request was faithfully observed by the media, more compliant in those days and mindful of the watchful eye of Commander Richard Colville, the Queen's Press Secretary.

Prince Charles did not prosper at Hill House. He was not particularly robust and both his intelligence and imagination were firmly concealed behind an inhibiting lack of self-confidence. His school report said he was "determined but slow, with above-average intelligence". But the Colonel described him as "full of go, full of physical courage . . . a damned good lad".

In the ensuing years, Hill House expanded, developing from taking pupils only from the age of eight to the age of 12. They rented one property and then acquired another at Glion in Switzerland and sometimes swapped whole classes between London and Switzerland for a few weeks at a time.

At his 90th birthday party in St Columba's, Pont Street, speaking clearly and without the use of a microphone, the Colonel announced to his Old Boys that any task worth doing was worth doing well, in fact better than the next man. It was important to strive, he said, since the only happy people were the successful ones. He gave a less clear message on the subject of race, having made a point of accepting as many foreign boys into the school as possible. "Equal but different," he boomed in the hope that this was how the British contingent would judge their foreign schoolmates.

I have to confess that, though I passed through his school more or less without incident, I was far from the prototype of schoolboy that he would have wanted for Hill House, nor was I happy there. On a particularly nasty Friday a youthful baronet, who I am fairly sure was later incarcerated, announced that he would kill me on the Monday morning. I sobbed three long nights in abject terror, and went mute to the school on the Monday convinced of my impending doom. (He did indeed brandish his pen-knife, but a bell then rang.)

I succeeded in avoiding playing the triangle in the school concert by screaming blue murder every December (though public platforms hold less fear for me now). The emphasis on sport was the bane of generations of schoolboys in the 1950s and earlier (myself included), but the academic standard was commendably high. My prep school, Scaitcliffe, asked that boys should be able to read and write. The Hill House contingent was already doing a fair amount of Latin and French when they arrived there, which put them in good stead in their new surroundings.

While I am glad not to be a pupil at Hill House now, I retain a lingering respect for the methods of the Colonel.

Hugo Vickers

As the youngest boy in the senior school, I was taught Latin and French at the age of seven, writes James Fergusson. Our science master drummed into us the virtues of an italic hand. Only the swimming teacher, a former Olympic competitor, failed me hands-down ("Poor", she wrote in my report, succinctly).

Hill House was completely sui generis; I never fully enjoyed a school after it. This, I now realise, was down to Colonel Townend, a man who combined pre-war officer-class brusqueness with an eccentric, superhuman energy.

Latterly, he appeared like a wayward educational visionary. When Hugo Vickers and I attended his birthday party in 1999, we expected an occasion of genial nonagenarian retrospection. On the contrary, it was like an evangelical rally. The Colonel, displaying a spruceness defying his years, spoke only of the future – and a future of international amity, symbolised by Hill House International Junior School, whose children (uniquely, surely, among London pupils) were expected to spend part of the year learning and exercising at its Swiss outpost above Montreux.

Glion when I went there, at the age of just eight, was in high summer. It was the first time I had ever been abroad. I had never been anywhere so hot; I had never eaten foreign food, even in a restaurant. Mrs Townend, a somewhat terrifying figure in London, with the smallest waist I had ever seen on a grown-up, was the soul of kindness to the youngest pupil. We alternated French lessons with marathon hikes up mountains covered with wild flowers. We took the waters (it would be wrong to say, in the circumstances, that I swam) in a huge and exotic swimming pool in Montreux, reached down an exhilarating funicular. I ate a whole chicken (a poussin, I suppose) and ice creams beyond English compare.

It was certainly educational, and a revelation of the outdoors after the dark warren of Hans Place. Later the joke was that the school had so many pupils that a certain proportion of them had to be outside, wandering from venue to venue across London. Whilst we certainly did our share of crocodiling (in shorts then, not knickerbockers) – to the Duke of York's barracks or the Natural History Museum – and indeed sometimes took the bus (there was then much competition for the infinitely long bus ticket), most of our time was spent in that capacious corner building, with the photographs of the recent royal alumnus lining the stairs.

I remember a boy trying to set fire to the gym there (he only set fire to his cap). And I remember, much later, the shock of watching a television documentary on Colonel Townend when, betraying hardly a flicker of emotion, he pointed over his shoulder at the window on to a balcony where, he said, his wife had been struck dead by lightning.