The school was founded in 1869 by the Reverend John Hawtrey. He had been a boy at
Eton, from the age of eight. In later life he became a master at Eton and was offered his own
house of boys. He decided to remove all of the younger boys from the school. With the permission of Eton College, he took the lowest two forms out to a separate school in
Slough and housed them in what is now
St Bernard's Catholic Grammar School. The new school was known as St Michael's School and was opened on 29 September 1869 (
Michaelmas). John Hawtrey's son,
Edward, removed the school to Westgate-on-Sea early in 1883. After Edward Hawtrey died in 1916, the name of the school was changed to Hawtreys. The school buildings were requisitioned during the Second World War and the school moved to
Oswestry in Shropshire, to the home of Sir William Wynn-Williams. In 1946 it moved again to
Tottenham House, a large Palladian
country house near the village of
Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire, in the heart of
Savernake Forest, when the last private owner,
George Brudenell-Bruce, 6th Marquess of Ailesbury, retired to
Jersey. Throughout the history of the school, a close connection was maintained with Eton College, to which many boys moved at the age of thirteen. Gerald Watts was headmaster from 1975 to 1990. When he left Hawtreys, numbers fell fast, falling from 128 to 50 in two years. Those taking their sons out of the school included
Kanga Tryon, who complained that the atmosphere was "no longer as it ought to be". In 1994, unable to survive, Hawtreys merged with
Cheam School, "Hawtreys School Staff and Pupils" were listed in the credits of
A Feast at Midnight (1994), a British comedy film about a prep school, made in the last operational year of Hawtreys. ==Old Hawtreyans==