The Digby

The Digby has been in continuous use as a school boarding house since 1964.

Originally the Digby Hotel, it was built by George Digby Wingfield Digby (1797-1883) of Sherborne Castle and was officially opened on 11 October (Pack Monday) 1869.

Designed in an adaptation of the Elizabethan style by architects R.H. Carpenter and William Slater, the hotel was built in about 18 months under the superintendence of Mr Thompson with Mr Estcourt of Gloucester as the general contractor. Constructed using Ham Hill and local stone and roofed with Broseley tile, on the gabled dormers stand stone ostriches holding horseshoes in their beaks (the Digby family crest) and over the entrance are the Digby coat of arms. The hotel’s gardens, which originally stretched as far as the railway line, were laid out by landscape gardener Mr Thomas. The cost of the whole, not including land or furniture, came to about £15,000.

In 1878 large assembly rooms were built onto the Digby Hotel which, following the demolition in 1883 of the Town Hall in Half Moon Street, were used for public meetings, lectures and balls. On 27 September 1898 Princess Victoria, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria who was married to Prince Louis Alexander of Battenberg, opened a fundraising bazaar at the assembly rooms in aid of the Yeatman Hospital. On 10 March 1909 Lady Frances Balfour spoke here in support of women’s suffrage which led to the formation of a Sherborne branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), the inaugural meeting of which was held at the assembly rooms on 23 April 1909. And on 13 November 1925 Brigadier-General R.B.D. Blakeney, President of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), spoke here at a meeting in support of the Fascist Movement. The Digby Hotel’s restaurant also attracted visitors, including Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald who dined there on 24 February 1932.

Digby Hotel luggage label. (Sherborne School Archives)

The hotel features in a number of novels – as ‘The Earl of Wessex’ in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887), as ‘The Lovelace Hotel’ in John Cowper Powys’s Wolf Solent (1929), and as ‘The Sawley Arms’ in John le Carré’s A Murder of Quality (1962). Scenes for John le Carré’s A Murder of Quality (1991) were filmed at The Digby in 1990.

When the Digby Hotel closed in June 1962 Sherborne School purchased the freehold for £25,000. The School had originally intended building a new boarding house in the garden of Greenhill House (now The Green) but decided it would be more cost-effective to convert the former Digby Hotel into a boarding house. The subsequent building works involved the conversion of the former cocktail bar into lavatories, the back bar into a shower room, and the removal of partition walls between the hotel bedrooms to create dormitories. A housemaster’s house and a dormitory block were also built onto the property.

At a meeting held on 17 November 1962 the School Governors formally adopted the recommendation that the new boarding house should be named ‘The Digby’.

The Digby opened at the start of Michaelmas term 1964 with 62 boys (including one day boy) under founding housemaster Peter Currie, and was officially opened on 10 October (Pack Monday) 1964 by OS School Governor Alan Lennox-Boyd, 1st Viscount Boyd of Merton.

The Digby Loving Cup, originally known as the ‘Brothers Cup’, was presented to Sherborne School in 1906 by brothers Arthur John Bodman Carrington (Abbeylands 1900-03) and Hugh Bodman Carrington (Abbeylands 1901-06) and made by their father’s firm Carrington & Co. of London.

Former Digby boys include Max Ayling (rugby union player), Steven Canty (director, Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network (TMON) & MarineGEO program, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center), Ben Caesar (consultant trauma and orthopaedic surgeon), Tom Carr-Smith (rugby union player), Christopher CF Chow (film & TV editor), Nick Chuter (director, Barclays Private Bank), Alex Crutcher (investigative journalist), David Fursdon (Lord-Lieutenant of Devon), Timothy Garton Ash (historian, author and commentator), Tom Gibbs (senior strategy adviser, HM Treasury), Max Halley (chef, sandwich and condiment expert), James Harris (philosopher), Andrew Heffernan (Dutch International event rider, Olympian & World Equestrian Games bronze medallist), Will Homer (rugby union player), Steven Lawn (died on 9/11 in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. In 2003 the Lawn family set up the Steven Lawn lecture series at Sherborne School with the aim of building better understanding between the West & the Islamic world), David Lough (historian, author, broadcaster), Richard Madden (British army officer), Chris Martin (songwriter, musician, record producer, lead singer and co-founder of the band Coldplay), Cokey Sulkin (hospitality sector entrepreneur), Simon Wilsey (British army officer), Freddie Wright (in 2016 broke the world record with Jack Galsworthy for the youngest pair to row the Atlantic).

House letter: m.

House colours: green and black (formerly Day Boy colours, also the racing colours of the Digby family).

Dormitory names (named by Peter Currie after Scottish islands): Eigg, Canna, Mull, Arran, Staffa, Islay, Coll, Orkneys, Benbecula, St Kilda, Outer Hebrides, Inner Hebrides, Shish Mahal, Tiree, Barra, Skye, Jura, Rhum, Outer Hebrides, Iona, Muck.

Housemasters:
1964 Peter Currie (1922-2014)
1972 Simon Wilkinson (1936-2020)
1987 Mike Davis (1942-2022)
1992 Alistair Morgan
2006 Martin Brooke
2018 Robert Le Poidevin
2024 Christopher Foyle
2026 Barnaby Allen

Online Resources:

For further information about the Sherborne School Archives please contact the School Archivist

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