Seven Grasmere Camps, One Set of Clothes

All four came home folded exactly as I had packed them, and so, in a sense, did he.

The context. For one week in the summer term at MGS, normal teaching stops and every boy picks a week-long activity, from Play in a Week to Ski in a Week. In June 2025 there were over 30 options, and around 450 boys went on residential trips, including the Lake District camps. Grasmere started in 1904, Borrowdale in 1931, Bassenthwaite in 1970. When the school posted a video tour of the camps, the old boys arrived in the comments, and the comments are the most useful school literature I have ever read.

Chris Gardner’s first camp was Bassenthwaite in 1990, where lights out meant the whole bell tent crowded round a transistor radio for the Italia 90 World Cup. Alex McGrath did five Borrowdales, including the year the camp blew down, the marquee poles snapped and everyone was evacuated early, and later went back as staff and watched Manchester United win the 1999 Champions League final. John Oxley’s first year was the last at the old Borrowdale site, washed out on the second night.

Crosthwaite again, on catering: gallons of porridge made the night before, and “Russian roulette with label-less sponge puddings”. Also praying for rain on the day of the Helvellyn walk. Another old boy added that the weather for Camps Week is, of course, “always great”. The school archive, meanwhile, has photographs of a flooded Borrowdale in 1986.

Mike Antrobus, looking through those archive photographs, judged that dining at Grasmere in the 1950s looked “very civilised” and in the 1940s “positively plush”. Jasper’s Scout camp had a barbecue, and he described one sausage as “mostly fire”.

I was ready to have words about the clothes. Then I read the comments, and now I cannot tell whether he has let me down or qualified.