For a dozen school generations, boys at Morning Assembly in Hall have gazed, usually apathetically, at the large oil painting on the side wall of a rather crab-apple-faced old gentleman in Victorian clerical dress.

Few, if asked, could say more than that the painting was of John Hymers.

Probably the man who was most intimate with him was the late E. Willis Mills of Beverley, his solicitor and a boy at Brandesburton, when John Hymers was rector there. Much of the story of the School's founder which follows is taken from Mr. Mills' vivid recollections.

It was in 1803 that at Ormesby in Cleveland, John Hymers was born of yeoman stock. His father's landlord was the Earl of Durham, and it was chiefly owing to his patronage that a year or two later young John went to Sedbergh school and from there in due course, in 1822, as a Sizar to St. John's College, Cambridge.

As his later work proved, John was a sound mathematician, and in 1826 he was Second Wrangler.

Although his father was by no means a poor man, it was a matter of personal pride with the young undergraduate that he lived on his Sizarship of sixty pounds a year.

This attitude developed as the years passed into an eccentricity of character, as, though often generous indeed, he maintained a strictness in expending pence which was a byword in Brandesburton during his rectorate there.

After taking his degree, he remained at Cambridge for some years as a private tutor, whose pupils numbered amongst them the Duke of Devonshire, Lord Chancellor Herschel, Bishop Colenso, and Tennyson's friend, Arthur Hallam.

John Hymers, as Colenso noted of him, was a man of many parts. He possessed a wide literary knowledge and was an intimate friend of Wordsworth, who was connected by marriage to the Hymers family.

In 1829, he became an Assistant Tutor at St. John's, then a Tutor in 1832, Senior Fellow in 1838, and finally, President of the College in 1848. During this period, he published his Mathematical Books which introduced the new Continental methods to the Cambridge of his day.

As was customary for a College Tutor in Victorian times, John Hymers took Orders, being ordained in 1834 at Carlisle and finally taking his Doctorate of Divinity in 1843. Nine years later, having completed his term as President of St. John's, he was elected by the College to Brandesburton Rectory, where he was destined to pass the remainder of his life.

At first, he was thoroughly unhappy in the parish, which was very remote in those days; a weekly carrier's cart to Beverley Market was the sole contact with the outside world. He wished strongly to return to his College, but his place had been filled, and so he settled down to make the best of his new surroundings.

His eccentricities were soon renowned in so small a place. Although he kept a coachman-gardener, he preferred to raise his own garden produce and to sell it himself at fixed rates to his parishioners, who spoke of him as "Owd fewer sticks a penny!" from his transactions in rhubarb. Willis Mills records that the prize for being the brightest boy in the village school, with his knowledge of the Catechism, given to himself by the Rector, was the cold rice pudding left over from the Rector's dinner.

But the actual quiet help given to the poor and needy of the district by the rector was in direct contrast to his eccentricities and often as a Justice of the Peace, he paid the fine himself of some farm labourer whom he had just sentenced for poaching. Several poor boys also owed their University careers to the parson who built his own garden fence rather than employ the village joiner for half a day. No wonder Brandesburton thought him 'a queer mixture'.

In other respects, he was equally self-sufficient. A Rural Dean was anathema and a lawyer was only to be employed as a last resort. It was this last attitude that was to have such a vital effect on his will in which he bequeathed his fortune to found a school at Hull, but that is too long a story to be recounted here; sufficient to say that he wished the whole of his money, almost a quarter of a million pounds, to be devoted to this project.

John Hymers died in 1887 and five years later the school which he desired to found came into being, through the generosity of his brother Robert. One last fact has never been explained satisfactorily and that is how the parson-scholar son of a Dales farmer amassed such a fortune. Not even his solicitor could give a definite answer, but the most likely suggestion offered is that he made his money in the great Hudson railway boom of the I840's and we can leave it at that with the knowledge that £70,000 was destined to establish Hymers College and that the country parson's vision was to become the living reality of today.

William B Pickles, OH Staff 1922-62

Related Stories:

• The Later Life of John Hymers
• Remembering the Birth of Rev John Hymers
• The Opening of Hymers College