Friday, November 4, 2016
Back in the 1970s Burton-on-Trent gave an education to that jean-clad, smart-mouthed, handy-with-his-fists motoring journalist and broadcaster, Jeremy Clarkson.
Yes old Clarky went to the fee-paying Repton School, a few miles outside Burton. A prestigious 400 year old boarding school, Yorkshire-born Clarkson managed to gain nine O Levels (GCSEs if you’re under 30) before he was expelled just before his A levels.
In fact he and his fellow pupil, Andy Wilman who was on the Top Gear production team, may have coined the name of the helmet-clad mystery driver ‘the Stig’ from a term that was given to the first years at the school.
Recently in a local newspaper* he waxed lyrically about his time at Burton: “I went to school about half a mile from it, my virginity went west in Yoxall, I got my first speeding ticket on the A38 outside Barton under Needwood, and it was in Abbots Bromley that I learned how to be chemically inconvenienced, how to be thrown out of a pub, how to be chucked by a girlfriend without blubbing, how to drive fast, how to do everything that matters really.”
Quite an endorsement we think you’ll agree.
*The Derby Telegraph
