City of London School and BSA

Four BSA students had been educated at the City of London School. Gardner was the first student admitted to the BSA and its second director (after Penrose).

• Ernest Arthur Gardner (1862-1939), Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge; BSA 1886/87; director 1887-95.
• Charles Henry Hawes (1867-1943), Trinity College, Cambridge; BSA 1904/05.
• Frederick Arthur Charles Morrison (1872-1899), Jesus College, Cambridge; BSA 1896/97.
• John Knight Fotheringham (1874-1936), Merton College, Oxford; BSA 1898/99.

Alfred John Spilsbury (1874-1940), who had been educated at Christ's Hospital and was admitted to the BSA in 1897/98, was later the senior classical master at the City of London School.

Percy Gardner (1846-1937), Ernest's brother and later the Lincoln and Merton professor of classical archaeology at Oxford (where he influenced numerous future students of the BSA), had attended the school under George Ferris Whidborne Mortimer (1805–1871), headmaster 1840-65. Percy Gardner recalled his time at the City of London School (Autobiographica, Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1933):

In those days the School ... was in Milk Street, within a stone-throw of Cheapside, and we boys had to pass through the heart of London daily, and, since there was no play-ground, spent the half-hour allowed for lunch in roaming about the precincts of the Guildhall. ... there was on every side a stirring and an energy which acted upon the minds of boys at an impressionable age, perhaps rather below them above consciousness.

Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838-1926) was the successor to Mortimer as headmaster from 1865 to 1889.