It had a great influence on many Suffolk artists and made an important contribution to art teaching in the east of England for forty years.
The traditionalist local artist Alfred Munnings had himself driven round its smoking ruins gloating at the destruction of what he saw as a dangerously radical tendency.
Undeterred, Morris told the students to draw the burnt-out wreck and arranged emergency facilities in a local pub.
The school's peak time was in the 1940s and 1950s, when Benton End was a "powerhouse of art and literature, good food and lively conversation".
[4] In addition to Lucian Freud, students of the school include Maggi Hambling, David Kentish, Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, Lucy Harwood, Joan Warburton, Glyn Morgan, Valerie Thornton and top legal scholar Bernard Brown.