In 1928, the school was already established at Aldwick, Sussex, just to the west of Bognor Regis, under Dugald S. Hancock (1897–1963)[3] and his brother-in-law Anthony Maurice Bell.

A modern linguist born in the Transvaal, Hancock had been educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, with Bell, and was a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society.

[6] In the 1930s the school was still operated in Sussex by Dugald and Vivien Hancock (formerly Bell), both schoolteachers, but in 1940 it was evacuated to Wiltshire, because of the risk of German bombing on the south coast.

He described the school's garden as an "oceanic surging of tangled nettles", with "waist high grass", the wall covered in a "jungle of weed and ivy".

[13] When Hancock needed money to buy Ashton Gifford House, Siegfried Sassoon lent her £8,000, and he later waived the agreed interest on the loan.

[17]The school's classrooms were whitewashed huts standing apart from the main house, and a barn behind them was used as a gymnasium, where the boys were taught to box.

He later wrote of it that it had an air of chaos, impermanence, and "something of Llanabbas, the prep school in Decline and Fall, but also something of a gulag in some distant region of the USSR just this side of Siberia.

[10] In 1956 The Spectator said of Greenways that it was "a Prep School where boys work well because they are treated like human beings and are warm, well fed, and happy.