John Haden Badley

Born in Dudley, Worcestershire, (now West Midlands), England, son of Dr. James Payton Badley and Laura Elizabeth Best his wife.

Graduating from Cambridge with a first class classics degree in 1887,[1] Badley heard about the plans for Reddie's school through his university friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson when he came down in 1888, went there and was fascinated.

He married Amy Garrett, sister of his Cambridge friend Edmund Garret, in 1892, and in January 1893, with the help of Oswald Powell they opened their school, Bedales, in a rented property near Haywards Heath.

For instance the curriculum was English-based, not classical, and wide ― with science, art, music, French, German, and opportunities for plays and hobbies.

The games emphasis of Rugby and the conventional Public School was condemned; instead much time was spent on manual labour in fields and gardens, and the boys were also taught tailoring, boot making and cookery.

Integral to that persona though was the personal reserve and sexual repression characteristic of the English Public School system, coupled with obsessions of 1890 Sandal Socialism and German Naturkultur: the emphasis on cold baths, earth closets, homespun fabrics, and "unsilly" (i.e. non-sexual) friendship between adolescent boys and girls.

He was strict and he was obeyed; he neither smoked nor drank: "When he came stalking with his quick, silent tread, into the classroom there was immediate silence; if there happened to be a piece of paper on the floor, he would point to it without deigning to say a word, and the boy nearest would hurriedly pick it up."

Badley wrote a number of books in his lifetime which include After the War (1917), Bedales: A Pioneer School (1923), Form and Spirit (1951), and his autobiography, Memories and Reflections, published in 1955, written ten years earlier and given to a friend and colleague for posthumous publication.