Bedales in Hampshire is one of the country’s priciest public schools, with fees set at an eye-watering £10,600 per annum for boarders and £8,300 for day pupils.

As such, there won’t be many children from Dudley heading in this direction.

Nevertheless, the roll-call of eminent Bedales alumni is distinctively different from the lists of equally well-healed Old Etonians and Harrovians. Sure, there’s the usual sprinkling of ambassadors and MPs, but many more from what we might call the arts.

Daniel Day-Lewis and his sister went there, as well as Sir Peter Wright, erstwhile director of both Sadler’s Wells and BRB, and Teddy Thompson (son of Richard and Linda), whom I used to rate as a rather fine songwriter.

The science-fiction writer, John Wyndham is also a former pupil, as is Lily Allen. That’s enough celebs, I think.

That earlier remark about Dudley’s comparative lack of upward social mobility is not entirely flippant, for the founder of that famous school in leafy Hampshire came from just here.

John Haden Badley was born in Tower Street, Dudley, in 1865.

Even if John Haden were not added to its ranks, the Badley family would be important enough in Black Country history, with an ancestral vault at St Edmund’s, Dudley, to prove it. John came from a long and distinguished line of physicians.

His father was one (James Payton Badley), as was his grandfather (John Badley) and his great-grandfather (William).

The grandfather was probably the pick of the bunch, a pupil of both John Hunter and John Abernethy, two of the greatest surgeons of the 19th century, and he even merited a plaque inside the church.

Thus it was a nailed-on certainty that John Haden Badley would enter the medical profession.

Except that he didn’t. John went to Rugby and Cambridge as a classicist, and left Trinity College not really knowing what he wanted to be.

But networks usually work in favour of such men, and a Cambridge friend got him a post at a revolutionary new school in Staffordshire. Abbotsholme School was established in 1889 by the noted Scottish educationalist, Dr Cecil Reddie.

Within three years of that appointment, Badley was ready to try its ideas out in a school of his own.

What Reddie had achieved at Abbotsholme, Badley was about to do at Bedales.

Reddie had dispensed with the usual classical curriculum in favour of more modern languages, got rid of top hats and Eton collars, and introduced art and music, and practical skills such as carpentry, into the syllabus. Sectarian theology likewise bit the dust.

In 1893, when John Badley took over an old Elizabethan manor house at Haywards Heath in West Sussex, his school was ready to roll.

When Dr Reddie introduced Badley to his radical educational ideas, he was already pushing at an open door.

Badley had left Cambridge a socialist, much influenced by William Morris and Edward Carpenter, the latter a future founder of the Labour Party and campaigner for women’s rights, and against sexual discrimination.

John Badley’s wife-to-be, Amy Garrett, was an equally strong campaigner for female equality.

Likewise in Badley’s buzzing head were the educational ideas of continental theorists such as Pestalozzi and Montessori, and the kindergarten schooling of Friedrich Frobel.

Badley’s new school would be for the hands and the heart, as well as for the head.

Once the boys began to enter the gates of Bedales, they found an atmosphere and a form of education very different to that on offer at most other public and grammar schools.

Lessons at Bedales were only for the morning, the afternoons reserved, not for the usual blood-bath on the rugby field, but for woodwork and cookery and tailoring. And the classes themselves included a wide range of science subjects, as well as drama and music.

That distinctive curriculum was maintained, when, 10 years later, Badley moved the school to new purpose-built premises at Steep in Hampshire.

But it was not only the boys who arrived at Bedales; and here we have Badley’s real innovation and his claim to fame, even more so than at Abbotsholme.

Girls too were admitted, making Bedales the first genuinely co-educational boarding school in the country. By the end of the First World War, girls and boys were being admitted to the school in equal numbers.

And what Badley had pioneered at Bedales – co-education, pupil-centred learning and more – was soon in evidence at a host of similar establishments: King Alfred’s in London, Dartington College in Devon and Bryanston in Dorset.

Badley’s model even crossed the Atlantic to New York City, where Helen Pankhurst opened her Children’s University School in 1914.

The dreaded league tables have made it hard to maintain quite the same innovative and practical curriculum in place in the 1890s, but the ethos of Bedales’ founder has not entirely disappeared, as its celebrity roll-call demonstrates.

John Badley remained headmaster of Bedales for 42 years in all, and, after the death of his wife, lived out his twilight years in a cottage in the school grounds. Here was genuinely a lifetime’s devotion. Badley died there in 1967, at the age of 102 years.

Longevity, it seems, was something he did inherit from the family of doctors before him, even if he turned out to be a physician of the mind, rather than the body.