Westminster School — where Shane MacGowan was expelled

Westminster School at 17 Dean's Yard — one of England's most prestigious independent schools, founded in the sixteenth century and counting among its alumni Christopher Wren, John Locke, and Edward Gibbon — offered Shane MacGowan a scholarship in the early 1970s on the basis of his evident academic ability. He accepted. The school sits in the shadow of Westminster Abbey, surrounded by the full apparatus of English institutional authority: the Houses of Parliament two minutes' walk away, the Church of England overhead, the expectation of a certain kind of future implicit in every corridor.

MacGowan was expelled after being arrested at Victoria Station for possession of drugs. He was fifteen or sixteen. The arrest at Victoria — a few hundred yards from the school gates — and the expulsion that followed ended whatever trajectory Westminster had been designed to produce. He was back in Hammersmith, back in the orbit of the London Irish working class, and the punk movement was beginning. The collision of his Westminster scholarship with his Tipperary roots and his Hammersmith streets had produced someone who understood both the English literary tradition and exactly what he thought of it.

The expulsion from Westminster is usually told as a pure disaster story. It probably wasn't. MacGowan's ear for language — the precision and compression of his best lyrics, the way "Fairytale of New York" uses six words to carry a marriage's worth of grief — is the product of someone who could have written a decent essay at Westminster and instead wrote something considerably more enduring. The school continues to operate at Dean's Yard, graduating students into distinguished careers. The most famous person to have attended briefly and been removed remains its most interesting alumnus.