Dr Fred Sanger is nearly ninety now, and very frail. He is renowned as one of only four individuals ever to have won two Nobel prizes, and is one the oldest living Bryanstonians, though with fading memories. Slowly, over the course of a grey August afternoon in the Cambridgeshire Fens, as the wind keened round his bungalow, we teased out his reminiscences of 1932-1936.

Sanger came to Bryanston from the Malvern Quaker prep-school The Downs, which he had hated. "Bryanston was a great relief after the Downs, which had been much more disciplined." He arrived just four years after Bryanston had been founded, in the aftermath of JG Jeffreys' disagreements with the school governors, and at the start of a new era. "I actually came the same term that [Thorold] Coade began as Headmaster. He made quite a lot of changes. Jeffreys used to have beatings, and Coade stopped all that: he was a more philosophical and intelligent person. I think at one stage he decided not to have any punishments at all, which didn't quite work. Then he introduced punishment runs, down to the main gate and back. I was a bit nervous, not the cheeky sort of type, so I never had to do one." That prompts a question: what about the legendary daily runs and cold showers? "No, no, no", comes the chuckling answer. "They did introduce cold showers, but they weren't compulsory."

Bryanston's increasingly relaxed attitude to extra-curricular interests suited Sanger. "Sports were more or less voluntary, but you had to do something in the afternoon. My main interest was squash and fives. I was captain of fives, but there were only two of us, so we didn't really have a team! Squash was more serious, and lots of the masters played."

So what else did they do? "We went for walks a lot, particularly up in the Hangings. I wasn't a smoker, but there used to be people who smoked up there. And we walked down the drive to Blandford, but not often." Sanger also remembers the lack of women. "Well we had matrons of course, but they hardly counted. We had houseboys, who kept the houses clean." Fortunately there were the teenage daughters of a geography teacher, who lived in the grounds and became good friends. "The other person I was fairly close to was the biology master, Fraser Hoyland. He used to take us on trips down to the coast for the weekend. He had a fast car, which was very exciting."

Naturally Coade took assembly. "We used to meet in the Centre room (now Cowley) every morning, the whole school. There was a history room on one side, and a geography room on the other. And we had to go to church on Sundays." Coade's influence on the school was quiet, after what had been seen by many as the tyranny of Jeffreys. "I didn't see much of Coade. He did get you in for little chats from time to time, nothing special. He was very well respected. At first when he came the older boys thought he was soft, but that soon went." One reason for that may have been the sudden uniform change. "Coade introduced shorts. Before that it had been long grey trousers and a blazer. But he completely changed it, to shorts and rough stockings."

Academically, Sanger describes himself as "an above average but not outstanding scholar" - he took Common Entrance, but not the scholarship. However, he sat the School Certificate (A-level equivalent) at least a year early, and after gaining 7 credits, was able to take most of his last year off before going to Cambridge. "People started calling me 'Seven-credit Fred'. It was quite an achievement for Bryanston - I don't think anyone had ever done it before. But I got a bit cocky after that. I told Coade I wanted to try for a school scholarship, but he told me in no uncertain terms I wasn't up to it. I think he was right, probably."

What he did take to was science, helped by his Shaftesbury housemaster, Mr Ordish, also his chemistry teacher. Sanger remembers long hours the pair spent distilling and recrystallising in the labs, formerly the Portman stables and now Purbeck. "We used to experiment all the time in that last year. Ordish used to make dyestuffs on his own, and it was a wonderful experience to work with him." However, Sanger no longer clearly remembers the Sherlock-Holmes style episode described in the 2004 Bryanston Newsletter, when he and Ordish caught some petty thieves blue-handed after dyeing coins and leaving them temptingly in Sanger's coat-pocket.

Sanger profited greatly from the individual study concept started at the school's founding in 1928 and still going strong. Like many of us, he remembers it making university life seem completely normal. Though his memory of the school is nearly gone, it had its effect on him, and those of us who have studied science are very proud to have such an example to follow.

Dr. Rachel Quarrell, Balliol College, Oxford (Gr '85) written September 2006

FACTFILE:

Frederick Sanger was born on August 1918, the son of a Gloucestershire doctor. He followed his Bryanston education with a BA and then PhD at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he moved into biochemistry. Staying in Cambridge, he concentrated on research and avoided teaching as much as possible, focusing on developing new methods for studying proteins. This paid off when his new techniques for amino acid sequencing helped him deduce the complete structure of insulin, the first time this had been done for a whole protein, and a fore-runner of the current treatment methods for insulin-dependent diabetics. For this work Sanger was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1958. Moving into genome sequencing, he worked with Max Perutz, John Kendrew and Francis Crick, and his method of 'dideoxy' rapid gene sequencing brought him a second Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1980, with Paul berg and Walter Gilbert. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Commander of the British Empire, and has won numerous awards and medals for science. He and his wife Margaret (now married for 66 years) sent both their sons to Bryanston. In 1957 he laid the foundation stone for the 'new' science block, now superseded by the Sanger Centre for Science and Mathematics.

The only other people to have won more than one Nobel prize are scientists Marie Curie, John Bardeen and Linus Pauling. Two organisations - the Red Cross and the UNHCR - have won multiple peace prizes.