Free Alan Rickman by Maureen Paton

Latymer Upper, he has a decidedly equivocal attitude towards the fee-paying school that gave poor scholarship boys like him a privileged upbringing.
    His misgivings were to lead to an ideological falling-out with Latymer towards the end of 1995 when the school asked permission to use his photograph in a display advertisement placed in theatre programmes for three productions from October to December at the Lyric Hammersmith. 1995 was Latymer’s centenary year, and the ads were specifically designed to recruit new pupils with an interest in drama. Hence the mug-shots of Latymer’s most famous dramatic successes: Alan Rickman, Mel Smith and Hugh Grant.
    The school wrote to ask Alan’s permission to use his photo. ‘We received a reply from his agent, one of those wonderful one-sentence letters that said Alan did not wish his photograph to be used in this way,’ recalls Chris Hammond. ‘Luckily we hadn’t sent the display ads off to the printers, so we didn’t have to reprint anything. We simply removed Alan’s photograph.
    â€˜The strange thing was that Alan had already given permission for his picture to be used in a book about the history of the school, which was published in October 1995.’
    Appearing in the school’s history book was one thing; but joining in with its recruitment drive was a very different game of soldiers. Staunch Labour supporter Alan Rickman refused to cooperate with the ads because he didn’t wish to be seen to be publicly endorsing a fee-paying school which no longer has the same quota of working-class scholarship boys that it did in his day. Paradoxically, that’s because the Labour Party abolished the direct-grant system back in 1976 with the inevitable result that Latymer Upper took fewer poor pupils and became more elitist. The 300 assisted places that still existed in 1995 were abolished by Labour after it came back into power in 1997.
    Ideally, of course, Labour would prefer private schools like Latymer not to exist at all. To add to the irony of Alan’s dilemma, a member of his Labour councillor girlfriend’s family was also educated at Latymer Upper. ‘I think it was her brother or her cousin, I can’t remember which,’ says Chris Hammond.
    In other words, though the system may not have pleased the purists, Latymer Upper proved to be the making of a lot of impoverished bright children . . . including Alan Rickman.
    â€˜Alan is a romantic,’ says Chris Hammond, not unsympathetically. ‘And every so often harsh political realities hit him, either through his partner or through logic. He has a romantic view of Latymer and of the Gild.
    â€˜He’s ideologically in dispute with the concept of an independent-school education, the idea that money buys all. But after Jim McCabe’s requiem mass in January, Alan came back to the school and stayed for three hours from which I deduce he’s not personally in dispute with us. He didn’t have to come back; nobody forced him.
    â€˜And when he was invited to the centenary service at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1995, he sent his regrets that he couldn’t come because of filming commitments.
    â€˜Harriet Harman’s name came up when we were talking, and yes, you could certainly say that he wasn’t exactly in favour of her decision to send her son to a selective school,’ adds Chris of the educational own goal by a Shadow Cabinet Minister that split the Labour front benches for a while in February 1996.
    â€˜But I asked Alan how he would try to maintain Latymer in future if he were a school governor, and he reluctantly agreed that he would have done the same as us. He’s ambivalent about it all, because he cares about Latymer.’
    According to Chris Hammond, another issue that Rickman felt strongly about was the sacking of Jim McCabe in 1993; he thought Jim was poorly treated at the time.
    â€˜Jim was asked to leave,’