Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Conservative leader of the House of Commons, has posted a photo of five of his children in Hill House School uniform on Twitter, and it’s gone viral. People are saying that the Rees-Moggs look like something from the early 20th century. 

Well, people are welcome to their opinion. We just don’t share it. The Rees-Mogg children all look happy, don’t they? 

The idea is that uniform should be practical and cheap. And the pupils are proud of it. I don’t think any of the children would think they were old-fashioned - they’re very modern, really. 

People who go to prep schools where they wear jackets and ties: they look like Victorian businessmen, don’t they? Our uniform is different from everywhere else’s. But the place is different from everywhere else, too. Why shouldn’t we be individual?

Grey school uniforms make for grey minds

The colour is the key. The whole point of the uniform was that it wouldn’t be grey. My mother designed the entire thing. I went to a school that had a grey uniform, and she wanted colour for our school. She said that grey uniforms made for grey minds. 

She wanted the uniform to be inexpensive, and easy to maintain. And she wanted children to be able to do anything in it. 

Back then, my father ran the school. My mother was a nurse: she was a theatre sister at Guy’s Hospital. If she said something, the answer was yes. But her uniforms have stood the test of time. 

I don’t know why she chose the specific colours: rust and gold. But they’re nice, bright colours, and it makes it very easy to see where the children are. We take the children to Switzerland fairly often, and you can easily spot them in the airport. It’s very easily identifiable, as a uniform. It’s iconic, really. 

It’s also very, very easy to maintain. I don’t think there are any buttons - there are two buttons on the polo shirt, and that’s it. The rest of the fastenings are velcro, like ordinary gentleman’s trousers. It’s a very, very easy uniform to put on and take off. It’s child-friendly, and parent-friendly. And it looks good, whether there’s rain or sun.

When summer lasts until Hallowe’en

If you look at most uniforms, there are lots of bits and pieces, and the costs can quickly mount up: it works out very, very expensive. Ours is about £150, for the whole uniform. We haven’t got anything expensive: we don’t have a jacket, and we haven’t got long trousers. Those things can be phenomenally expensive. 

You can wear our uniform all the time, to anything. You can wear it to a concert, you can wear it playing games, you can wear it in lessons, in church, and you always, always look smart and well turned-out. 

The little ones do their sport in their usual uniforms. They might very well come back from games and go straight to a concert. They don’t have to change: all the uniforms are wipe-down.

The Rees-Mogg photo shows our summer uniform. They’re fairly long shorts, and they’re worn from Easter until Hallowe’en. We call that period “summer”. It’s a very old-fashioned idea of summer: from Easter Day to Hallowe’en.

In winter, they have a big gold sweater - it looks like a fisherman’s sweater - and plus-fours. They can even go skiing at -10C in those, so they’re much warmer than the shorts. They all go to Switzerland to go skiing from time to time. So the uniform works in the mountains, and it works in Chelsea. 

You can’t do sports in long trousers. But in knickerbockers, you can do rugger or cricket or fencing or football or anything. You can’t do many things in long trousers. You have to change. And then you have the extra expense. 

The modernity of cravats

And then there are the cravats. Eton has bow ties and Harrow has boaters. And we have cravats. 

Everybody else has ties. But how many people in the world wear ties now to the office? Ties are old-fashioned and have gone out of date. Cravats are special, easy to put on, and hide a multitude of sins. And they’re very distinctive. They’re modern - really modern. 

Cravats are easy to maintain and put on. Ties are actually very complicated to put on for young children. Some children can put them on, and some children can’t - and then you end up with ties at half-mast. It can look a mess. 

Cravats always look good. Girls in ties can look a bit odd. I think you’d be a bit self-conscious as a girl, wearing a tie. But cravats can be worn by girls. They look jolly smart, and they’re very inexpensive: a fiver each. 

Uniform as unifier

The great thing about having a uniform is that it makes it difficult to tell who’s rich and who’s poor. Everyone’s the same. It overcomes any sort of prejudice of any sort whatsoever. 

We have lots of scholarship pupils in the school: I think 17 this year, out of 600 pupils, between the ages of 4 and 13. We have everything from top-notch people in the City to local shopkeepers: there’s an enormous range of people. And the uniform is absolutely the unifying thing. 

You also can’t tell who’s famous and who’s not. Prince Charles went here, and he happily wore the uniform. And people couldn’t pick him out of a row of children walking down the street. It’s very difficult to pick them out when they all look exactly the same. 

We’re proud of our school, and proud of our uniform. I’m sure my mother would be delighted that the Rees-Mogg photo has had so much attention. My father would be over the moon. 

We’re the only school left - other than a small one in North London - that’s still entirely run by the founding family. That’s the secret, really, of the whole place. One of my sons is the undermaster, and the other is the bursar. My wife deals with admissions. One grandchild has passed right through, and is now at Winchester, and I have two grandsons left here. 

We’re unique; we’re individual. It’s different from other places. I suppose the uniform is part of that philosophy, really. 

Richard Townend is headmaster of Hill House School, in West London