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Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson’s first jobs was as a travelling Paddington Bear salesman. It might seem a long way from there to becoming Britain’s – and arguably the world’s – best known motoring journalist, but in fact his first foray into the world of employment was because his parents, Eddie Grenville Clarkson and Shirley Gabrielle Ward, owned a business selling such bears near the family’s Doncaster home (his mother was also a magistrate). According to some reports, their previous business was selling tea cosies. The bear line of work came about by accident, after they made two at home for presents for their own kids and people kept asking where they could buy them. With no small amount of ingenuity and boundless hard work later, the couple had a thriving business that was sufficiently profitable to send Jeremy to a private school.
    He first attended the nearby fee-paying Hill House School and then moved on to Repton School in south Derbyshire (taking withhim a vast collection of Dinky model cars). The school building at Repton itself is a colossal grand affair, a Hogwarts-esque country pile with a staggering history of academic achievement on the site of a former twelfth-century Augustinian Priory; the school itself dates back to the second half of the sixteenth century. One of the founding fathers of the halcyon Victorian era believed that ‘healthy exertion of body and spirit together, which is found in the excitement, the emulation and the friendly strife of school games’ was the way forward for his pupils. Clearly, he didn’t have Jeremy Clarkson in mind.
    So-called Old Reptonians include none other than writing legend Roald Dahl, who boarded there for four years (it was here that Cadbury’s presented ‘blind’ confectionery tastings to pupils for market research purposes, an experience widely believed to have been Dahl’s inspiration for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ). Other notables include novelist Christopher Isherwood, poet James Fenton, Olympian Harold Abrahams of Chariots of Fire fame, actor Basil Rathbone, no less than three Archbishops of Canterbury and Jeremy Clarkson, who is listed on their website as a ‘journalist’.
    In fact, Clarkson has gone on record saying he was bullied in school and that the ‘fagging was brutal’ but he has also pointed out that the baptism of fire applied to all new boys. One fellow pupil was a certain Andy Wilman and it was here at Repton that the two became firm friends and a future television partnership was born. It was their cheeky schoolboy humour, founded here at this fee-paying public school, that many years later would transform them into a household name and a TV production legend respectively. Talking in the Guardian , Wilman said that Clarkson at that age had, ‘a massive gob, really bad music taste and massive hair – the full Leo Sayer.’
    Clarkson’s rebellious streak that has caused so manycontroversies on the set of Top Gear was there from an early age: he is reported to have spent much time visiting the local girls’ school as well as numerous drinking establishments around Burton upon Trent. He also enjoyed ribbing teachers and confronting those authority figures with whom he disagreed.
    Despite this, the young Jeremy was academically excellent, gaining nine O-levels and easily graduating straight into the sixth form. Some reports suggest that until his voice broke, he even played the part of a pupil named Taplin in a BBC radio adaptation of Anthony Buckeridge’s novels about a schoolboy called Jennings and his friend Darbyshire. The Children’s Hour specials started in 1948 and were extremely popular for many years. They made much of the author’s unique schoolboy language, such as ‘fossilised fish hooks!’ and ‘crystallised cheesecakes!’
    Unfortunately, just over two months before sitting his A-levels , Clarkson was expelled: his mother told Auto Trader that the school took a dim view of him ‘drinking, smoking