Shropshire Star

Travelling back in time to Doctor Who Tom Baker's days as a schoolboy in Shropshire

Some time in the late 1940s Doctor Who, the world’s most famous time traveller, fetched up in Shropshire.

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Doctor Who star Tom Baker

And for him it would indeed have been an initially alien world.

In this incarnation he was a schoolboy amid a religious order in a grand mansion.

That Liverpool lad was Tom Baker, for whom the religious calling was not to last, and instead he became an actor – best known as the fourth Doctor Who, renowned for his trademark resonant voice and scarf.

Doctor Who star Tom Baker

He played the Time Lord from 1974 to 1981, to become the longest-serving actor to play the Doctor in the series.

His time in Shropshire was spent at first at Pell Wall Hall, near Market Drayton, which was the home of St Joseph’s College, a school run by the French Catholic order, the De La Mennais Brothers, otherwise known as the Brothers of Christian Instruction. The school at Pell Wall Hall closed in 1962.

Pell Wall Hall, Market Drayton, in the days it was St Joseph's College, which was a Catholic school which closed in 1962