‘I know not how to abstain from reading,’ wrote Samuel Pepys back in the seventeenth century. Were he by some miracle still alive, Pepys would discover that this is a problem entirely alien to most people today. Indeed, his own diaries, avidly pored over by generations gone by, have now been condemned by today’s moralists and seem destined to be ignored.

This ‘new evidence’ seems to have prompted Hinchingbrooke School to review its association with Pepys. But why?

Almost four hundred years after he was a pupil, Pepys is in trouble at his old school. Following a ‘comprehensive consultation’, students at what is now Hinchingbrooke School, but was then known as Huntingdon Grammar, have voted to remove the name of this famous old boy from one of their houses. This is tragic. No other school in the country can boast of having Samuel Pepys as an alumnus. To be able to tread the same corridors as such a notable figure should be a source of pride, not shame.

Call me a cynic, but no child independently concludes that Pepys’s legacy is tainted and reminders of his existence must be erased. They do so only after having first had........

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