YOU WOULD be forgiven for thinking the young men posed with top hats and elegant long coats in our main photograph today were sixth-formers – or perhaps young masters at Eton. Wrong. They are actually York St John’s College students.

Quite a change from the casually-dressed young men and women of today. But then this photograph was taken sometime between 1905 and 1907, and these young men were being trained as school masters.

At the time the photograph was taken St John’s College, as it was then known, was the largest Diocesan College in the country – no fewer than 112 students, all men, were enrolled.

That is small by today’s standards – York St John University has just over 5,000 students – but was nevertheless a far cry from the college’s much smaller beginnings almost 70 years earlier.

According to the History Of York website – historyofyork.org.uk – the then Archbishop of York, Vernon Harcourt, held a meeting of the Diocesan Society on December 11, 1839. Two weeks later, an announcement was made: “It was resolved upon, as the most powerful means of remedying the existing defects in the Education both of the Poor and Middle Classes of Society, to establish a School for the purpose of Training Masters in the Art and Practice of Teaching; and it was determined to found such a school at York as soon as sufficient funds should be raised in the Diocese to maintain it.”

The new college opened in May 1841 in a building in Monkgate with a principal, masters, and just a single student – 16-year-old Edward Preston Duke.

The college was men-only, but in 1846 a Female Training School was founded.

By that time, the male college had already outgrown its Monkgate base, and in 1846 moved into the magnificent mock-Tudor building in Lord Mayor’s Walk so familiar to us today. Both institutions prospered, and by 1862 space at the women’s college was so tight that it moved to Ripon.

The men’s college came to be known as St John's College from the late 1890s. By the time of our second photograph, which shows St John's College prefects in 1911-12, it had also become known for its strict discipline.

A new college principal, the Rev H Walker, had taken over from the Rev EE Nottingham in 1908. And according to John Maw, who was a student at St John’s from 1955-58, and later a lecturer from 1970 to 2000, Principal Walker “was noted for the strict unbending regime that he imposed on the student body.”

One story has it that he was so stern and inflexible that when the college’s Rugby XV returned from a victorious match against arch rivals Bede College, he decreed that “no triumphal celebrations should be made”. Perhaps the prefects in our picture, top right, were the ones who enforced this edict?

• Photographs courtesy of the York St John University archives. The University has established a Heritage Trail on its campus. If you would like to be guided around the trail please contact Professor Andy Smith at a.smith@yorksj.ac.uk