schoolboy one had known ... He was quite a phenomenon". Another contemporary, Denis Hills, later said that Powell "carried an armful of books (Greek texts?) and kept to himself ... he was reputed to be cleverer than any of the masters". Powell won all three of the school's classics prizes (in Thucydides, Herodotus and Divinity) in the fifth form, two or three years younger than anyone else had won them. He also began to translate Herodotus' Histories and completed the translation of the first part when he was fourteen. He entered the sixth form two years before his classmates and was remembered as a hard-working student; his contemporary Roy Lewis recalled that "we thought that the masters were afraid of him". Powell also won a medal in gymnastics and gained a proficiency in the clarinet. He contemplated studying at the Royal Academy of Music but his parents persuaded him to try for a scholarship at Cambridge. Duggie Smith, Powell's form-master in the lower classical sixth and his principal classics master in the upper sixth, recalled in 1952: "Of all my pupils, he always insisted on the highest standards of accuracy and knowledge in those who taught him ... He was a pupil from whom I learnt more than most". It was during his time at sixth form that Powell learned German and began reading German books, which would influence his move towards atheism. Aged thirteen he also read James George Frazer's The Golden Bough and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which led him towards Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche. During the last four years at King Edward's School he was top of his form and won a number of prizes in Greek and Divinity. In 1929 he was awarded the Higher School Certificate with a distinction in Latin, Greek and ancient history, and won the school's Lee Divinity Prize for an essay on the New Testament after having memorised St Paul's Epistle to the Galatians in Greek. Powell also won the Badger Prize for English Literature twice and the Lightfoot Thucydides Prize. In December 1929, aged seventeen, he sat the classics scholarship paper at Trinity College, Cambridge and won the top award. Sir Ronald Melville, who sat the exams at the same time, recalled that "the exams mostly lasted three hours. Powell left the room halfway through each of them". Powell later told Melville that in one-and-a-half hours on