How Grateful We Should Be....

I was doing a little research on Family History (What Else) when I thought of something my Mother told me many years ago.

She said as a child she went to a school in Preston, Lancashire, England called Mill Hill Ragged School. In researching the school I came across plenty of Information on these types of Schools.

So much Information in fact it would be too much to put on this post. Briefly it seems they originated in Victorian times by a man named John Pounds in Portsmouth, England. As a young man John was an apprentice ship builder, he fell in to a dry dock and became crippled for life. He then became a shoemaker and while working in his shop he began teaching children how to read, his reputation grew and soon he had 40 pupils attending his lessons. As well as lessons in reading he taught arithmetic, cooking, carpentry and shoe making. John did not charge a fee for teaching the poor.


After his death a Rev.John Guthrie started a Ragged School in Edinburgh and Sheriff Watson one in Aberdeen. Lord Shaftesbury formed the Ragged School Union in 1844 and over the next eight years over 200 free schools for poor children were established in Britain. I read that as many as 300,000 children went through the London Schools alone between the 1840's and 1881.


In 1870 an education act was passed and gradually Ragged Schools were absorbed in to Board Schools. So the Ragged Schools were a fore runner of free Education as we know it. My mother would have attended school in the mid 1900's just as these schools ended. In fact I believe the Mill Hill School she attended closed in 1936. So many thanks should go to John Pounds and those like him who donated time and money to educate the poor.

A volunteer teacher of the times said how boisterous the children are "all of them ragged and dirty and some of them revoltingly so,and who were spending the Sabbath in lounging about the streets and yards or playing games. When ushered in to the first classroom they whistled, sang, shouted and yelled until better sport presented itself....The girls appearance was unrefined in the extreme; their answers to the teachers' questions revealed a state of ignorance truly deplorable"


The picture posted is of the school my Mother attended, I am sure taken many years after it was closed as evident by the more modern buildings surrounding it.