Ragged Schools and Industrial Schools

Thomas Guthrie was born in Arbroath Scotland in 1803, 12th child of his father David, a merchant and banker. The young Thomas went to Edinburgh University at 12 where he studied as a divinity student, then studied surgery and anatomy. In 1829 Guthrie was appointed to a parish where he intro­duced classes for young people every Sabbath. He also started a village library.

In 1837, Guthrie became minister at the Old Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh where he saw at first hand the ragged children who lived by begging and stealing. Presumably he knew of Sheriff Watson in Aberdeen who had formed his Industrial Feeding School in 1841. Guthrie converted a room beneath the church as a kitchen and he soon had his first class going. Within a year he had started three Ragged Schools in Edinburgh! In his 1847 pamphlet Plea for Ragged Schools, Rev Guthrie described a unique curriculum - education, meals, clothes, industrial training and Christian instruction. Pupils learned cobbling, tailoring and cooking. And by doing jobs for local shops, the children could earn a small wage and learn its value. The effect was to clear the streets and prisons of young beggars.

Ragged Schools provided free education for children too poor to re­ceive it elsewhere but they were not pretty. Charles Dickens thought a particular London Ragged School was the most wretched place he’d ever seen. By 1841 c2 million people lived in London, but with­out compulsory schooling only a fract­ion of them had attended school. The Empire was expanding, but much of London was still impoverished.

Barnardo's Hope Place Ragged School, 

Edinbugh Castle Mission, London 1909

Docklands and East London Advertiser

The London City Mission was founded in 1835 by Scottish missionary David Nasmith and his colleagues to bring free education and Christ­ian good to London’s children. In 1840 the Mission received finan­cial and political support from the ref­or­mer Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftsbury. Reports were from the Children’s Employment Commission were read in Parliament­, detailing the horror of child labour in Brit­ain: low pay, long hours & dangerous work conditions exper­ienced by child­ren working in mines and collieries.

Field Lane Ragged School opened in 1842. The school consisted of two or three miserable rooms where ragged, filthy chil­dren huddled together on a bench. Not to be trusted with books, the pupils were taught orally by a voluntary teacher. By the 1850s Field Lane consisted of a day school, which taught reading, writing, counting and the Bible; two night schools, one for vagrant adults and another for boys who were employed during the day. There were classes in shoe-making and tailoring for boys, and sewing classes for girls. Field Lane also fed and clothed its students, ran a night refuge and a weekend Bible school. Evangelical Christianity was at the heart of Ragged schooling! 

In 1844 the Ragged School Union was founded as a movement of in­div­idual schools, sustained by charity or government grants. In under a decade, 300+ free schools for poor children were estab­lished in Britain. London, Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh of course, but Manchester, Liverpool and other cities became equally important.

There was criticism. Dickens thought the movement was not secular enough.

In 1850 journalist Henry Mayhew noted ongoing juvenile delinqu­ency. In his 1851 report, London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew noted the Mudlarks who traipsed along the banks of the Thames looking for coal, copper and rope scraps to sell. Few of these children had been to church or school. Indeed, due to their acts of petty theft brought about by hunger, they were often in prison.

Many poor families believed the classes on offer were irrelevant, so the Ragged School Union began to establish Brigades for boys in 1857. These groups provided certified jobs in street vending or shoe shining, with a proportion of the boys’ earnings being placed in a personal bank account. The police approved.

statue of Rev Thomas Guthrie,

Princes Street Edinburgh

Ragged Industrial Schools were intended to help destitute children who had not as yet committed any serious crime. They’d remove the children from bad influences and teach them a useful trade. Under the 1857 Industrial Schools Act, magistrates could send child­ren who had been found in the company of criminals or were begging, to attend residential Ragged Industrial Schools for two years. 

Were the Ragged Schools popular among the poorest in society? In the Ragged School Union’s Annual Report for 1857, only 21,500 out of London’s half a million children had attended their lessons. Eventually Parliament agreed that Ragged schooling alone would not solve the problems. The introduction of univ­ersal, compulsory schooling in London under the 1870 Education Act finally arrived.

The Jews' Free School in Spitalfields, in London’s East End, taught c20,000 pupils between 1856-1907. By 1900, the school had 4,250: it was the largest school in Europe. .Since my grand­moth­er lived in Whitechapel, sharing the two rooms with the 12 other people in her impoverished family, I must invest­igate her Jews’ Free School detailed records. Grandma went on to become a singer/dancer in the three Yiddish Theatres AND in the English-speaking pantomimes. So for at least my family, the Free School did a great job.

Westminster Jews' Free School

London

Ragged School Museum

Copperfield Rd, London

When Thomas Barnardo left Dublin for London in 1866, intending to be a doctor/missionary in China, he found a city where disease was rife, overcrowding were endemic, and educational opport­unities for the poor were still inadequate. Thousands of children had to sleep on the streets and others were forced to beg after being maimed in factories. Worse still was the cholera epidemic that swept through the East End, leaving 3,000 Londoners dead.

He gave up his medical training to pursue his local missionary and philanthropy works and in 1867 opened his first ragged school, Copperfield Road School in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Copperfield Road School (and his other properties in the East End) educated tens of thousands of chil­­dren over the years. It only closed in 1908 when enough gov­ern­ment schools were available to serve the loc­al famil­ies (although the Factory Girls’ Club lasted until 1916). Was this the last Ragged School to close?

 A group of 3 canal-side buildings once formed the largest ragged school in London, Barnardo’s. These 3 buildings later went through a variety of industrial uses until they were threatened with demolition in the early 1980s. Local people joined together to save them and The Ragged School Museum opened in 1990. Visitors can see lessons taught in an auth­entic Victorian classroom; and they can inpsect the recreated Victorian kitchen with no electricity or running water.