East End Grammar Schools part 2
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
Perhaps Henry Raine wasn’t sure whether he had been a force for good or bad in the East End. He had certainly made a good living from brewing beer, and he had employed a lot of East Enders, but as a devout Christian, he must have worried about the effects his ales had on his customers. So he took the route of many a successful London businessman of his day, giving the proceeds of his work to charity.
Raine lived from 1679 to 1738, but he founded his school in Wapping’s Fawdon Fields in 1719. There were two academies, one taking 50 boys, the other 50 girls. A master was employed at £40 a year to teach the boys reading, writing, and arithmetic. A mistress earned £20 for teaching the girls reading, knitting and sewing. School was tough in those days. Long days of study also incorporated real work to augment the finances of the school, with the boys making nets, while the girls had to knit and sew. Holidays were restricted to four days a year - Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, and Bartholomewtide. And any girl seen speaking to a friend on the way to or from church would lose her next day off (with expulsion for repeated offences).
By the mid-1800s, the construction of the London docks had seen the Wapping school cut off from its catchment area, and Raine’s moved to Cannon Street Road. The school would move again, to Arbour Square in 1913. The clamour for a good education in the 19th century (and in the decades preceding World War II) had seen Raine’s and the other East End grammars thrive. But the years after 1945 were tough on local schools. The East End population dropped year on year. Many people had been bombed out of their homes of course. The razing of many of the remaining houses, the building of the new towns, and a general movement of East Enders out to the home counties only accelerated the drop in numbers. East End schools, even the good ones, found it hard to maintain their rolls.
In 1963, the Minister of Education ordered Raine’s to drop its long-cherished practice of two single-sex schools and it became fully co-ed. In 1977, Raine’s merged with St Jude’s, and became a comprehensive. And in 1985, irony of ironies, it moved into a new home - the old Parmiter’s school building in Approach Road. Parmiter’s had left the East End to escape the problems beseting Raine’s, setting up a new home in the country - and with plenty of prospective pupils.
The Coopers’ Company and Coborn School has an even more venerable heritage than Raine’s. Its roots lie in the Nicholas Gibson Free School, founded in 1536 at Ratcliff, by a wealthy City of London grocer: stewardship passed to the City of London Coopers’ Company in 1552. Meanwhile, in 1701, Prisca Coborn, the widow of a brewer, set up a co-educational school in Bow, first near Bow Church then moving to Fairfield Road in 1814, and to Tredegar Square in 1870. The two schools became one in 1891 and remained in Bow until 1971. But a declining East End population, and the allure of a new and spacious site among the green fields of Essex (or Upminster at least) persuaded the governors to shift the school 15 miles east. The East End’s hold on its grammar schools was weakening.
Ralph Davenant hadn’t done anything so morally questionable as brewing beer - he had dedicated his life to doing the lord’s work, but his chief concern was what would happen after he was gone. The clergyman, a favourite of King Charles II and rector of St Mary’s Whitechapel, was a wealthy man. But perhaps looking for greater riches in heaven, he instructed his wife that, after their deaths, their goods should be sold to build a school. The reverend died in 1680, with a bequest of £100 funding an institution for ‘the poor boys of Whitechapel’. With his wife’s demise, and a grand sale of silver and gold plate, the pot grew. A number of houses were given to the foundation, yielding healthy rents to keep the school funded.
A building was raised on the Whitechapel Road (and is there to this day). It was a huge school, with a roll of more than 1200 in 1818. But as for many other schools, World War II was a turning point. The school was evacuated, and returned after the war to decaying buildings and with fewer pupils. As peace dawned, the Davenant Foundation Grammar School for Boys had just 200 pupils. And so, in 1966, Davenant followed the well-trodden route out to Essex - a county now filling up with former East Enders. The Davenant link isn’t dead though. The legacy for the East End is the Davenant Centre, now a ‘centre of excellence’ for youth services. The buildings themselves are a terrific blend of the Renaissance style building older pupils will remember and some dramatic modern spaces. The Revd Ralph wouldn’t recognise it … but his educational work goes on.
