eastlondonhistory.com

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.

It was a tricky conundrum for wealthy East Enders of bygone centuries. How to store up extraordinary wealth in this life, while assuring themselves of a smooth passage to the next.

The likes of Ralph Davenant, Thomas Parmiter, Henry Raine, George Green, Nicholas Gibson and Prisca Coborn would have been believers all … or at the very least would have wanted to hedge their bets with God by doing good works. Davenant, after all, not only had a bit of cash but was also a clergyman.

They also knew that, satisfying though building wealth was, you couldn’t take it with you. So, rather than copying the pharaohs, and after taking care of the family, they built for future generations. Schools would be the way that the children of the poor would raise and improve themselves. It was a subject dear to the heart of Gibson, Parmiter, Raine and the rest - for many of them had come from humble beginnings themselves.

And there began a curious evolution. While many of the public schools began in just the same way, as endowments for small numbers of the poor to educate their children, they soon became appropriated by the rich, who knew a good deal when they saw it. Hence the paradox of a ‘public’ school that most of the public can’t get into - unless they are very rich. In the East End, the foundation schools took a different twist, becoming the grammar schools that everyone wanted to send their children too. But where are they now? In large part, the answer is ‘the home counties’, though there is a lot more to the story than the schools simply following East Enders as they decamped to Essex and Hertfordshire. A couple remain. But who were these wealthy benefactors, and how have the centuries changed their schools?

Parmiter’s School is now at Garston, near Watford in Hertfordshire, but it started life in St John Street, Bethnal Green. The school was founded by a bequest from wealthy East End silk merchant Thomas Parmiter. When Parmiter died in 1681 he left two farms in Suffolk - between them they would supply a fund providing £30 a year for six almshouses and £100 a year for ‘one free schoolhouse or room for ten poor children’ in Bethnal Green. Elizabeth Carter gave a plot of land at the top of what is now Brick Lane, as well as a further £10 a year. And William Lee gave a further tenner a year plus £100 for the raising of school buildings.

The school opened in 1722 and by 1730 had 30 boys, by 1809 there were 50. In 1839 the school had to move when the Eastern Counties Railway bought the original plot (the Liverpool Street Line runs beneath the original site and out to Bethnal Green overground station). The new site was in Gloucester Street (now Parmiter Street). The school moved again, to Approach Road in 1887. Parmiter’s was gradually moving further out of London, and steadily growing in size.  In 1977 the first pupils had entered the new Parmiter’s school in Hertfordshire. The Queen officially opened the new school in 1981, the 300th anniversary of Thomas’s bequest. The grammar school in Bethnal Green closed the same year.

George Green School is still in the East End, on Manchester Road on the Isle of Dogs, not so far from the home of its founder. George Green was from humble beginnings, starting as an apprentice shipbuilder at the Blackwall Yard in 1782. In 1796 he married the boss’s daughter and was made a partner. It was a boom time for shipping and Green became rich but devoted equal industry to giving his cash away - to almshouses, sailors’ homes, a chapel and, in particular, schools.

In 1828 the first George Green’s School was built on the corner of Chrisp Street and the East India Dock Road. A larger building was raised on the corner of Kirby Street and East India Dock Road in 1884, before the most recent move, in 1976. George Green School now sits on the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, and looking across at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. The shipyards and shipbuilders may have gone, but at least Green’s foundation still has the Thames as a neighbour.