| Anon. (2006). The Friends' School at Croydon, Bull Croydon Nat Hist Sci Soc, 126: 18-20. |
The Friends' School at Croydon
CROYDON - 1825-1879 The Committee took over another beautiful house here, this time almost as old, 1708, as the date we all started. But they had learned: on 19.1.1824 they minuted that 'it is desirable that the rooms in the wings (i.e. the new additions) be not less than 13 feet in height and those of the dormitories no less than 12 feet'. The splendid glass negatives taken before it left in 1879 by Bedford Lemere, President of the Old Scholars Association and architectural photographer to Queen Victoria, show the spaciousness of it all, with that beautiful long garden stretching out apparently into infinity. My uncle Alfred Alexander Radley was there before emigrating to Canada and becoming President of their Methodist Conference. I speak', he wrote to me, 'of my experience as a child during five years (1867-72) in a boarding school under the control of the Society of Friends. Games were encouraged. Cricket, football, shinny, paperchase and others. Nature study was stimulated by long walks into the country and the collecting of specimens; plants, butterflies, shells, birds' eggs. Budding literary genius found its opportunity in the 'Select Society' to which the older boys were admitted on the approval of the Teachers' Meeting. All of which was good. But over against this, put the fact that we had no organised physical drill or athletics; anything like the Boy Scouts or Cadets would have been frowned upon; dramatics were taboo, as also was the singing of secular songs (and even hymns for a while); no music, vocal or instrumental, was taught or even allowed; novels were absolutely forbidden; theatre-going and public entertainment (except lectures) were not to be thought of and anything like games of chance, such as cards etc., were equally regarded'. The school shared in a motley collection of educational establishments at Croydon, from the Military Seminary of the East India Company through a Dame School, a 'School of Industry' (very much up our street), a Ragged School sponsored by Lord Shaftesbury, and the Warehousemen and Clerk's School similarly by the 1st Earl Russell. But eventually the local illness struck again - this time typhoid - hence another move in 1879. After a series of lesser schools in the building came the solid preparatory St Anselms's in 1904 which pulled down the wings but left the 1708 core and added a Memorial Hall for WW1. And then in September 1940 it all went, along with the Head's house and the Friend's Meeting House; providentially the school had been evacuated. The Germans had dropped a landmine captured at Dunkirk from the British stores, and out of respect for its origins it refused to explode on landing; but on removal it did, though luckily no-one was hurt. The only survival was the 1708 front gate, which had allowed the blast to whistle through it. And its most likely craftsman, Thomas Robinson, who had worked at St Paul's Cathedral, had already designed two masterpieces at Carshalton Park and Beddington. Both were exported to the USA in the 1900s but from the replica of the latter, insisted upon as part of the deal, we can compare a trick in its tracery, a U motif, with one of ours, thus clinching its origin by Robinson, described by the expert Raymond Lister as 'representing the greatest achievement of pure English blacksmithery'. The gate had been carefully guarded during the War by Ernest Allen, a Croydon Friend living in the country, but when it came to reinstatement the London Borough of Croydon had pre-empted this by building its new high-rise municipal headquarters on our site! And the Meeting House couldn't accommodate it either owing to a road-widening scheme involving the delightfully re-designated Friends Road. so it ended up at Walden, with a plaque now on it recalling its 1976 reopening by Duncan Fairn, the Clerk of London and Middlesex General Meeting, in the presence of two former Clerks of London Yearly Meeting, Redford Crosfield Harris and Godfrey Mace, an Old Scholar, and the acknowledged pioneer in the tracing of these four sites, George Edwards. Some wags put up a token resistance to Duncan's actual opening, but "Friendly Persuasion overcame all." The section on Croydon ends here but the author adds in the section on Saffron Walden that 'when Croydon became too unhealthy with typhoid and even a death from rheumatic fever the Committee explored Alton and Chelmsford before Walden'. The site that was offered was on a hill and 'what clinched it after the Croydon experience was that it had "a good supply of water from a deep artisian well"'. He adds that 'Croydon had bequeathed the 1872 clock which had graced the garden front, and it is now proudly seen from the School walk, the Avenue, in the view immortalised in the Quaker Tapestry depicting all the Friends' Schools of its day. There came also the Barometer, one in a group given to all the Friends' Schools in 1871 by the first Quaker Member of Parliament, Joseph Pease.' |
Top of page ~ Index of Bulletin issues ~ CNHSS Archives Page Last
updated September 23rd 2006 |