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lewes
ragged
school
Education, education,
education,Victorian style
As local historian LS Davey found to his fr<strong>us</strong>tration
in the 1970s, information about the history
of the Lewes Ragged School has been difficult to
find, beca<strong>us</strong>e, he concludes; ‘these ragged schools
were very much family affairs’. But two recent
discoveries have cast a fascinating new light on
a slice of 19th-century Lewes life experienced by
those who were extremely poor.
This year, the East S<strong>us</strong>sex County Record Office
purchased a series of lantern slides, unseen by the
public for over a hundred years, which include
portraits of pupils of the Ragged School from
1895. And Senior Archivist Christopher Whittick
traced a file held at the National Archives at Kew
which tells <strong>us</strong>, amongst other things, how and
why a heavy s<strong>now</strong>fall in 1916 led to the School’s
eventual closure.
Free, compulsory education in Britain did not
begin until after 1870, and the parents of impoverished
families in Lewes, as everywhere, could
not afford to educate their children. In 1818, a
Portsmouth shoemaker called John Pounds started
teaching poor children without charging a fee,
and the name ‘ragged school’ was coined. Dickens
later wrote a letter to the Daily News describing
ragged schools as being for people ‘who are
too ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn, to enter
any other place: who could gain admission into
no charity school, and who would be driven from
any church door’.
Lewes Ragged School, which ran for upwards of
70 years, was founded by a Jireh Chapel member,
but it seems that the Ragged School was run
as a separate entity in a rented schoolroom in St
John’s Street, owned by John Dudeney. In January
1870, an event for the benefit of the school
took place, according to the NA file, ‘at the old
room in which they assemble’. Then, in 1879,
a freehold was acquired for the school on the
east side of St John Street, the site of the former
Bethesda Chapel.
The lessons mostly took place on Sunday evenings
although eventually ‘week-night classes
were sometimes held for instruction in secular
subjects’.
A newspaper article from 1892 refers to ‘... the
Ragged School so energetically conducted by
Mr Isaac Vinall’ where ‘the teachers, the majority
attending monthly in rotation ... number 179.’
The article goes on to say; ‘When we consider
the difficulties of influencing and reclaiming the
class for whom it is established all praise m<strong>us</strong>t be
accorded to Mr Vinall for his excellent work’.
The lantern slide portraits of Lewes Ragged