Chapter 8 - The Workshops
The Founder was not to be distracted from his overall plan by the small matter of schooling. Work was already in progress on the substantial building that now forms the administration block and dining hall. This was designed as Workshops, and was opened without ceremony in 1887. The workshops provided vocational training for the boys, and, in time, included carpenters, blacksmiths, tailors, shoemakers, millers, plumbers, bakers, printers, masons, and a laundry. Every boy was expected to choose a trade, and the new houseparents on the Hill were selected often because they were Master Craftsmen in their own right. The farm provided an opening for those who wanted to work in agriculture, and in due course exceptionally bright boys, like Alf Jarvis himself, could become pupil teachers and enter the teaching profession. This vocational training was an integral part of the vision for the Hill. Of course the boys needed to acquire the rudiments of literacy and numeracy, but this was of secondary importance. If the boys from the Hill were to be able to stand on their own feet when they returned to the world outside, it was essential that they should have been given the skills that they would need to earn a living.
The central part of the Workshops was a steam-powered flour-mill to make the Hill self-sufficient in bread. Ernest Lainchbury says
Photo by Kind permission of the Lainchbury family November 2010.
The motive power for all this was supplied by two Lancashire boilers in the basement, which supplied steam to a large vertical Tangye steam engine. Two lengths of line shafting with a maze of pulleys and belts transmitted the power to the various machines. Once upon a time I assisted in carrying out repairs to the engine. (K. the B.P. p.320)
Many years later, this was demolished to be replaced by the present Dining Hall, and the basement filled in, allegedly with carbide drums in which Windoes’ beloved collection of rare fossils was embedded in cement.
The scale of the Workshops, with their clock tower, belie the story that the Founder intended originally to build only one Home on the Hill. Alf Jarvis (Charles Baring Young p.39) records a conversation, which must surely be apocryphal, between the Founder’s mother and Claude Birch, another of the committee members of the London Working Boys Homes, in which she is said to have tried to dissuade her son from starting work on a second Home. It seems likely that Claude Birch may have said something on the lines of ‘Charles [Young] is the most obstinate of men; nothing can stop him when once he has made up his mind`, but surely the whole project was planned in advance, and preparations for the new Home will have been well under way by 1887.
The Bishop of Oxford, on commemorating the centenary of the School Chapel in 2003, said that, on leaving, each boy had been given a suit of clothes and a Bank Account! Wherever did the Bishop pick up such an incredible story? Clothes, certainly, but the only bank account that the Founder provided was a trade to earn his living, and a Bible to guide him through life.
