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By Dennis Rookard It's a bit off the beaten track. But to find Poplars Hall, turn off Rayleigh Road at the Bishops Hill traffic lights and follow the road around and into the upmarket housing estate that now stands around a large green play area. That's where you'll find it, A red brick Edwardian hall still standing proud and along with the nearby adult education centre the last surviving buildings of what was once a great social experiment, when this area was known as Hutton Poplars school and home for up to seven hundred poor parentless and deprived East London Children. Today, It's the pride of Brentwood Council, and probably one of their more unusual Public Halls that's available for hire. For this imposing building 1906 built red brick and carved stonework hall with its still working clock tower complete with chimes that ring out the hours, is a hall that is almost pure gothic in appearance. But it's beauty lays inside. Apart from the modern Bar and lounge areas and updated kitchens installed when the hall was taken over by Brentwood Council is the original hall that been designed as a dinning room for the school. Rather then take the easy way out and modernise it the Councils architects department mounted a battle to be allowed to restore it back to its original Victorian Gothic style glory. That they succeeded is seen by it's popularity as a venue for weddings, receptions, and other social activities. Large stained glass leaded windows, allow light in to reflect off its Victorian tiled walls and up onto huge wooden beams that hold up its vaulted roof. But why was this splendid building built in the first place. For the answer to that question we have to look back to The East London of the mid Eighteen Fifties. And in particular, the problems being faced by the Borough of Poplar, which like today attracted because of its closeness to the developing Thameside docks large numbers of emigrants, plus the thousands of people attracted from the hardships of farming into the city and its factories. With the result that the borough was soon inflected with slums and with them the squalor of people trying to live in over-crowded areas on slender means. For those falling through this poverty trap, the only answer was the workhouse. And to administer them London's various boroughs set up Boards of Guardians who acted as the forerunners of today's social services, taking much local pride in how they helped the poor. By the eighteen nineties however the various Boards of Guardians were fast running out of space in the East End to build new orphanages or training schools, and with the prevailing feeling being that the best place to look after and educate the hundreds of deprived poor and often parentless children being to build school and training establishments well outside London and away from temptation. How the Poplar Board of Guardians found Hutton as an ideal site for one of his boards training schools is down to It's then Chairman George Lansbury, who so the story goes journeyed out from Poplar by train to the recently opened station at Shenfield. Leaving the station he eyes saw largely open countryside. This must have impressed him, for on his return to London, his Board of Guardians put in a bid for a 100 acres of prime Essex land. By 1906 The Poplar board of guardians had developed a large school, - today better known as the Bishops Hill centre, still with its large hall. Along with a network of homes to house their 750 young charges in more family sized groups. Also build was accommodation for the schools large teaching and ancillary staff. Sport was not forgotten either, with the building of playing fields, and a large indoor heated swimming pool. That was to the disgust of many locals demolished when the site was taken over by Essex County Council before being sold for building. It's true to say that having Hutton Poplars school on the doorsteps did not go down well among the areas well healed residents, they regarding the school as little more then a large workhouse, and their young charges to be avoided at all costs, an attitude that was rampant among the teacher and pupils of Brentwood Secondary in the late fifties. So what was the school really like? In March 1914 as part of a report by the chief inspector of British Immigrant Children to Canada, A Mr G Bogue-Smart told a Government investigating committee. "In equipment and architectural design these training schools are among the best in Britain and the most costly. At Shenfield the boys and girls gathered from Poplar live in a self-contained village and are well cared for by an efficient staff of specially selected teachers." And that said Mr Bogue-Smart, "a fine Christian spirit was also to be seen at work." He also noted that apart from normal schooling, the children were trained in cooking, gardening, boot making and carpentry, a knowledge he noted that would be useful to them when they would be sent on to Canada and Australia. And that of course was to be the fate of so many of those boys and girls. A new life in the colonies. For some that Poplar board of Guardians and their Hutton training school was a huge success. They did finds a new life in a new country, well away from the hardships of life in the East End. But for others, life was not so successful. It is easy today to look back at their activities and criticize. But the men who became those Guardians were a proud group, genuinely concerned to help other less fortunate them themselves, and in the process laying the foundations of our present welfare state. Ends… 954 words. |
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