Objects of Charity: Liverpool's Bluecoat Children in the Eighteenth Century

Research by Michelle Girvan

Yon calm retreat, Where screen’d from every ill, The helpless orphan’s throbbing heart lies still; And finds delighted, in the peaceful dome, A better parent, and a happier home 1

Cover image: Richard Fowler, one of 31 miniature silhouette portraits of Blue Coat School boys by Gerard Ebenezer, 1822. Image courtesy of Liverpool Record Office (377.72 GER).

Introduction

In 2017, the Bluecoat – the oldest building in central Liverpool –celebrated its tercentenary. Today, this historic landmark is dedicated to the arts, but it originally housed the Blue Coat charity school for poor children. It was built just as Liverpool began to rise in significance as a global port. Yet, despite the building’s educational role for nearly 200 years, the experiences of the children have remained unexplored. In 2021-22 however, the arts centre’s EchoesandOrigins participation project researched the school’s forgotten children, and how their personal stories resonate with the contemporary experience of ‘looked after children’ in the UK care system. Contributing to this project, Michelle Girvan’s archive-led PhD research, investigated the building’s eighteenth-century origins, to shed new light on the maintenance, education and apprenticeship of the children, and some of her findings are summarised here.

H. Hulsbergh (after Joshua Mollineux), TheNorthProspectoftheCharitySchoole atLeverpoole, engraving, 1718. Image courtesy of The Rt Hon. The Earl of Derby.

The Blue Coat School

Liverpool’s Blue Coat Charity School, or Hospital, was co-founded in 1708 by master mariner Bryan Blundell and rector of Liverpool, Revd Robert Styth and erected, at the cost of £35, on wasteland adjacent to St Peter’s Church. The day school – financed by Blundell and maintained by donations from Liverpool’s social and commercial elite – was dedicated to promoting Christian charity and the academic, religious and moral instruction of poor children – 40 boys and 10 girls. It was one of over 1,000 philanthropic institutions established across the nation since the late-1600s as part of the charity-school movement led by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK). Becoming Blue Coat’s Treasurer in 1714 following Styth’s death, Blundell was concerned at the inadequacy of the modest schoolhouse, with many pupils being forced to beg in the streets for food, due to their circumstances, allegedly leading to idleness.

George Perry’s map of Liverpool, 1769; detail showing St Peter’s Church, with the charity school the H-shaped building between School House Lane and College Lane.

He therefore solicited ‘the town’s most respectable inhabitants’ to invest in construction of a large residential facility on the School Lane site, capable of housing 50 children and taking them wholly from their parents.2 The foundation stone of the Queen Anne-style building was laid in 1716. By 1725, the new boarding school was complete, along with 36 alms houses to its rear, at a cost of almost £2,300 (roughly equivalent to £370,000 today). Further extensions ensured bed and board for up to 320 students (270 boys and 50 girls) by the century’s close.

Portrait of Bryan Blundell. Image courtesy of Liverpool Blue Coat School.

Admission to Blue Coat

During the Georgian era, the school received numerous applications on behalf of Liverpool’s poorest and most vulnerable inhabitants: its destitute and orphaned children. Applicants had to demonstrate that they were a ‘real object of charity’ by producing evidence that they lived in Liverpool, a certificate confirming the child was Anglican and at least eight years old, and testimony from a churchwarden and four overseers of the poor, verifying that the child received parochial aid. This prerequisite documentation precluded non-Anglicans and the vagrant poor while establishing clear distinctions between those considered ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ of relief. In Liverpool, as elsewhere, charity –underpinned by Christian humanism – was selective and discriminatory. Indeed, many positions at the school were left unoccupied despite an overwhelming demand, as ‘no more of the children who applied [were] properly qualified’.3

Respectable social or commercial connections could prove critical when seeking charitable intervention. The most effective

Richard Ansdell, TheBoardroomoftheLiverpoolBlueCoatHospital, 1844, engraving. Ansdell had been a pupil at the school and went on to be a successful artist.

means of securing a position at the school was via the recommendation or nomination of one of its 50 trustees, who each ‘had his turn’ to appoint a child.4 Subscribers who donated £100 were likewise rewarded for their generosity, while those who gifted over £1,000 were able to admit five pupils.

Who were Blue Coat’s Poor Children?

Children admitted were simply classified as orphaned, fatherless or indigent.5 Yet, closer inspection of their fathers’ occupations – entered alongside each child’s name in the admission registers – reveals that the charity’s student demographic once belonged to Liverpool’s respectable labouring and lower-middling families, forced into crisis and destitution by circumstances beyond their control, and not the town’s swelling (and ‘undeserving’) vagrant poor, as might be expected. Such crises included the illness, injury, death or desertion of the breadwinner, irregular- or under-employment, and economic recession. Over half of the children admitted during the late-1700s came from singlemother households, reflective of the considerable number of widowed matriarchs subsisting on poor relief in eighteenthcentury Liverpool.

On entering the school, the children’s basic needs of ‘meat, drink, apparel and lodging’ were satisfied – necessities that their

BlueCoatHospitalQuarterlySessionsMinuteBook,1741–1813, entry for 28 December 1741. Image courtesy of Liverpool Record Office (377 BLU/15/1/1).

RecollectionsoftheBlue-CoatHospital,Liverpool,StGeorge’sDay,1843, 1850, lithograph after a painting by Henry Travis.

patrons argued had been neglected by their parents.6 Pupils were neatly dressed in identifiable blue uniforms – a colour associated with charity; fed three daily meals of beer, water-porridge, root vegetables and small amounts of meat and dairy, supplemented with plantation-produced sugar, molasses and spices; and housed in gendered dormitories.

Theological, Academic and Industrial Instruction

The social elite of the period associated childhood with innocence – which it was their Christian and civic duty to protect. Nevertheless, these formative and tender years were simultaneously viewed as an opportunity to reform, evangelise and civilise the ‘idle poor’ via its youngest and most malleable generation. Consequently, class- and gender-specific academic training, infused with theological and industrial instruction, was designed to procure a

generation of ‘painful Labourers, honest Men and good Christians’, serviceable to Man, God and the society that benevolently raised them.7

Between the ages of eight and 14, children endured strict routines and regular discipline. The school day was divided between elementary education, religious teaching and manual labour to instil in the children industry, piety and moral discipline, in preparation for useful occupations befitting their social station. Religious education was embedded into the lives of the children, the day beginning and ending in prayer, with psalmody regularly practised, and public catechism each week. Pupils were ceremoniously paraded to and from St Peter’s Church on Sunday to join the local community for Anglican worship. Blue Coat’s choir, comprising 56 students, also routinely performed in other churches.

BlueCoatHospitalQuarterlySessionsMinuteBook,1741–1813. The ‘Dyat’ of Blue Coat pupils, 28 December 1741. Image courtesy of Liverpool Record Office (377 BLU/15/1/1).

Gendered Schooling

For half the school day, children received elementary education in the three Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic. However, only boys trained in all three, as girls were not allowed to learn writing until the beginning of the next century. Many boys were also taught the art of navigation in preparation for a life at sea. The remainder of the school day was spent at work. Able boys picked oakum, wove stockings or crafted pins in an onsite manufactory. Meanwhile, girls fashioned school uniforms, spun cotton, contributed to domestic chores, and assisted with younger or sick children, equipping them with idealised feminine skillsets suitable for service, marriage and motherhood. The children’s subsequent earnings contributed to their upkeep and underscored the utilitarian ethos of the period.

BlueCoatHospitalQuarterlySessionsMinuteBook,1741–1813, terms of employment in onsite stocking manufactory, 1 April 1765. Courtesy of Liverpool Record Office (377 BLU/15/1/1).

Apprenticeships

Once a Blue Coat child turned 14, school governors arranged for their apprenticeship.8 Boys were formally bound to a master for a seven- or eight-year period, while girls were typically placed into service for six years. Indentured children were expected to work long hours, acquire various technical and interpersonal skills, and meet the demands of their master or mistress. Apprenticeship agreements, signed by the child, prohibited them from marrying, gambling or visiting taverns. They were instead instructed to serve their masters, keep their secrets and behave appropriately in the town. In exchange for their free or cheap service, masters provided apprentices with food, apparel, lodging and vocational training. Upon completion, apprentices earned basic civil liberties, including the right to practise a trade.

Governors of charity schools were encouraged by the SPCK to apprentice children where there was greatest demand. For Blue Coat boys, this inevitably meant that Liverpool’s economic dependence upon seafaring impacted on their apprenticeship status: 50% of over 1,000 boys apprenticed during the second half of the eighteenth century trained as sailors, many of them indentured to some of Liverpool’s most infamous slave-trading merchant families, including the Blundells, Gildarts, Tarletons and Crosbies. Other boys were apprenticed in the town, contributing to its expanding industrial and manufacturing base, for example as shoemakers, tailors, woodworkers, smiths and watchmakers; supporting commercial enterprise via ancillary industries, such as ropemaking and shipbuilding; and distributing regional and colonial produce.

Girls were apprenticed into live-in service and other ‘feminine’ menial occupations. Such labour, it was argued, would strengthen their domestic skills, enable them to earn an honest livelihood, and consolidate their subordinate position in a patriarchal society. At least 83% of over 180 female scholars whose apprenticeship identities are known, learnt the art of housewifery. Outstanding girls went into predominately feminised needle-based manufacturing

trades, which their school education had prepared them for. Occupations included mantua-making, millinery, sewing and cotton-spinning.

Blue Coat’s apprenticeship scheme formally integrated ex-scholars into the local, regional, national and transcontinental labour force. Throughout the eighteenth century and beyond, these previously overlooked child workers contributed to, and helped facilitate, Liverpool commerce, its traditional trades, small-scale enterprise and home-based industry.

The Mira Flores, a 500-ton sailing vessel. On one of its journeys to Valparaiso, Chile, apprenticed Blue Coat boy William Seed was washed overboard and drowned.

Boys

Girls

1 William Roscoe, MountPleasant:ADescriptivePoemtowhichisaddedanOde (Warrington, 1777), 23. This verse refers to the charity school.

2 Blue Coat Hospital subscription roll, 1717, Liverpool Record Office, 377 BLU/1/1.

3 30 June 1800, Blue Coat Hospital Quarterly Sessions Minute Book, 1741–1813, Liverpool Record Office, 377 BLU/15/1/1.

4 Ibid., 28 December 1741.

5 Both parents of those described under the latter category were alive but living in indigent circumstances.

6 28 December 1741, Liverpool Record Office, 377 BLU/15/1/1.

7 25 December 1778–25 December 1779, Blue Coat Hospital reports 1778–1832, Liverpool Record Office, 377 BLU/12.

8 Since the sixteenth century, apprenticeship was the national system of vocational training and completion was required to legally practise any craft or trade in the country.

Text by Michelle Girvan, Arts and Humanities Research Council North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD candidate, University of Liverpool and the Bluecoat, and published 2022.

The

Bluecoat is funded and supported by

EchoesandOrigins was funded and supported by Arts Friends Merseyside

Boy at the school gates, photo c. late nineteenth century

Find out more about the Looked After Children project and the history of the Bluecoat at thebluecoat.org.uk