Chelmsford, Grammar School 1892

Photo ref: 31516

More about this scene

For a while the Bewleys' only local rival had been the London Road Ironworks, which was opposite a house called The Cloisters. This house had been built on the site of The Friars, a private residence that stood where the Dominican priory's tumbledown refectory had once been. It is conceivable that, following the Grammar School's hasty exit from the old refectory, it had been patched up and gentrified until, by the 18th century, it had mutated into one of the town's more respectable residences. The priory's last vestige, the gatehouse on the west side of Moulsham Street, was demolished in 1857. The pathway leading through it had solidified into the road known as Friars Place. The Grammar School itself had had a rough ride through the 19th century. Ever since the town's Georgian gentrification, the school, with its curriculum of dead languages, had seemed increasingly out of date. What Chelmsford's wealthy tradesmen wanted was a school that taught accounting and the three Rs - and they accordingly took their sons elsewhere. By 1846 the school only had three pupils, and was soon forced to shut. It reopened in 1856, with a wider range of subjects on offer, and numbers started to rise dramatically. The washhouse had to be converted into a second classroom. It was, of course, only a temporary answer, as the site was so constricted. In 1892 the school moved to its third official home, in new buildings just up Broomfield Road (see photograph 31516, below). There was now space for 126 day-boys and 24 boarders.