Talk:Hutton, Essex

Revert of edits 25th May 2008

I have just reverted substantial edits that may well have been made in good faith but which (i) removed large tracts of what appears to be valid material and (ii) introduced some grammatical inconsistency and poor phrasing. Apologies if this is wrong. DaveK@BTC (talk) 11:23, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Pasted below is some of the poorly formatted/worded material that, with suitable references, may add to the story:

DaveK@BTC (talk) 11:33, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

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.

re: poorly formatted/worded material

I had tried to cobble together some information from other sites and refine the content of this subject. I don't quite understand how it became as distorted as it appears on your post. I took some information from another site but wanted it to be less informal and chatty and tried to redraft the whole page. I think my connection to the net was lost during the process so it ended up as quite messy. Perhaps we could sort it out together. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Chenzxl (talk • contribs) 23:06, 28 May 2008 (UTC)