We often hear how children were once supposed to be ‘seen and not heard’.
Chelmsford businessman and entrepreneur Joseph Brittain Pash, however, had a more benevolent view towards children during Victorian Britain. He believed they should not only be seen and heard, but also loved and encouraged.
Pash lived in Waveney House, based in Rainsford Road, Chelmsford, and was not only a good man of business, he made great efforts to improve his own community. He had come to Chelmsford as a farmer and bought land in Bexfields in Galleywood. He quickly became involved in all sorts of local charities and committees. He started a new cattle market in the town. Clearly, he was a very talented agricultural engineer. He invented or bought all sorts of modern farming machines and implements such as a portable ‘corn threshing machine’ and rented it out to local farmers.
He had a kind nature and passed this ethic onto his own three children. But he was evidently aware of how, unlike his own, many children were not so lucky as to have a stable homelife or access to education. He once said: 'A child who is permitted to grow up in a neglected condition, too frequently grows into a pauper or a criminal.'
Pash’s motto was said to be 'thoroughness with enthusiasm'. It’s no surprise he used his own enthusiasm for helping children to start up his own school.
At the height of the Victorian era there were some 275 industrial schools across Britain. Some were better than others and the Essex Industrial School, based in Chelmsford- which Pash was to start up in 1872- was most definitely one of the better ones.
The school came at a time when it was very much needed and for decades it acted as a beacon of hope, brightening up the dark lives of poor and neglected boys across the region.
It started out as the ‘Essex Industrial School and Home for Destitute Boys’ and was located in Baddow Road, Great Baddow.
It had humble beginnings. It began with two pupils but by the end of the first year there were 22 boys enrolled.
These were hard up boys - many couldn’t read words of more than one syllable. Some of them had never even had a bath. Most had never slept in bed on their own. The school provided accommodation, a basic education, and practical training for boys considered to be at risk of falling into crime or those whose families were not able to cope with them anymore. Some had committed petty crimes, but not enough to warrant being sent to a reformatory school.
The boys at the school were normally aged between six and 16 years of age. There was a master, a matron on site and alongside a basic education, the boys received training in shoemaking, tailoring, gardening, building, carpentry, painting and decorating, and engineering. The school was different in that it wasn’t state funded, like other industrial schools. It was run entirely by voluntary contributions.
Before long, thanks to grants from the Essex Courts and the West Ham School Board as well as charitable donations and of course personal cash from Pash, a larger site in Rainsford End, Chelmsford, was built which could house 120 to 150 boys.
This state-of-the-art site, which cost £15,000, to build officially opened in February 1879 in a grand ceremony attended by 400 people. The whole site covered 11 acres. As well as classrooms and workshops there was a theatre, a swimming pool, a bakehouse, laundry, a library, a playground, a choir and even a fife and drum band. There was a 35ft deep well on the site which supplied the water. The main school block contained large dormitories for the boys to sleep in.
The boys would rise at 6am, where they’d then have to make their beds and clean their boots then engage in lessons in both academic and trade subjects throughout the day. Bed was strictly at 8pm.
When boys left the school attempts were made to find them employment somewhere, often working on a farm in Australia, New Zealand, or Canada. Many went to farms in Yorkshire where they were crying out for labour.
On special occasions such as every year on the birthday of Joseph Brittain Pash, who remained the manager of the school most of his life, the boys were treated to a special tea and a prizegiving ceremony. At Christmas they were given a slap-up lunch of beef and plum pudding - paid for through donations.
In general, the school was a positive happy place for many of the boys brought in. We can tell from reports and old letters that this was a place where boys could make friends and for many of them, live in a stable, supportive environments for the first time in their lives.
An example of this support can be seen from a day in 1882 when three boys – all of them orphans – left for Queensland in Australia. Every single one of the boys from the school marched down to Chelmsford Station to see them off. The school band played and everyone waved as the boys went off in the train headed for a new life on the other side of the world.
Admission registers held at the Essex Records Office reveal the details of the boys who were admitted to the school. Entries would include name and age, if the boy was literate, information about their background and any distinguishing features - for example George Milner, who was sent to the school for committing larceny. He was described by Southend Alderman Thomas Dowsett, who was the magistrate in his case, as having a ‘slightly long nose’. Dowsett - the first ever mayor of Southend and an active philanthropist himself, sent many boys from Southend to the school instead of to prison.
John Ferguson, aged ten, was sent to the school in 1914 for shoplifting. Again, he was sentenced by Thomas Dowsett. It was noted in his records that he had several scars on the back of his head. Probably due to beatings by his parents.
Some boys found themselves in the school for committing petty crimes. Walter Kemp, aged 11, for example was admitted in 1914 for setting fire to a haystack. Little Thomas Mills, from Leigh-on-Sea was just 11 when he was admitted in1913 for stealing a bicycle. His notes remarked how his mother was dead.
Many single parents fought to get their children into the school. Perhaps because they wanted them to have a better life, perhaps because they couldn’t or didn’t want to care for them anymore. John Lang for example was admitted as a pupil in March 1911. He was to be held there until he was 16 by special agreement with his mother. John’s father was dead. Freddy Pentice from Romford was deemed “uncontrollable” and so he was enrolled in the school in 1912.
Ernest Burrows was also sent to the school for begging. He was 12, stood at just 4ft 5ins tall and had a scar from a dog bite on his left wrist. The pattern continues – his father was also dead.
Then there was little William Swainston, a Victorian orphan who was admitted to the Essex Industrial School in 1876, aged 11, having been found sleeping rough in an outhouse at Parson’s Heath near Colchester. William was an orphan, and he was found in a filthy condition. But here’s where we can see the difference that the school did make to so many of the boys sent there.
William was educated at the school and afterwards he was sent to Canada where he got a job on a farm. William seems to have made a good go of life in Canada. He got married and had three children. In 1888 he came back to England for work and he returned to the school to give a talk to the boys about his life and how he loved it in Canada. His visit to the school even made the news.
Another welcome visitor was the Duke of York, who would go on to become King George VI. The royal visited the school in 1921 and despite his famous stammer he delivered a speech to the boys where he gave them ‘four rules for life’ – advice which centred around not giving up when life gets tough and ‘playing for your team, not for yourself’.
As for Joseph Brittain Pash he devoted much of his life and lots of his money into making the school a success. All of his children worked at or helped out at the school in some way.
In July 1890 one of Pash’s daughters happened to be in Admirals Park, Chelmsford when she saw a boy in the river drowning. He was nine-year-old John Carr, a pupil at the Industrial school. He had been playing in the park and had fallen in the swollen river. Passers-by had tried to rescue him with sticks and umbrellas, but he had already disappeared under the water twice.
Without giving a second thought she jumped in and dragged him to safety. She nearly died herself, but she managed to save the boy.
Unfortunately, both of Pash’s daughters died quite young Pash himself died in February 1926 of influenza. He was 86. His death was big news across Essex but also made national newspapers across the country. He had suffered from ill health for some time.
During the Christmas before he died, he was virtually bed bound so boys from the school gathered outside his house and sang carols to him. He heard them from his bed. They had done the same sort of thing in 1926 when it was the school’s jubilee. He was also ill on that occasion and so hundreds of boys gathered outside and performed a drill display while he looked on from his window.
In his later years Pash said some of the best times of his life were reading letters from hundreds of the ‘old boys’ who had gone onto great things. Pash was survived by his second wife and his one remaining son.
He was buried in the London Road Congregation Church in Chelmsford. At least 90 boys from the school came to say goodbye to their benefactor- the man who had changed their lives.
They lined up outside the church to pay their respects. The Rev Wallace Sim who led the funeral said of Mr Pash: 'He had a lofty sense of duty. He felt he had his part to play, and he played it nobly.
'Today, scattered abroad are men, who in their boyhood received from him moulding of good character. They have lived to love and honour his name.
'He wanted to couch a lance on behalf of the boys who without him would have been left without a champion. Even in his last moments, it was the boys, so dear to his heart, that were in his final thoughts.'
By the end of the First World War industrial schools were going out of fashion. In 1924 the school became known as the ‘Essex Home School’ and in 1933 Reginald Fish became the headmaster. By the 1960s there wasn’t such a need for boys to be housed on a residential basis anymore. The school was transformed into smaller housing unit for just 35 boys. In the 1970s it came under the control of the county council and 1980 the school was closed. The school buildings in Rainsford End were demolished and the site was re-developed into housing.
