A Short History of Quintin Kynaston School (Page 1)
A Ragged School for Poor Boys (1864)
When the young Quintin Hogg left Eton College to begin a career in the City, he embarked on a solitary mission of civilisation into the dirty and dangerous underworld of alleys and nameless streets in the area of London between Trafalgar Square and the Law Courts.
Quintin Hogg tried his hand at teaching. He found two boys working as crossing sweepers near Trafalgar Square and offered to teach them to read. In the Adelphi Arches, lapped by the river Thames, he set up with a couple of Bibles as reading books and a tallow candle in an empty beer bottle for illumination. Soon he noticed a twinkling light at the far end of the Arches. "Kool ecilop", shouted one of the boys, at the same time "dousing the glim" and off they ran. Now in darkness beside an upset bottle, QH seemed a most suspicious character to the torch-bearer. After scrutinising him closely, however, the policeman moved on, leaving Quintin to ponder on the meaning of those mystic words ("back slang" used by urchins which he later learnt). This encounter left the old Etonian determined to find out more about the lives of the poor.
In 1864, Quintin Hogg set up a Ragged School in rooms he acquired in York Place, near Charing Cross. The boys arrived in a dreadful state of poverty. Many had to be washed, scrubbed and deloused before they were fit to be taught to read. Some had no clothes and came with only their mothers' shawls pinned round them. Many belonged to gangs of thieves. If he was able to set them up as shoe blacks at least, QH felt that he had done a great deal for them. There were no state schools until Forster's 1870 Education Act which provided elementary schooling for poor children up to the age of 12 funded from taxes. Ragged schools would no longer be needed but Quintin Hogg had other plans...
The area behind The Adelphi, now protected from the river by the Victoria Embankment, was still being used by rough sleepers 150 years later, though illiterate boys no longer sweep crossings around Trafalgar Square.
"Kool ecilop" is "back slang" for "Look (out) Police!". "Doucing the glim" = extinguishing the candle.
York Place, lying between the Strand and the Embankment, is now called York Buildings. It is a side road off Savoy Place where the Adelphi Arches are to be found.