Lessons have just begun at Lower Collins Street Ragged School in Hobart’s Wapping. Minnie L crosses her bare feet under the desk and chews the top of her pencil. She glances at her friend Mary U, who sits beside her carefully copying a map of Australia.
In another classroom, Maud G erases the six times table on her slate for the fourth time. At the annual meeting of the Ragged School Association later in 1889, she receives the prize for Endurance, while Minnie and Mary share an award for the best drawn map of Australia. The girls are exceptionally proud of their achievements.
Charles Dickens writes of ragged schools in London that they were for children “who are too ragged, wretched, filthy and forlorn to enter any other place”. Their major purpose was to get the children of the poor off the streets and into schools. It was a place where a hand that was not the “iron hand of the Law” would be stretched out to them and they could learn something.
At the first meeting of the Hobart Town Ragged School Association, the children of Wapping were compared to “wild vines” which, when trained and cultivated, instead of being a nuisance might become “useful, beautiful and profitable”. Continuing the Dickensian tone, the school’s 1879 inspection report in The Mercury newspaper describes the Wapping environment: “The school itself stands in the midst of an unsavoury neighbourhood … the pestilential Hobart Town Rivulet winds its unlovely and polluting course hard by the school gate, while in the immediate vicinity noxious trades flourish unrestrained by any sanitary precautions, or the eye of the city inspector”.
The leaders of Hobart’s religious community were particularly vocal in their anxiety to rescue the area’s children from the “degrading influence by which they are surrounded”. It was claimed that at night a score of young boys slept in casks, in tunnels and, if driven away by police, “under the gum trees in the paddock”. Indeed, an item in The Mercury in 1909 reports that two boys aged eight and nine were brought before the magistrate under the Neglected Children’s Act (1896), after being found sleeping in a horse-box on the wharf.
The Lower Collins Street Ragged School, built in 1858, cost £500 and had a consistent enrolment of well over 100 children during the 56 years it existed. The cost of the building was defrayed by a grant from the Colonial Treasury and contributions from the citizens of Hobart Town. Such a school was necessary in Wapping because of the difficulty of its residents to pay the fees required by state schools. By 1914, when the Ragged School finally closed, most of the children in the area were going to government schools, which were free by then, and vibration from the Electric Tramways Company next door was damaging the sandstone building.
In 1880, junior and infant children attended classes on the top and bottom floors of the stone building, while two classes of senior students were accommodated in a wooden single-storey building nearby. The students attended school for an average of four hours a day, five to six days a week, under the watchful eyes of three teachers.
Judging from contemporary accounts, the children who attended ragged schools in both London and Hobart appreciated their rescue from the streets. Dickens observed that the miserable upstairs rooms of Field Lane Ragged School, off Saffron Hill, were “sad and melancholy”, but that the students were listening to their instructors with apparent earnestness and patience. He was so moved by his visit that in 1843 he wrote A Christmas Carol, to draw attention to the injustice of child labour and harsh attitudes towards poverty, particularly child poverty. The novella has never been out of print.
In general, Wapping’s Ragged School inspectors state likewise. In the infant room upstairs, the children were “interested and eager to answer questions and to obtain the correct answers”, singing with the organ was sweet and tuneful and “thoroughly enjoyed”, while an unusually large amount of poetry was memorised.
Reports from the Inspector for Schools from 1911-14 also note that the school rooms were kept scrupulously clean and that flowers from the school garden adorned them. However, the first annual inspection in 1877 notes that the upstairs classroom, which faced north and had a low ceiling, was so hot on sunny days that blinds had to be pulled down, making it too dark for effective teaching. Later it is stated that children in the infant room sat on forms with no backs and that the school library was “scanty”. By 1894 a health officer’s report declares the building quite unfit for school purposes. A few years later there were alterations and improvements, including a new schoolroom for the older children at a cost of £230 – a great expense, according to the Ragged School Association.
Each year, the association held a meeting of the city’s religious, civic and business supporters, where matters concerning the school’s management were discussed. The children sang hymns and recited poetry for their guests and the benevolent ladies of Hobart handed out gifts of buns, lollies and fruit. In later years, warm clothing and medicine were provided on a regular basis. There were annual awards for attendance, good conduct, general improvement and needlework and, by 1906, the premier, JW Evans, applauded the committee for giving additional prizes for “the cultivation of flowers”.
From accounts of school activities in newspapers of the day, the Lower Collins Street Ragged School was seen by local children as an important place to be. At the end-of-the-year examinations in 1881, The Mercury records that “some of the little people, in their anxiety to do well, went at their work with such a will, that they emerged from the task as though they had passed through a great ordeal”. After the children answered spelling and mental arithmetic questions, a little girl performed A Ship on Fire “very nicely, being letter perfect in the poem”.
The desire to impress the assembled dignitaries was obvious. “A tiny lad commenced to recite Twinkle, twinkle little star, but though he started off the first line at a gallop, his feelings overcame him before he reached the middle of the second and, hurt at his failure, he fell a’weeping”.
In 1882 the infant class sang their nursery rhymes accompanied by actions, just as kindergarten children do today. As the meeting was held in the evening, one of the youngest fell asleep on the shoulder of his companion. Several years later, a senior student was awarded a prize for her “splendid” handwriting of God Save the Queen.
The school building was located in the centre of Wapping’s small, tightknit community and, compared to the often harsh discipline at state schools, the ragged school teachers had a caring and tolerant approach. In its early days, teachers and committee members regularly visited Wapping homes to persuade potential students to come to the school. One of the teachers, Thomas Dagnia, told the Royal Commission on Public Education in 1867 that students at the school were aged three to 14, and most came to school barefoot. The better attendance in winter was because the rooms were heated and they were given food and clothing.
The authors of Down Wapping: Hobart’s vanished Wapping and Old Wharf Districts conclude that the poor parents of the area often used the school as welfare relief, a source of sustenance for their children and, evidenced by the consistently large infant classes, a crèche. One teacher reports that many parents struggled to find employment for little more than one day a week and were keen for their children to gain an education. When they were absent, it was frequently because seasonal work, such as hop or cherry picking, had been found for them.
On the other hand, it was also said that the parents were on the whole degenerate and indifferent to sending their children to school. But at the 1884 meeting of the Ragged School Association, Bishop Daniel Sandford, newly arrived from Edinburgh, advised that “our characters and ourselves” are modelled by both heredity and environment and that in their dealings with ragged schools the state must employ kindness and “a little humanity”, rather than over-efficiency.
Irrespective of the attitudes of their parents and Hobart citizens, the children of Wapping found acceptance and self-esteem at the Lower Collins Street Ragged School, as well as a place to learn.
As I walk down Ragged Lane where the school once stood, I imagine the sound of singing, the clamour of children’s voices in the playground, and the clank of a trowel on brick paving as they plant the school garden with flowers and herbs.
Carol Freeman is a Hobart-based researcher and writer. Her work appears in books and academic journals, exhibition catalogues and art magazines on topics that connect art, science and history. Her book Paper Tiger: How Pictures Shaped the Thylacine, is published by Forty South.
