by Ray Howgego
On 14 December 1804 the wealthy tradesman Thomas Clark deposited in the Caterham parish Register a document stating that he had enclosed ‘a piece of land little more than an acre on Caterham Common’ and that ‘having built thereon a house adapted and intended for a school, and planted an orchard, etc.’, he gave ‘to the parish of Caterham the said house, outbuildings and plantations.’
The house would be occupied rent-free by a schoolmaster, ‘with a right to the produce of the orchard’, subject to ‘the free education of some children, not less than six in number, of the parish of Caterham whose parents cannot afford to pay for their instruction.’ The overall management of the school would be ‘vested in the resident clergyman, the acting overseer of the poor, and owner of the manor.’ If no such person existed ‘the farmer that occupies the Manor Farm would be manager in his stead.’ It would be another year before a meeting chaired by the minister of the parish on 24 December 1805 and attended by a number of parishioners agreed to ‘carry into execution the will of Mr. Clarke’. At the same meeting they appointed a schoolmaster and selected the six lucky children who would pioneer the venture.
Thomas Clark(e) (1737–1816) was a wealthy London entrepreneur who owned an arcade, the Exeter Exchange, on the north side of The Strand. Clark, whose personal fortune was estimated at £300,000, had in 1790 started buying up the various Caterham manorial estates, and by the time of his death owned virtually the whole of Caterham from Whyteleafe to Harestone Valley. He was largely an absentee landlord, about whom it was said he had ‘never been absent from his business in London for a single day, during the last fifty years of his life’. It has been suggested that he occasionally held court at Caterham, although one questions how he could have found the time. It is also curious that Clark had already built the house, sometime in 1804, before offering it as a school. Perhaps he had intended it for another use, and it is also significant that Clark, always the businessman, had enclosed what was actually common land, one assumes without cost to himself. On his death the bulk of his estate passed to his son, also Thomas Clark, who built himself a luxury home in Manor Park and squandered much of the family fortune, selling off plots of land as the need arose. One assumes that money had been placed in trust by the father to provide for the maintenance of the school, the management of which by 1830 had fallen to ‘the minister and lord of the manor’.
Clark’s ‘piece of land’ was situated on the south side of the corner of the High Street and what would become Chaldon Road, opposite the site of the recently demolished Golden Lion. As is evident from the 1830 tithe map – the only map in existence to clarify the exact position – the schoolhouse itself was situated where Hillcroft Court now stands, facing east with a wide gravel frontage onto the High Street. The population of Caterham in 1805 was a little over 300, resident in 63 dwellings, most of them scattered along ‘The Street’, or High Street.
The first schoolmaster, 65-year-old John Brooke, was appointed on 24 December 1805, so we might assume that the first pupils would have arrived in January 1806. Brooke, a vestry clerk since 1786, served as master until his death in 1821 at the age of 81. His first six pupils were Richard and George Brooke, Rachel Rowed, George Elief (Ayliff / Elliff?), James Norris and Harriet Smith. All were aged five or six, except for ten-year-old Rachel. Brooke was followed by George Pratt who served 29 years until his death in 1850, then by William Brough, who was also parish / vestry clerk. Brough, whose wife Elizabeth also taught in the school, served until the end of 1871 when the changes in administration outlined below forced him and his wife to vacate the schoolhouse. There are few records of the number of pupils who later attended the school, but a Religious Census of 1851 mentions that 36 seats were allocated in St Lawrence’s Church for pupils attending the school; and in 1855 the local Post Office Directory stated that places were available in what it now called the ‘National School’ for 20 boys and 17 girls. It is known that from an early date heavy reliance was placed on ‘pupil teachers’ who were selected from the older children and their performance closely monitored.
The ‘old school’ era effectively came to an end with the passing of the 1870 Education Act. This required the election of a school board as the governing body, the result of which was that the school became known as the Caterham on the Hill Board School. The elected board, consisting of William Garland Soper, G.H. Cook, Juland Danvers, Henry Hall, and Thomas Bradbury Winter, held its first meeting on 28 December 1871 in the 1805 schoolhouse. The former schoolmaster William Brough was appointed clerk to the board with an annual salary of £50. Brough finally retired in February 1898 and died in Caterham fifteen years later at the age of 89.
After carrying out a census of all the children in the parish it was decided that a completely new school would be built, capable of housing 125 boys, 125 girls, and 100 infants. An architect, Richard Martin, was engaged to draw up plans. A new headmaster for the boys’ school, Henry Grinstead, and a headmistress for the girls’ school, Mary Ford Morris, were appointed, together with Miss Ellen Searle as headmistress of the infants’ school. Grinstead and Morris took up their appointments on 12 February 1872 and 8 April 1872 respectively, still occupying the 1805 schoolhouse and outbuildings. The new school was formally opened for girls and boys on 2 July 1873, whilst the old building, now very much enlarged by extensions and outbuildings, was used to house the infants. A gymnasium was opened in April 1894 and is said to have reduced the dependence on instructors from the Guard’s barracks. However, shortage of space was an eternal problem, made worse by the introduction of cookery facilities for the girls and by the raising of the school leaving age from ten to twelve in 1899.
In 1902 the Education Act was passed, by which school boards were abolished and responsibility passed to local education authorities, thereby bringing to an end the close working relationship between the school and the local community. In 1937 older children were transferred to the new Central School near Wapses Lodge in the valley, now Marden Lodge. Remarkably, Hillcroft Primary School, which had adopted its new name in 1979, still occupies, with the exception of land sold off for Hillcroft Court, the original ‘piece of land’ enclosed by Thomas Clark back in 1804.