Cowley: School

SCHOOL.

Anthony Brown, by will dated 1800, left £5 a year to educate poor children. About 1823 the rector paid the income to two schoolmistresses towards the education of several children, and made up the remainder of the cost himself. (fn. 1) A Sunday school had been started by 1833, (fn. 2) and about 1836 a church school was started in a building (in 1959 a private house called the Meads) to the east of the church. (fn. 3) This took over Brown's charity, together with a legacy of £500 left by Thomas Dagnall (d. 1865) for the education of poor girls. (fn. 4) This school may have been in union with the National Society, and in 1877, when it was moved into new buildings, it was certainly a National school. The new school was held in what is now (1959) the house called May Trees in Church Road. It seems to have moved in 1891 to the buildings in the High Street which are still in use, but whether these already housed part of the school before 1891, or what was the relationship between it and the Church Road building, is uncertain. One of the two seems originally to have been a mission church of Hillingdon parish, in which so much of Cowley village originally lay. (fn. 5) The girls' depart ment of the school received government grants from 1887, (fn. 6) and by 1890 the school took only girls and infants, while the older boys went to school in Hillingdon. (fn. 7) About 1930 the older children were removed and the school from then on took juniors and infants, both boys and girls. Average attendance reached about 100 at the turn of the century and then dropped a little, but rose, with the building of new houses, to nearly 200 in 1938. (fn. 8) The school was enlarged in 1933-4, and in 1955 a new building was opened in Worcester Road. This took most of the juniors, while the High Street school continued to be used for the younger children. (fn. 9) In 1959 there were 430 children in the whole school. (fn. 10)

A drop of about 50 in the population of Cowley between 1841 and 1851 was attributed to the removal of a large preparatory school: it is not known where this had been held. (fn. 11)