Here’s one I’ve been saving up, not for a rainy day, for today has been anything but rainy, positively sweltering, but a day when being Out & About has been a touch limited.
It is a photo of the hallowed “village schoolroom museum” of Great Ayton, proudly preserving the educational shrine where James Cook—local boy turned world explorer—supposedly learned his ABCs. Except, of course, that he didn’t. The real schoolroom he actually attended was razed to the ground in 1785, because nothing screams “heritage” like a building constructed after the fact.
In a charming twist of historical revisionism, we now celebrate this later structure as if young Cook himself once scuffed its thresholds, clutching a slate and dreaming of Tahiti. His father had brought the family from Marton to Aireyholme Farm in the 1730s to work as manager for one Thomas Skottowe, a gentleman who kindly paid for young James’s education—either out of philanthropy or, as the old farmer at Aireyholme once hinted to me between swigs of New Year ale, out of a suspiciously keen interest in the lad’s future. But far be it from me to peddle local gossip.
The original school—the one Cook might actually have set foot in—was the brainchild of one Michael Postgate in 1704, who also generously paid for a schoolmaster with the princely annual salary of £4. Postgate, a childless widower of advanced years, suddenly took a second wife, fathered an heir, and promptly stopped paying the salary—presumably because, in his view, charity truly did begin at home. The land and buildings, however, he left as a gift, perhaps in a moment of residual guilt.
Curiously it seems our dear Michael Postgate may have been a bit too fond of the “King over the water,” in other words he was a Jacobite, which, in Whiggish circles, was akin to openly rooting for the villain in a pantomime. But, consistent in his contradictions, the school he funded was meant to teach good Anglican doctrine—possibly to combat the dangerous proliferation of nonconformist riff-raff.
The Postgate School, despite its chaotic beginnings, prospered. It quickly expanded beyond its original remit of “eight poor boys” to become a mini educational empire—charging modest fees and reportedly educating 20 or 30 children by 1743. By the late 18th century, the villagers decided it would be a good idea to throw a Poor House into the mix. Conveniently, there was tumbledown cottage right next to the school—on land originally gifted by, yes, our old friend Postgate. Thus was born the two-in-one solution of an upstairs schoolroom and a downstairs poorhouse—education and destitution, stacked like a Victorian social trifle. Incidentally, a few years ago the Poor House name was resurrected, but as a plush pizza restaurant and bar.
Anyway, the school/poorhouse arrangement nicely encapsulated the prevailing philosophy: educate the poor just enough so they might one day stop being poor, and ideally do so without draining the public coffers. Everyone wins—especially the ratepayers.
By 1833, the Postgate School boasted an attendance of 48 boys and six girls (because of course the girls barely counted). Yet, in 1818, Ayton still managed to have some 400 to 500 children in the village and surrounding area entirely uneducated. One might call it a failure. Or, with the right amount of irony, a historical treasure.
Source:
o’Sullivan, Dan. “Great Ayton: A history of the village”. 1983. ISBN 0 9508858 0 0.
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