The tanners’ school
The land the old school stood on was given by Gregory, John and Thomas Ballard. Among the later benefactors were Richard Clare, John Crump, John Sheriffe and John Crane. In a town where twelve tanneries were working in the Tudor period, the money for educating the town’s boys came out of hides and oak bark.
It is worth following that where it leads. Two of the churchmen in Bewdley’s illustrious men, one of whom finished as Bishop of Winchester, came out of the town’s tanning families.
The building itself survives, though not as a school. The Victoria County History describes it as an L-shaped half-timber house, probably of the first half of the seventeenth century, turned into cottages.
One Gloucestershire farm, three quite different purposes
In 1661 Richard Viccaris settled the Shepherdine estate at Oldbury in Gloucestershire on the town, and the terms are a small lesson in how seventeenth century charity actually worked. Five pounds a year was to go to the master of the school. Three pounds a year was to go to poor women in childbed. Whatever was left over went to the preacher at Bewdley chapel.
A schoolmaster, women in childbirth and a preacher, all funded out of the rent of one farm sixty miles away. Nothing about that arrangement was unusual at the time, and all of it would be unthinkable now.
The end of the school, in 1914
Under a scheme of 1914 the foundation was carried on as a cookery and woodwork centre run by Worcestershire County Council. A grammar school endowed by a Tudor tanner finished as a place where children were taught to bake and to use a chisel, which is either a comedown or a return to type depending on how you look at it.
Thomas Wigan’s library, and the man who left it
In 1819 the Reverend Thomas Wigan left a collection of books to the rector of Ribbesford and the master of the grammar school, to be kept as a public library. That is the origin of public reading in Bewdley, and the man behind it is more interesting than the bequest.
Thomas Wigan served as curate of Christ Church chapel in Wribbenhall in the early 1770s before becoming rector of Oldswinsford. He appears, by name and with his dates, in the correspondence of Samuel Kenrick, the Bewdley banker and unitarian dissenter, who encouraged the young clergyman’s private doubts. Wigan, Kenrick recorded, could not bring himself to profess openly “the belief of palpable contradictions or unintelligible jargon” in the Thirty-Nine Articles, which he thought had been “contrived in times of ignorance”.
The dates and the parish match exactly, so this is very probably the same man. If it is, the person who gave Bewdley its first public library was a Church of England clergyman who could not privately accept the articles of the church he served in.
A banker, a turnpike bond and ten widows
In 1819, the same year as Wigan’s books, Wilson Aylesbury Roberts added a codicil to his will bequeathing £200, secured on a turnpike bond, the income to be distributed on St Thomas’s Day among ten poor widows of the town. Caroline Aylesbury Roberts left a similar sum in 1830.
Roberts is not simply a name on a charity board. When Samuel Kenrick formed a new bank in Bewdley in 1778, the partnership was Roberts, Skey, S. Skey and Kenrick, and Wilson Aylesbury Roberts was the Roberts in it. The man whose money went to ten widows every December was one of the four men who ran the town’s bank.
The almshouses
The town’s three almshouse foundations are a subject of their own, but their dates belong here. Sayers’s, otherwise Lower Park, was founded by a will proved on 27 January 1625 for six poor men. Bourlton’s, otherwise Park Lane, was founded in 1645 by Humphrey Bourlton, for poor old decayed men, their wives and children. The name is spelled Burlton locally and Bourlton by the county history, and both spellings are in circulation.
Cooke’s, in the High Street, has the most affecting story attached to it. It was founded by the will of Thomas Cooke, dated 1693 and confirmed by deed on 20 September 1705, endowed with an annuity of £21 5s charged on Newhouse Farm at Neen Sollers in Shropshire, and occupied by eight poor women. The tablet records that the money was bequeathed by Thomas Cooke, son of “Mr. Richard Cooke, late of Bewdley, who departed this life the 22 of January 1693, aged about nineteen”. The buildings were restored in 1860 at the cost of the Reverend Joseph Crane.