Research Forum

If you put Eastern House into the Search Box in the banner at the top of this page and press Search you will find a photo of it as a school which was part of a query I put in the Forum in March of last year.  I do have some more photos of it as a School which I can send to you.

Coincidentally, if you click on Milton Road Cemetery in the left hand column you will find an extract from our transcription of the Memorials which shows the burial of Leonard COMFORT who was the last Headmaster of Lewisham Boys' School who died in 1931.

You may have already seen this file in Weston Library which may have some other information - there will be a similar file containing information about Lewisham School

Thanks for the information, I had found the references you mentioned. Incidentally, an elderly friend who was a pupil at Eastern Housein the 1930's tells me the housewifery classes (as shown in the photo) were held at Villa Rosa which also belonged to the school.

This is one of the photos in the set which confirms the location of the Housewifery School.  Perhaps you have the rest - they include some interior views of the school and some exterior ones - there are about 12 in all.

Eartern House was used by Weston Area Health Athority as a post operative ward to free beds in the General Hospital in the Boulevard, not for chronically sick or geriatric patients.

Picture of Eastern House, date not known.

For those of you who are interested in the history of Eastern House click here for a brief history of the school and the building.

Hello Bill,

Your picture of Eastern House is not the one in Landemann Circus.  Look at it carefully and you'll see it looks nothing like Eastern House and look at the houses behind - these are not in Landemann Circus.  I have a copy of the same PC and I agree it is labelled Eastern House but this must have been an earlier house down in the town.  Not sure where!

The Eastern House in this photograph was at 22 - 24 South Road and was used for the School in the 1920s.  So the Post Card is correctly titled but from an earlier date - before the school was in Landemann Circus.

This photograph - courtesy of Google Street View - shows the building now and is the view from Atlantic Road although its address is the other side in South Road.

Thank you Pat - I'd always wondered where it was!

Paul

I know that the Yorkshire-born Charles Henry Southerns was FC Comfort's Deputy Principal from 1904 until circa 1916 (when Southerns passed away). Southerns was an Old Boy of Kingswood School, Bath, and his twin brother was Second Master (Deputy Principal) of Woodhouse Grove School, Leeds.

Also, a relative of a former pupil from the period sent me a copy of a letter from Dr Comfort to the boy's parents, extolling the virtues of Lewisham School. I've pasted in below a copy of a blog post which I wrote for the Weston Mercury 4-ish years ago which may be of interest:

Let them eat (a lot of) bread & butter…

The 1911 census is out early (at 1911census.co.uk) but boy is it expensive to view and download – almost £3.50 a page!

So it’s cost me £6.95 for Weston’s long-gone Lewisham School (to check out Deputy Head Charles Southerns plus pupils and staff) and a massive £20.85 for his twin brother’s school Woodhouse Grove in Leeds.

And annoyingly, with Woodhouse Grove there’s a whole page with only one person on it. Hugh Woods of Moseley Staffordshire, aged 15, you’ve cost me a fortune by hogging page four to yourself!

But I’ve forgiven Hugh. Woodhouse Grove’s ‘In Memorium’ 1914-18 booklet tells me that “During the British attack on Serre, July 1^st 1916, Private Woods was killed by gun fire. His body was found in the third line of enemy trenches…”

Sadly out of the 84 boys on the 1911 Woodhouse Grove census, 8 were to die in the war and at least one of the 32 Lewisham boys.

The two 1911 Lewisham census pages are completed and signed by Frederick G Comfort, the Headmaster. He’s got Charles Southerns’ place of birth wrong: Bradford instead of Richmond, North Yorks.

Clicking expensively through the Woodhouse Grove pages I was chomping at the bit to see who’d completed and signed that. But it doesn’t say. I was hoping I’d see Alfred Southerns’ signature; he was in charge while the Head was in Canada in 1911.

Anyway, I’ve done a mini-search on Ancestry.co.uk to find out a bit more about the 1911 Lewisham and Woodhouse Grove boys. As you’d expect, many of the Weston boys come from farming families whereas the Leeds boys are from textile or mining backgrounds. Both schools have a smattering of fathers who are shop-keepers, insurance agents and so on.

Ancestry.co.uk tells you if the people you’re searching for feature on living people’s family trees. And one of the Lewisham boys does – Henry Cotton, born in 1901 into a farming family from West Bradley near Glastonbury.

Henry’s son, Allen Cotton, has sent me a copy of a letter sent from the Headmaster in August 1910 enquiring whether Henry will be joining the school as a boarder in September. He’s kindly allowed me to include excerpts from it here.

We see that the fees (including tuition, music, gym, books, stationery, library & sports club) come to £17 3s 10d per term (more expensive than Woodhouse Grove which was charging £12.67-£15 depending on age).

And that the Head is offering the Cottons a special reduction but on condition that “you will not mention to anyone the arrangement I have here proposed”!

Virtually half the letter is taken up with describing the food. We see that the boys have “porridge with milk and sugar on four mornings a week with tea and bread and butter and jam or golden syrup on the remaining three mornings”. They enjoy “ham or bacon or eggs or sausages with bread and butter” and “a piece of bread and butter at 11 o’clock”.

Dinner is “hot and cold joints”, “sometimes soup” for an “additional course”, “sometimes fish, almost always two vegetables” and “always pastry or milk puddings”. Tea is “bread and butter with jam or golden syrup”. Supper is “bread and butter” and “some days cheese”. There’s a lot of bread and butter!

There must be stacks of this kind of memorabilia hidden in homes up and down the country. And in the case of Lewisham School which closed in the 1950s, snippets like this may be the only things that remain.

There’s a website I check out now and again – an antiquarian bookshop specialising in old school magazines. But I have yet to find anything about Lewisham School. There are one or two bits and pieces in Weston Library and here on the Weston Mercury website, but nothing about the era I’m interested in, between 1910 and 1916.

Maybe I’ll come across someone else whose ancestor was a pupil of Charles Southerns at Lewisham School, Weston. Someone with school memorabilia like photos and other bits and pieces…

Or maybe someone will read this blog entry and be able to help. Fingers crossed…

Of course a number of the Woodhouse Grove pupils would have Methodist parents, including Ministers and the Southerns boys went to Kingswood, the first school established in 1748 by Rev John Wesley, whose Methodist movement within the C of E eventually became part of today's Methodist Church of Great Britain. Queen's Taunton is also a Methodist School (there are 16 Independent Schools altogether) and there are a number of Methodist/Ecumenical VA/VC Primary Schools in Somerset, with one ecumenical Middle School (Selwood Academy in Frome).

Yes, the Southerns twins' father was a Methodist minister, and in those days Kingswood was solely for the sons of Methodist ministers. WG was the second of the Methodist schools to be established and, for a while, acted as the lower school to Kingswood - not ideal considering the distance between the two! While his twin, Charles, was Vice Principal at Lewisham School, Alfred Southerns (known as 'Sam') was Second Master (i.e. Deputy Head) of WG. Sadly Charles passed away in 1916 and Alfred / Sam in 1921. Both are buried in Sheffield, where their father retired.

Interestingly, the other day while doing a search for Lewisham School (and coming across this website in the process) I found an old postcard of Lewisham School being advertised on eBay. Although no longer for sale, the seller put it back up again for me, so I bought it and it arrived today. The postmark is dated 1909 and the building looks practically unchanged from how it looks today.

But most intriguing of all was the fact that, on the reverse, the sender of the postcard was none other than Charles Southerns! It was a true "wow!" moment for me.

The postcard was mailed by Southerns to France. As the family had strong connections with the ex-pat British community in Rheims, I wonder if it was to someone Southerns knew through that. (Southerns' Great Uncle was Sir Isaac Holden, the woolcomber from Scotland and later Bradford who set up a woolcombing factory in Rheims which had its own Methodist chapel (Holden was a Methodist). Southerns' father was the minister there in the 1860s which was how he met his wife-to-be whose family lived as part of the community in Rheims.