The Cellars in The Strand

King’s was founded as part of King’s College London in 1829. When the new institution opened in 1831 the college, or ‘Higher Department’, took the ground and upper floors, whilst the school, or ‘Lower Department’, was down below. Moving from the school to the college at the age of 16 was referred to as ‘going up’, and the boys literally progressed from the dark, damp basement to the airy, spacious classrooms above.  Before long, the school earned the unassuming nickname of the ‘Cellars in The Strand’. Despite the less-than-ideal conditions, the school was based there for 66 years before it moved to Wimbledon in 1897.

‘I was a little disconcerted to find that our School was to be downstairs on the basement storey, in the kitchen as some said, or, according to others, in the cellar. … We found that we had no reason to complain of our quarters. Our rooms were large and high; and masters had been provided for us, of whom any, even the old, schools might be proud.’

(F.J. Manning, pupil at the school from 1831 to 1836)

The subterranean school was accessed by wide stone steps which led down to a long, dark passage, some 10 feet wide, that ran the 300-foot length of the building. At the bottom of the steps there was an iron gate, the keys for which were held by the porter. The gate was locked after the pupils arrived and was not opened again until the end of the school day which meant a pupil could not leave unless he was able to present the porter with an exeat from a master giving permission to leave.

There were classrooms running off each side of the passage.  Steps at the end led upstairs to the Chapel where a service was held at 9.30am each morning. All the classrooms were below street level, and several had flagstone floors which soon began to create a permanently dank atmosphere. There was also an issue with drains. The Thames was, at that time, a sewer for over a million Londoners, and the resulting smell permeated the classrooms. The additional stench from the nearby dissecting room of the college’s medical department was sometimes so bad that the boys were forced to leave their classrooms. By 1840, the Head master, Dr Major, was forced to write to the College Council demanding that something be done to improve the situation.

Although the steep bank from the Thames Embankment up to the Strand meant that some classrooms had windows which afforded natural light, they looked out over a dismal paved yard, described by Sabine Baring-Gould (OK 1846) as a place ‘in which not a blade of grass showed, and not a leaf quivered in the air’. The internal passage was always dark and was lit by gas jets throughout the autumn and winter months. When there was a London smog it became darker still, and wax candles would also be used in classrooms–one candle was shared between two boys and would be stuck onto the desk with melted wax.

‘When my father decided to send me there, a friend said “so you are going to study in the cellars of Somerset House?” and he wasn’t far wrong; for our classrooms were mostly underground, and our playground a walled-in pit.’

(L. H. Kirkness, a pupil at King’s from 1896 to 1901)

Breaktime was fifteen minutes in the morning and thirty minutes at lunchtime, and the boys could go out into the small, gravelled yard (likened to a prison yard by some pupils) where they amused themselves by indiscriminately kicking around a piece of wood or loose stones. As a consequence, the school regularly received bills for broken windows from local businesses in Strand Lane, and eventually the playground was paved over.

At breaktime, a local baker and confectioner came in to sell buns and jam tarts from a counter set up in the corridor. The baker reappeared at one o’clock with a greater assortment of hot pastries such as meat pies for lunch. Alternatively, the boys could have a meal in the large dining room upstairs which overlooked the river and where beer was served for a penny a glass! On one occasion though, the entire roof of the dining hall collapsed into the kitchen. This is likely to have been caused by the nearby excavation work for the construction of Victoria Embankment–luckily it happened two hours before lunchtime when the dining room was empty and no one was injured.

School finished at 3pm each day except Wednesday when it finished at 1pm and Saturday when it finished at 12 noon. After school the boys would go to Sainsbury’s, a chemist close to school for iced soda drinks, for a stroll in Covent Garden or to Soho to learn to ride bicycles (36-inch bone shakers became fashionable in 1868 and many boys went to rooms in Soho where they could take lessons).

A great strength of the school was its proximity to the college. From its inception, pupils had been given the option to attend lectures in science given by the professorial staff of King’s College (an additional fee was charged). In 1842, following the success of these early lectures they became a compulsory part of the curriculum at no extra fee. By taking advantage of the relationship with the college, the school became one of the first in the country to offer an education in these subjects. One of the ambitions of this advanced curriculum was to prepare some pupils for Oxford and Cambridge (the college, at that time, did not confer degrees). In this respect, the school did exceptionally well: in 1882, King’s came second only to Eton in the Oxford and Cambridge Board Examinations.

The academic reputation of the school helped to bolster pupil numbers which, under the second Head master, Dr Maclear, rose to over 600 pupils. In response, the playground had to be converted into a gymnasium and four new classrooms were constructed. By the end of the 1880s, however, numbers at the school had fallen to just 251 boys (by the 1890s there were fewer still). There was a need for better facilities and outside space. Sufficient land to accommodate onsite playing fields was becoming an increasingly important feature for prospective pupils and their parents.  As the railways expanded, making travel easier and more convenient, so too had the appetite of parents to send their children out of London to boarding schools set in acres of countryside.  With falling pupil numbers, the search for a new location for the school began in earnest. A site on West Hill in Putney was being seriously considered by the College Council when a property called South Hayes, opposite Wimbledon Common, was found. The large Victorian house might have been unremarkable but the 6 acres of perfectly flat land with which it came was perfect. The new Wimbledon site would mean that King’s could compete once again with St Paul’s which had quadrupled its intake following the school’s relocation from the City of London to a large, semi-rural site in Hammersmith in 1884.

Once the decision to move to Wimbledon had been taken, matters moved quickly, and the school was relocated during the Easter holidays in 1897 opening in Wimbledon for the summer term that May. Some of the existing pupils who lived in north or east London decided not to move with the school but a number of local new boys took their places.  At the time, Wimbledon was a rapidly growing town with its own rail links but, to make the journey to King’s even easier, an early school coach system was put in place with an omnibus drawn by two horses and driven by a coachman which ran from the station up to the school. At first the system operated on a pay-per-journey basis when the boys disembarked at school but, with too many boys jumping off early on the Ridgway to avoid payment, this was soon replaced by a termly fee of 10 shillings.

Following the school’s move, the basement in which it had been located for so long was taken over by the Strand School, where boys aged between 10 and 16 could secure a ‘General Education suitable for commerce and the Civil Service.’ The Strand School no longer exists. Like King’s College School, it became independent of King’s College following the college’s incorporation into the University of London. In 1913 the Strand School moved close to Tulse Hill, operating as a boys’ grammar school until it closed in the late 1970s. Meanwhile, back in the basement at King’s College, in May 1952 molecular biologist Dr Rosalind Franklin and her PhD student Raymond Gosling took one of the most important photographs ever taken: ‘photo 51’. The image demonstrated the helical structure of DNA thus enabling James Watson and Francis Crick at the University of Cambridge to build the first correct model of the DNA molecule. Quite an impressive finale for the dark, smelly classrooms populated by the first King’s boys in the ‘Cellars in the Strand’!