AOSA CENTENARY HISTORY 1841 - 1941

Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Appendix

Return History
Contents

For the proposed School certain Friends had favoured Howlish Hall near Bishop Auckland, but Thomas Richardson’s offer made inevitable the choice of Great Ayton.

The Ayton property belonged to the Heseltons, Friends and cousins of Thomas Richardson. It included more than 75 acres of good land. Part was grass, part was under the plough, part was garden. The Leven ran through it and it possessed a fair amount of wood. The house and buildings were substantial and adjoined the Meeting House. The original house has been the headmaster’s house since 1895 and externally looks now much as it looked in 1841, except that the pillared porch was added later. Stone steps led from the village green into the hall. On the right from the hall stood the dining room, on the left a sitting room. Behind the dining room was a kitchen, behind the sitting room an office which had a second door giving on an archway at the end of the house. Through this archway carts passed to the fields behind and ultimately the archway became the Meeting House lobby. Upstairs were three bedrooms in front and two behind. The top storey was reached by a side door from the green, a passage, which separated the house from the adjoining buildings, and a stairway. This storey contained two other bedrooms and a large room used as a granary.

Behind the house a small field sloped gently to the Leven. This field is now the two playgrounds and the terrace. The coach road to the village ran between the graveyard wall and the fence round this field. Across the beck were four more fields and a little wood. Certain farm buildings stood by the side of the road to which the coach road led, and in the angle made by the main road as it turned East were the remaining fields. The cottages in front of them were afterwards bought by Thomas Richardson whose executors, shortly after his death in 1853, handed them over to the School.

Alterations plainly would be needed before the Heseltons’ house would shelter even a few scholars. From the first floor a staircase was made to the granary in the top storey where a few boys could sleep. The girls were to use the bedrooms on the first floor. The Committee soon decided that a new building should be erected facing the village green. William Holmes of Newcastle made the plans and superintended the work. The estimated cost was ‘calculated at short of £500, the oven and steam apparatus included.’ William Holmes was genuinely interested in the job. He took lodgings in the village for his wife and family so that he himself would be always on the spot to supervise and control. He kept constantly in his mind the need for economy, simplicity and sound work. George Dixon tells how he was awakened at two o’clock one morning by a knocking on the wall. “I felt greatly alarmed, sprang from my bed and went into the next room where I found William Holmes. He apologised for having disturbed me, and said, ‘I wanted to know whether this partition was a brick wall or a stoothing.’ Thomas Richardson, who could judge a man well and who came up from Ayton House every day to see how the work went on, wrote that he ‘must say that William Holmes is the greatest economist that ever I met in working up materials and keeping the men at work’.” He thought that the committee would be well satisfied with what he had done.

The workmen began in July 1841 by pulling down two old cottages and the other buildings adjoining the west end of the Heseltons’ house. On this site Holmes built the severely plain three-storey block which with its door and seventeen windows in three rows still looks on to the green. The boys were to use the ground floor, now part of the school dining hall, as a schoolroom. The middle floor, now the girls’ main schoolroom, was to be used partly as a girls’ classroom and partly as the dining room. On the top floor the boys were to sleep, and though boys have not continuously used the room as a dormitory, yet a hundred years later the little boys still sleep there.

At the back of the new buildings Holmes put up a kitchen and washroom. Thomas Richardson considered that Holmes ‘was making the most of it, but it will only be a makeshift for the present and will not be a dis-sight to be pulled down when a larger place is needful.’ In the kitchen a brick oven was used for the brown bread nicknamed ‘brown Geordie.’ The cook filled the long oven with brushwood and faggots, fired these, withdrew the ashes when the burning was accomplished and with a wooden pele pushed the loaves into the hot oven. Four iron ovens were ‘so admirably combined by Alfred Kitching that by means of a very small fire meat could be roasted or pies baked all at one and the same time sufficient for a family of eighty persons ‘. From the kitchen a lift worked by a rope and pulley carried the food up to the dining room and the empty dishes and crockery down to the kitchen.

William Holmes had made a sound job of the whole building and had done it quickly, for in November 1841 the new building was furnished ready. The eight girls and the eight boys who constituted the little school, all who could be packed away in the Heseltons’ house, duly took possession of their respective quarters and Ayton School had got over its first growing pains. Holmes’ devotion, skill and economy had their lasting reward in the restrained and simple building which still stands a memorial to him.

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