September 2022

22
Wanstead Village Directory
HISTORY COMES HOME
Redbridge Museum will open a new permanent exhibition later this
year exploring 200,000 years of local history. In the eighth of a series of
articles, Museum Officer Nishat Alam looks at some of the items on show
The Wanstead Infant Orphan Asylum
opened in Snaresbrook in 1843. The
building is now known as Snaresbrook
Crown Court, but for over a century it was a
boarding school. In this article, I look at the
history of the asylum, later called the Royal
Wanstead School, which will be explored in
a new display about the borough’s historic
institutions when Redbridge Museum reopens
in the next few months.
We usually understand ‘orphan’ as someone
who has lost both their parents, but the pupils
of the Infant Orphan Asylum were children
whose fathers had died and whose mothers
could not afford to take care of them. The
asylum only took in children from respectable,
middle-class families, who could often buy
the vote of the private donors who funded the
asylum, ensuring their child’s admittance.
In this way, the asylum was not a traditional
orphanage. The building itself is not the kind
of place we tend to picture when we think of
homes of its kind. Now Grade II listed, it was
designed by two prominent architects and
its foundation stone laid by Prince Albert,
consort of Queen Victoria, who was the
institution’s first royal patron. But despite
its status amongst royals, the Infant Orphan
Asylum was, after all, a boarding school where
children were sent away from their families,
often as infants. Pupils had a strict, disciplined
schooling by the teachers and nurses who
took care of them and, as with many in similar
schools at the time, may have been quite
miserable.
Donald Grist, who was there from 1903 to 1919,
wrote in his memoir, A Victorian Charity: “Meals
were simple and sparse: mince or stew with
one vegetable… Drinks were cocoa, water and
watered milk.” Meals were served on plates
like the one pictured above, which will feature
in the new museum display among other
material, having been donated to us by a
local resident who, in 1990, recovered various
pieces of crockery used by the asylum from
the shores of Eagle Pond. They paint a picture
of a rather grim experience hidden behind a
grand façade.
The asylum’s slightly ominous Victorian name
was abandoned for the more inviting Royal
Wanstead School in 1938. At this point, it
began to operate as a school rather than an
orphanage as social attitudes on education
and care changed. Pupils attending at this
time probably looked back at their time more
fondly than their Victorian counterparts.
As welfare provision improved in the 1950s,
more children began to attend local schools
and the Royal Wanstead School saw a decline
in income and attendance until it could no
longer afford to stay open. It finally closed in
1971. The building opened as a Crown Court on
26 November 1974.
Redbridge Museum is located on
Clements Road, Ilford. Visit wnstd.com/rm
To complete a survey on what else should
go on display, visit wnstd.com/rms
© Redbridge Museum
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