Queer Places:
Ockham Park House, Woking GU23 6NQ, UK
18 Eaton Pl, London SW1X 8AE, UK
Alice Lushington (April 12, 1829 - December 18, 1903) was a pioneer educationalist. She became Lady Principal of the First College for Training Women Teachers for High Education opened in 1878, now called the Maria Grey Training College. She was also Lady Principal of the College for Female Pupil Teachers of the Voluntary School in Liverpool which were opened in 1881. Together with her sister Frances (born 1827), she later opened the Ockham Schools in Kingsley, Hampshire.
Alice Lushington was born in Great George Street, Westminster, London, to Stephen Lushington and Sarah Grace Carr; her brother was Vernon Lushington. Stephen Lushington was an eminent lawyer who made his reputation as counsel to Queen Caroline, wife of George IV, in the matter of her divorce, and to Lady Byron in her divorce. Throughout his life, Stephen was an ardent reformer and staunch churchman, campaigning for the abolition of capital punishment and supporting his friend William Wilberforce by speaking in favour of the Slave Trade Abolition Bill. He was also involved with members of the Clapham Sect. Stephen Lushington spent the last years of his life at Ockham Park, Surrey which belonged to the Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace. A neighbour wrote 'At Ockham Park the famous Dr Lushington collected around him the cleverest folk of the day' and visitors at Ockham included John Ruskin, William Holman Hunt, William Michael Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edward Lear, Benjamin Jowett and the Christian Socialist F D Maurice. At Ockham Lushington's daughters took over the running of the Ockham Industrial Schools which had been created under Lady Byron's influence. It was there that the two celebrated former slaves William and Ellen Craft were both educated and employed after their escape from the USA. In 1821 Stephen Lushington married Sarah Grace Carr (died 1837) whose father Thomas Carr, a Scottish lawyer, had known Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey and whose circle of friends included the writers Joanna Baillie, Maria Edgeworth, and Anna Letitia Barbauld together with Harriet Martineau, Henry Crabb Robinson, Sir Humphrey Davy, Lady Byron and William Wordsworth. Sarah Carr's sisters were Laura, Lady Cranworth whose husband, a Whig politician was twice Lord Chancellor and a neighbour a friend of Charles Darwin; and Isabella, Lady Eardley whose husband was Sir Culing Eardley a religious campaigner and a prime mover in the founding of the Evangelical Alliance. Stephen Lushington was a judge of the High Court of Admiralty from 1838 and Dean of Arches from 1858 to 1867. He died at Ockham Park in 1873.
In 1831, Alice, unmarried, was living with her sister Edith Grace and this latter husband, clergyman John P. Norris, at Rowley Bank, Castle Church, Staffordshire. In 1836 elaborate schools were planned by Ada Lovelace, Lady King, daughter of Lord Byron. Besides the ordinary village school, they included workshops where the children were taught carpentry, the use of the lathe, and gardening. The subjects of school lessons were also more advanced than was then common in village schools, and there was a gymnasium. As children were attracted from neighbouring parishes, accommodation for boarders was provided. There were masters' houses, in one of which infants were taught up to seven years old. After Lord Lovelace had removed from Ockham to Horsley Towers they were superintended by the Misses Lushington, daughters of Dr. Lushington, who lived at Ockham Park. After his death they were unfortunately given up, in 1874, and an ordinary National School carried on in the same buildings, where it still continues.
Letters to Stephen Lushington's daughters show that, later in his life, he gave them, in his absence, "command of his purse" for the relief of poor persons living in Ockham, the Surrey village where Lushington had his country house. 3 December 1856: Stephen Lushington to Alice Lushington: "You have now sole charge of Ockham. Should the weather continue severe remember you have the command of my purse and God has blessed me with great prosperity and I ought not to be niggardly."
In 1871, Alice, still unmarried, was living with her widowed father, at 18 Eaton Place, Belgravia, London. The 1881 census records her (her father died in 1873) as being at Hinderton Hall, Great Neston, Cheshire, the home of Christopher Bushell who, with Samuel G. Rathbone, had instituted a Pupil Teacher College in two houses in Shaw Street, Liverpool. Alice and her sister Frances later founded one of the first co-educational boarding schools in the country in Kingsley, Hampshire, in 1875.
Frances and Alice Lushington were as progressive in their views of education as their father, who had helped found the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1826, and their brothers Vernon and Godfrey, who had taught in F D Maurice's Working Men's College in the 1850s. Ockham School recruited not only fee-paying children from the surrounding area, other parts of England, and the outposts of the Empire, but also, in accord with their philanthropic aims, children of servants from nearby large houses who may not have paid all the cost of their education. Besides this innovative mixing of different social classes, the school was among the first in the country to accept pupils of both sexes, though boys and girls were taught separately. Their ages ranged from eight to nineteen. The discipline was Victorian: a child who misbehaved might be put in the cellar. The grounds included tennis courts and small gardens for the pupils. For sports they trekked to Sandy-field. For ice skating there was Kingsley Pond, and for swimming a small pool near Kingsley Mill. A couple near the school kept a tuck shop for the children. They could play on Kingsley Common but the village was off limits. Locked gates on the north and south sides of the premises aroused some bitter feeling among local residents and eventually free access to the school grounds was provided.
The school closed not long after the death of Frances Lushington in 1900.
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