The Home was founded in 1829 in east London but moved to Hampstead in the mid-1850s. Its supporters believed that the needs of sailors were seen by the public as less pressing than those of soldiers.
An appeal of 1853 said that orphans of sailors in the Royal Navy, Royal Marines and Merchant Service were eligible for entry, but this was the only Home that also took in orphans of men who served in the mercantile marine.
The girls were educated and supported until they were 15. Donors voted and ‘elected’ girls to the Home; the more money you raised, the more votes you were entitled to. In 1867, each lady who collected five guineas was enrolled as a Life Governor with two votes at all elections. Alternatively, single payments for support could be made. In common with most homes, the sailors’ orphans were trained for domestic service; situations were found for them, and outfits provided. In the case of this Home, proof of the father’s service, parents’ marriage and child’s birth certificate were required to be eligible for selection.
The Royal Patriotic Fund and the Crimean War
The Crimean War (1853-1856) highlighted the issues faced by bereaved families of all fighting men at a time when there was no state help. The Royal Patriotic Fund was set up during the war and administered by the government, to provide aid to bereaved servicemen’s families. Public response to the appeal for donations was generous, although the various Homes that benefitted rarely had enough money to secure full occupancy.
In May 1855, the chairman suggested to the governors of the Sailors’ Orphan Girls’ Home that they should pay special attention to the needs of merchant seamen and their orphans as they were not entitled to any benefits from the Fund. A month later, the press reported that the Home had nonetheless agreed to take 12 orphans of Royal Navy personnel who had died in the Crimean war with Russia. The Patriotic Fund suggested an annual payment of £15 for each girl but subsequently agreed to make the sum flexible, according to prevailing circumstances.
Frognal House, Hampstead
The Home had moved there by May 1856, a large, detached house opposite Mount Vernon. The girls worshipped at the nearby protestant Christ Church, where the Reverend Bickersteth was minister. The Home’s AGM that year reported 11 orphans had been admitted at the request of the Patriotic Fund Commissioners, that annual expenditure had exceeded receipts and the present complement was 50 girls. By the time of the 1861 census, their number had risen to 62, but annual intake fluctuated according to funds available.
The Alicia Race case
In January 1857, the case of Alicia Race was widely reported in the national press and set precedents referred to in subsequent rulings. Royal Marine Lanman Race and his wife Alicia had two children, son John and daughter Alicia, named after her mother. Lanman was a Protestant, and his wife was a Catholic but she apparently had no problem with her children being raised in the Protestant faith, while Lanman had no objection to them learning Catholic prayers. Religion only became an issue after Lanman’s death.
Alicia was around 10 years old when her father was killed in action during the Crimean War on 4 September 1854, at the battle of Petropavlovsk. This siege took place on the Siberian Pacific coast, far away from the main centre of action on the Black Sea. The official report noted 52 men were killed or badly wounded; of these 12 were from Lanman’s ship, HMS Picque.
Widowed Alicia took her children to live with her mother-in-law until the following year, 1855, when her son John was accepted by the Sailors’ Boys School in Dorset and her daughter was placed in the Sailors’ Orphan Girls’ School and Home by the Patriotic Fund – almost certainly one of the 11 girls referred to above. That August her mother also moved to Hampstead.
Lanman had made a will in his wife’s favour dated 24 August 1852, ‘feeling confident you will do justice to my two children’, but without saying how they should be brought up or appointing a guardian. He made landfall only twice en route for Petropavlovsk and wrote Alicia a letter dated 25 August 1854, outlining further wishes but without saying anything about his children’s education. This eloquent note must have been penned by a fellow seaman, as neither Lanman nor his wife could write and they both made their mark, an ‘X’, on their marriage certificate.
‘When you receive this I shall be no more, as it will not be sent to you if I survive. My dear Ally, I am but ill prepared to meet my maker face to face, kiss my dear children for me as a last embrace from a loving father. We are only waiting for the morning dawn to go into Petropaulouski and commence the work of destruction. It is a Russian colony and we are about to take it or die in the attempt.
The last from your affectionate and loving husband,
Lanman Race’.
In October 1856, Mrs Lanman asked to have her son and daughter returned to her care. When the Hampstead School authorities refused, she took them to court. There it was argued that her Catholic faith was the reason she wanted to remove her daughter from the Home, that her priest was willing to help both but not one of her children. Despite her young age, daughter Alicia had a mind of her own, and told Reverend Bickersteth that she wanted to remain at the School and attend Christ Church. In January 1857, the case was decided in Mrs Lanman’s favour although the court expressed some reservations:
‘It might be every way much better for this child to remain in the school at Hampstead, which appears to be in all respects so admirably conducted; and we may individually deplore her removal from it; but we think we are bound, to order that the infant Alicia Race be now delivered up to her mother’.
However, this ruling was overturned the following month, and Alicia was returned to the Sailors’ Orphan Girls’ School and Home. The Reverend Bickersteth and four other gentlemen had agreed to provide for the girl, until she was 21 years old, to the tune of the usual £25 per year.
In yet another twist, the 1861 census shows Alicia, not at the Home but back with her mother and brother, at 12 New Buildings, Hampstead. Today renamed as New Court, her home was a newly completed flat in the first of two blocks, built for the ‘deserving poor’ by a local philanthropist. We don’t know how or why this happened and we can’t tell where Alicia went to school or if it was possible for her to continue learning at the Sailors’ Orphan Girls’ school without being resident in the Home. It does however seem likely the Reverend Bickersteth kept a fatherly eye on the young girl, as he was present at her marriage many years later.
Alicia did well, perhaps assisted by a good education and helpful friends. In the 1871 census she was working as a governess in a surgeon’s home in Carlisle. She married Philip Lancashire Booth in 1893; perhaps a co-incidence, but Booth was also a surgeon. The ceremony in Exeter was conducted by the Bishop; Reverend Bickersteth assisted and may have suggested the venue, as he was the Bishop’s Chaplain. One notice of the marriage made specific reference to the fact that Alicia was, ‘the only daughter of the late Lanman Race.’ The Booth family home in 1911 was 1 Empress Drive, an 11-room house on Walney Island, overlooking the strait that separated it from Barrow in Furness. Alicia died on 5 February 1914.
The new building in Hampstead town
In June 1866, the Duke of Edinburgh was the speaker at a ‘festival dinner’ held to raise funds for the Home. He was Victoria and Albert’s second son, who joined the navy in 1858, rising through the ranks to become an admiral of the fleet. As such he had a special fondness for the sailors’ charity. He told the assembled company that Frognal House was ‘inadequate and ill-adapted’ for the girls, and in any case, the lease on the property was up in three years. He urged the Committee to set aside funds for a new building and by the end of the evening, £1,000 had been promised to kick start the project. A site on the Greenhill estate was secured for a larger, purpose-built home, where Fitzjohn’s Avenue meets Heath Street on the corner of what is now Perrins Lane. Designed by Edward Ellis of Fenchurch Street, the ‘large and handsome brick building’ then stood in spacious grounds. The builder was William Huson Watts who lived nearby.
The sinking of HMS Captain and the Margate surf boat disaster
The following year the 65 orphans at the Home included six whose fathers had died when HMS Captain sank off Cape Finisterre. A masted turret warship, it was completed in March 1870 but capsized on 7 September with the loss of nearly 500 lives, due to design and construction errors that led to inadequate stability.
Another tragedy that captured the public’s sympathy was the Margate surf boat disaster. These boats were nothing to do with surfing but were rescue craft, funded and crewed by locals. On 2 December 1897 in gale force (some said hurricane strength) winds, the surf boat called the ‘Friend to all Nations’ went to the aid of a sailing vessel, ‘Persian Empire’. The surf boat was hit by large waves and capsized on Nayland Rock off Margate. Nine of the thirteen-man crew died, including a father and two sons from the same family. There were four survivors. The Hampstead Home agreed to take six girls whose fathers died when the boat sank.
Life at the Home continues
The local papers periodically reported concerts and fetes to fund raise, and generally printed an account of the Home’s AGM. Otherwise, it seems to have attracted little attention.
From 1871 two rooms had been used as a school where teaching included training for domestic service. It was recognised as a public elementary school in 1879, receiving a parliamentary grant from 1882 until the early twentieth century. In 1919 the school again became independent.
In 1888, it was reported that since opening its doors in 1829, the Home had housed, educated, and sent out to work upwards of 800 sailors’ orphans.
The Sailors’ Families Society took the Home over in 1957, when the orphans were moved to Hull, and the Hampstead Home was closed down.
Originally No.96 Fitzjohn’s Avenue, it was renumbered as 116. Despite the loss of most of its garden, the main building has survived largely unscathed and still bears the inscription ‘Sailors’ Orphan Girls’ School and Home’ on its fascia. Today it is Monro House, named after a previous long serving secretary of the Home, and provides sheltered housing run by Camden Council.
Frognal House and General de Gaulle
Frognal House is now No.99 Frognal and Grade II listed. During WWII it was the home of General de Gaulle and his family, from September 1942 to 30 March 1943. A plaque on the house commemorates his stay when he would regularly attend mass at nearby St Mary’s in Holly Walk. De Gaulle led the Free French Forces, the government-in-exile, from London. Jean Moulin, one of the most important heroes of the French Resistance, is commemorated on a second plaque. In a secret ceremony at the house on 14 February 1943, he was presented with the Croix de la Liberation by the General. Moulin was the first President of the National Council of the Resistance; he died in July 1943 having been betrayed to the Germans and tortured.
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After fifty years as St Dorothy’s Convent, the property was up for sale in 2021, with an asking price of £15M.
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