In Christ Church, Warminster, The First 150 Years, a booklet published in October 1980, to celebrate the 150th birthday of Christ Church, the Rev. John C. Day (Vicar) wrote:
The Mission School, South Street
Opened in 1868 and very much a church project. The site and building cost £300; £245 of which came from local well-wishers, £25 from the Diocese and the rest raised locally.
This school was built through the endeavours of the Rev. William Hickman and his Churchwardens and they were the first trustees of the new building. It continued as a school until about 1922 and was finally sold for conversion into a private dwelling in 1950.
When the Vicar opened the Mission School on December 2nd, 1868, a large gathering assembled. We still have part of his address on that occasion and it provides some interesting peeps into the period.
He began by thanking all who had brought the project to fruition. especially the devoted people who had “sat in the room of a small cottage with between 30 and 40 children and laboured to instil into their youthful minds the rudiments of scriptural and secular knowledge.” These children were to form the nucleus of the new school.
Mr. Hickman went on to say that he hoped “the building would have a wide use as “a weekday school and also for a Sunday School for those whose work during the week prevented them from attending any school.” He also hoped to make of it a Reading Room for young men, and by that means instruct them and keep them out of mischief. It was a room to which he “would like to see used for mothers meetings where they might learn to make and mend clothes, and to read and write if necessary.” He hoped also that “the room may be used for afternoon services on a Sunday, for poor old people who were unable to reach the church.”
An interesting snippet of local history was recorded by the Vicar. He believed “that where the room now stood used to stand a building which gave the name to the place, ‘Skittle Alley’. He had been told by the old people still living that within living memory stood a barn-like structure, where on Sunday afternoons, as many as a hundred people, the most dishonest and dissolute of the neighbourhood, were wont to assemble and play at skittles, have cock fighting and carry on the most disreputable vagaries. It showed the advancement of the age that such a building had given place to that in which they were then met.” He hoped the place would no longer be called ‘Skittle Alley.’
Recalling the former school in a cottage, the Vicar mentioned that “he and his wife together with Clara Cundick and one or two other kind friends had collected together in the streets and lanes of the Common, some 39 children. These children were all more or less neglected and he did not believe that there were two among them who could tell A from B or L from M. Now with the opening of the Mission School they had between 60 and 80 at the Sunday School and 54 attending the day school.”
In keeping with nearly all schools in those days, tuition was not altogether free. In this case it was intended to ask families of those who took part, “to pay a trifle to help keep up the building, but to all who were not in a position to pay, it would be entirely free.”
The first School Mistress, Clara Cundick, “was to have the use of the dwelling room in the school and of the sleeping room above with firing, lighting and garden and a salary of £10 a year.”
Such was the beginning of an enterprise which was to radically change the lives of many living at the western end of the Common.
The school was in regular use as a church up until its closure and many former St. Boniface Theological College students can remember it with affection as the place where they made their first gentle experiments at preaching and conducting services.