St George's German and English School

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St George's German Lutheran Church schools
Contributed by Survey of London on July 31, 2020

St George’s Church had supported ‘German and English Schools’ from 1765, but there was no school building until 1805. Pastor Dr Christian E. A. Schwabe, who had arrived at St George’s in 1799, was an experienced teacher and instrumental in this initiative. Stable and coach-house buildings east of the pastor’s house on Alie Street were replaced by a modest single-bay three- storey clerk’s house and a three-bay single-storey school. The clerk’s house had a second door for a way through to the burial ground and vestry block to the rear. Samuel Page (1771–1852), the parish surveyor who drew a plan of this site in 1802 when deliberations about its future were underway, may have been responsible for designing the buildings. The small school accommodated a mixed class of girls and boys aged seven to fourteen. Schwabe moved to Stamford Hill where he established a school for well-to-do German families, many of which, with other wealthy German merchants, some of them sugar-bakers, supported the Whitechapel school and enabled less well-off children to attend on scholarships. Numbers increased rapidly, and after a decade the girls' classes moved to the now former pastor’s house. Schwabe also became chaplain to the Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mother, who became the patron of the school and is said to have worshipped regularly at St George’s. Schwabe, who died in 1843, has a commemorative tablet on the west wall of the church, in German.¹ In the 1850s, during the pastorate of the Rev. Dr Louis Cappel, rooms in the former pastor’s house were given over to an infants’ school, such provision being seen to be an urgent necessity for the local German population to allow mothers to go out to work. Then, in 1859, a separate infants’ school was built on the former burial ground, to the east of the church vestry behind the earlier school. This attractively polychromatic two-storey building was a gift from W. H. Göschen, a banker, the son of Goethe’s publisher, and the father of G. J. Goschen, who became the first Viscount Goschen through eminence as a Liberal MP for the City of London. By 1877 there were 283 infants registered, but the infants’ school had come to house older girls, the infants being in the vestry, the boys in the front range. The intake of the schools had increased to the extent that accommodation was inadequate.

The whole frontage east of the church was redeveloped in 1877–8, still under Cappel. Large new junior schools went up, with E. A. Gruning, himself an immigrant German, being the architect of the striking red-brick block that survives. Browne and Robinson of Worship Street were the builders and Baron Oscar von Ernsthausen, another immigrant German, was the Treasurer. The most significant benefactor was James Duncan, a local sugar-baker who employed many German workers.²

The new junior schools had three main storeys, attics and a basement that was lit from above the pavement and used as a playground. Four large classrooms on the raised-ground and first floorscould each accommodate up to seventy boys or girls. Sliding partitions allowed for classes to be taught alternatively by German and English teachers. The upper levels housed a schoolmaster’s flat, teachers’ bedrooms, and house-keeper’s rooms.

St George’s schools closed in 1917 when Pastor Mätzold was deported to Germany. The lower floors soon fell to use for tailoring, and the upper storeys were otherwise let out. In 1983 St George’s converted the first floor to be a student hostel and retained the basement as a church hall. Both the junior and infants’ schools were converted into flats in the late 1990s.³