On a recent walk around West Ham Cemetery, I discovered this obelisk – a monument to the memory of 26 schoolboys who died in a fire on New Year’s Day 1890. The story of this tragic incident gives us an insight into the lives of children from poor families in London during the late Victorian era.

The fire at the Forest Gate Industrial School in Forest Lane occurred at night. The schoolboys lived on site and were asleep in locked dormitories on the floors above the room where the fire started. Fifty-eight of the 84 boys in the dormitories escaped from the building or were rescued, but tragically, 26 boys, aged from 7 to 12 years, died. Most suffocated due to dense smoke.

The cause of the fire was traced to a defective stovepipe in the sewing/wardrobe room on the ground floor. Clothes and blankets stored in the room provided fuel for the fire.

The story of the fire, including rescue attempts and the aftermath, are well documented. As with any event like this, some of the details are upsetting to read. News reports at the time perhaps lacked the dramatic slant often seen in present-day reporting, though to my mind still succeed in getting across the terrible tragedy of the event.

Finding the monument prompted me to look at the history of the Forest Gate Industrial School. It was located in the building that later became Newham Maternity Hospital, closed in 1985 and now converted into flats.

The school was established in the 1850s by the Whitechapel Board of Guardians for children whose parents were so poor that they lived in the workhouses of East London. Industrial schools were intended to provide destitute children with bed and board, basic education, and practical training to enable them to take up employment in the future.

Significantly, there were a number of fires in industrial schools from the 1850s to 1880s, and in 1882 the Local Government Board had urged Poor Law Guardians to put in place proper fire escape arrangements in these schools. The fire of 1 January 1890 resulted in the government taking steps to enforce fire safety protocols including leaving dormitories unlocked at night.

Source material can be found at:

http://www.e7-nowandthen.org/2014/05/the-forest-gate-industrial-school-story.html

http://www.e7-nowandthen.org/2017/01/forest-gate-industrial-school-1890.html

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