(In the Appreciation as "School")
(Unlisted in 1973, but now Grade II listed)
(Unlisted in 1973, but now Grade II listed)
This School was erected by the Earl of Ilchester in 1858, after the earlier "school house" was burnt down, along with several other houses, though how that school house relates to 19 Rodden Row, known to have been "the penny school" isn't clear.
Old photographs show a bell tower in the centre of the school roof ~ it was removed on safety grounds many years ago, but so far, village memories have been unable to come up with a precise date.
The Abbotsbury school had been originally endowed in the 18th century by the first Earl's mother-in-law Mrs Susanna Strangways Horner, when she also donated a building for the school and its master. The Ilchester ladies seem to have taken a strong interest in this new 19th century school: the old logbooks record regular visits, and in 1874, Lady Ilchester gave 24 print dresses to the most regular attenders, and sent down 12 dusters and 24 kitchen rubbers to be hemmed and marked. In the following year, she gave 12 pairs of boots to the most regular attenders among the boys. The vicar was not so supportive ~ the Revd Mr Penney complained that 55-70 boys had been bowling and dancing at the Ship Inn during Abbotsbury Fair, and added that if the Earl didn't stop the bowling and the dancing, he (the vicar) would never enter the school again.
It must have been a pretty spartan school: the logs report constant problems of absenteeism, due to the heating and condition of the building, and as recently as 1946, the village youth group were asking for electric lighting, leading the Parish Council to ask why there was none installed. (Incidentally, when electricity cables for the rest of the village were installed in the late 1940s, a 30-feet deep well was uncovered in the square in front of the school.) New heating and lighting were not, in fact, put in until the school became the village hall, when it was hoped that the WI could be persuaded to move house from the Reading Room in Rodden Row.
The school closed in 1981, after a vigorous campaign fought, from as early as 1973, by parents and the Parish Council, and the Estate bought the building back from the County Council in 1982.
Edward Green, the Estate manager at the time, commented on the irony of the fact that the Strangways family had built the original school in 1758, put up the new building in 1858, sold it to the Council for £2,000 in 1920, and were now buying it back again, adding that the sum paid for buying it back "represents a considerable return to the Council on its initial outlay", as the Estate had to pay the full residential market value, the Council having sought planning permission for housing on the site.
The one-time school thus became the Strangways Hall in 1985, and was given to the village in return for an annual rent of a bouquet of flowers and the condition that the Strangways name be remembered in the Hall's title. As a hall, it became so popular with many village groups (and several from further afield) that bookings had to be made weeks in advance; but in 2001, dry rot was discovered under the toilets, and the Hall had to close while expensive repairs were put in hand.
Among the fund-raising efforts launched to meet the cost of the repairs, a group of ladies hand-stitched a 42-panel quilt (right) which was raffled over the summer of 2002, raising over £1,200 towards the repair bill. Among the thousands of people who bought tickets was a couple from New Zealand who wrote on their counterfoils that they would pay the cost of shipping the quilt across the world if they won it. In fact, the quilt was won by a lady from Blandford, who took that as a sign that she should go ahead with her dream of building a treatment room alongside her house, and it now hangs there to soothe her cancer patients.
More recently, a group of four dozen people have been meeting weekly in the Hall to put together a dramatic "crazy patchwork" cover for the grand piano in the parish church, which was dedicated in the spring of 2006.
Meanwhile, schildren have now returned to the school building, which today houses the Chesil Bank Pre-School: a rather different type of child, and a very different type of schooling from their 19th-century predecessors below ~ the date on the boy's slate appears to read "National School, Abbotsbury, 1872"
