Introduction by Margy McShane

Introduction by Margy McShane

For nearly two hundred years, countless children lived, worked and were schooled at the Blue Coat Hospital, but little is known or recorded of their characters and personalities. The aim of this project was to research and commemorate the lost lives and voices of those children and, for me, it was a privilege to facilitate a group of writers to that end. The writers, drawn from various community groups, each brought a unique lived experience and writing skills to the project. We focussed on three individual schoolboys and looked more generally at the schoolgirls, about whom there is scant information. As we researched and workshopped, the children seemed to emerge, whispering their stories to us.

In the archives, we found a photograph of the bible of William Seed, presented to him on leaving the school in 1872. Less than a year later, apprenticed to a seafaring master from among the Blue Coat’s wealthy trustees, he drowned at sea. In Liverpool Record Office, a silhouette book of cherubic profiles accompanied the school reports from 1722. Among these was one Richard Fowler, scathingly described as stubborn, self-important and doomed to failure. An account in the Blue Coat Hospital Yearbook of 1800 described a riotous truant spree involving over a hundred boys on a trip to Liverpool’s annual Folly Fair. One of these scallywags, serial truant, George Harrocks, was later expelled along with thirty five of his A.W.O.L accomplices.

As we progressed, the subliminal whispers became a cacophony of voices. It got a little weird in the workshops sometimes. Seagulls shrieked overhead, as we wrote of George Harrocks and the rioting schoolboys. Rainfall, strangely appearing only from the courtyard window, somehow felt like tears for poor, drowned William Seed. William, George, Richard and the many Blue Coat girls, destined to duty and anonymity, were suddenly in our care — we mourned their losses and rejoiced in their rebellions. The writers spoke of feeling ‘haunted’ by the children. We were cyphers, channelling their forgotten stories.

The selection on the following pages celebrates the characters that came to call on us. Each piece is deeply personal and presents a coming together of a writer and a Blue Coat child. Although Scouse, as a Liverpudlian dialect, was yet to be established at this time, I like to think of the children as proto-Scousers: self-assured, rebellious, defiant; plotting mutiny, weaving mischief, waiting to be heard.

Listen carefully, the children are calling…