Events in
Local History

The
Industrial School Fire.

1889

Forest Gate Buildings.

The large Forest Gate Schools buildings were situated about halfway along Forest Lane, used by the Whitechapel and Poplar (and prior to this event - Hackney) 'poor law' unions to house boys of various ages, who were apparently from poor, orphaned or neglected family situations and they were receiving 'welfare' and education while attending an 'industrial' school. Some were as young as seven years old (possibly even younger) and some were housed at the institution with their own brothers.

Forest Gate Industrial School - after the fire

Just after midnight on the last day of 1889 - 31st of December - a fire started in the building, below where the boys slept, the building was of three floors, 80 ft by 40 ft. The lower floor of the building was a workshop and wardrobe area and the upper two floors dormitories in which 84 children were sleeping., The fire was first spotted by a Miss Julia Bloomfield at around 12.20 a.m., she immediately aroused the superintendent of the school.

The Superintendent of the school - Mr. Duncan - immediately dispatched messengers to the local Forest Gate fire station and in the meantime got a hydrant working, only succeeding in controlling the fire to some small extent. The Fire personnel arrived within 10 minutes at 12.42 a.m. Messages had also been sent to the other West Ham fire stations and they arrived shortly after.

Early on, the heat and smoke held back efforts at subduing the flames, but gradually the firefighters managed to approach the burning building although the fire itself was mainly contained on the ground floor, but to make matters worse still, as the firefighters reached the dormitories' inner entrances on the upper floors they found that the doors had all been locked from the outside. There were apparently also stairs at the rear of the dormitories, but doors to these were also locked, these had to be forced open by rescuers.

The fire was probably started by a stove situated in the centre of the workshop and used to provide heat. It had been cleaned the day before, and the stove's flue pipe rose upwards 10 ft from the stove, turning 90 degrees to go across the workshop, through a partition into a storage room and then entered a chimney. It was believed that a fault on the pipe had allowed ignited loose soot to escape thus starting stored clothing smouldering for some time before the actual fire started.

Twenty six children perished in the incident, thirteen on each dormitory floor, nearly all died by suffocating from smoke inhalation. It was apparently normal practice to lock these children into their dormitories, with the keyholders sleeping in rooms nearby and no arrangements for action in the eventuality of fires, and as a result most the 58 boys that did escape did so only after escape doors had been forced open or by rescue from windows.

  
The dormitories.

The disaster caused similar institutions to review their fire precautions and started their thinking about using 'scattered home' instead of 'barrack' style schools. Whitechapel union withdraw from the school in 1897 and Poplar union transferred to a new location in 1906. The main school buildings were subsequently converted into the former Forest Gate Hospital, and later into an 'apartment' complex.

When reading through the 'report' of this incident, it gives the impression that the adults involved performed many heroic deeds in trying to rescue the children, and no doubt many did. But those that were responsible for the children's welfare - the superintendent and the keyholders - are also cited as heroic during the fire although in modern times, no doubt, the opposite view might have prevailed about their actions leading up to the incident (i.e. the woman who first noticed the fire gathered her keys, then instead of unlocking the doors, went and reported to the Superintendent first!!). One person connected with the school stood out as a real hero however, he was the man normally employed to catch runaways from the institute, he apparently went into the burning building several times, dragging out petrified youngsters 'by the scruff of their necks'.... There is no criticism or even mention in the report about the practice of locking the children in at night, or indeed, if the practice ceased after the disaster, although it eventually caused a rethink in how such institutes were organised.  To give some idea of the size of the 'school', the 1881 census shows 663 children aged from just 3 years to 18 years, plus around 47 staff were on the school premises on census night.

© Lal Cook.

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