On this day … 31 July 1875

July 31, 2023July 29, 2023 ~ Peter Smith

An advertisement was placed in the Preston Guardian announcing the opening of the Catholic Grammar School’s new premises in Winckley Square.

Fr Cobb, the priest at St Wilfrid’s, had opened Preston’s first Catholic grammar school in around 1865 at a house in the square on the corner with Garden Street. It only stayed there for about a year before moving to a property in Mount Pleasant, then a passageway off the square. In 1875, the school, later known as the Catholic College, settled in the premises that it was occupy for the rest of its life.

While the school was in Mount Pleasant, in 1871 the headmaster, the Rev Martin, in his speech at the annual presentation of prizes, reported in the Preston Chronicle, set out why a Catholic grammar school was so urgently needed in Preston: it was to overcome the disadvantages that Catholic boys faced in lacking the quality of education available to the Protestants in the town.

The school aimed to provide what the Rev Martin described as a ‘middle-class education’. It built on the schooling provided for the town’s younger Catholic children, again the work of a priest at St Wilfrid’s, Rev Joseph ‘Daddy’ Dunn, who opened the first Catholic school in Fox Street in 1814.

In his speech, Fr Martin detailed the need that his school would meet:

‘It is necessary that we should have a good middle school of this description, as our boys should have an opportunity of pushing themselves on in the world, because we know the reason that many of them are, in these our times, kept back in the scale is, that they have not received the education which the Protestants have received; and therefore I look upon this school as very great and important for this town that all these boys may have an opportunity of receiving an education equal to that given to the Protestants, so that in future all our boys in Preston may take their stand on an equality with the Protestants. If they have not been so in the past it is because their education has been deficient.’

A few years later, a St Wilfrid’s priest, the Rev Dykes, returned to the subject in his prize day speech in 1881, again reported in the Preston Chronicle. He went further, regretting the inferior position in which the town’s Catholics were still placed:

‘Whilst referring to the Catholics of the town, he said that where there was such a large part of the population of this town Catholics, they ought to be able to hold their own, to have a very considerable influence in the governance of a town like that

‘They formed one-third of the population of the town, and they were entitled to have a very prominent place in the management of the town, and in what is done for the good of the town. The Quakers were only a one-fiftieth part of the Catholics, and they held higher places. The Catholics did not hold a position of importance in the town, although they were such a large body, and that, he thought was chiefly owing to the defect of their education … He thought that was the great reason why they held an inferior position in the town.’

The headmaster, the Rev Lapasture, in addressing ‘most of the respectable Catholics of the town and neighbourhood’, rather pointedly noted the absence of the town’s prominent Protestants who had been invited, including the vicar and the mayor, who pleaded a previous engagement:

‘He had received a letter from Col. Goodair regretting that he could not get there, he had also had letters sent to him from the chief men of the town expressing their regret that they could not be present, one for one reason and one for another, and he felt rather disappointed at that.’