All Saints

Prologue

PrologueSpeke Hill Orphanage, Liverpool

Strictly speaking, Speke Hill Orphanage was something of a conundrum. First of all, it wasn't in Speke, the area of Liverpool that today is possibly best known as the location of Liverpool's John Lennon airport. Secondly, there wasn't a hill in sight, and in point of fact it had never been designed to be used for its current purpose. There probably wasn't a living soul who could rightly recall how or why the former Mental Asylum had been given its original name other than those who assumed it was perhaps an attempt to give the old place a touch of the grandiose with a name bearing a similarity to Speke Hall, the Tudor mansion once owned by the wealthy Norris family, and now in the care of The National Trust, a few miles away. Though, bearing in mind the 'clientele' of the old asylum, it would have been debatable whether any of the inmates would have appreciated the pleasant rural-sounding name of their place of incarceration.

For most of those held within the grim walls of the old Victorian buildings that comprised the asylum, Speke Hill would have been the last place on earth they wanted to be, and for the worst afflicted, it may also have been the last place on earth they would see, many being confined without limit of time behind the locked doors and corridors of the bleak, forbidding red-brick buildings.

Set back from Woolton Road, in its own deceptively pleasant landscaped grounds, a sweeping, curved gravel driveway, bordered by an avenue of fir trees, the asylum employed all the horrors of early Victorian psychiatric 'treatments' to those in its care, including dousing with freezing cold water from high-pressured hoses, to beatings, long periods of solitary confinement and worst of all, the enforced use of frontal lobotomy in a madly useless attempt to cure the sufferers of perceived insanity.

Thankfully, the suffering of those held behind the walls of Speke Hill ended when the asylum was closed in the 1930s, and its inhabitants transferred to other establishments, though whether their treatment improved or deteriorated in their new 'homes' was hardly a subject considered worthy of recording by the chroniclers of the time.

After standing empty for five years, it was decided that, rather than the council going to the expense of demolishing the three buildings that comprised Speke Hill, the old place could be utilised, following a cheap and cheerful programme of renovation, as an orphanage, there being an ever growing proliferation of parentless children in the city and its environs during the austere and barren industrially sterile years following the Great War of 1914-18. Often, children whose fathers were away at sea and whose mothers simply couldn't cope would be placed in orphanages. Hunger, general deprivation and homelessness had taken a bitter toll on the great port city.

The project gained more popularity with cost-conscious councillors when the local diocese of the Roman Catholic Church offered to contribute a sizeable portion of the cost of renovation, provided they were given the rights to run the orphanage, placing a strong emphasis on discipline and religious instruction, with the stated aim of turning out useful members of society by the time their charges were old enough to leave full time education, usually at the age of fifteen, which would be provided in the school which would be run in one of the three old asylum buildings. There had been some opposition in the council chamber at this development.

It was felt by some that the orphanage should be run on secular lines, as not all the children who would populate the orphanage would be of the Catholic faith, but the voices of dissent were over-ridden, probably for reasons more to do with cost than matters of faith. It was, however, written into the constitution of the new Speke Hill Orphanage that no child should be forced to follow the Catholic faith if they held strong beliefs of an opposite faith. Of course, this tended to be easier to say than to execute, as most children of tender years would find it difficult to argue such a point with those in charge of their everyday lives, and so catholic or protestant, the children who first moved into the dormitories of the newly renovated buildings found themselves being taught as though they were all of the Roman Catholic faith. Most of them, being children of the poorer inner city areas and rather wise to such things, tended to take the religious instruction with a pinch of salt, and most people thought at the time that the new orphanage was initially a great success. What many failed to realise at the time was that by allowing Speke Hill to effectively become a closed community, many of the children accommodated in the new orphanage felt as though they were in an environment that almost amounted to being incarcerated in much the same way as the previous inhabitants of the old asylum must have felt.

The well-meaning diocese of the church provided plenty of areas within the grounds for the children's recreational needs, a football pitch and netball court, two separate playground areas containing various implements of play, slides, swings, etc, and the children were allowed out of the grounds on certain days so they could interact with the local population, but those youngsters who were forced to call Speke Hill home found they would never be fully integrated or accepted by those who lived in the surrounding areas along Woolton Road.

And so, life went on at the new orphanage, the old wards gradually being modernised and the large open dormitories eventually becoming partitioned so that groups of four children could have their own shared 'rooms' and a modicum of privacy. The school, taught by well qualified Catholic priests, and at first thought of as providing nothing more than basic education to the children of Speke Hill, surprised everyone by establishing a good reputation for turning out young teenagers with a higher than average standard of education for the time, and even bred a little resentment among the children and parents of some children at other schools in the area.

With the coming of World War Two, things changed at Speke Hill, as they did almost everywhere in the country. Though those in charge attempted to carry on normally, by the time the blitz arrived, with regular bombing of the city of Liverpool, the docks being seen as a prime target by the Luftwaffe, it had become apparent that even one stray bomb, dropped on the buildings of Speke Hill, could result in devastating loss of life, and the children were added to those who would be evacuated out of the cities to temporary homes well out of reach of the Luftwaffe's bombs.

Speke Hill closed temporarily, and didn't reopen its doors, unscathed by the attentions of the Luftwaffe, until after the end of hostilities in 1946. Most of the staff who had worked hard to build the reputation of the orphanage and its school, both ecclesiastical and civilian, in its early days had moved on to other things during the war years, and indeed, many of the children who had been evacuated had reached an age where they were ready to leave school and begin their working lives, and for the most part, Speke Hill was virtually reborn in the post war years with new staff and a mostly new population of poor and needy children from the poorest housing estates of Liverpool.

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The nineteen sixties arrived with little having changed in the running of Speke Hill during the post-war years, apart from the fact that the new Local Education Authority exercised more control over the educational standards required of pupils in the United Kingdom than in pre-war years. As such the school at Speke Hill was overseen in greater detail than before and the priests charged with the children's education were now all required to hold relevant teaching qualifications in the subjects they taught. For the most part the orphanage had grown to be a reasonably happy place for those living there, with educational standards once again rising, and very little trouble caused by those very children who might at one time have been deemed 'troublemakers' if left to roam the streets from whence they originated.

In an effort to add a touch of 'class' to the educational side of things, the teaching staff copied the 'house' system, as used in many secondary schools at the time, to help instil a sense of pride, belonging and competition among the children, and so Molyneux, Norris, Stanley and Sefton, all names historically associated with the city, were chosen by a Diocesan committee as the names for the four Houses of the Speke Hill School.

By the time the 'Swinging Sixties' hit the United Kingdom in general and the city of Liverpool in particular, Speke Hill had expanded its sports facilities to include a second football pitch, a rugby pitch, the netball court remained of course, and the school now boasted an indoor gymnasium, with sport and recreation having been deemed as being good not only for the body, but for the soul as well, by those with responsibility for the youngsters in care in the orphanage.

As Cilla Black's You're My World became her second UK number one chart hit at the end of May, 1964, the staff and children of Speke Hill prepared for their forthcoming school sports day with all the usual enthusiasm that went hand-in-hand with a day spent out of the classrooms and buildings of the orphanage. An air of excitement spread through the halls and dorms of the orphanage, and the children felt a slight lessening in the usual strictness of the regime enforced by the priests and nuns who held control over their everyday lives. An extra hour was allowed for all the boys and girls in the communal TV room, a privilege extended to allow a similar additional allowance to radio time, for those lucky enough to possess a transistor radio and the batteries to power it. Only a few lucky children owned such treasures, saved for out of their meagre weekly allowances, pocket money that most would quickly spend in a few days at the local sweet shop or on cheap throwaway toys, perhaps from Woolworths, on rare visits to town, under supervision by an ever watchful priest and nun.

And of course, in case you were wondering, due to its former incarnation as an asylum it was almost inevitable that over the years certain stories of a more fanciful nature began to attach themselves to the orphanage, spread no doubt by boys or girls with lively imaginations and too much time on their hands in their spare time to allow such thoughts to manifest themselves, and so, as with many such institutions, Speke Hill is reputed to possess its very own resident ghost…