Two of the things that the schoolteachers in the Old Nichol slum were up against were persistent truancy, and the appalling state of health and sometimes semi-starvation among their pupils. With the former, children were sometimes crucial to very-poor families’ budgets, and could not easily be spared from the working day. Fighting truancy and absenteeism was a very long battle in the first 30 years of compulsory London education.

With the second, some devastatingly upsetting data from the Old Nichol schools can be found at the London Metropolitan Archives. Here are a couple of examples of the tables that one of the girls’ teachers submitted to the London School Board.

“Defective intellect” may well have indicated learning difficulties, or, as some teachers claimed, an inability to concentrate because of malnutrition or exhaustion. The teachers themselves went down with wave after wave of the infectious illnesses that swept through the districts (whooping cough, smallpox, scarlet fever, measles, diptheria). In the table above, Mrs Shea is likely to have been hit by the ophthalmia that affected hundreds of London schoolchildren in the 1880s and 1890s.

Below is a group shot of the teachers at the schools, with local celebrity vicar Headlam (a friend and supporter of Oscar Wilde) sitting in the front row, centre, and the local (Liberal-Radical) MP Edward Pickersgill, front row, far right.

The school buildings are the only structures that survive today following the total demolition of the Old Nichol by the London County Council in the early/mid-1890s.