Evidence gathered from pilot schemes reveals a rise in levels of concentration and achievement among children who are given free school lunches. This phenomenon was recognised in the last years of the nineteenth century, and the schools of the Old Nichol were instrumental in securing free lunches for all London schoolchildren.

Lady Mary Jeune, below, was one of the London County Council’s first aldermen, but had begun her own political and social observation as a philanthropist, supplying food and clothing to the children of the Nichol. She was a co-founder of the Schools Dinners Association – which provided charitable free lunches for 36,000 schoolchildren. When Lady Jeune was elected to the LCC, she campaigned for the authorities to take over the feeding of London’s 750,000 schoolchildren from charitable bodies and church groups.

The 1886 illustration below shows the charitable feeding of the most destitute kids at the Old Nichol Street Ragged School – the elementary school for the very poorest children. It’s highly stylised and can’t make up its mind if it wants to sneer at the infants or break its heart over them. At the Ragged School, breakfasts were served four days a week in the winter months, and comprised bread and butter, milk and cocoa. Around 100 to 120 of the neediest children were identified by the teachers and given tickets to come to be fed. Two days a week, lunches of bread and soup were served to the same children.

In addition, Reverend Loveridge of St Philip’s, Mount Street, and Reverend Osborne Jay, of Holy Trinity Old Nichol Street, provided hundreds of dinners in the winter months. But all these efforts were nevertheless inadequate, and in 1889 the London School Board reported that one in eight London school pupils was underfed. Testimony from teachers in the Old Nichol and other very poor areas indicated that hunger was impacting on the ability to learn. The reports of the Old Nichol teachers, held at the London Metropolitan Archives, are a desperately sad catalogue of the physical problems and malnutrition that prevented slum children from being able to concentrate in the school room.

In 1889, the London School Board, which had initially been against public money being spent on school dinners, began to co-operate with the voluntary feeding of children as a prelude to full, rates-funded intervention. The Board discovered that the provision of meals boosted attendance, and in 1904 the parliamentary Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration came to the conclusion that the free feeding of all London schoolchildren was leading to higher rates of attendance as well as of achievement. The photographs below, of children from Lant Street in Southwark, were published by the Committee as showing the changes between 1875 and 1902.

As for the rest of the nation, in 1906 parliament passed The Education (Provision of Meals) Act, which permitted local authorities to lay on school lunches free of charge, though there was no obligation for them to do so.

Although the following passage from Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London survey may well not be referring to a Nichol school (it is named only as “A School in Bethnal Green”), it is a vivid eyewitness account of a charitable school lunch being served: “With the exception of a few small girls, all were poorly dressed and ill-nourished, but none were bare-footed. In Bethnal Green, however poor the children are, some foot covering is worn; it may be in holes, and simply absorb wet, but something they must have. One boy I noticed, as they filed out, had a pair of ladies’ dress slippers, with high heels and pointed toes; they had to be tied on across the ankle. Dinner was plentiful thick soup, with two slices of bread, followed by a slice of currant pudding put into the hands of each child as it left the building.

“After grace was sung, the distribution of the soup began, it being ladled out of the copper into enamelled jugs by the caretaker, and taken round to the children by the girls. This took a few minutes, and whilst it was being done the impatient children were rapping the tables with their spoons, making a terrific noise. Gradually the spoons were diverted to their proper use, and some twenty minutes were occupied in consuming the food.”

And at another Bethnal Green school (again, not necessarily in the Nichol), this: “There were 48 of the boys at dinner – poor, thin, anaemic children – many of them very ragged; only three had collars. Chubby faces are scarce in this school. . .The children remain dull and difficult to teach. This, he [the headmaster] attributes partly to heredity, but still more to environment and especially to deficient nourishment.”

In the Nichol itself, a peculiar grace was sung by the children at charity lunches. It went:
I thank the Lord for what I’ve had,
If I had more I should be glad,
But now the times they are so bad,
I must be glad for what I’ve had.

Further reading:
School Attendance in London 1870-1904: A Social History by David Rubinstein (Hull), 1969.
Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (Third Series: Religious Influences), 1902, pages 240-242.
Archives of the Old Nichol’s schools at the London Metropolitan Archives have the shelfmarks LCC/EO/DIV5/ROC/AD/001 to 007, and LCC/EO/DIV5/NIC/LB/1 to 3, and LCC/EO/NEW/LB/1 to 6.
London Metropolitan Archives, 40 Northampton Road, London EC1. Tel: 020 7332 3820
https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/london-metropolitan-archives/Pages/default.aspx