Newington Academy for Girls
In a time when girls' educational opportunities were limited, it offered a wide range of subjects "on a plan in degree differing from any hitherto adopted", according to the prospectus.
[1]) From 1668 there was a Quaker girls' school in nearby Shacklewell, run first by Mary Stott and then Jane Bullock, “to Instruct younge lasses & maydens in whatsever thinges was civill & useful in ye creation”[2] By the early nineteenth century, Stoke Newington was known for its Quaker residents, many of whom had connections to the Gracechurch Street meeting in the City of London.
Samuel Hoare Jr, founding member of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, was born there, as was his brother Jonathan, who commissioned the mansion in Clissold Park.
These villages north of London had been part of that movement: it was in Newington Green in 1785 that Mary Wollstonecraft opened her innovative boarding school for girls.
Quaker women were involved in shaping the national conversation on subjects such as abolitionism; in the year of the school's founding, for example, Elizabeth Heyrick published a pamphlet entitled Immediate, not Gradual Abolition, which was influential in encouraging public opinion to support the cause.
He died as it was being completed and the estate passed to his sister, who married Sir Thomas Abney, a prosperous merchant and banker and later Lord Mayor of London, getting its name from them.
John Farrar, Secretary of the Methodist Conference on fourteen occasions and twice its elected President, so Newington Academy for Girls had high-minded neighbours.
Its founders and benefactors included the Quaker scientist and abolitionist William Allen and his third wife Grizell (1757–1835), sister of Jonathan and Samuel Hoare Jr., mentioned above.
[8] She was a wealthy and elderly widow, having previously married a Birkbeck, and their marriage caused Robert Cruikshank to produce a satirical cartoon, in which the academy is referred to as "Newington Nunnery".
Other founders included Anna Hanbury, mother of Sir Thomas Buxton, 1st Baronet, Luke Howard, pharmacist and meteorologist, Edward Harris, father-in-law of Alfred Tylor, and Samuel Gurney, banker.
[11] Susanna Corder later wrote biographies of Quakers, including an 1853 volume about (and drawing largely on the diaries of) Elizabeth Fry,[12] whom she knew well enough to accompany when the prison reformer escorted the King of Prussia to see the conditions at Newgate in 1842.
The first prospectus proposed “an Establishment in our religious society on a plan in degree differing from any hitherto adopted, wherein the children of Friends should not only be liberally instructed in the Elements of useful knowledge, but in which particular attention should be paid to the state of mind of each individual child”.
George Shillibeer (1797–1866) grew up in London and worked for the coach company Hatchetts in Long Acre, the coach-building district of the capital.
"Coz" is an abbreviation for "cousin", but was often used to indicate a wide range of family relationships; "Friends" means "Quaker" and "Town" means "London"; "Blues" presumably refers to Bluestockings, learned women, rather than Oxbridge athletes; Gracechurch Street is a metonym for the Quaker meeting house in the City that they attended for services; the "van" is the school bus.
