Wellington Union Children’s Home (Brooklyn House)

A specially purposed children’s home situated in a pair of houses on the corner of the Cock Hotel crossroads on Watling Street. It was officially opened in October 1916 and bought outright by the Board of Guardians of the Wellington Poor Law Union in April 1919.

Background

The catalyst for opening a new children’s home in Wellington was a direct consequence of the Great War itself. The separate building attached to the workhouse in Holyhead Road in which the facility had previously been housed (which opened just a few years earlier around 1912) was taken over by the military as part of the convalescent hospital established on the site between September 1916 and April 1919. While the adult inmates were transferred to Wolverhampton Union Workhouse, the educational needs of the children (who attended Wrekin Road School) necessitated that the Board of Guardians find somewhere local to continue their care. 

The children's home was located in a wing of the Workhouse on Holyhead Road between 1912 and 1916

No Longer Workhouse Children

At the opening ceremony for the new home Reverend William P Nock, Chair of the Board of Guardians, provided an insightful look back at the history of the facility, highlighting the strides made by the Wellington Poor Law Union in the treatment of children in its care. Only forty years earlier, he observed, they had been housed in the parish workhouse at the nearby village of Waters Upton, returning to the town only when a new workhouse was built in 1876. In the Reverend’s eyes this had been an unhappy union, as the Wellington Journal dutifully reported:

“For a number of years after the children came to Wellington they had their meals with the adult inmates — a very bad system, as so many old people came to the workhouse through faults of their own and to mix the children with them was not at all desirable (applause)”.

Brooklyn House became a children's home in 1916

To Reverend Nock, the home was ‘one of the most important, if not the most important of poor law institutions’ that ‘claimed their most careful attention and sympathy, to bring the children up as faithful, patriotic and true citizens’. This sentiment was very much in tune with a time when the carnage on the Western Front brought the fortunes of the coming generation to the forefront of popular concern. However, there were practical advantages to the new facility’s geographical isolation from the workhouse, too. Recalling the old-fashioned attire of the children at Water’s Upton (‘the boys in smock frocks and clogs; the girls in stuff dresses, black bonnets and also clogs’), Nock saw an advantage to a situation where ‘the children were so absolutely independent of the workhouse, and as they were not in distinctive dress people could not point the finger and say “those are workhouse children”’. Consequently, he was ‘very proud of them’.

Consolidation

The war also brought with it a dramatic rise in the cost of keeping the children. At a County Council meeting in June 1919 it was revealed that the precept for Brooklyn House had risen from £14 000 to £22 000 since 1914 (roughly £710 000 to £1 115 000 in modern terms), which was largely attributed to the cost of the children’s education. Some furnishings also appeared to be in short supply as the Guardians were also keen to purchase the bedsteads from the recently closed military hospital. The new children’s home, with fifty residents, was operating two short of full capacity at the time. Despite those privations, they had still been able to purchase Brooklyn House in that year and it fulfilled its function until 1928, when the unit moved to the Mount in Haygate Road.

The children's home moved to the Mount on Haygate Road in 1928