Money meant for railway was used to create orphanage after 30-year fight
IF you’re leaving Painswick in the direction of Cranham, above the road on your left is a handsome country home of Cotswold stone and Arts and Crafts in style.
It’s Gyde House. And when it was built, just after the First World War, it was a boarding school “for Protestant orphans of the locality and blind and deaf and dumb children”.
One of the former pupils, whose name was Brian, attended the school in the 1940s and 1950s and organised a reunion for fellow boarders. This took place at the Falcon Hotel in Painswick when Gyde was about to be converted into apartments in 2001.
In a feature that appeared in the Gloucestershire Echo, Brian reminisced about his schooldays on the outskirts of the elegant Cotswold town. He explained that Gyde House came into being by default.
“There was a local benefactor called Sir Edwin Francis Gyde who left the money in his will to build a railway through Painswick. That didn’t happen though because of local opposition, so instead the money was used to fund an orphanage, a school for the blind and almshouses.”
It took 30 years of legal wrangling before work on the orphanage finally got under way and Gyde House eventually opened in 1919 as a home for children of officers who had been killed in the conflict.
By the 1930s Gyde House was in financial difficulties and was given to the National Children’s Homes organisation and run by the Methodist Sisterhood.
Like many infants in the 1940s, Brian came to be at Gyde House because his father was killed during the war. “My two brothers and myself had been evacuated to South Wales from Fulham where we lived. We were taken to Gyde House in 1946 when I was six years of age. It was run then by Sister Maud Ingram and there were about 60 boys in the home. We slept 15 to a dormitory.”
In addition to the anxiety of being in strange surroundings, Brian learned soon after his arrival that an ordeal awaited him in the communal dining room. “A different boy each day had to say grace before meals and I was told it was my turn in a week’s time. I was worried because I didn’t think I could learn ‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful’.
“So one of the older boys told me to say ‘For every plateful, we are grateful’ and in my innocence I did. And I got into trouble of course.”
Brian recalled that older boys were allowed to help out on local farms at harvest and potato-picking times. Gyde also had a strong reputation for music and won the Three Counties Choir festival on one occasion. The choir gave regular recitals in and around the area, which helped to boost Gyde’s funds.
Boys from Gyde House formed a sizable contingent of the pupils at Painswick School, but Brian recalled that there was no stigma about coming from the orphanage.
Pupils at Painswick who passed their eleven-plus examination went on to schools in other places, but those who didn’t went to a classroom in the village hall that served as the upper school.
“The headmaster when I was there was Mr Harper and if you went to the top school in the hall it was run by Mr Holister,” remembered Brian. “That changed in 1961 when the top class at Painswick was phased out and pupils went to Paganhill School in Stroud instead.”
When Gyde closed in 1985 the actress Coral Atkins acquired the house and it became a home for young people with special needs, one of three she founded.
Brian estimated that some 3,500 boys and girls had lived and been educated at Gyde House.
Almost 100 of them returned to Painswick for the reunion Brian organised, as the Echo later reported, making the day a great success.