Training School for Servants: North & South House
When James Morrell built Headington Hill Hall, in the 1850s, he naturally didn't want the views from his mansion spoilt by lines of washing, so a laundry for the Hall was built on the other side of the Headington Road, facing Gipsy Lane. The laundry is visible on the 1876 OS map of Headington, and the drying ground beside it is clearly labelled. It was in the area now occupied by the main entrance to Oxford Brookes University, and still appears on the 1939 OS map; it must have been demolished some time in the 1950s when the Oxford College of Technology moved on to the site.
At the time of the 1861 census Mrs Hannah Bradwell was in charge of the laundry, helped by three live-in servants (aged 14, 19, and 20) who are described as assistant laundresses. (Mr Bradwell, a road contractor, also lived in the laundry house.) But James Morrell died in 1863 and his wife Alicia in 1863, leaving their daughter Emily a ten-year-old orphan. The Hall was let to a blind landowner from Shropshire, Richard Corbet, who greatly reduced the number of live-in servants: and in 1871 there was just one laundress, Mrs Jane Hutchinson, living at the laundry, with her husband and six young children.
Emily married her cousin, Herbert Morrell, in 1874 when she was 20, thus retaining her surname. Around the beginning of 1877 she set up the Headington Hill School for Servants just a short distance to the north-west of her laundry, in the two houses which are today known as North House and South House. The following report in Jackson's Oxford Journal of 3 February 1877 implies that it was a replacement for the free school for the girls of St Clement's which Emily's mother had opened in the Marston Road near the church in 1858 as an alternative to the parish school:
Mrs Morrell's School has been removed outside the School Board, but as it has been converted into an Industrial Training School for Servants, it may be hoped that the benefits will not be wholly lost to Oxford children.
The girls at this training school wore servants' uniforms and were taught the skills necessary for a life below stairs: this included doing all the washing and ironing for Headington Hill Hall. The school was usually known as "Mrs Morrell’s training school".
The 1881 census shows Mrs Sarah Weller as Matron of the training school, living there with Miss Sarah Drake, the school’s governess, and eleven girl "scholars" aged between 12 and 16, most of them born in Oxford. Ten years later Miss Drake had been promoted to Matron, and the number of girls in training remained the same: the fact that the youngest trainee was only 8 years old and that the birthplace of one of them was unknown suggests that they could have been orphans.
The training school operated until the second world war, and is marked as such on the 1939 OS map of Headington. In 1945 the building was used as a remand home for girls.
North and South House survive as two private houses, just to the west of Oxford Brookes University and set back out of sight from the Headington Road.