North & South House, Headington Hill
Victoria Villas
The present North and South House on the private road at the top of the north side of Headington Hill were originally a pair of houses called Victoria Villas, and for nearly 70 years they were used as a Training School for Servants.
Directories show the following occupants of Victoria Villas:
- 1866: Mrs Haynes at No. 1, and Mrs Davies at No. 2 Victoria Villas
- 1867: John Rivington at No. 1, and Mrs Davies at No. 2 Victoria Villas
- 1869: "Mr Saunders" living at "Victoria-villas". The 1871 census shows the son of the house, John Sanders (24), an unmarried bank clerk, living here with his two sisters.
On 13 July 1872 an advertisement appeared in Jackson's Oxford Journal offering the pair of villas for auction at the Golden Cross on 31 July 1872. It promised further details the following week, but in the event these details were not supplied in the advertisement that appeared in the next two weeks, but instead people were advised to consult the solicitors or auctioneers, as shown below in the advertisement of 20 July 1872.
It appears that no buyer emerged at the auction, as the following notice appeared in Jackson's Oxford Journal for 10 August 1872:
Victoria Villas, Headington Hill
Mr John Fisher begs to announce that this Property not having been sold at the Auction, he his [sic] open to treat for the same by private contract.
8, High-street, Oxford, 9th August, 1872
In a directory for 1875, Stephen Bendall is listed as living at "Victoria Villa".
The laundry on Gipsy Lane
When James Morrell built Headington Hill Hall, in the 1850s, a laundry building for the Hall was built on the other side of the Headington Road. It was reached by a footpath on the west side of Gipsy Lane, at the southernmost point of the present Oxford Brookes University. It is shown on the 1876 OS map of Headington (below), and the land to the west of it (marked with the red arrow) is labelled "Drying Gd". North and South House (coloured red) are clearly marked as "Victoria Villas".
At the time of the 1861 census the road contractor William Bradwell and his family are listed as living in Gipsy Lane. His wife Mrs Hannah Bradwell (37) is described as a laundress, and as three laundress servants (aged 14, 19, and 20) are also living in the household, it is fairly certain they lived at the laundry building itself.
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 (36), living at the laundry with her husband Luke (50), who was a grainer, and their young children. Their eldest children had been born in Michigan and Nova Scotia, but the youngest were born in Headington, indicating that Mrs Hutchinson had beenappointed as the Headington Hill Hall laundress in 1869.
In 1891 the laundress Mrs Emma Harman, a widow of 50, lived at Laundry Cottage with her daughter Rose (21) and her niece Annie Chandler (14), who were also laundresses.
In 1901 the laundress Mrs Margaret Brown (46) lived in Laundry Cottage with her husband Thomas (56) who was a waiter, and their niece Louisa Watkins, who is described as a domestic servant.
School for Servants
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 in the former Victoria Villas. The following report appeared in Jackson's Oxford Journal of 3 February 1877:
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.
This implies that it was a replacement for another school within the city boundary, probably in St Clements (and possibly 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). The girls at the 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", but was also referred to as Headington Hill Hall School.
The 1881 census shows Mrs Sarah Weller (62), the Matron, living at the training school with Miss Sarah Drake (25), the school’s governess, and eleven girl "scholars" aged between 12 and 16, most of them born in or near Oxford.
Ten years later in the 1891 census, Miss Sarah 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.
In 1889 the municipal borough of Oxford was extended eastwards, bringing Headington Road and the Training School for Servants into the city of Oxford. In 1894 this area was taken away from the parish of St Andrew's Church in Old Headington and annexed to the parish of St Clement's.
The map below shows the Training School in 1899.
In the 1901 census Sarah Drake is still listed as Matron of the Training School, and Miss Alice Brown (49) is the schoolmistress. Miss Drake continued as Matron until 1904. In Kelly's Directory, Miss Cooke is listed as Matron in 1905; Miss Waghorne from 1907 to 1912; Miss Brown from 1913 to 1918; and Miss MacMillan from 1919 to at least 1923. (After that date, directories do not give the name of the Matron.)
The training school continued to operate until the second world war, and is marked as such on the 1939 OS map of Headington below. It was latterly known as Mrs Herbert Morrell's Training School for Servants.
In 1945 the former school at North and South House was used as a remand home for girls, and in about 1952 it was converted back into two private houses, which were called North and South House.
The old laundry off Gipsy Lane was probably demolished some time in the 1950s when the Oxford College of Technology moved on to the site.
