BLUE COAT HISTORY

By Rev Dr David Steers - a Blue Coat pupil from 1973 until 1980

As a former pupil at the Blue Coat School and a minister for seventeen years in Northern

Ireland I am shocked at the desire of the Church of England to seize control of my old school.

There can be no doubt that a Church takeover would reduce the school’s academic success

and end its long tradition of delivering non-doctrinal education to pupils of all religions and none.

What is particularly concerning is that this devious move runs quite contrary to the intentions of

the original founder of the school. Bryan Blundell was an Anglican but he told John Brekell, one

of the dissenting (Presbyterian) ministers in the town, that the Latin inscription above the main

entrance which declared that the school was for the children of the established church only had

been forced on him against his will by "some zealous Churchmen".

More to the point Blundell did not allow the school to be the sole preserve of the Church of England. In a sermon preached to his dissenting congregation in 1769 ('A Discourse on Christian Fruitfulness, Being a Charity Sermon....for the Public Infirmary') Brekell described the Blue Coat School as "an object worthy of general attention" and revealed that the children of dissenters were able to share in its benefits on an equal basis. Furthermore he rejoiced to know that many of his congregation already gave generous financial support to it. Clearly it was never Blundell’s intention to create a purely “Church” school and this evidence from a local minister shows that in the earliest years of its existence it was never run on such a narrow basis.

The Church of England has a privileged position in English society and has not always used this privilege for the wider benefit of people in general. In Liverpool alone we might think of the support given by the Church to the slave trade in the eighteenth century or the backing it gave to sectarianism in the nineteenth century.

In Bryan Blundell’s and John Brekell’s day only Anglicans could go to University, people like Brekell had to leave the country to get a University education. It seems very sad that modern-day “zealous Churchmen” should be seeking to put the clock back in the Blue Coat School.

Rev Dr David Steers

(Downpatrick, Ballee & Clough)

THE LIVERPOOL BLUE COAT HOSPITAL, AS IT WAS THEN KNOWN, WAS FOUNDED IN 1708. IT MOVED TO THE PRESENT PREMISES ON CHURCH ROAD, WAVERTREE, IN 1906. THE FULL STORY CAN BE FOUND ON THE SCHOOL'S OFFICIAL WEBSITE, WHICH YOU CAN ACCESS FROM THE "LINKS" PAGE.