Carlton North Primary School No.1252 Carlton North Primary School No.1252The last patients at the Carlton Asylum were moved to the new Kew Asylum on 16 June 1873. The asylum buildings and some two acres of the former stockade grounds were transferred to the control of the new Department of Public Instruction on the following day for use as a state primary school. It was called the Carlton Stockade school until being re-named Lee Street State School No. 1252 on 14 January 1879.
The school was intended to be temporary, and simply took over the existing asylum buildings pending the completion of new public schools in the neighbourhood. Like the supposedly temporary prison stockade and asylum which preceded it, however, the school was to endure. The Education Act of 1872 had endorsed the principle of free, secular, and compulsory elementary education for Victorian children. The Act, and the administration needed to implement it, came into operation in 1873. Schools were urgently needed, and the old Stockade site was taken in order to help address this need.
In order to secure the vacant property against vandals and thieves, it was arranged for a policeman to live in the former chief attendant and matron's quarters. Little work was apparently undertaken in the way of repair and modification before the school was opened. Schoolrooms were prepared in the former dormitory and hospital wings of the asylum's entrance block, and (possibly at a later date) in the asylum dayrooms and dormitories which were located in a large weatherboard building behind. The classrooms and the superintendent's former residence - now re-used as the Head Teacher's home - were fumigated with sulphur. A wooden lavatory block was relocated to the Canning Street side of the classrooms, north of the teacher's residence.
The Head Teacher, Henry Jones, opened the school on 28 July 1873, and 276 children enrolled. Over the next few weeks enrolment increased to 409 pupils. The school was made permanent on 14 August 1873. Jones wrote to his superiors that 'I feel ... highly estimated ... to be put in charge of a school adapted to become one of the largest in the Metropolis.'
On other occasions Jones, less sanguine, reported to the Department that the buildings swarmed with bugs, and were so dilapidated that their roofs leaked during rainy weather. The stockade's bluestone perimeter wall was so crumbling and hazardous that a child was seriously injured by falling stones. The eastern section of the wall was removed in January 1874.
An undated plan, probably from 1874, enables us to glimpse the school as it would have appeared in these early years. Land surveying for homebuilding encroaches upon the southern and Rathdowne Street borders of the stockade reservation, and the projected line of O'Grady Street and the planned housing allotments to its north are superimposed upon former dormitories and the cell block from the old stockade. However, for the moment, the arrangement of buildings within the site is essentially unchanged from its asylum days.
This state of affairs was not long to continue. The Education Department conceded in 1874 that 'North Carlton is growing into a thickly populated district where a school for 1000 children will be required'. Having decided to build a new school on the site, the Department in 1875 surveyed and evaluated all the existing buildings. [see plan in previous section]
Almost all of them were targeted for demolition, with their materials to be either auctioned or recycled for the new school. The weatherboards were sawn up for fencing, the lavatories and wash basins reused, and some of the bluestone reserved for building foundations. The Head Teacher's residence was retained, although it was by now 'damp and in very bad repair'. Teaching continued in the day rooms of the former asylum, and &emdash; until it was demolished in 1877 to make way for the new school building &emdash; in the western wing of the former entrance block.
A sketch plan dated July 1877 shows the outline of the planned new school building, superimposed upon the remaining buildings of the old stockade. Plainly, the days of the earliest classrooms and the matron's former residence - located on the site of the proposed school - are numbered. The Teacher's House, the 'Present School' building, and a stone building alongside the doomed matron's cottage, will survive.
This stone building was recycled as an additional classroom, and &emdash; as the Infant School &emdash; continued to be used until the First World War. Previous histories have suggested that the infant school was located either in the former policeman's residence or the asylum storeroom. This is incorrect. The asylum's stone-built storeroom and wash-house was located elsewhere, on the north-eastern corner of the site, and was earmarked 'to be converted into Laundry'. The 'Constable's House', which formed part of the asylum building that had been occupied by the head attendant and matron, was described in 1875 as a 'Stone & Wood Building' that 'will have to be removed for the new [school] building'. It is identified on the 1877 plan as a 'Wood Cotage [sic]' and overlaps the site of the new school building.
On this cottage's eastern side, however, and identified in the 1877 plan as a 'Stone Cotage'[sic], stood another building that had been used by the asylum as a 'Dormitory for feeble females', and which possibly had been built in the late 1850s as the officers' quarters for the Collingwood Stockade. This stone building was retained in 1877 because it did not stand in the way of the new school block. This, it seems, is the building that became a classroom and later the Infant's School. It may have been used since October 1873 as a residence for the school cleaner, a Mrs Tait, and her six children.
The new Lee Street school building was based upon a generic public-school design by the architect W.H. Ellerker, that had been prepared for a design competition held by the new Department of Public Instruction in 1873.
Built during 1877 in the Gothic Revival style, it featured a vast slate roof, relatively short walls, and Gothic-style windows and buttresses. It was arranged along a central axis with two end wings. Opened by the Minister for Education on 28 June 1878, it still stands.
This undated photograph, which was probably taken shortly after the school was completed, enables us to visualise the new school. A large and handsome structure, it would clearly have turned the heads of passers-by along the main streets of what was still an only partially-built suburban landscape. Two features immediately distinguish it from the building with which we are familiar today. First, it was built of exposed brick, patterned in brown and cream. Second, its roof line was distinguished by a bell tower. Both these features were removed during renovations in the 1930s.
The new school building's surroundings were considerably less attractive. In 1881 the remaining portions of the stockade's decaying bluestone perimeter walls were demolished. The condition of the schoolyard, however, remained unsatisfactory, the headmaster - James Lewis - complaining in 1885 about its rough and undrained dirt surface. In dry weather the yard was hard, and pocked with jutting stones and pebbles. With rain, it became wet and sloppy. An inspector reported that the recycled weatherboard fences were out of repair, and that the roof of the girls' closets - 'one of the original buildings of the late Stockade' - was rotten and worn out.
The decrepit headmaster's house, another relic from the stockade, endured well into the twentieth century, but was downgraded in the late 1880s or early 1890s to become a caretaker's house, as this 1895 illustration by William Field (headmaster 1895-1907) shows:
The asylum's stone dormitory building, recycled for teaching, was still being used as a classroom when it featured in plans of the school in 1906 and 1908.
Both these buildings, apparently, were finally demolished in 1913 to make way for a new infant's school. This large red-brick building, typical of Edwardian school architecture, is the current Junior School. It features a large terracotta roof capped with decorative vents. With its roomy classrooms and spacious hall, the infant's school became one of the prize training grounds for student teachers from the Melbourne Teachers' College.
Three plans of the main school building, dated 1883, 1906, and 1908, give us a glimpse inside the school during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A wide north-south passageway from the main entrance in Lee Street gave access to the school office and adjoining classrooms. There was no east-west corridor, however, so that access to some classrooms necessitated a walk through successive classrooms.
1883 Plan
1906 Plan
1908 Plan
One of these classrooms, used as the infants' class, was so long that in 1883 Lewis informed the Department that 'All the teachers have complained of its great length and the difficulty they have in teaching without being overcome with fatigue. We are obliged to employ four teachers in this room.' It was divided into two classrooms later in the year.
The plans for 1906 and 1908, more detailed than the rough plan of 1883, show that five of the classrooms featured galleries: with the pupils' desks positioned on an ascending tiered floor. This 1906 photograph, showing a gallery in another school, gives a good sense of how Lee Street's classroom galleries would have looked:
The school's galleries were removed shortly after the First World War. Apart from these renovations, however, the school - situated in what was by now widely thought of as a 'slum' - appears to have been left untouched by the Education Department. The building's decay was highlighted in 1936 when a sandstone finial and iron ornamentation collapsed, damaging the bell tower and main roof.
The damaged tower was demolished during a major remodelling of the school in 1937. The decaying brick exterior of the main school building was protected with cement render, and horizontal courses were ruled in to imitate stone-block construction. An east-west corridor was constructed, the classrooms redesigned, heating installed, and a new classroom built.
Further repairs and renovations were carried out in 1954, and in the following year a sick bay was added to the main school's eastern end. Two additional rooms were added in 1964.
See also:
Valma Pratt, Passages of Time: A History of the Lee Street State School and its site from 1853 (Melbourne: Valma Pratt, 1981), pp. 41-73 (chapter 3: 'Slates and Cane').