History
In the early 1880s, Emma Cons and her supporters took over the Royal Victoria Hall, (the ‘Old Vic’) a boozy, rowdy home of melodrama, and turned it into the Royal Victoria Coffee and Music Hall to provide inexpensive entertainment ‘purged of innuendo in word and action’. The programme included music-hall turns with opera recitals, temperance meetings, and, from 1882, lectures every Tuesday by eminent scientists.
Local enthusiasm for these ‘penny lectures’ and success in attracting substantial philanthropic funding, led in 1889 to the opening of Morley Memorial College for Working Men and Women. The College was founded by an endowment from Samuel Morley MP for Nottingham and later Bristol. Samuel Morley is buried at Dr Watts' Walk, Abney Park Cemetery, in Stoke Newington, London.
The College was run separately from the Theatre, but held its classes and student meetings back-stage and in the theatre dressing rooms. The two split in the 1920s, when Emma's niece and successor Lilian Baylis raised funds to acquire a separate site nearby.
Around the same time as the founding of Morley College (c.1880s), concern for the education of working people led to the establishment of other institutions in south London such as the forerunner of the South London Gallery.
Purpose-built accommodation by Edward Maufe built in 1937 was largely destroyed during the Second World War and substantially rebuilt by Charles Cowles Voysey in 1958.
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