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.
Read more about this topic: Morley College
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)