History
The earliest record of a building at Boothroyd was in 1272. The present house was originally built around 1850 as a family residence. During the First World War, it was used as a war hospital, which between 1916 and 1919 treated 1,975 patients.
William Smith, the first mayor of Brighouse, created the Smith Foundation Trust in 1916 and bought the Boothroyd Estate to set up as an orphanage. In 1919, the Boothroyd buildings were handed over to the Trustees, and was opened on 31 July 1920 as an orphanage for girls, but soon admitted boys. On William Smith's death in 1922, he left the bulk of his estate to the Trust; money that would have gone to his cousin’s son William Henry Smith, who was killed in Action during the First World War.
After the Second World War, the Trustees were forced to reconsider the role of the Trust. In 1951, a scheme was devised to convert the orphanage into a special school. The last of the children from the orphanage left in 1959 and in September 1961 a residential special school for boys, named after William Henry Smith, was established on the site by the Trust.
Read more about this topic: William Henry Smith School
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—Howard Estabrook (1884–1978)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)