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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)