For the beginning of Sunday Schools we must go back into the “dim distant past,” since classes held on Sunday for religious instruction were not unknown in the early centuries of the Christian Church, but the “modern” Sunday School movement arose out of the
efforts of Robert Raikes, a printer, in Gloucester, in the Year 1780.
Raikes took a very active part in philanthropic work in his native city; he was, moreover, a great lover of children, and as he went up and down the streets of Gloucester he was painfully impressed by the lamentable ignorance and misery which prevailed at that time among the young people in the poorer districts. He was moved to make some attempt to remedy their wretchedness, and in making enquiries into the circumstances-so he once wrote in a letter to a friend-he found that Sunday was the worst day of the week, because on that day, one informant said streets were “filled with multitudes, who, released from their employment spent their time in noise and riot“.
“Upon the Sabbath they are all given up to follow their own inclinations without restraint, as their parents have no idea of instilling into the minds of their children principles to which they themselves are entire strangers.”
It occurred to him that” it would be at least a harmless attempt, if it were productive of no good“, should some little plan be formed to check the deplorable profanation of the Sabbath,” so he engaged four “decent well-disposed women who kept schools for teaching to read;” to receive as many children as he should send upon the Sunday, whom they were to instruct in reading and in the Church Catechism, and for their day’s employment he agreed to pay the women a shilling each.
The experiment was very successful, and a visible improvement in both the manners and the morals of the children was soon apparent. A few years later, public attention was drawn to the work of Raikes, in Gloucester, and similar Sunday Schools began to spring up in various parts of the country.
The first Sunday School in London was established by the Rev. Rowland Hill, in 1784, and many of the principal towns, including Stockport, adopted the movement in that year.
All the Sunday Schools in Stockport were at first managed by a committee of gentlemen from various religious denominations, who met quarterly in the Parish vestry, but ten years after the commencement, that is in 1794, the School now known as the Stockport Sunday School became a separate institution from the other Schools in the town, under separate management, and conducted on entirely non sectarian and interdenominational lines.
The aim was that the town be divided into six, and an establishment provided for each division. Additional schools were built in Bramhall, Heaviley, Edgeley (Brinksway -1801), Heaton Mersey (1801), and Heaton Norris (Lancashire Hill – 1821).
One of the schools abandoned the practice of paying teachers and encouraged a large number of unpaid volunteers to do the job. This was successful and it grew faster than the rest – this approach was later adopted by all the schools.
In 1805, £6,000 pounds was raised from subscription, and a school large enough to accommodate 5,000 scholars was built on London Square in the centre of Stockport. The school belonged to the town rather than a particular church. The building, austere in design, was 132 feet in length and 57 feet in width. The ground floor and first storey were each divided into 12 rooms; the second storey was fitted up for assembling the whole of the children for public worship, or on other occasions; having two tiers of windows, and a gallery on each side extending about half the length of the building. In order to aid both the hearing and sight in this long room, the floor rose in an inclined plane about half way. There was also an orchestra with an organ behind the pulpit.
The school had its own choir, orchestra and music library, it was also had many active sports teams and a growing reputation. The report for 1859 states the number of scholars belonging to this school made it the largest Sunday school in the world, with 3,781 scholars, and 435 teachers. In 1905 the Centenary Hall was added making the school one of the largest buildings in the town. During the blitz in the second world war the building was used as a lookout post for incoming planes heading towards Manchester.
The building was huge and in later years became difficult to keep in good repair. Many of the rooms were abandoned and the later years it was impossible to keep heated and watertight.
Much later the main school congregation moved to Heaviley sunday school on Buxton Rd, leaving the 1805 building and Centenary Hall vacant. The buildings were listed as a National Monuments in around 1970, but in those days listed buildings were not protected in the way that they are today and they were demolished soon afterwards.
A new building was built on the site of the school playing fields in Heaviley in 1974 and would thrive in the 1970s and 1980s but in the 1990s it became too big for the size of the congregation. This building would later be shared and used by Aquinas College who named it the Joseph Mayer building after the founder of the Sunday School. It was sold to them in 2011 and demolished in 2013 to allow the land to be released so they could build on another part of the greenspace. In 2012 the school opened their present building on part of the car park of the 1974 building and named it Compass Point.
The Stockport Sunday School’s enormous registers (now at Stockport Central Library) testify that Stockport Sunday School catered for 3,000 children. The un-indexed registers 1789-1920 have their names and ages (Registers for the Stockport Sunday School, Cheshire, 1790–1877). Many families sent generation after generation of children to Stockport Sunday school, the age range being from three years to late teenage.
Now the vast majority of “scholars” are now adults with many over 80 years of age and a plaque on the wall of the present building records the names of the many teachers who reached more than 50 years of service to the organisation.