History of The Bluecoat & Chester Municipal Charities

In 1190 the Hospital of St. John the Baptist was founded on the site of the current Bluecoat building. This was an ecclesiastical foundation, with a prior, brethren and lay servants living under a religious rule, and in 1241 permission was granted for the building of a chapel.

The hospital had a chequered history with several phases of neglect and impoverishment, but it is known that around the middle of the fourteenth century there were thirteen beds kept ready for the city’s poor and that each inmate was to receive a daily allowance of a loaf of bread, a dish of pottage, half a gallon of ale and a piece of meat or fish.

The almshouses behind The Bluecoat building, the direct successors to this hospital, still provide accommodation today.

The hospital was demolished in 1644 when all the hospital’s stone buildings, chapel and the surrounding wall were pulled down (so as not to provide cover to the Parliamentary forces then besieging the city). Nothing remains of this original hospital building.

In 1717 the Corporation approved building of The Bluecoat Hospital School. This charity school for poor boys (one of the first charity schools outside London) was built on the site of the original hospital on the condition that a new chapel was also built on the site. The school was originally an L-shaped building, with its main wing on Upper Northgate Street. The south wing contained a chapel, and the main wing the schoolroom and dormitories. A north wing was added in 1733.

By 1762 the Corporation ceded the ownership of the land – on which the school stood – to The Bluecoat Trustees. The St John’s Hospital Trust retained ownership of The Bluecoat’s chapel, plus land at the rear of the school (on which the almshouses were built).

In 1854 the central section was enlarged by the construction of a new façade closer to Northgate Street and The Bluecoat Boy placed on a niche at the front of the building. The clock (housed in the bell tower) was added the following year.

The Bluecoat school underwent various stages of development. From 1755 until 1761 the school shared The Bluecoat building with the Chester Infirmary which treated patients in the first floor rooms. Under a scheme of 1787, pupil numbers were reduced from forty to twenty-five, boys then being admitted as boarders only at the age of eleven for a two-year period. Provision was also made for a new day school – the Green Cap School – which catered for up to sixty boys aged nine and upwards, and this also met in The Bluecoat premises. In 1818 the Consolidated School for Girls (derived from various Sunday Schools and Working Schools) opened in the building.

The original Blue Coat School, along with the Green Cap School, continued in the same building throughout the nineteenth century. Kelly’s Directory for 1896 described them as having, at that time, thirty-six and sixty-four boys respectively, with orphans and the sons of widows being given preference for admission to the former. In addition to the headmaster and his assistant, the foundation employed a bandmaster, drill master and matron. The Green Cap School eventually closed in 1901 and The Blue Coat School closed in 1949.

Since then The Bluecoat has been used for office and retail purposes, an adult education site and youth club, a welfare and job advice centre, and as County Council offices. In 1996 it became home to the History department of the University of Chester. Eventually, all usage of The Bluecoat stopped until, in 2015, after an extensive £1.3 million revamp, Chester Municipal Charities re-opened The Bluecoat as a centre for charities and voluntary organisations.

In 1854 a Bluecoat Boy statue was placed at the front of The Bluecoat building (after a special appeal had raised £25.00 to meet costs).

The statue’s model was John Coppack, a pupil of The Blue Coat school from February 1853 to February 1854.

Born in August 1840, he was the son of a shoemaker in Northgate Street (his mother had died by the time he enrolled at the school). John Coppack later worked as a coal merchant and, later, a Corresponding Clerk for the Shropshire Union Canal Company. He married in 1859. The first of his fourteen children was born in 1861, the same year that he became a Freeman of the City of Chester. He died in 1898, aged 57.

The Bluecoat has two bells on its roof: the Galeka bell, plus the bell inside the bell tower.

Galeka Bell

This bell was salvaged from a WWI hospital ship, SS Galeka. When entering Le Havre in 1916, SS Galeka hit a mine and nineteen Royal Army Medical Corps were killed. The Galeka was beached at Cap Le Hogue, but was a total loss. The bell was eventually brought to Chester and placed atop The Bluecoat building (canal-side corner) in commemoration to those who had fought in the Great War.

Bell Tower

The bell inside the bell tower was made in 1716 and has been in situ – and chiming on the hour – since 1717.

In 1837 thirty-one local charities amalgamated under the umbrella of one charity (though each charity was run in accordance with its own deed). Further charities joined in 1892 and 1976.
Over the years the income of the smaller charities dried up and in 1976 a new deed dissolved the old charities setting up, in their place, four new charities which were Chester Municipal Almshouse Charity, Chester Municipal Relief Charity, Owen Jones Relief Charity and Owen Jones Education Charity.
In 2010 the administration of the charity was further simplified in a new deed. The four charities were dissolved and incorporated into one organisation, Chester Municipal Charities.