GOODNESS knows how many youngsters attend Sunday School nowadays but, from a yearbook lent to Looking Back by a reader, we find that 60 years ago nearly 8,500 children were on the books of more than 50 schools connected with the Blackburn Sunday School Union.

But if there was a championship for the number of young souls they uplifted, surely the runaway winner was the town's Ragged School.

The much-loved institution in Bent Street, founded in 1881 - on Protestant, but non-denominational lines - to "impart moral and religious instruction to poor children, parents and relatives," had 1,000 Sunday school scholars registered, more than three times more than its nearest rival.

But the school - out of which was later born the Blackburn Orphanage - did more far more than cater for the spiritual well-being of the thousands of who attended its classes and services, many of which even as recently as the 1960s were "full house" affairs.

It also fought hard against poverty and ignorance - so that, down the years, many children and adults were clothed, shod, fed and warmed with the assistance it gave.

But it is probably equally well remembered - especially by more recent generations who never experienced privations of the barefoot days that inspired its founders James Dixon and John Thomas Walkden to begin the Ragged School in a small rented building in Lune Street - for the pleasure it provided.

Taboo even 50 years later were activities such as whist drives, raffles, dancing and smoking, "however legitimate or harmless," but the school provided a wide range of interests for hundreds of all ages - everything from gymnastics, elocution and snooker to a grandfathers' club, a library and field days. Among the most popular events was its annual Poor Children's Trip which for more than three generations gave as many as 2,000 youngsters a day at the seaside - and for many, their first sight of the sea.

Yet, perhaps, the oddest of its ventures - but one that lasted 40 years - was that, though absorbed each winter into the school's Lads' Club, put a sparkle into summertime Saturdays . . . when the members of the Boy Naturalists' Troupe answered the call of the wild. What wildlife this group actually managed to study in the field on their weekend rambles is hard to imagine as the troupe - claimed to be the first uniformed youth group in the country when it was formed in 1908 by the school's first full-time missioner, Mr Jesse Chilman - marched out into the countryside to the blare of its own 40-strong band of bugles and drums.

The troupe carried on until 1947- when, two days after his arrival, the Rev Philip Royston-Bishop, superintendent for the next 27 years, set up a Sea Scouts troop at the Ragged School and, four year later, made it the base of the "only Girls' Sea Guild in the world."

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