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Excerpt from Sixty Years of Citizen Work and Play: Realities, Trivialities, Divagations, Reminiscences and Letters
A few words about this matter may not be uninteresting. Alleyne was a contemporary of Shakespeare, an actor and owner of the Bear Garden and the little Playhouse in Whitecross Street, St. Luke's. He saved money and held property in four parishes, viz. St. Luke's, Middle sex; St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate; St. Giles', Camber well; and. St. Olave's, Southwark. The property he had in these parishes consisted chie¿y of land and tenements, and the rents, especially in the City parish, increased so enormously that when he died the houses let at £30 a year are now worth from to a year. In order to make an affidavit which I had to swear to as evidence of the quality of the teaching in Alleyne's School at Dulwich in 1842, I had to examine the children in the school and also the pauper children in St. Luke's Workhouse, and my evidence was that the children of the former were very little better taught than the pauper children of St. Luke's, although good old Alleyne declared in his will (which I learnt by heart) that his School at Dulwich should always be maintained up to the standard of the school at Westminster, which, of course, meant that it was to be equal to any in the kingdom.
When my father was first elected Churchwarden of St. Luke's he found himself an ex-officio Governor of Dulwich College. He was a man of determined character and a great lover of fairplay all round, and finding that he was on a perfect equality with the other Governors, he began to look into things and see whether the men - then his colleagues - were using the Splendid bequest as Alleyne intended. The governing body then consisted of six Fellows and two yvardens, who were living like Sybarites, and devoting nearly two-thirds of the income, which should have been used entirely for eleemosynary purposes and education, for their own pleasures and purposes, and he then determined never to rest until he had cleared out this den of thieves, as he used to call them, and made Dulwich College something like Alleyne intended it to be. It took him three years' hard work to carry this out, and ultimately it was brought before Parliament and referred to the Charity Commissioners, who pre pared a scheme on which the present great institu tion is founded.
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