Next to St Mary’s church and now the site of Gale’s Court and the Church Centre once stood a very pretty building of brick and flint with a distinctive, turreted tower, known as Gale’s Schools.

At the time of its demolition in 1975, any pupils were long gone and the building had been used as a general church hall for many years, gradually deteriorating and with little available in church funds to restore it; indeed, this was just at the time when the church itself was in need of substantial repairs and any available funds were directed towards that project.

Many will remember that the then incumbent vicar was all in favour of pulling down St Mary’s itself and replacing it with a ‘worship centre’ but the demolition of Gale’s Schools, an attractive building of unique design in Andover, was a great pity.

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The founder of the school – actually two schools – was Martha Gale, the adopted niece of Revd William Goddard and his wife Henrietta, whose maiden name was Gale. The couple lived in the Old Vicarage, now the offices of Parker Bullen in Newbury Street, and it was Goddard who conceived and put into practice the demolition of old St Mary’s and the building of the church that stands today.

By his will in 1845, his private residence was bequeathed as a vicarage.

Niece Martha moved into Priory House next door and set about her own programme of good works that included an industrial school for girls and also an infants’ school, on part of the medieval priory site, to the north-west of the new church, conveyed to her by Winchester College in 1847.

Gale’s Schools were built around 1850-51. The industrial school, which was to the left of the tower, was intended to equip girls from the age of 13 to 15 to be ‘instructed in the elements of a sound religious education’ and to enable them to enter domestic service as kitchen or nursery maids.

School clothes were provided and a matron was in charge, as all – up to 10 pupils – boarded at the school.

It was a charitable institution, endowed generously by its founder; although parents had to provide a small sum of 5/- per quarter, the trustees contributed £5.

Demand for domestic servants declined by the 1920s and by 1930 the school comprised just four pupils, after which the terms of the original trust were changed to widen its scope.

The infants’ school was to the right of the tower and had a resident schoolmistress.

Although school education became available to all after 1870, Andover already had an established Church of England school from 1818 and a non-conformist or council school from 1834.

Neither of these were then compulsory but the 1851 census suggests that two-thirds of Andover children between the ages of four and 14 were at school.

By 1870, Gale’s infant school was attended by 96 children of both sexes.

A small fee was probably charged until education became free after 1891 but even after becoming linked to the East Street school, Gale’s remained well-attended for Andover’s infants.

My mother’s cousin Roy Fry, who was born in 1926, joked that he went to school at ‘Miss Gale’s Academy’.

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The whole building was closed for educational purposes in 1935, although it helped to house pupils from Itchen Grammar School during their evacuation in World War II.

Thereafter, it became a useful church hall –  accommodation for the verger, a Sunday school, parish council meetings and general lettings.

Some of its flints still survive in St Mary’s Church Centre, which was built on the church side of the land.