In about 1882 or 1883, Edward went to school, just up the road, in sight of his house:
"Then I entered the lowest class of a large suburban board school — Here began a lifelong preoccupation and love of maps, reaching into his life as an army instructor in Hare Hall, Essex: What I most enjoyed was doing maps of Great Britain and Ireland, inking in the coast lines with red, and marking the mountain ranges with thin parallel strokes arranged herringbone fashion. I never tired of the indentations of the western coasts, especially of Scotland. The line of the Hebrides I think I actually loved."
Benedict Mackay:
Return to the junction with Northcote Rd and cross it to go up the other half of Wakehurst Rd. On the right, looming above all else, is the redbrick pile of Belleville School. This was Edward Thomas's first school. It is a substantial three-storeyed block, still retaining a large asphalt playground with its original London brick wall as in Thomas's day.
Looking at the school's large windows it is easy to imagine Thomas's statement: We were huddled close together in great lofty rooms with big windows and big maps and on Mondays a smell of carbolic soap.
Thomas graduated from the Infants to the Junior section in 1886, staying till early 1888.
His father, solicitous for his elder son's future, then moved him to the private St John's Hill House School, from where he went, aged 12, to Battersea Grammar School and, at 15, to St Pauls, London.
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Philip Boys (aka "HistoryBoys")