Stockport Sunday School

The Stockport Sunday school was founded in 1784, and became the largest Sunday Schools in the world. It was situated on London Square, Wellington Street behind the town hall. Before the days of universal education, children who would be employed in the cotton and hatting industry from a very early age, Sunday Schools provided the one source of Education. Later Part-Timers would be educated here. The Sunday School though nominally inter-denominational was a protestant institution.

Indeed in 1811, a Mr Myddleton, vicar of St Thomas', Heaton Norris, reported to the Bishop:

¨The Methodists and Calvinists together make about a half of the number of inhabitants. The former much increased of late owing principally to this district bordering upon Stockport, which is considered as the focus of Methodism, and where is a Sunday School erected chiefly through their means, and capable of containing they say four thousand children."

In 1842

One of the Sunday-schools ‘the Stockport Sunday-school,’ was not exclusively connected with any denomination. The Bible was used as the school book, and the children were taken alternately to church and to dissenting places of worship. This school, with four branches, had, in 1833, 5,244 scholars, about half of each sex. It was supported by subscription, and was under the management of a committee elected from among the subscribers of a guinea and upwards, and of visitors chosen from among the persons actively engaged in the school. There were two libraries, a teachers’ library of 850 volumes, and a scholars’ library of 1,700. There were connected with the school a religious tract society which circulated yearly 30,000 tracts, and a Bible association which distributed yearly about 400 copies of the Scriptures. There were no paid officers connected with the institution.

In later years the people moved to Heaviley, leaving the National Sunday School and Centenary Hall vacant. The buildings were listed as a National Monument and were demolished around 1970.

The Stockport Sunday School's the enormous registers (now at Stockport Central Library) testify that Stockport Sunday School catered for 3,000 children. The un-indexed registers 1789-1920 have their names and ages (Registers for the Stockport Sunday School, Cheshire, 1790-1877). Many families sent generation after generation of children to Stockport Sunday school, the age range being from three years to late teenage.