FOOTNOTES
[1] The information in this section, up to the close of 1884, is taken from the very accurate and interesting “History of the Corporation of Birmingham,” by J. Thackray Bunce. Two vols., 1878 and 1885.
[2] In 1795 it had risen to £1,200; in 1818 to £3,000; in 1861 to £11,000; in 1880 to £21,983; and it is reckoned that at the end of the century the revenue of the School will be £50,000.
[3] This barn and croft were taken away in 1738 from both chief master and usher, and their salaries raised in lieu to £88. 15s. 0d. and £60.
[4] In all these provisions boys from the manor had the preference.
[5] An alternative plan, apparently not adopted, was to have two exhibitions of £5 each, at Catherine Hall, Cambridge; and two fellowships of £30 a year each at the same college.
[6] The first exhibitioners were William Milner and Bartholomew Baldwin, in 1677. Up to 1817, eighty-two exhibitioners had been elected. In 1723, however, a chancery commission declared it a manifest breach of trust on the Governors’ part that no exhibition had been granted for twenty years; while on January 18, 1734, the chief master, having no scholars under his care, William Spilsbury, jun., a scholar in the usher’s school, was elected exhibitioner at Oxford, no other boy being qualified or likely to be qualified for some years.
[7] See the illustrations in Hutton’s Birmingham.
[8] The first appointed were in 1752, as follows: William Latham, in Dudley Street; Thomas Wilson, near the Old Cross; Mary Ankers, wife of Noel Ankers, in Freeman Street; another Widow Austin, in London Prentice Street.
[9] For some reason not very clear, the branch school in Shutt Lane, as also a drawing school established by the Governors, were in 1829 declared by a decree in Chancery to be unauthorised by the charter, and were then discontinued.