Blue Coat Liverpool Graves

The Blue Coat Liverpool city centre’s oldest building celebrates its 300th birthday in 2017. The building that is now an arts centre was first opened as the Blue Coat School, a place where the town’s poorest children could be accommodated and learn to read and write.

Blue Coat Liverpool

Sadly there were occasions when some of the children became ill and died. After its opening in 1836 they were buried in plots that had been bought by the school in St James cemetery, which is now overlooked by Liverpool Cathedral. Most of the gravestones in the cemetery have now been removed by Liverpool council, but the two Blue Coat ones are among those that have been placed around the edges.

The Blue Coat gravestones contain the names of 23 children who died between 1867 and 1924, ages ranging from nine to fifteen. Even after the school moved to Church Road in Wavertree in 1906, they continued to bury any children who died in St James cemetery

Blue Coat Liverpool

In 1927 things changed when the school bought a plot in the graveyard Holy Trinity Church, just a short distance along Church Road. The reasoning behind the plot was a tragic one, as it was for the burial of a boy who was said to have foretold his own death.

That summer, eleven year old Charles Saggers was on a tram with his mother and sister returning home for the summer. As they passed Holy Trinity, there was a large crowd of mourners and he asked his sister if there would be a large crowd for his funeral. He was told not to be silly but one of his friends, Danny Ross, who was on the tram remained silent. That was because a few weeks earlier they had been looking at lifelines in the yard and Charles’s was very short.

Blue Coat Liverpool A week later Danny returned to his home in Everton after going to church and was met by Charles’s brother, who had some devastating news. Charles had been run over by a bus near Holywell in North Wales, where he had been staying with some relatives.

When Charles funeral took place at Holy Trinity Church, over one hundred boys were in attendance and older pupils carried his coffin. His grave is adorned by one of the largest headstones in the churchyard, but thankfully no more names were added to it prior to the school changing its role in 1948 from an orphanage to a day and boarding school.