MIKE MATSON, who was among the 1951 intake at the Stockton-on- Tees Grammar School, was vaguely aware that one of his grandfathers had attended the same school in the 1890s when it was called the Blue Coat School.

That was all he knew of his school’s history.

Now, 60 years later, after a career in planning, he is beginning to fill in the gaps with the publication of volume one of what promises to be a trilogy.

With an extraordinary wealth of detail that brings alive the social history of Stockton, he looks at how the Blue Coat School was formed in 1721.

The school was the suggestion of the vicar, George Walker, who may have been inspired by his boss, Nathaniel Crew, the Bishop of Durham (immortalised by Lord Crew pubs across the North-East), who the year before had started a blue coat school in Bishop Auckland.

It was to educate poor children in the 3Rs, with religious and moral instruction dominating the curriculum.

The pupils were to be given a blue uniform – not to make them feel proud, but to single them out as recipients of charity and to remind them of the virtues of humility.

At the Bishop Auckland school, Mr Matson says: “The boys wore a long blue frock coat, leather breeches, a pair of wooden clogs, heavily ironed, and a coarse worsted cap.”

His research shows that there were already 15 other charity schools in County Durham, the oldest being in Trimdon where a Henry Airey had left £5 in his will in 1680 to pay a schoolmaster to instruct five or six children in the art of reading.

A vicar in Gainford left £100 in his will of 1691 to start a school in his village, whereas clockmaker William Dent left property in Middlesex to fund a school in Barnard Castle.

In 1713, Dame Mary Calverley left £1,000 to teach the poor in Darlington, and in 1718 Durham’s Blue Coat School started meeting in two rooms above the Bull’s Head, in the Market Place.

In Stockton, the vicar persuaded 21 of the great and the good – aldermen, gentry, solicitors, tradesmen, the collector of customs and the owner of The Virgin Inn – to subscribe to the new school, and it opened its doors to 20 poor boys early in 1722.

The first headmaster was James Richardson, who had been attracted from Middletonin- Teesdale by the £20-a-year salary.

A lack of records makes it difficult to count the number of pupils who attended the school during the 18th Century, but Mr Matson estimates there were about 700.

There may well have been quite a few expulsions, for rule four said that “any scholar found guilty of lying, swearing, cursing, stealing, taking God’s name in vain, profaning the Lord’s Day, using indecent language in the streets or elsewhere was to be punished severely for the first offence and if they commit the like again, to be turned out of school and their clothes taken from them”.

In Victorian times, the nature of education changed considerably – but that is to be the subject of Mr Matson’s second volume.

The first, is 240 pages long, and is available for £10 from Rediscover Stockton, in the High Street, or Preston Hall Museum, in Eaglescliffe.

For further details, email mcmatson@btinternet.com