BILL MCALLISTER: Raining's School, Inverness may be gone but memory still lives on
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This year is the 265th anniversary of the opening of a building at the top of Ardconnell Terrace which was to vanish 48 years ago.
Raining’s School was demolished in 1976, having latterly been a youth club and a jazz club and thus fondly remembered by a certain vintage of Invernessians.
Eventually it fell into disrepair and where the Georgian building once stood is now a car park.
The name of Scots-born Norwich merchant John Raining, who left £1200 in his will to fund a school, lives on in Raining’s Stairs – or as generations of Invernessians have called it ‘The Raining Stairs’ – linking Castle Street with Ardconnell Terrace in a 27-metre climb.
The steps were already there, then called the Barnhill Vennel, the area at the top, known as ‘the back of town’, housing many craftsmen’s premises.
The Scottish arm of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge received Raining’s donation and aimed to teach “religion and virtue” in the Highlands “and other uncivilised parts of the country.” The move was to counter growing enthusiasm for the Jacobite cause.
The SSPCK was firm that there should be “no Latin or Irish”, the latter being the then term for Gaelic. This led to Gaelic-speaking pupils reciting what they were taught – without any clear understanding.
Raining’s School actually opened on the third floor of the former Dunbar’s Hospital building in Church Street in 1727 and it was 30 years later that pupils were decanted to the new school, which is thought to have been built to a design of leading Scottish architect John Adam.
The new building had two teachers – and 250 pupils! SSPCK’s work focused on children aged seven to 11 and was the forerunner of the primary school education system.
The magistrates of Inverness complained that Alexander Fraser, who taught at Raining’s from 1771 to 1792, neglected the school due to his business dealings.
Inverness Presbytery, however, found that Fraser’s trade did not interfere with his teaching.
Robert McComie, head teacher from 1759 to 1806, was told not to take on so many fee-paying students as it excluded poorer scholars for whom the school had been created. In 1817 Farquhar Matheson was accused of marrying a woman whose husband was still alive.
He was dismissed but continued to teach and the society had to ask the city’s provost to evict him!
When the society declined in the early 1800s, it is highly ironic that its educational role in Scotland was taken over by the Gaelic Societies of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness. Alexander MacBain, who was head teacher at Raining’s School from 1881 to 1894, was a highly regarded Gaelic scholar who pioneered the study of Celtic place names and produced a Gaelic language dictionary as well as writing ‘Personal Names and Surnames of Inverness’.
Under MacBain, Raining’s became a bi-lingual school, with trainee teachers speaking Gaelic to pupils before completing training elsewhere in English.
An extension was added in 1840 and another in 1881 but in 1894, it’s educational era ended and pupils transferred to Inverness High School, which moved from opposite what is now Blindcraft in Ardconnell Street to a new site in Kingsmills Road. When the High School ‘flitted’ to Montague Row in 1937, its building became Crown Primary.
Archaeological surveys in 1993 and 1994 showed a timber building was terraced into the slope in the 14th or 15th century before being destroyed by fire.
The pulling down of the former school left a gap site and several development proposals were approved but failed to happen. Finally, a successful project transformed the steps area.
The ‘new’ Raining Stairs, with 16 housing units in a public-private venture, won a 2019 Scottish Design Awards prize. Architect Edward Meldrum, former chair of the Georgian Society’s Highland Group, observed in 1982 that Raining’s School building was “regrettably demolished for no good reason.” Under today’s heritage regime, it would probably have survived.
Sponsored by Ness Castle Lodges.
