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If Only the Walls Could Speak: An Orphanage Diary. Alan Hamblin
If Only the Walls Could Speak An Orphanage Diary Alan Hamblin Author:Alan Hamblin This title presents the true story of The Royal Albert Orphanage, Worcester. For the Victorian and Edwardian periods, starting in the 1860s when the orphanage was set up independently by local businessmen, the book draws on the Orphanage's records. However from 1910 onwards, the personal recollections of 33 of the children who lived there during... more » the forty year period up to the early postwar years provide us with a vivid and striking first hand picture of what life for them was really like. Eventually in the mid 1950s dwindling numbers caused the orphanage to move elsewhere before closing entirely in the 1960s. The original rather forbidding looking building in Henwick Road, now listed and occupied by the YMCA, survives to remind us of what many children had to endure in the not so very distant past.« less