Over the years the building at the corner of Vlissengen Road and Brickdam Street, once described as “handsome and hospitable”, was at first an orphan asylum; then the site for Queen’s College, one of the country’s premier schools, before it became the current address for Guyana’s health ministry.
The lot 1 Brickdam St. building standing today is a rebuilt edifice, after a July 2009 pre-dawn fire destroyed the original historic timber construction.
The Orphan Asylum, known officially as the Orphan Asylum and School of Industry, was established in March 1852 by the British colonial government, after the government acquired the land from an Edward Carberry in 1838.
It originally housed juvenile offenders, orphans and destitute children. In 1906 it was considered “undesirable” to mix destitute children with offenders, and offenders were removed to an Industrial School.
It became an Orphan Asylum, where children whose parents were dead, too poor to provide for them, in prison for petty crimes or ill in hospital and unable to look after them, were taken in.
According to the Ordinance establishing the institution, such children no older than 14 years who were “not idiots or lunatics” were eligible. The Ordinance also advised however that children whose parents were both dead would be given preference over those who had at least one parent.
The orphan asylum began by accepting children for six months at a time. By 1905, children were being accepted for two years, and by the end of March 1909 there were 61 boys and 30 girls in the institution.
Upon attaining the age of 14, they were apprenticed out at the discretion of the director, for no more than five years.
The Orphan Asylum was maintained from the public treasury; it was also supported by a “two per cent duty on all public sales”. In 1903 it came under the supervision of the Chairman of the Poor Law Commissioners.
According to “The New Local Guide of British Guiana” (1862) both boys and girls were “instructed in reading, writing and arithmetic”. Boys were further taught agriculture and other trades the asylum’s director thought “proper”, while girls learned “plain sewing, cooking, washing, scouring, and all other matters of domestic economy.”
The Orphan Asylum was closed in 1917 and, when a government committee on education in British Guiana recommended that same year that Queen’s College be relocated to the Orphan Asylum Buildings and Ground in Brickdam, students of Queen’s College moved into the building in 1918 and remained there until 1951.
It has been reported that while at Brickdam, a pavilion was erected in 1920 from funds provided by the Combined Court, but begun by the proceeds of school concerts.
Subsequently, when the school moved to its current Thomas Lands site, the building became the headquarters for the Ministry of Health (MOH) up to today.
Joseph Hadfield, a well-known architect of the time, is said to have designed the colonial block of the original building. Then Chief Justice William Arrindell is said to have founded and promoted the Orphan Asylum during his career as colony lawyer and legislator.
