ABSTRACT
T He building which the Prince of Wales opened in December, 1924, was an architectural hotch-potch. Its core was an elegant 18th-century town house, erected on ground leased in 1783 from an old-established institution near by—the Magdalene Hospital for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes. After serving for forty years as a private residence, this house had been taken over in 1834 by the Yorkshire Society as a school for boys of Yorkshire birth or descent. The school had flourished, with the result that in 1885 the Society had clapped on to the 18th-century structure two flanking portions not unlike Nonconformist chapels. It had also added an extra storey with a steep pitched roof and protruding dormer windows. Thus enlarged, the compilation had served its purpose until the growing provision of education by the state had rendered the school unnecessary. In 1917 it was accordingly closed and the building was taken over by the War Office, which established there the Britannia Club for Soldiers and Sailors. Five years later it stood dilapidated and empty when the Vic Appeal Trustees bought it for Morley College.
