The Blue Coat School

Bryan Blundell and the Reverend Robert Styth, Rector of Liverpool, founded a charity school to feed, clothe and educate the town's poorest children and orphans: the boys and girls in their distinctive blue coats who gave the school its name.

What began as a modest day school grew, under Blundell's hand, into one of the great charitable institutions of the north of England. After Styth's death Blundell became treasurer, and over the following decades he raised subscriptions, gave a substantial share of his own income, and oversaw the building of a fine new school. That building, known today as Bluecoat Chambers on School Lane, is the oldest surviving building in central Liverpool and now home to the Bluecoat arts centre, where The Slave Trader will be launched on 16 September 2026.

Blundell served the school until his death in 1756, and his sons followed him as treasurers. The school itself endures: the Liverpool Blue Coat School continues today, more than three centuries after the captain and the rector opened its doors.

In the book

The school is the thread that runs through Blundell's whole later life: the place where his faith, his money, his ambitions for his town, and the contradictions of its wealth all met. Drawing on the Bluecoat's own archives, including minutes of meetings, financial records and correspondence, the book tells that story from the inside, including the uncomfortable truth that the money which clothed and fed Liverpool's orphans was made, in part, in the slave trade.