The Old Almondburians' Society

Grants

The King James’s School Foundation can give grants to promote the education of young people under 25 who either:

l attend or formerly attended King James’s School and/or

l live in the Ancient Parish of Almondbury (map on right).

In recent years, these grants have helped with foreign trips and sports training and with expenses in attending special music training at summer school.

Brief history of the Foundation

From the time of the School charter in 1608, a piece of land was enclosed and conveyed to a trust fund to be held for the purposes of the School and occupied by the School in perpetuity. This represents an area of approximately 2.8 acres and that covers what might now be described as the oldest part of the School.

The assets of the fund grew over the years with gifts from various benefactors. Particularly noteworthy was the winding-up of Wormall ’s Charity in about 1880 and the subsequent transfer of its assets to the King James ’s trust. This is no doubt how the fund now comes to be the owner of the building which we all know as Almondbury Conservative Club (right) but which was originally Wormall Hall erected in 1631.

In 1922, when the School came under the formal control of the old Huddersfield Corporation, the council became the trustee of the fund and in 1974, on local government reorganisation, that responsibility passed to the new Kirklees Metropolitan Council. In 1987, largely because the fund had been dormant for many years, a new scheme was approved by the Charity Commission with Kirklees Metropolitan Council as the sole corporate trustee.

Once the new trustees were in place, it became easier to obtain documentation about the past administration of the fund. It quickly became clear that the fund had been neglected from 1951 onwards and very probably from as far back as 1922. In due course, this led to legal proceedings against Huddersfield Corporation and Kirklees Council resulting the fund being compensated to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The capital value of properties owned by the King James’s School Foundation, along with other investments, is in the region of £2 million. This enables the Foundation to make substantial grants each year to the School and to individual beneficiaries.