Figure 1.--The school here looks loike a private pre-school. The children look to bejust short of primary age abour 4-5 years old. They are wearing front-buttoning smicks. The photograph is unndated. We might guess the 1940s.

We do not yet have information on smocks being worn at 19th century English schools. We do not notice smocks in the 19th century phographic record, but our archive mostly has 2oth century images. Britain laged behind America and Germany in building a substanial public (state) school system, but finally did so in the late-19th century. We do not see any of these children wearing smocks, although we have very few images at this time. Nor as far as we can tell were they worn in the private schools. Most of the The examples we have found of English school children wearing smocks come from the 20th century. We are not sure yet about state pre schools. We note smocks at one unidentified pre-school, perhaps in the 1930s. The images we have found look like pre-prep schools, meaning schools for children only through the first two primary years (6-8 year olds) before they began their prep schools. The school here looks like a pre-school (figure 1). We are not sure that was the enture school. It could be pre-prep school and the older children were photographed separately. We do not notice smocks being one a preppreps in the180s, except at one Scottish school. We do not see smocks at all in state primaries.

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Created: 7:15 PM 11/5/20200
Last updated: 10:19 PM 11/3/2024