Polmont Prison - History

HM Young Offender Institute Polmont first opened as a Borstal in 1911.

Blairlodge Academy opened in 1843 by Robert Cunningham, a Church of Scotland minister, who also played a significant part in the Free Church breakaway in Polmont in the same year.

The new school was for boy boarders and flourished under an innovative and dynamic headmaster J Cooke-Gray who took over in 1874.

Modelled on the English public school system it attracted the sons of some of Scotland's wealthiest families, and inevitably, cricket and rugby were the principal sporting activities of the three hundred pupils. But there was an admirable practical strain to the curriculum and an emphasis on science which was unusual for the period. At the turn of the century Blairlodge was the largest school of its kind in Scotland and was the first to use electric lighting on such a large scale - it had nearly nine hundred bulbs at the same time as the people of Falkirk were being shown electric light as a novelty in a church bazaar!

The pupils who left Blairlodge entered the privileged world of the Colonial Service, Oxford or Cambridge or into the upper echelons of the commercial world.

After the death of Cooke-Gray in 1902 the school experienced financial difficulties and when it was forced to close in 1908 by an outbreak of an infectious disease, possibly measles, it never reopened.

The buildings were purchased by the Prison Commissioners in 1911 and shortly afterwards opened as Scotland's first Borstal. It is now, of course, Polmont Young Offenders Institution.