THERE probably are more forbidding looking buildings in Worcester but right now I can’t think of one. When they built the Royal Albert Orphanage back in 1868 they didn’t go for cosy.

It has been described as “a fine Gothic edifice with turrets, towers and fine iron work”. Great, that is, unless you had to live there. For the place in Henwick Road had all the welcoming appearance of a Hammer house of horror.

That isn’t to say it wasn’t built with the best of intentions. It cost local industrialist and philanthropist Richard Padmore £4,000, a tidy sum in the 19th century, and he wouldn’t have spent that unless he felt it was for a good cause.

Padmore’s intention was to provide a suitable building for an orphanage for girls, which had already opened in another house in St John’s six years earlier. It wasn’t his fault its appearance was the stuff of nightmares. It was the style of the day and is still appreciated by architectural connoisseurs, because it is grade two listed.

A new book has been published about the orphanage that closed in 1955, called If Only These Walls Could Speak (Belnheim Press, £15).

It has been compiled by Worcester-born Alan Hamblin, who was himself an orphanage boy, although not in Worcester. It is a quite remarkable piece of work, because Alan, who now lives in Hertfordshire but in the 1940s spent four years at Princess Alice Orphanage in Birmingham, has not only trawled through the old records of the Royal Albert for information, stories and anecdotes, but also managed to contact many of the residents who were there in its later years for their memories.

Which he did by advertising in this newspaper.

Hence you can read about the four Brace children, whose parents took them for a walk one Saturday afternoon in 1945, straight to the orphanage and left them there.

Marian Brace, who was 10 at the time, seems to have born no grudge.

She says in the book: “It was very strict, but it did us no harm. In fact it taught us to respect our elders.”

Or of Gerald Bullock, who was in the Royal Albert from 1938-47 and said: “I am sure there was not one boy who did not have the cane at one time or another. Food was very basic, lots of bread and porridge. A rock cake was a Sunday treat and there was a boiled egg once a month.”

Alan Hamblin first saw the Royal Albert Orphanage as a youngster in the late 1940s: He said: “I remember standing back aghast and thinking ‘The poor little devils’.“ However, what is very apparent from Alan’s book is that most of the residents were not orphans at all, but from families that simply couldn’t afford to look after them.

They banded together in adversity and referred to other children as “outsiders”.

The spartan nature of the regime, with plenty of PE and physical work, produced some excellent young sportsmen. All went to local schools and in one as many as 80 per cent of the first teams in football and cricket were Royal Albert boys.

It had, however, started rather differently. Headed by Richard Padmore, the orphanage was run by a committee containing famous Worcester names like Mr Lea and Mr Perrins, the Fownes brothers, William Stallard and Mr Spreckley.

Patrons included the Earl and Countess of Dudley and Lady Lechmere. Children’s names were put forward for admission and voted on. The first 57 were all girls.

About 500 children passed through the Royal Albert during the Victorian and Edwardian eras with their parents, if they had any, signing an agreement they would stay there until the age of 16.

This was no child prison, an application had been made for them to enter, but once in they were expected to stay there.

However, absconding was a common occurrence, as in most orphanages.

This was dealt with either by extra sessions of hard work, such as scrubbing floors, corporal punishment or, in the worst cases, dismissal and the youngster being sent back to where they had come from.

An entry for August 6, 1902 reads: “That the boy Thomas Lewis, who left the orphanage on the morning of 5th inst without permission and did not return until 7pm, be whipped.”

Flogging children went out of fashion but even in the late 1940s, the headmaster “Gaffer” Smith was wielding a sawn-off billiard cue across miscreants’ hands, leaving two inch wide weals, and one boy recalls being whacked 23 times with a stick – presumably he counted every one – for failing to pick up stones from the playground. His wounds bled for days.

And if you didn’t eat your food you found it sitting there at the next meal or even the next day until the plate was clean.

But it wasn’t all bad and many of the youngsters, once used to it, found security, camraderie and a certain comfort in the orphanage compared with what they could be facing outside.

Among the perks were regular visits to the cinema or passing circuses and seaside day trips to Weston-super-Mare.

However times were changing. In 1950 there were more than 70 boys and girls on the roll, but within five years the number had dropped to below 20 and the building was far too big.

In its last days unused floors became spooky. Cobwebs swayed from the rafters, group photographs of children taken over a hundred years hung from the walls and the corridors and dormitories echoed in silence.

The place was full of ghosts.