John Pounds and the Ragged School

It was a terrible fall, and it sickened those who saw it. John Pounds, a tall,
muscular teen laborer at the docks of Portsmouth, England, slipped and plunged
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from the top of a ship’s mast, pitching headfirst into the bowels of the vessel. When
fellow workers reached him, he was nothing but a mass of broken bones. For two
years he lay in bed as his bones healed crookedly. His pain never ceased. Out of
boredom, he began to read the Bible.

At length, John crawled from bed hoping to find something he could do with
his life. A shoemaker hired him, and day after day, John sat at his cobbler’s bench, a
Bible open on his lap. Soon he was born again.

John ultumately gathered enough money to purchase his own little shoeshop,
and one day he developed a pair of surgical boots for his crippled nephew Johnny,
whom he had taken in. Soon John was making corrective shoes for other children,
and his little cobbler’s shop became a miniature children’s hospital.

As John’s burden for children grew, he began receiving homeless ones, feeding
them, teaching them to read, and telling them about the Lord. His shop became
known as “The Ragged School,” and John would limp around the waterfront, food
in his pockets, looking for more children to tend.

During his lifetime, John Pounds rescued five hundred children from despair and led every one of them to Christ. Moreover, his work became so famous that a ‘Ragged School Movement” swept England, and a series of laws were passed to establish schools for poor children in John’s honor. Boy’s homes, girl’s homes, day schools, and evening schools were started, along with Bible classes in which thousands heard the Gospel.

When John collapsed and died on New Year’s Day, 1839, while tending to a
boy’s ulcerated foot, he was buried in a churchyard on High Street. All England
mourned, and a monument was erected over his grave, reading: “Thou shalt be

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blessed, for they could not recompense thee.