In the early weeks of 1849, a devastating outbreak of cholera tore through Surrey Hall, a residential school for workhouse children in Lower Tooting. It was a tragedy on a terrible scale, and the loss of life owed much to the appalling conditions in the school, where half-starved boys and girls wearing threadbare clothes were crammed into filthy premises, and were kept in line by tyrannical adults. The owner, Bartholomew Peter Drouet, had been busily turning human misery into handsome profit, but now, in the wake of the tragedy, he found himself on trial at the Old Bailey on a charge of manslaughter. In this book, the first full-length history of the Surrey Hall scandal, the reader is given access to the children's experiences before, during and after the outbreak of cholera. The stories they told of cruelties perpetrated behind closed doors shocked the nation, and Drouet quickly became a despised household name, a process that was helped significantly by the journalism of an outraged Charles Dickens. However, change was in the air, and the events in Tooting, far from being just a local affair, had important consequences for the future management of the children of the poor. AUTHOR: William Ellis-Rees read Classics at Lincoln College, Oxford, and went on to teach the subject in schools for many years. His earliest publications were articles on cultural aspects of plants and gardens, but his principal area of research is now social history, and he is a co-founder and co-author of www.london-overlooked.com, a website dedicated to the extraordinary lives of ordinary nineteenth-century Londoners. His deep interest in the story of Bartholomew Peter Drouet is not unrelated to the fact that he lives in Tooting Graveney only a few streets from where Surrey Hall once stood. 30 b/w illustrations