Strathmore Girls' Home

Strathmore Girls’ Home was opened on 8th February 1923 by the Church of England Homes at Glebe in a building that had previously been used as the Church Rescue Home for women. Strathmore was on the same site as the Avona Girls’ Home and the Tress Manning Girl’s Training Home. Strathmore had capacity for 50 girls. It was opened due to an increasing number of applications for girls to be admitted to Avona, which was at capacity. A notice published in The Sydney Morning Herald (‘Anglican Homes’, 8 February 1922) stated that many of the girls who were to be placed at the new home were the “orphans” of soldiers.

Girls at Strathmore, like girls at the other Church of England Homes at Glebe, did school work in the morning, in the afternoons were taught lace-work, clothes making and mending, chair-caning, wood carving, and singing, and were also expected to do all of the housework. The items that the girls produced, particularly the lace-work pieces, were sold to help finance the Homes. Other fundraising efforts such as fetes, dances and concerts, annual subscriptions, and donation appeals provided the remainder of the funds for the Homes.

In June 1924 some of these lace items created by the girls at the Glebe Homes- two tray cloths and two handkerchiefs – were sent to Queen Mary, who had stayed at Strathmore during a trip to Australia several decades earlier. Later that same year a sale was held at the Homes where 500 handkerchiefs made by the girls, including some in the style of those sent to Queen Mary, were displayed and sold.

In 1928 the Church of England Homes committee opened a new Girls’ Home at Carlingford. This new site allowed for an increase in the number of children admitted to the homes, as well as what was seen as a healthier environment in the country, compared to the city location of Glebe. From 1928 the girls were transferred from Strathmore, Avona, and Tress Manning to the new Girls’ Home. Strathmore closed in 1929, when the last of the girls were transferred to Carlingford.