The founder: John Allen

Our building began as a school, and the school began with John Allen.

He arrived in the 1870s having previously owned or managed a commercial college in Preston, and put up Kilgrimol School for Boys in what one account calls complete isolation amongst the sand dunes of Clifton Drive. It opened around 1876. The school took between twenty and thirty pupils - a small number until you consider that St Annes then held perhaps three hundred souls, which made Allen's boys something like a tenth of the town.

He signed himself John Allen, B.P.A. The letters stood for the British Phrenological Association, and he was one of its first members. Phrenology - the belief, long since discredited, that character and ability could be read from the shape of the skull - was not a private enthusiasm but the organising principle of the school. Kilgrimol advertised that its pupils would be taught and supervised according to their physiological and phrenological requirements, and a phrenological journal of 1887 noted approvingly that Mr Allen, having a school at St Anne's, taught his scholars on phrenological principles.

He was busy elsewhere too. He published the town's first newspaper, and had a hand in forming the first Local Board of Health - the body that became the town council. His wife Anne served as a Poor Law Guardian for the Fylde. In a town barely a decade old, the Allens were part of the machinery.

Then, in December 1886, came the Mexico. Two lifeboats were lost in a single night and twenty-seven men with them, thirteen of them from St Annes. Allen's response was characteristic: he designed a lifeboat that could not sink. It was shallow in draft, and instead of oars it carried cranks along its length which the crew would turn to drive a propeller - motor power being, as a later account drily observed, then unknown. He built a scale model. It was claimed the craft would be faster than any oared boat.

Nothing came of it. The model ended up in a glass case in a quiet corridor on the top floor of the Town Hall, its paintwork chipped and faded, where a reporter found it more than fifty years later.

Allen sold Kilgrimol School around 1892 and opened a toy and fancy goods shop in Park Road, which almost certainly stocked phrenological literature. Anne died in 1898, at about the time the shop was twice flooded from the rooms above. He moved to the new row of shops on North Crescent around 1899, and by 1904 had moved again, to premises near the police station in Park Road. He appears to have suffered a breakdown, and he took his own life there in May 1904.

The school outlived him by more than twenty years. J. F. Davenport was principal by 1893, and under him the boys did well - in one five-year stretch, 108 of 112 entrants passed the College of Preceptors examinations. There was cricket on the recreation ground by St Thomas' Road, football, and swimming at the open-air baths on the promenade. Richard Greenwell Telfer, an assistant master, was killed on the Somme in 1916; old boys of the school are remembered on memorials across the town. By the 1920s C. Bertram-Stinson had taken over, and in 1927 Kilgrimol School closed for good.

The premises were advertised for auction in February 1928 as adaptable for a hydro, a private hotel or a convalescent home. They became, on 23 May 1931, the St Annes District Club.

One last thing, for the bowlers. When the school became the club, the sandy ground at the back - where the gymnasium and outbuildings stood - was cleared and laid to grass. The green you play on is where Allen's boys once ran about.