It is well-known that the Duke of York's Royal Military School (DYRMS) was evacuated from its Guston site during both world wars, allowing the school to be used as a military camp for British Army personnel. Whilst there has been plenty recorded about the school's stay at the Saunton Sands Hotel during the Second World War, little has been formally recorded about the DYRMS' Great War evacuation to Hutton near Brentwood in Essex. A little bit of research has allowed the following detail to be added to our collective Dukie knowledgebase.

At the commencement of the First World War, it was clear that the DYRMS site at Guston was ideally situated to act as a transit camp for troops moving to and from the Western Front and the War Department agreed that a move to a suitable site away from the Dover area was needed. The Army List of October 1914 recorded the school as still being at Guston, but by November 1914 the school's location was given as “Hutton, near Brentwood, (temp)”, indicating that the relocation from Guston had occurred sometime in October/November 1914. That said it has been difficult to get a definitive date of the Hutton DYRMS being stood up, it is doubtless somewhere in an archive.

Importantly for the 'Dukies' decanted from Kent the Hutton site was an existing 'Industrial School' i.e., one of many such establishments that had been set up to educate the children of the impoverished and develop them as good citizens with useful practical skills, an ethos not unlike that of the DYRMS. Hutton was the site of the Poplar Training Schools (for there was a boys and girls' boarding school collocated on one site). It was established in 1906 by the Poplar Board of Guardians (a London-based Poor Law Union covering the parishes of Bromley, Bow and Poplar). Boys were trained in a range of trades including boot making, tailoring, carpentry, baking and gardening. They could also participate in the school military band. Girls were trained as domestic servants and were taught cookery, needlework and laundry skills. 

The Poplar Schools were designed for around 700 poor children on a 100-acre site at Hutton in Essex. It was a large complex of buildings including a swimming bath, gymnasium, boiler house, water tower, administration block, the school buildings and a superintendent's house. The Poplar Union constructed a 'cottage school' with large family-home style houses laid out like a village, which was considered better for children than the large and unwelcoming Victorian city workhouses. The most famous exponent of this approach was Dr Thomas Barnardo, who established a village home for destitute girls at Barkingside in 1874. The ethos being that children were sent to these sorts of schools to be educated and trained in skills which would allow them to rise above pauperism in later life.

The Hutton school site although relatively well-appointed would have been fairly crowded, with the Poplar Boys' School remaining on site with the DYRMS boys occupying the Poplar Girls' School part of the site (i.e. east of the Green). The Poplar Girls were relocated around Hutton and Brentwood for the duration of the Great War. It is not clear what else of the Poplar Schools' facilities were used by the DYRMS during its stay there, but one assumes the 'Dukies' would have been using teaching spaces and physical exercise facilities – such as the swimming pool and any sports pitches. The school was shown as still being at Hutton in the Army List of December 1918. Lieutenant Colonel John Samuel Dyke MVO had remained the DYRMS Commandant and Quarter Master for the duration of the Great War, relinquishing his post in 1919. Queen Mary visited the DYRMS and Poplar schools at Hutton on 14 May 1919; and the DYRMS remained there until the end of the summer term of 1919, returning to the Guston site at the beginning of autumn term of that year.

As to the Hutton site once the DYRMS had left, well it remained a school for deserving poor children and was eventually closed in 1982. Most of the Poplar Schools' buildings have been demolished and replaced with housing. However, the main school building has survived and is now Bishops Hill Adult Community College, as has the Boys' Dining Hall now administered by Brentwood Borough Council as a community amenity. Rayleigh Road runs east-west along the southern boundary of the former school site and the only other surviving building - the gate-keeper's lodge. All that remains in Hutton as a memorial to the DYRMS' time there is a communal grave marker in Hutton's All Saints Churchyard, remembering the four 'Dukies' who died at the school during its time in Hutton.