Peek Hall is named after Sir Henry Peek, who purchased the village of Rousdon in 1872, having made his fortune in the family business importing tea, spices and other groceries. Incidentally, his father also created the Peek Freans biscuit company, which may ring a bell with older aficionados of Bourbon biscuits and Twiglets.
Peek Hall was originally built and funded by Sir Henry as the Village School. Before long, the school was achieving outstanding results, which were attributed to his decision to introduce ‘penny dinners’ (making this probably the first school in the country to provide inexpensive hot dinners). The school’s success was brought to the attention of Parliament by A. J. Mundella in a House of Commons debate:
He [Peek] found that the children were poor and ill-fed, and that they could not walk three or four miles backwards and forwards to school two or three times a day, bringing with them wretched morsels of food for dinner, with satisfactory results. Well, my hon. Friend who set up the school perceived that something must be done in the direction of feeding the children, as well as educating them, and he solved the difficulty in this way. He said—”I will give the children one meal a-day on the five days a-week they attend the school, and they shall pay for that meal one penny a-day.” My hon. Friend is a thorough business man, and he has kept an account of every penny spent and received, and the result is not uninteresting. I hold in my hand a record of the quantity of food supplied. The account of the expenditure was carefully kept to the utmost farthing; and, at the last examination, it was found that the total number of dinners given to the children was 110,221 from October, 1876, to December, 1882, at a total cost of 107,406 pence, and they were good full meals for every child.
Source: Hansard, Thursday 26 July 1883
The school closed in 1939 and the building was gifted to the village by Sir Francis Peek (4th baronet) in 1973, becoming the village hall for Combpyne-Rousdon.
