There are always unusual stories connected to every town and city - some sad, some heroic, some - well, some are just inspiring and humbling, as with the story of the most unlikely pioneer of education in the 19th century, not just in Portsmouth, but eventually across the rest of the country ...

Born in the previous century, a local lad by the name of John Pounds, son of a sawyer in the dockyard, became an apprentice shipwright there at the age of twelve and probably felt he could eventually look to a life of relative comfort, as an experienced and qualified man in a respected trade.

Three years later, in 1781, however, he fell into a dry dock and suffered injuries that crippled him for life; certainly, his intended career as a shipwright had come to a grinding halt.

Young John, however, was made of stern stuff and turned his attention to learning the skills needed to become a shoemaker and, by 1803, he had established his own shop in St Mary Street, in Portsmouth.

His dedication to children possibly stemmed from an encounter he had with a young boy who had a deformed foot, and whose friends subjected him to ridicule as a result. John made a cast of the lad's feet, from which he then produced a pair of specially designed shoes to all but eradicate the boy's limp.

This is reckoned to be the first recorded manufacture and use of "orthopaedic shoes" and in time, the idea was adopted far more widely.

In about 1818, in addition to his work as a shoemaker, John began teaching many of the local poor children and, as his reputation grew, he soon had more than forty children attending his classes.

Primarily, he taught them to read and gave them a grounding in basic arithmetic, but gradually he expanded his curriculum and taught cookery, carpentry and his own main trade, shoemaking, all the time refusing to charge a fee for his efforts.

News of his work began to spread, at first slowly, but then at a greater pace, and it inspired many philanthropists throughout the country to donate funds for similar "Ragged Schools" to be established in their own areas.

Judge by the results, it's often said, and the results from these schools could not be disputed, as more and more children grew up with the skills necessary for jobs in a rapidly modernising world - this fact was not lost on many influencial figures in government and industry, sewing the seeds for a movement for complete national educational reform. It would take some years to bear fruit, but bear fruit it eventually did. and all thanks to a modest little shoemaker with a limp.

John Pounds eventually died in 1839, aged 73, but he had provided a legacy that spread far beyond Portsmouth; "Ragged Schools" as they became known, began to appear in other towns and cities and many youngsters who would have grown up illiterate and fit only for basic labouring or soldiering, owed their opportunity to make a better life to the Portsmouth man who, in 1999, was voted "Man of the Millenium" by readers of a local Portsmouth paper.

The John Pounds Memorial Trust has built a replica of his original workshop (right), in the grounds of the John Pounds Memorial Church; the original building was lost in the Blitz, in 1941.

It's not often that anyone from such an "ordinary" background is able to influence not only the society in which he himself lived, but the society that came after him and John POunds' selflessness laid the foundations, it could be argued, for what would eventually become the modern concept of free education for all.