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In 1542 Sir Thomas White, a Merchant Taylor of London, gave £1,400 to Coventry Corporation, with which they purchased the land and property of the recently dissolved Priory of St. Mary. In his will, Sir Thomas stated that the profits from the estate were to be used to provide Warwick, Coventry, Nottingham, Leicester and Northampton with £40 each year to be given, by the corporations of each town, in loans. These were to provide young men (former apprentices of the city) with capital for nine years, with which to set themselves up in business. He also bequeathed every year £24 among twelve poor Coventrian male householders, £4 to the mayor and recorder, £1 to the steward and town clerk for helping with the charity's accounts and £1 to the Merchant Taylors' Company of London. The amount paid out through the years increased but in 1835, the charity was placed among the city's General Municipal Charities, following almost two centuries of financial mismanagement. By this time, applications for loans (popularly known as the "City Fifties") had not kept pace with the charity's increased interest earned through rising property values, so in 1851 the Attorney-General began proceedings which led to the 1861 scheme whereby £3,000 of the surplus was spent in building a school for the daughters of deceased freemen, known as the Industrial Girls' School, and the rest invested in Sir Thomas White's Pensions Fund. In 1875, £360 of the interest from the charity's income was paid to King Henry VIII's School Foundation every five years, but through the 1882 Scheme, the whole income was paid into the same fund. The Girl's Industrial School closed in 1919, but in 1921 the Sir Thomas White's Educational Foundation began giving exhibitions to girls, favouring deceased freemen's daughters, to enable the recipients to attend schools, universities or training colleges. In 1929, the exhibitions were extended to boys and in 1961, part of the fund was reserved to the Alec Turner Scholarships, which were each worth £1,000 maximum and awarded to freemen or their children who wanted to do postgraduate research.