Following the death of Thomas Gayer-Anderson in June 1960 ownership of Little Hall passed to Surrey County Council who funded Kingston Art College. It was intended that Kingston art students would use the hostel as well as those from other art colleges in the county.
It is clear from the inventories of the Hall’s contents prepared in 1947 and 1960 that the Gayer-Anderson brothers lived amidst a huge amount of furniture and decorative objects, and this was after they had donated their prized collections of Egyptian and Indian artefacts to museums! Many of these furnishings were removed from the house before the Hall opened as a student’s hostel, but what remained was an extensive selection of furniture and other objects described in great detail in a guidebook that Colonel Gayer-Anderson created in 1956.
The first students arrived on 5th February 1963.They attended in groups of six and generally stayed for two weeks and were expected to carry out work set by their principals at their college. They stayed in the Hall or in the cottages opposite which the brothers had owned. Easels and studio equipment were provided but students were expected to bring their own material for work. The hostel offered full board, and students were told to dress suitably for the evening meal, cooked by Nellie Smith, the housekeeper, at which Reginald and Rosalie Brill presided.
Jenny Rush and Brian Green who arrived at Little Hall on 26th March 1963, remembered Nellie with great fondness. Other students had good memories of the Brills and their friendliness at the rather formal evening meals. During the day the students were left to get on with their painting; Brill does not appear to have closely supervised their work but gave advice when asked. Keith Dunkley another student recalls that the only time he saw Reggie was ‘at mealtimes’; ‘we were left entirely to our own devices.’ This regime clearly worked in his favour; a water colour he did in a railway cutting in a shower of rain was the first painting he had accepted at the Royal Academy Summer exhibition! Brill did agree on one occasion to allow his young artists to observe him at work on a painting in his studio in the Guildhall.
Sue Groombridge, now Broadley, who painted at Little Hall in the Spring of 1963 kindly donated two sketches made at the time. They show the dormitory with its great beam and a figure lying on one of the beds and the outer hall by the door to the garden.
In 1969 Little Hall welcomed its last group of students; the number of applications for places had fallen with Kingston becoming a Metropolitan Borough, leaving just the smaller art colleges as sources.