Chapter Five

Willingly to School

The schools that served British working-class children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been almost universally condemned by historians. They are consistently depicted as places of brutal discipline and rote learning, where children were taught only the basics and trained to become obedient cogs in an industrial machine. This dismal portrait is, however, based almost entirely on information and impressions culled from official sources—from educational bureaucrats rather than their pupils. That is why this history is in need of revision. Administrative directives do not tell us what teachers actually did in the classroom, and government reports cast no light on the attitudes of the children. School inspector Edmund Holmes is often cited as a witness to the oppressiveness of Victorian schools,¹ but no inspector could know intimately the thousands of schoolchildren he was charged with assessing. “Under this regime neither the teacher nor the inspector could get into living touch with the child, or make any serious attempt to understand his character or take the measure of his capacity,” Holmes protested. “The mind, the heart, the whole personality of the child, was an unknown land which we were forbidden to explore. … I took little or no interest in my examinees either as individuals or as human beings, and never tried to explore their hidden depths.”²

If we want to discover how late Victorian and Edwardian working-class children actually experienced school, we must consult them directly. Historians have assumed that the sources for such an investigation simply do not exist.³ In fact, we can draw upon two rich mines of first-hand information. In the late 1960s Paul Thompson and Thea Vigne conducted a University of Essex oral history project which compiled a quota sample representative of the British population in 1911 in terms of sex, social class, regional distribution, and urban–rural balance. The 444 interviewees, all born between 1870 and 1908, belonged to the first generation of schoolchildren to feel the full impact of the 1870 Education Act. The respondents were classified according to their current political affiliations (Table 5.1, p. 147), the religions they were raised in (Table 5.2, p. 147), and their fathers’ class status (Table 5.3, p. 147). This chapter also draws on the autobiographies of working people, most of them belonging to the same 1870–1908 cohort. One valid objection to using memoirs as a source for educational history is that they overrepresent the winners: those children whom the system failed were much less likely to record their lives on paper. For any statistical measure of attitudes toward schooling, we must rely on the more representative Thompson–Vigne sample. Autobiographical sources, which do offer more detailed accounts of school experiences, are used here to flesh out the harder data.

Table 5.1: Party Affiliation
	N	Percent	Percent Less Unspecified
Conservative	78	17.6	21.5
Liberal	72	16.2	19.8
Labour/Socialist	96	21.6	26.4
Apolitical	116	26.1	32.0
Welsh Nationalist	1	.2	.3
Unspecified	81	18.2	–
Total	444	100.0	100.0

Table 5.2: Religion in Which Respondent Was Raised
		N		Percent Less Unspecified
Anglican		172		39.1
Nonconformist of which		220		50.0
Methodist	60		13.6
Presbyterian	34		7.8
Baptist	20		4.5
Congregationalist	15		3.4
Salvation Army	3		.7
Unitarian	1		.2
Unspecified Nonconformist	87		19.7
Catholic		40		9.1
Jewish		3		.7
Atheist		3		.7
None		2		.5
Unspecified		4		–
Total		444		100.0
Note—“Nonconformist” includes Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregationalist, Salvation Army, Unitarian, and unspecified Nonconformist.

Table 5.3: Father’s Class
	N	Percent
A: professionals	15	3.4
B: employers and managers	74	16.7
C: clerks and foremen	36	8.1
D: skilled manual workers	147	33.1
E: semiskilled manual workers	117	26.4
F: unskilled manual workers	52	11.7
G: unclassified	3	.7
Total	444	100.0

As Thompson and Vigne asked their subjects a set of questions about their schooling, it is possible to reconstruct a kind of “poll” assessing the quality of primary education in turn-of-the-century Britain. Drawing on their 444 interviews, I generated all the tables in this chapter except Table 5.10. It should be stressed that this “poll” is not unimpeachably scientific. The interviewees were not all asked the same questions in precisely the same language. They were not asked to check boxes rating their schools as good, bad, or middling. Instead, they had to describe their experiences in their own words; it was then up to me to classify those responses as positive, negative, or mixed.⁴ Rough as it may be, this quantitative method can help us avoid the selective use of evidence—and the evidence used previously to construct our grim image of working-class schools has often been highly selective.⁵

These schools certainly were dismal places in the early nineteenth century. The Anglican National Society (founded 1811) and the Nonconformist British and Foreign School Society (founded 1807) created networks of voluntary schools, which began to receive government aid in 1833. Large numbers of children could be taught the basics through the “monitorial system”, under which each teacher recruited several monitors from among the older pupils, trained them in some very basic lessons, and had them transmit what they had learned to the rest of the class. Of course the quality of instruction was poor, and schools became the kind of educational factories satirized in Hard Times. The church schools naturally emphasized reading and religious indoctrination. Writing, or any other form of self-expression, was not encouraged.

There were, however, definite improvements as the century progressed. The 1870 Education Act supplemented the church schools (which had never served the entire population) with state schools governed by elected school boards. From 1846 there were better facilities for training teachers: brighter students could be apprenticed to schoolmasters as pupil-teachers for five years, their salaries paid by the government. They could then take an examination for the Queen’s Scholarship, which entitled them to formal training at a teachers’ college. Having completed that course they became “certificated teachers,” who received a higher salary and could (for extra fees) train their own pupil-teachers. Sons and daughters of the working classes could now step up into one of the lower professions. By the late nineteenth century, then, working-class children were often taught by teachers from the same social background, who enjoyed some professional respect, and who understood well the obstacles their pupils faced.

In 1862 a “payment by results” scheme was instituted, under which government school subsidies were partly tied to test results. Educational reformers, such as school inspector Matthew Arnold, protested that the system would force teachers to cram pupils narrowly for their examinations. In 1871 the effects of “payment by results” were mitigated by a new set of grants for passes in specific subjects such as history, geography, science, algebra, geometry, and grammar, which tended to expand the curriculum beyond the three Rs. From the 1850s attempts were made to introduce literature into the curriculum, in the form of Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and Swiss Family Robinson. From 1882 students in Standard VI were required to “Read a passage from one of Shakespeare’s historical plays or from some other standard author, or from a history of England.” In 1880 only 12 percent of inspected schools in England and Wales had their own libraries, but by 1900 the proportion was up to 40 percent, with an average of 221 volumes per school.⁶

“Payment by results” was abolished by 1897, but some scholars have claimed that its stultifying effects were felt well into the twentieth century.⁷ Educational historian H. C. Dent himself attended three public elementary schools between 1900 and 1904, and he remembered the classroom as “a place of hatred”:

I can testify from personal experience that the spirit inculcated by that Code was still very much in evidence in the attitudes and actions of both teachers and pupils. With relatively rare exceptions—I was most fortunate in one school—teachers and taught were sworn enemies. The latter resisted by every means known to them (and some of these means were extremely unpleasant) the dessicated diet of irrelevant facts the former insisted in pressing upon them; teachers retaliated with incessant applications of corporal punishment, impartially inflicted for crime, misdemeanour or mistake.⁸

Yet if we turn to the Thompson–Vigne interviews, a very different picture emerges. Literally hundreds of Dent’s contemporaries testify from their personal experience that school was a far happier place. Tables 5.4 (p. 150) and 5.5 (p. 151) group together the middle and upper classes (ABC) and the working classes (DEF). Only those respondents who unambiguously enjoyed or disliked their schools or their teachers were classified “positive” or “negative”: everyone else who gave a response was placed in the “mixed” category. Two-thirds of all working people who expressed an opinion remembered school as a positive experience, a slightly higher proportion than their more affluent contemporaries, and only one out of seven had unhappy memories. In each social class, few respondents regarded teachers as their enemies, and seven out of ten working people rated them positively. About 90 percent of working people who gave a response said they had derived some benefit from their schooling, compared with 95 percent of the upper and middle classes. More than two-thirds of those who attended Board schools or Anglican schools rated them positively. The low negative score for private schools suggests that those classic horror stories of prep school life, George Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys” and Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, do not speak for most privately educated pupils.⁹ Catholic and Nonconformist schools appear to have been less well loved, though the samples are quite small.

Table 5.4: School Experience: Did the Respondent Enjoy School? (in Percent)
	Positive	Negative	Mixed	N
All	66.2	14.7	19.1	429
Sex:
Male	59.7	17.1	23.2	211
Female	72.5	12.4	15.1	218
Class:
ABC	62.8	14.9	22.3	121
DEF	67.5	14.4	18.0	305
A	85.7	.0	14.3	14
B	56.3	21.1	22.5	71
C	66.7	8.3	25.0	36
D	69.2	12.6	18.2	143
E	70.3	15.3	14.4	111
F	56.9	17.6	25.5	51
Party:
Conservative	68.8	13.0	18.2	77
Liberal	75.0	11.8	13.2	68
Labour/Socialist	61.7	12.4	25.5	94
Apolitical	61.1	15.0	23.9	113
Religion:
Anglican	63.9	12.7	23.5	166
Nonconformist	69.3	14.6	16.0	212
Catholic	57.5	22.5	20.0	40
Religion and class:
Anglican ABC	52.3	18.2	29.5	44
Anglican DEF	67.8	10.7	21.5	121
Nonconformist ABC	67.2	14.9	17.9	67
Nonconformist DEF	70.8	13.9	15.3	144
Catholic ABC	75.0	.0	25.0	8
Catholic DEF	53.1	28.1	18.8	32
Schools:
All schools	69.4	13.2	17.4	402
Board schools	68.8	15.1	16.1	199
Anglican schools	72.0	11.4	16.7	132
Catholic schools	58.3	20.8	20.8	24
Dissenting schools	57.1	21.4	21.4	14
Private schools	66.7	9.1	24.2	33
Dame schools	100.0	.0	.0	3
Note—N excludes respondents who did not address the question.

Table 5.5: Rating Teachers: Did the Respondent Like the Teachers? (in Percent)
	Positive	Negative	Mixed	N
All	66.5	6.8	26.8	385
Sex:
Male	58.7	8.2	33.2	184
Female	73.6	5.5	20.9	201
Class:
ABC	58.5	2.8	38.7	106
DEF	69.6	8.0	22.5	276
A	66.7	.0	33.3	12
B	60.3	3.2	36.5	63
C	51.6	3.2	45.2	31
D	69.8	4.7	25.6	129
E	70.7	9.1	20.2	99
F	66.7	14.6	18.8	48
Party:
Conservative	67.6	5.9	26.5	68
Liberal	60.9	3.1	35.9	64
Labour/Socialist	66.7	10.7	22.6	84
Apolitical	68.6	5.7	25.7	105
Religion:
Anglican	62.3	7.5	30.1	166
Nonconformist	72.0	5.2	22.8	193
Catholic	61.1	7.5	30.1	36
Religion and class:
Anglican ABC	43.2	5.4	51.4	37
Anglican DEF	68.5	8.3	23.1	108
Nonconformist ABC	66.1	1.7	32.2	59
Nonconformist DEF	74.4	6.3	18.8	133
Catholic ABC	75.0	.0	25.0	8
Catholic DEF	57.1	7.1	35.7	28
Note—N excludes respondents who did not address the question.

A Better-Than-Nothing Institute

Only three respondents attended dame schools, so here we must rely on the assessments of autobiographers. “Dame school” is a generic term applied to any working-class private school. Not all of them were conducted by women: often they were a last resort for workingmen whom accident, illness, or old age had rendered otherwise unemployable. Until the late nineteenth century, anyone could set up as a schoolmaster in his or her own home and take in paying pupils, though inspectors protested that such schools were good for little more than child-minding. Once universal compulsory education was introduced in 1880, schools that did not meet government standards could be shut down, and dame schools were swiftly harried out of existence.

Phil Gardner and other educational historians have attempted to rehabilitate the dame school. They argue that it offered a less rigid, more “progressive” style of schooling, free of evangelical propaganda, where each child could learn at his own pace. Parents were willing to pay extra for such schools, where they exercised consumer sovereignty over their children’s education, and could pull them out of class whenever they were needed for work or chores. The fact that educational bureaucrats decried such schools only reflected their own middle-class prejudices, as well as a fear of competition.¹⁰

Yet the inadequacies of dame schools are undeniable. An 1838 survey of sixty-three such schools in Westminster found that, though 425 of their 721 pupils were over five years old, nearly half were taught nothing more than spelling. Only twenty-one were learning arithmetic, only twenty-five grammar. None of the schools had maps or globes, and many had only one book.¹¹ There is no question that many working-class parents voted with their weekly pennies to send their children to dame schools, for whatever reason. But schools do not exist to serve parents: they must ultimately be judged by their students, looking back across a lifetime of experience. And the verdict of working-class memoirists is not far short of unanimous: they did not mourn the passing of dame schools.¹²

A typical (and vivid) account was offered by Wellingborough shoemaker and sanitary inspector John Askham (b. 1825). He warned the reader not to imagine “an airy and commodious room, such as those of the infant schools of the present day [1893]. … Our schoolroom was the one and only down-stairs room of the dwelling (excepting a coal-hole, of which more anon,) and not only served for parlour, kitchen, and hall, but for schoolroom and all.” It was cluttered with a fantastic collection of ancient furniture, and as for the dame:

Her mode of teaching would scarcely do for this age; it consisted chiefly of oral instruction, and I am afraid her spelling and pronunciation were sadly wide of the mark—hymns, I remember, she called humes, and bishops bushops—the number 6 she spelled s-i-c-k-s, and so on. But learning was a secondary consideration; to be kept out of harm’s way and from troubling our parents were the main considerations. Her chief occupation was knitting stockings; that seemed to be her special mission upon earth. She used to sit with a perfect armoury of long steel needles projecting from her side as if they sprang from her body, and a large ball of worsted, knitting for ever and ever. She was an epitome of old errors, a repository of recipes, a cyclopaedia of superstition. … Her chief reading was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, of which she possessed an old dog-eared copy, with wood-cuts of the early Christians hung up with hooks in their flesh, or being boiled in cauldrons, burnt at the stake, or being cooked before cheerful fires.

She also punished her charges with threats, a dunce’s cap, and, as an ultimate deterrant, confinement in that coal-hole. That may help to explain why Askham, after the 1870 Education Act, became one of the first members of the Wellingborough School Board.¹³

Such stories can be reproduced indefinitely. Robert Collyer (b. 1823) was yanked out of one school when his mother learned that he had been set to work scraping potatoes.¹⁴ William Gifford (b. 1756) and Francis Place (b. 1771) were taught nothing but a spelling book.¹⁵ W. J. Hocking, son of a Cornish carpenter, could only read the simplest sentences after two years of instruction.¹⁶ “The only thing I remember learning there was to hold skeins of wool for Miss Annie or Miss Hettie to wind into balls,” wrote a Southend printer (b. 1848), who regretted that he had come of age before the advent of the Board school.¹⁷ William Cameron (b. c. 1785), son of a mashman at a Scottish distillery, had a full nine years of virtually worthless schooling:

The teacher was an old decrepit man, who had tried to be a nailer, but at that employment he could not earn his bread. He then attempted to teach a few children, but for this undertaking he was quite unfit; writing and arithmetic were to him secrets as dark as death, and as for English, he was short-sighted, and a word of more than two or three syllables was either passed over, or it got a term of his own making. At this school I continued four years, and was not four months advanced in learning, although I was as far advanced as my teacher.

He then wasted five more years at another school, where an equally incompetent teacher crammed the children’s heads with various catechisms “till our little judgements were so mixed up, that, in a few years, I could not answer a question in any of them. All this time was lost, the scholar robbed of his learning, and the parents of their money, through the teacher being ashamed to say ‘he could go no further.’” With that intellectual training, Cameron spent much of his adult life as a beggar and died in the Glasgow Poorhouse, though he himself worked for a time as a schoolmaster.¹⁸

One Slaithwaite boy characterized his 1d.-a-week school as “A better-than-nothing institute.” It was conducted by an old woman (“when they could do nothing else they could keep a school”) out of her married son’s house. She had a leather lash tied to a walking stick and sometimes used it. Nothing much was taught beyond the alphabet, and the pupils often slipped away when she dozed off. “We began, continued, and ended in Standard 0,” but he liked the old woman, and was sorry that she had to go into the workhouse when she could no longer teach. He went on to the stricter discipline of a National school: though he described it as something out of Nicholas Nickleby, he had to admit that he learned much more there. In 1926, having worked as a school visitor, he could vouch that “The contrast of present day order, obedience, and mutual respect between teacher and taught, and the high standard of mental attainment contrasting with past time rumpus and slow progress is as daylight to twilight, if not as daylight to darkness.”¹⁹

Shoemaker’s son Allan Jobson attended two of the last surviving dame schools, in London around the turn of the century. At one, the schoolmistress “was like Queen Victoria in a play, always off-stage. She had one or two pupil teachers who did the work, which was but a pretence at teaching, and I was given small sums to do yet never instructed as to how they might produce an answer.” At a second school he was read to from an old magazine (“I think the tale was Queechy”), as painless as it was valueless.²⁰

Probably the greatest social service performed by such schools was that they provided work for the otherwise unemployable. John Harris (b. 1820), son of a Cornish smallholder, learned his letters from a crippled miner with a wooden stump for a leg:

In those days any shattered being wrecked in the mill or the mine, if he could read John Bunyan, count fifty backwards, and scribble the squire’s name, was considered good enough for a pedagogue; and when he could do nothing else, was established behind a low desk in a school. I do not think John Robert’s acquirements extended far beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic; and I doubt if he knew what the word geography meant.

Still, he taught Harris the basics—enough to become a preacher, a Sunday school superintendent, and a published poet.²¹

It has also been suggested that dame schools were at least adequate to the job of providing day care for very young children. In fact they failed even at that for Joseph Burgess (b. 1853), a founding member of the Labour Party:

In my mind’s eye, I can see her now, making her porritch, and repeating to us The Lord’s Prayer, while she stirred them over the fire. Near the hearthstone, she had a long rod, which would reach across the house, and it was a custom of hers to break off in the middle of the prayer, and use the rod vigorously on any boy who was not paying attention to the prayer. After laying the rod about some unruly boy, she would pick up with the prayer exactly where she had broken off.²²

Another difficulty with that argument is that dame schools often catered to older children, for whom they were a complete waste. One Staffordshire workhouse boy (b. 1860) at age nine was taught (or rather, minded) by a woman who attended to her washing while he studied on his own. He did some complicated sums but had no way of checking them, because neither his teacher nor her son (a night worker at a colliery) could do them. His father decided that was not worth 4d. a week, and sent him to work on a farm for £2 a year.²³

Radical artisan Christopher Thomson (b. 1799) became a passionate activist for working-class education partly because he did not get much instruction from his schoolmistress. “This ancient had the reputation of ‘keeping a good school,’” he noted, “which goodness consisted mainly in having a large number of pupils—so large, that the ‘letter learning’ was all she could afford time for, except drilling into the young mind a goodly array of ghost stories.”²⁴ Frederick Rogers, a dame school boy, made his first foray into politics agitating for the 1870 Education Act, which he considered necessary euthanasia for inferior private schools.²⁵ He was only one of many Victorian workingmen who regretted that Board schools had not existed when they were children. “I now see Board schools almost equalling the colleges of some of the older universities,” proclaimed a Tunstall potter in the 1890s. “Even poor children now receive a better education than what I heard ‘Tom Hughes’ once say he received when a boy at much greater cost.”²⁶ Walter Freer (b. 1846), a Glasgow power-loom tenter, could not understand why Lord Shaftesbury opposed free education: “For me education consisted of three months’ tuition at a penny school. Every Monday morning the school-master collected our pennies, then left us to do whatever we wanted, while he went out to get tipsy. I left school, unable to write, and able to read only the simplest words.”²⁷ George Lansbury (b. 1859) was not so hard on his old teachers, who apparently did convey the basics of writing and arithmetic, but he did not regret the extinction of dame schools:

Children of to-day, no matter where they live or to what class they belong, ought to bless the memory of W. E. Forster who introduced compulsory education. School is now [1928] a place, not for learning and discipline only, but for individual development. The teaching profession, taken as a whole, is one of which we are all proud. The enormous amount of voluntary work given by teachers in working-class districts teaching music, games, and sports of all kinds to both boys and girls, is beyond all praise.²⁸

“Schools have changed considerably from my childhood, and totally for the better” remarked miller James Saunders (b. 1844). “Sometimes now [after 1888] when I see the opportunities children have I feel a little jealous.”²⁹ Elizabeth Flint’s mother had hated her dame school, where the cane was wielded freely and she hardly learned to read, but Elizabeth herself was “enthralled” by the East End school she attended during the First World War: “If you listened a whole new world could open out before you in the classroom.”³⁰ In 1895 a Suffolk farm laborer gave thanks that education had improved vastly since 1850, when even church schools

were very little better than dame schools. Many of them were held in cottages which had been adapted for the purpose, but the rooms were gloomy and unfit to accommodate a number of children. The teachers had to make all sorts of shifts, owing to the absence of suitable apparatus. … The Bible was the general reading book. Maps were in some cases hung on the walls, apparently by way of ornament, as there were teachers who did not know how to use them.

The parish had 900 inhabitants and property assessed at £5,000 a year, with a benefice worth about £900, but the rector, squire, and parish each contributed only £5 annually to the school. The teachers were mostly untrained females paid 5s. to 10s. a week; the schoolmaster earned only a little more than that. “The farmers as a class were dead-set against the school. They often said, ‘We don’t want to have children educated above their station’; though there was but little chance of that with a schoolmaster at 12s. a week.” That schoolmaster estimated that most boys had only two years of formal education, and two-thirds of them left school without knowing how to read or write properly.³¹

Possibilities of Infinitude

In contrast, the 1870 Education Act produced a school building boom. Twentieth-century architects and historians would denounce them as ugly run-down brick cubes, but for late Victorian children they were brand new and marvelously equipped. Engraver Frank Galton (b. 1867) first attended a parish school in St. Pancras, where all boys’ classes were in one large room. The teachers were incompetent and miserably paid, and one of them could only maintain discipline “by sheer brute strength.” At age ten he transferred to a mint condition Board school, where he enjoyed professionally trained teachers, orderly classrooms, and French lessons.³² His contemporaries offered equally loving testimonials:

… a wonder building, sumptuous and indeed palatial beyond belief, with its large classrooms, brand-new equipment so different from the mouldy patchwork of the [old] school, the desks with lids.³³

We all thought it marvellous, judging by the standards of those days. It was a fine building …: it had flushed toilets, heated water pipes in the class-rooms, and a playground, asphalt of course, but, alas, no playing-field with soft green grass.³⁴

… the smell of copal oak varnish as the big windows, desks, partitions and fittings were of pitch-pine well and truly varnished, even today if I get a whiff of oak varnish I remember the new school. Two other features of the school of which we were justifiably proud was that it was the first school in Bolton to be lit by this new electricity, the other feature is that it was the first in central heating with radiators and a constant supply of hot water for domestic purpose.³⁵

Even when the physical plant was dingy, the curriculum could be innovative and exciting. The daughter of a Sheffield flatware stamper (b. 1911) described her first classroom as

sunless and gloomy because it overlooked a prison-like quadrangle surrounded by high buildings. But we did not need the sunshine, for we made our own. School was sheer bliss, and I could not wait to get there. By some miracle, the teachers had achieved a balance between formal and informal methods, a technique which could not be improved upon today [1984], and we learned quickly.³⁶

A London gasfitter’s son (b. 1884) recalled that his Higher Grade School offered “an unceasing panorama of knowledge … a harvest of kindly instruction coming little short of a college education. At ten we were doing what secondary children do at 14.”³⁷ Another boy was taught to love music by the future operatic star Frank Mullings.³⁸ In an advanced class (age thirteen) at a London County Council school in the Surrey Docks district, John Edmonds (b. 1911) had a teacher who gave students copies of textbooks to take home, taught them how to do research in a library, and brought in newspapers for information on current affairs. Edmonds was also taken to the National Gallery, the Tate, and the Victoria and Albert—the beginning of a lifelong love affair with museums.³⁹ Frank Goss (b. 1896), the son of a pianomaker and dressmaker, loved his teachers in spite of excessive corporal punishment. Among poor children, he explained,

teachers were thought to belong to a higher social order than their pupils. Their private lives away from school, to the extent that we ever thought of them, were conceived to be on a higher plane than our “bread and margarine” lives; a world of gaiety and fashion, an educated cultured world such as we might read about in the best Victorian literature, this was the life we thought to be theirs. We had nothing but gratitude for their patronage in bearing with us over the long days and weeks of our tutelage.

He had reason to be grateful: his teacher took some pupils to see the unknown wonderland of the City of London, treating each child to a bun and a cup of tea.⁴⁰

English literature was the subject most often singled out for praise.⁴¹ One Essex headmaster, who read aloud from Macbeth, The Pickwick Papers, and The Water Babies, so profoundly inspired an ironmoulder’s son that he spent the next forty-seven years studying with the WEA “to try to catch up” (Interview 12). Historians usually describe rural education in this period as hopelessly inadequate, but every day Spike Mays (b. 1907) ran to his East Anglia school, where he studied Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, and Tales From Shakespeare. His headmaster, was “a kindly, cultured gentleman whose mind was well-stocked with classics.”⁴² “Thinking back, I am amazed at the amount of English literature we absorbed in those four years,” recalled Ethel Clark (b. 1909), a Gloucestershire railway worker’s daughter, “and I pay tribute to the man who made it possible. … Scott, Thackeray, Shakespeare, Longfellow, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rudyard Kipling were but a few authors we had at our finger-tips. How he made the people live again for us!”⁴³ H. M. Tomlinson (b. 1872/73), a successful author and dockworker’s son, credited his East End Board school with encouraging free expression in composition classes and giving him a solid literary footing in the Bible, Shakespeare, and Scott. “In my childhood, I never met another youngster who could not read,” he recalled. “Some of them could be so excited by the printed page that they passed on the fun they had found, and thus … I was introduced to Mayne Reid, and again to Harrison Ainsworth, with The Headless Horseman and Rookwood.”⁴⁴

Even schools that did nothing else well usually managed to instill a passion for literature. Edgar Wallace (b. 1875), the adopted son of a Billingsgate fish porter, remembered attending

A big yellow barracks of a place, built (or rumour lied) on an old rubbish-pit into which the building was gradually sinking. … I was a fairly intelligent boy, and I am trying to remember now just what I did learn. At geography, roughly the shape of England; nothing about the United States, nothing about the railway systems of Europe. I learnt China had two great rivers, the Yangtse-kiang and Hoangho, but which is which I can’t remember. I knew the shape of Africa and that it was an easy map to draw. I knew nothing about France except that Paris was on the Seine. I knew the shape of Italy was like a top-booted leg, and that India was in the shape of a pear; but except that there had been a mutiny in that country, it was terra incognita to me.

History: The ancient Britons smeared themselves with woad and paddled round in basket-shaped boats. William the Conqueror came to England in 1066. Henry VIII had seven—or was it eight?—wives. King Charles was executed for some obscure reason, and at a vague period of English history there was a War of the Roses.

Chemistry: If you put a piece of heated wire in oxygen—or was it hydrogen? —it glowed very brightly. If you blow through a straw into lime water, the water becomes cloudy.

And so on through religion (“No more than I learnt at Sunday school”), drawing (“Hours of hard work in an attempt to acquire proficiency in an art for which I had no aptitude”), and arithmetic (“the ability to tot columns of figures with great rapidity”). But in the midst of this wasteland was an electric moment, when the teacher read aloud The Arabian Nights. “The colour and beauty of the East stole through the foggy windows of Reddin’s Road School. Here was a magic carpet indeed that transported forty none too cleanly little boys into the palace of the Caliphs, through the spicy bazaars of Bagdad, hand in hand with the king of kings.” And every so often

There were golden days—poetry days. We learnt the “Inchcape Rock,” of that Sir Ralph the Rover who sailed away

“And scoured the seas for many a day.

At last grown rich with plunder’s store,

He steered his course for Scotland’s shore.”

And Casabianca, and Brave Horatius, and so by degrees to the Master. I learnt whole scenes of Macbeth and Julius Caesar and Hamlet, and could—and did—recite them with gusto on every and any excuse.

Wallace’s grounding in literature “was of the greatest service in after life,” when he became a staggeringly popular novelist.⁴⁵

Educational histories tend to assume that official curricula were actually carried out in the classroom, but students recall imaginative teachers who improvised. John Allaway (b. 1902), who went on to become a journeyman fitter and WEA leader, had a teacher who disregarded the timetable that prescribed one hour each for history, geography, and English. Long before the word “interdisciplinary” had been invented, he taught them all together as one subject: “Although I never heard him mention the unity of knowledge, [he] vividly brought it home to us in his classroom teaching. … As we worked he moved round among us asking questions and giving advice and encouragement.” He introduced the class to Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and The Call of the Wild

for their own sake and as models to follow in creative writing, which he set us to do. Gathered round him we would listen to readings from these books and discuss key passages. Once in Art session he dropped an old boot on my desk and said, “Make a pen and ink sketch of this.” It seemed an odd request, since the only Art I had previously done in school consisted of copying pictures from instructional cards.⁴⁶

Mark Grossek (b. 1888), son of a Jewish immigrant tailor, concluded that his Board school in dismal Southwark was in many respects superior to the genteel grammar schools he later attended on scholarship. While public school boys struggled with Latin, he was treated to Byron, Shakespeare, clay modelling, basketweaving, woodwork, tonic sol-fa singing lessons, and a science class with all kinds of interesting apparatus and explosions.⁴⁷ George Hitchin (b. c. 1912), raised by an impoverished Durham miner, affirmed that his teachers accomplished great things, though they had no free time or staff-room for classroom preparation:

With few exceptions the teachers were capable and imaginative. They worked hard, for they were expected to teach all the subjects in the curriculum with the minimum amount of equipment and in the meanest accommodation to an uncooperative class of forty or so urchins. Not one of our teachers had any academic distinctions—one or two, I believe, were even unqualified; but each knew his job, namely, how to impart knowledge, in as interesting a way as possible, to his pupils. If they were not always successful, this was due more to the attitude of the boys than to any fault in teaching methods.⁴⁸

Alfred Green (b. 1910), who rose from poverty to become a Sheffield councillor and justice of the peace, recalled that

Whilst the schools were sadly overcrowded, with classes at a minimum of 50 scholars, and the equipment poor and insufficient, at least the teachers did their best for us. … Here and there were men and women of character and vision, who in spite of all the difficulties they had to contend with, gave intelligent and devoted service in the teaching and care of their charges. … School was not all boredom and discouragement; this there was in plenty, but there were other things too. … Some of the teachers, quite frankly, were simply inadequate, probably reflecting the paucity of their own education and the training they had received, as well as the difficult circumstances in which they had to work: a few, if not actual sadists, were tyrants; and others—these to my mind worst of all—were severe because they were toadies to the system and the times. … However, many of the teachers … brought to their work a cheerfulness and sense of humour and kindliness that bore witness to their devotion to humanity.

There was also the headmaster who assigned him to write an essay on “My Ambition.” In “a white-hot enthusiasm,” Green described his dream of becoming a Labour prime minister, in “an amazing miscellany of fact and fancy, of glowing hopes and clumsy expression, of insight and sheer ignorance.” The paper was handed back drenched in red ink (“like a bloody battlefield”) with the comment: “This is certainly the most interesting essay I have received for some time, but your English and spelling are simply appalling.” Green’s self-esteem was not even dented: “I was so accustomed to adverse comment on my work, that this did not greatly trouble me, but the praise he gave to the ideas independent of the form of expression, sent my spirits soaring into a seventh heaven!” Another teacher, with artistic talents, dazzled the students with colored chalk pictures on a blackboard strip that encircled the classroom. One head teacher awed his students into wide-eyed attention with his upright manner, his bamboo cane (“rarely used”), and an intolerance of laziness (“Come, Green lad, this won’t do. The workers will need the best leaders they can get for the future”). He also had a genius for shock tactics:

He made a great impression on me one day, when he strode into the classroom carrying a copy of Pears Encyclopaedia in his hand, demanding that we ask him any question of fact, to which he promised to give us the answer from this book. Our minds immediately became alert, and most of us were sufficiently crafty to choose answers likely to be answerable from such a book. So the questions flowed thick and fast: what was the capital of such a country, or what was such a river’s length, or who was Prime Minister in a certain year, or on what date did the war end—the usual run of questions that could be summoned at short notice. The pages of the book were quickly turned and the answers given with speed and accuracy—a veritable virtuosity of performance! At length he snapped the book closed, and held it up in triumph: “There you are, lads,” he said, “worth its weight in gold, isn’t it?” Dazed and fascinated, we obediently chanted, “Yes, Sir.” “Right,” he said, thrusting the book into the hands of a startled lad in the front row, “Here is the book, now give me its weight in gold!” A deadly silence fell on us all. A critical person might regard this as cheap humour at the expense of defenceless children. We did not see it that way: we knew that we had fallen into a trap, but we knew too that there was something to be learned from it. What he had done within the compass of a few minutes was illustrate that knowledge is to hand if only we will take the trouble to use it, and at the same time he had warned us that every statement or thing was not to be taken at its face value. In a vivid way he illustrated what was meant by an enquiring mind, and a critical spirit; not bad going in an elementary school of the twenties!⁴⁹

T. A. Jackson credited his Board school teachers with starting him on his career as a Marxist philosopher. They introduced him to Greek mythology, “which in time brought me to Frazer and the immensities and infinitudes of The Golden Bough, and all that that implies.” Of course,

They gave me no notion at the time of any such thing as a revolutionary philosophy. Rather the reverse since they left only the conservative impression that the universe was so structured that it could not by any contrivance be altered. But indirectly they fed my appetite for wonders insofar as they enabled me to see possibilities of an infinitude of happenings and combinations hidden beneath the exterior aspect of even the most ordinary things. So far this fed my romanticism—my liking for things unusual and extraordinary, for things as they had been, and might still be in places remote and all but inaccessible.⁵⁰

In rural areas, where education had been particularly inadequate before 1870, the new generation of teachers could have a revolutionary impact. Fred Gresswell attended a Lincolnshire village school where no real education was accomplished until a dynamic new schoolmaster took over around 1900. On his first day the pupils were so disruptive that he spent all morning marching them in and out of the classroom to teach basic discipline. With only one female assistant, he was able to give each child individual attention, helping some to win scholarships and encouraging others to emigrate. The students were soon performing concerts and a scene from The Merchant of Venice, though Shakespeare was unknown to most of the villagers. In the evenings, the schoolmaster conducted adult literacy classes for farm laborers, including Gresswell’s father. One school manager, a prosperous farmer, predictably complained that the children were being overeducated—and his fears were not groundless. Though it was a Church of England school, wrote Gresswell,

Elementary education weakened the hold of evangelism over children of my generation. Though we had been “converted,” we soon found that not only did this form of worship mean nothing to us, but that we were no worse if we did without it. In other words, day school teaching gave us a code of conduct which superseded the purely emotional influence of the chapel. Moreover, the local preachers were on the whole uneducated, and they had no power of reasoning which could appeal to children who had had some systematic instruction.⁵¹

Ironmoulder’s son Joseph Stamper left his Lancashire school in 1899, just as “a new kind of teacher was coming along,” more inclined to entertain pupils than to cane them. One schoolmaster won a lifetime of gratitude by presenting Stamper (a future novelist) with a dictionary. It was, as he later appreciated, a “silent revolution.”⁵² Arthur Goffin (b. 1879), a compositor’s son, concluded that his Board school education “was remarkably good” compared with the fact-grubbing that children were offered in 1933:

In my time and day we learnt facts too—limited, granted, but in addition to learning them we were taught how to assimilate and make use of the knowledge thus gained. We were taught direction and guidance. We were taught to use sense and application, and acquired the soundness, contentment, control and stability which most middle-aged people possess today. … [One teacher] had always something beyond the textbook for us, and he drove his lessons home by unforgettable—at least to me—anecdotes and stories. … The other teachers, too, were splendid and we grew to love and respect them. … I can recall so many things they said which I realized in later life have helped me in different ways.⁵³

Many alumni felt that the Board schools, with all their limitations, provided a solid foundation for lifetime education. They taught basic learning skills, introduced the best in English literature, then set their pupils free at adolescence to read on their own. “One advantage of leaving school at an early age is that one can study subjects of your own choice,” wrote Frank Argent (b. 1899), son of a Camberwell laborer. Taking advantage of the public library and early Penguins, he ranged all over the intellectual landscape: Freudian psychology, industrial administration, English literature, political history, Blake, Goethe, Mill, Nietzsche, the Webbs, Bertrand Russell’s Essays in Scepticism, and Spengler’s Decline of the West. It all prepared him for multiple careers as a trade unionist, a factory inspector, and a writer for taxi industry journals.⁵⁴ Lancashire weaver Elizabeth Blackburn (b. 1902) conceded that

By present [1977] standards our horizons were very limited and our education, linked up as it was to our economic conditions, provided little room for the cultivation of leisure pursuits. But I left school at thirteen with a sound grounding in the basic arts of communication, reading and writing, and I could “reckon up” sufficiently to cope with shopping and domestic accounts and calculate my cotton wages. … I had gained some knowledge of the Bible, a lively interest in literature and, most important, some impetus to learn. To a State school and its devoted teachers I owe a great debt, and I look back on it with much affection.

She proceeded to an evening institute course in English literature, and by the rhythm of the looms she memorized all of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Milton’s “Lycidas,” and Gray’s Elegy. She discovered the ancient Greeks in the home of a neighbor, a self-educated classicist with six children, and a Sunday School teacher introduced her to the plays of Bernard Shaw.⁵⁵ While attending her looms she silently analyzed the character of Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester, “sometimes to the detriment of my weaving!”⁵⁶ She studied commercial arithmetic at a technical college, classical music with the WEA, and Esperanto at an Adult School; she also pursued residential courses at Woodbrooke College and at Manchester’s Cooperative College. And she accomplished all that well before her thirtieth birthday.⁵⁷

Board school alumni could indulge their intellectual passions with far more freedom than the typical graduate student today. Once Richard Hoggart (b. 1918) began studying English at the University of Leeds, he had to suppress his natural enthusiasm for the subject. “I could jump the fences as required and give a passable imitation of understanding,” enough to get a First Class Degree, but he never really grasped Shakespeare until he found Macbeth in a North African army barracks in 1942:

It was as though, to get through to the point at university at which you sat those eight or nine papers on different periods and genres, you could not allow the force of the works to flood into you; you might have been pushed off course. Or as though someone writing about many varieties of physical love had suffered powerful but temporary inhibitions in the practice of it. You did not for those three years dare to release yourself to the power of the works; you controlled your responses to them, almost unconsciously.⁵⁸

Of course, even students who praised their schools overall often admitted that certain subjects got short shrift. Autobiographical evidence suggests that the same schools that so splendidly introduced children to the English classics usually reduced geography to the memorization of place names. History rarely dealt with modern times or, indeed, anything other than English kings and queens. “Scratch us, even now, and we’ll break out into a rash of Browning, Wordsworth, Shelley, Milton; and, of course, the Bard,” wrote Amy Gomm (b. 1899), daughter of an Oxfordshire electrician. But “Geography was a fairly sketchy affair. History was a matter of battles and kings, and trying to remember their dates. We’d hear, in passing, of certain villains who ‘rose up in revolt.’ It was years before we realized that they might have had a point of view. We didn’t learn real history.”⁵⁹ In the early 1920s one south London school was still using a history text published around 1900, which included no pictures except monarchial portraits and stopped short at George IV.⁶⁰ C. H. Rolph complained that

never once, in my twelve years of schooling in various parts of London, did I come across a teacher or a textbook able (or perhaps permitted) to convey the fascination and excitement of those twin subjects, history and geography. They were twin bores: heavy-hearted subjects, dull, stripped of nearly all the magic and the human interest to be discovered years later in “adult education.” The history lessons were, it seemed, judged to be sufficiently human if they were larded with fancy legends like Alfred and the Cakes, Bruce and the Spider, Canute and the Tide, and Turnagain Whittington. … What history I ever learned I was to get, in due course (a euphemism for middle age), from Gibbon, Froude, Macaulay, Wells, Toynbee and the marvellous teams of scholars who compiled the Oxford and Cambridge Modern Histories.⁶¹

Without that historical background, literature could be hard to decipher. Jack Common recalled that his mother once bought him a secondhand and severely abridged Life of Johnson for 1d., and he had to read it several times before he even partially absorbed it. He did adopt the great man as his hero and model, introducing Johnsonian flourishes into his school essays, but

the world of Doctor Johnson was so unknown to me, I couldn’t really see what he was trying to do. He wrote a dictionary—yes, well, you’d only to look at a dictionary to appreciate that that was an heroic job all right. He knew all the words, give him that. And he always won his arguments. But what were they about? Why were they so important to all these gladiators of the verbal arena? Our history lessons, you see, had nowhere near reached the eighteenth century. We were still bogged among the Plantagenets, and by the same method of slow torture employed in the issue of books for class-reading, it was all too likely that next term would find us starting the Plantagenets all over again. In fact it might easily take us as long to get down the centuries as it did the folks who originally made the trip, except that in one class or another we were bound to encounter a teacher who dropped us quickly down a ladder of dates into an era he had been reading up on.⁶²

There certainly were some pupils who found the classroom stifling, especially the endless lessons in copperplate.⁶³ Edna Bold (b. 1904) felt “incarcerated” in her Manchester Board school:

Not for long could the creature withstand such confinement and the dust-laden atmosphere of the place. … Visually, aurally, mentally stultified, the days passed, featureless and painless. Dry as dust knowledge was literally poured into colander-like craniums, and any wretched, under-par child was expected to absorb that which refused to be contained. Its self-respect, its confidence, its love of life was eroded. To love life, to live life was not the prime function of EDUCATION.⁶⁴

Given the very large classes common in such schools, mass memorization was often the only workable teaching strategy. Jack Lanigan (b. 1890) recalled that his overcrowded classroom accommodated five grades: “Under such conditions each individual scholar had to learn how to concentrate on his own class and lesson, and shut his eyes and ears to what was taking place in the other classes.” Yet Lanigan concluded that the system, within its limits, worked: “I must admit I did not know of any children of my age who could not read or write, do arithmetic and know something about history and geography.”⁶⁵ Another memoirist dismissed his Catholic school as “totally inadequate” but conceded that “although there were many ragged and neglected children in the poorer parts of large cities and towns [in 1915], there were not many illiterates among the younger generations.”⁶⁶ After 1950, old-age pensioners commonly insisted that they had actually received a better education than their grandchildren. “We were taught the three Rs, which is more than they are today [1956]” is a typical growl.⁶⁷ In 1978 one Catholic school graduate recalled that she was not fond of her spinster teachers but admitted “they did their job most conscientiously, and I consider that even though most children left school at 12–14, we were far better educated than the present day children.”⁶⁸ In 1972 a former workhouse boy, who flourished under the semi-military discipline at his Poor Law school, dismissed modern education as “balderdash … the principal reason why a very large percentage of young people are almost completely illiterate when they leave school and another large percentage semi-literate. … The education the boys received at this Poor Law school was sound and prepared a boy for a fair start in life. The three Rs were properly dinned into the minds of all.”⁶⁹

Not all working-class children disliked rote learning. For many, it was both easy and fun; some even enjoyed the endless practice of penmanship. “Did we find it drudgery? Not so,” one woman (b. 1890) asserts. “There was pride in achievement, and we all worked to get the word of praise that would follow our ‘best work.’”⁷⁰ “There was much repetition,” admitted a Bermondsey tanner’s son (b. 1883), “but we didn’t notice the drudgery of it all. Children, young children particularly, love habit formation and they like what would be regarded as drudgery by those older. They love to follow, adults love to lead.”⁷¹ “The continuous chanting of so many facts was a hopeless mumbo jumbo to me at first,” recalled the son (b. 1878) of a Suffolk factory foreman, “but gradually light dawned and I began to see what it was all about and enjoyed finding out more. The chief aim seemed to be to give children sufficient education to carry on the life of the village, which was at that time a self-contained unit.”⁷² “To some modern theorists the chanting of [mathematical] tables is shocking,” wrote the son (b. c. 1911) of a Cornish fisherman, “but we enjoyed it—and learned the tables. … Pendlebury’s Arithmetic books were old and fusty in appearance, but we worked enormous numbers of examples,” and when some pupils went on to secondary school they were already doing math at School Certificate level.⁷³ The son (b. c. 1930) of a Devon farmhand wrote:

There was a time when I thought there was little value in … the alphabetic chanting about cats and mats, … but the circumstances were so different in those days. There were not the books and other aids that tend to clutter up today’s [1983] classrooms. There was no TV, and just the beginnings of radio. I never saw any advisers, or remedial teachers, or other supporting staff, and there could not have been much in the way of encouragement or refreshment for the workers at the “chalkface”. So [our teachers] found themselves invested with numbers of country children, a good proportion of whom were not bright. On a restricted site, with few props, such teachers had to ring the changes to keep us occupied and educated. They did this; and more. The drills I once thought tiresome, if not useless, were conditioning us into a work routine which we were going to need. I often feel that such discipline ought to be more in evidence today.⁷⁴

The example of Jane Mitchell (b. 1934), a lorry driver’s daughter who became a lecturer in classics at the University of Reading, demonstrates that even an unusually creative and ambitious student could thrive on the rote method:

I enjoyed the mental drill and exercise I was put through, even the memorizing from our geography book of the principal rivers and promontories of the British Isles, going round the coasts clockwise, and the principal towns, with the products appropriate to each. Arithmetic I enjoyed as an agreeable game, and made it a point of honour to do as much as possible of it mentally. For a year or two, I had what was almost a tic—I would go round compulsively factorizing and multiplying numbers in my head—dates, bus-ticket numbers, anything. … It never occurred to me to question the purposes or methods of what we were made to do at school. The stuff was there to be learned, and I enjoyed mopping it up.⁷⁵

In the same spirit, a Devonshire girl (b. c. 1919) memorized most of the poems in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury

even when not required to do so, and I can recite them to this day. Educationists would think this was a terrible way to teach poetry; for me, it was pure magic, pure enchantment. I loved the poets’ tone of calm authority; they suggested nothing, they stated, not aggressively but with conviction. It was like listening to an argument that had already been won, to a debating motion that had already been carried, to a recorded programme where nothing could go wrong.⁷⁶

Memorization was not incompatible with creativity, an insight put into practice by Bert Linn, one of the most respected and innovative teachers at London’s Paragon school in the 1930s. He taught poetry by giving each boy one line of verse to learn by heart, and then calling on them to recite in order. “His methods might be frowned upon today” [1977], one of his admiring pupils conceded. “Yet they were extremely effective instilling into so many of us boys from the grimy back streets of South London a love of poetry and fine writing which has enriched a lifetime.” In fact, he brought close reading to the slums:

Bert would dissect a poem line by line, phrase by phrase and even word by word. There are those today who say that you shouldn’t do that; that the work should be appreciated as a symmetrical whole. Had Bert attempted this, we would have quickly become bored with words and idioms we simply couldn’t understand. As it was, we were able to eventually appreciate not only the final structure but all of the fine detail which went to build it. By working in this way he added enormously to our knowledge of our own great language.⁷⁷

Of course many teachers did not range far beyond the three Rs, but not always for want of trying. Robert Hayward (b. 1907), son of a Wiltshire farm laborer, recalled that his old headmaster honestly attempted to teach a broad curriculum, but was forced back on the basic skills his students would need to find work. His attempts at music instruction were frustrated by the pupils themselves:

It must be confessed that we were an untalented lot (with just one or two exceptions) and trying to teach us to sing melodiously offered as much prospect of success as trying to teach the subject to a flock of geese. … Even now, over 60 years after, I feel sad for him when I think of the daunting prospect confronting him each Monday morning; rows of unwilling, untidy, unruly, grubby ignorant kids facing him with a surly expression, hating the prospect of five days of confinement; a prospect to deter any but the most dedicated. And to his eternal credit he achieved some success. … He taught us to become good citizens by precept and example. I never knew, or heard of, any pupil or ex-pupil of his who in any way disgraced the school or the village; neither have I ever known any who did not grow up to be a credit to the school and the village, with a keen sense of social responsibility.⁷⁸

Newcastle Labour politician T. Dan Smith (b. 1915), explained why a strictly disciplined and inadequately equipped classroom could seem attractive to a slum child: “School, even though a sterile place as compared with today [1970], was still an oasis in a grim social situation.”⁷⁹ The Board schools offered what many poor households did not: a structured learning environment, recognition for academic achievements, and (often) sympathetic adults, not to mention proper heating, lighting, and plumbing. For Nancy Day (b. 1912), an orphan who had difficulty winning acceptance from her stepfather, school was a place where “I could be myself. … I became something of a teacher’s pet, which compensated for having to be ‘seen & not heard’ at home.” The headmaster “taught me not to be afraid of men, & perhaps became a father figure to me. … His approval made me feel more confident & secure, & as I grew older, & made myself useful at home, I was accepted by Dad & was much happier.”⁸⁰ Lottie Barker (b. 1899) worshipped her teachers because

They were always so kind to me. … I know they appreciated the fact that I tried very hard, for one or the other would at times praise me. This I loved for at home I was always considered bad tempered, and try as I might I always seemed to get blamed for any mishap that occurred. … No one at home encouraged me except perhaps in my cookery.⁸¹

For the daughter of an unemployed painter, growing up in Derby between the wars, school was a haven from life on the dole:

I enjoyed the order and the routine of school days and hated weekends and holidays. They meant a repeat of the domestic rows that plagued our household and I was handed the responsibility for the care of the younger children. The headmistress … was very strict, but her heart was in the right place. All the children went hungry at times but I must have looked more hungry than the rest, being thin as a beanpole and tall for my age. She would often call me into her office on the pretext that there was punishment ahead and then demand that I sit down and eat the sandwiches she had placed on her desk.⁸²

Strict but Just

If we have painted too harsh a portrait of these schools and teachers, we have also been too sweeping in our indictments of corporal punishment. G. A. N. Lowndes and Brian Simon asserted that “in boys’ schools every sum wrong, every spelling mistake, every blot, every question which could not be answered as the fateful day of examination drew near, was liable to be visited by a stroke of the cane.”⁸³ Paul Thompson writes that “Caning in school was ubiquitous,”⁸⁴ and Standish Meacham claims that turn-of-the-century teachers were uniformly brutal: “All of them punished a lapse from the expected standard with the cane.”⁸⁵

What, all of them? The Thompson–Vigne interviews (quantified in Table 5.6, p. 169) do not entirely support that conclusion. True, hardly any boys completely escaped corporal punishment in school, but at least a quarter of working-class children, a third of other children, and 42 percent of all girls suffered little or no such punishment. About a quarter of both social classes reported that there was corporal punishment without offering any opinion on it. One out of six working people said that corporal punishment was fair and necessary, compared with only one in ten middle-class respondents. The phrase “strict but just,” or words to that effect, is a commonplace in workers’ memoirs.⁸⁶

Table 5.6: Respondents Reporting Corporal Punishment (in Percent)
	None	Little	Punishment, No Comment	Strict But Just	Too Severe	N
All	11.9	17.3	25.4	14.7	30.6	421
Sex:
Male	5.3	10.2	32.5	18.4	33.5	206
Female	18.1	24.2	18.6	11.2	27.9	215
Class:
ABC	19.3	15.1	24.4	10.1	33.1	119
DEF	8.7	18.4	25.8	16.4	30.8	299
A	50.0	0.0	14.3	14.3	21.4	14
B	17.1	12.9	27.1	11.4	31.4	70
C	11.4	25.7	22.9	5.7	34.3	35
D	9.3	18.6	28.6	16.4	27.1	140
E	8.9	17.9	23.2	17.9	32.1	112
F	6.4	19.1	23.4	12.8	38.3	47
Party:
Conservative	13.3	20.0	24.0	18.7	24.0	75
Liberal	17.9	14.9	29.9	13.4	23.9	67
Labour/Socialist	7.5	14.0	28.0	16.1	34.4	93
Apolitical	10.4	19.1	26.1	12.2	32.2	115
Religion:
Anglican	12.9	19.6	23.3	18.4	25.8	163
Nonconformist	11.6	16.4	28.0	13.0	30.9	207
Catholic	10.5	15.8	23.7	7.9	42.1	38
Religion and class:
Anglican ABC	19.0	16.7	26.2	9.5	28.6	42
Anglican DEF	10.8	20.8	22.5	20.8	25.0	120
Nonconformist ABC	21.2	13.6	21.2	10.6	33.3	66
Nonconformist DEF	7.1	17.9	30.7	14.3	30.0	140
Catholic ABC	12.5	25.0	37.5	0.0	25.0	8
Catholic DEF	10.0	13.3	20.0	10.0	46.7	30
Note—N excludes respondents who did not address the question.

In working-class communities there was a consensus in favor of corporal punishment in the schools. A 1949 Gallup Poll found that only 31 percent of adults were completely opposed to it, while 45 percent favored it for both boys and girls.⁸⁷ There would be outrage if the innocent were punished, of course, but few objected in principle. Though some of the boys at one Birmingham school went on to become professional boxers and footballers, none of them dared to retaliate against their teachers. “There was that inborn fear of rebellion against authority,” as one of them (b. 1902) put it. “Because these lads knew, if the lads went home and reported to their parents that a teacher had thrashed you, you booked yourself for another thrashing at home.”⁸⁸ “We found nothing wrong with the strap,” asserted William Campbell (b. 1910). “To be confined to school after class to write hundreds of lines was a much worse punishment.” His mother backed a campaign by the Communist Party Women’s Committee to abolish corporal punishment in the schools, and ordered her reluctant son to mobilize his classmates, though at home she had a strap on the wall. Campbell organized fifty boys into a schoolyard demonstration, confronted the headmaster, and “piped something about the strap being a tool of World Imperialism.” He was promptly nabbed by the ear and hustled off to his punishment, abandoned by his timorous followers.⁸⁹ Even pupils supported the system, if the alternative was Lord of the Flies. “We knew we deserved it and there were no hard feelings,” remembered one Battersea boy (b. c. 1900). One day a teacher,

impelled by I know not what feelings, … told us that henceforward he would dispense with the use of canes and would trust us to behave ourselves. In furtherance of this good resolve, which even then we didn’t feel we could take the chance of applauding, he ceremonially took his several canes from his desk drawer, broke them over his knee and threw the pieces into the wastepaper basket. Whether this gesture was but an experiment in better living we never knew, but it didn’t work with our high-spirited crowd for more than a day or two. Candidly no one knew just where they were .… The only way out was for him to get fresh canes: then we settled down in mutual comfort again, like Paradise Regained.⁹⁰

Children might interpret an unwillingness to use the cane as a sign of weakness, to be exploited ruthlessly. Flora Thompson recalled a young Oxfordshire teacher of the 1880s who completely lost control of her pupils on her very first day, when she made the fatal error of telling them “I want us all to be friends.”⁹¹ These memoirists tend to confirm the common-sense notion that corporal punishment is traumatic only when it is sadistic and arbitrary, not when it is administered solely for violating a clear and reasonable set of disciplinary rules. One Board school alumnus (b. 1911) drew that distinction when he denounced a schoolmaster who caned him every day. “As a result of his treatment I have a thorough appreciation of what constitutes victimization and injustice,” he wrote, adding that “subsequent masters also caned me but with just cause and never for trivialities.”⁹²

There may have been some correlation between unfair canings and political ideology in later life. Conservatives and Liberals were less likely to complain of severe corporal punishment and more likely to rate their schools well than those who embraced the left or apathy. Punished for an offense he did not commit, C. H. Rolph never forgave or forgot: “It’s more than sixty years ago and I remember the whole thing with total clarity. … From that time onwards I never had any faith in ‘justice’; and am quite certain that I acquired a kind of qualified contempt for ‘law and order’ at the hands of one fatheaded and probably distracted schoolmaster.” That came from a man who made a career as a London policeman.⁹³ Though her parents were caretakers at a Yorkshire Conservative Club, and she herself belonged to the Tory Primrose League, Gladys Teal (b. 1913) rebelled when she was caned on the hands for simple mistakes in arithmetic: “All my life I have been unable to tolerate injustice, perhaps because the seed was sown then.”⁹⁴ Militant socialist Rowland Kenney (b. 1883) claimed that unfair corporal punishment transformed him into a political rebel and destroyed the prestige of adults in his eyes:

“Grown-ups,” those incredible and unpredictable creatures, … were reviewed and presented to me in a new light. Previously I had believed in grown-ups. In the realm of knowledge, in spite of the plain evidence of my acute childish senses, I had accepted as a fact their assumption that they knew. They must know. Until that moment my little world would have seemed impossible had I consciously thought that they did not know. Had I thought of it at all, I should have assumed that their difficult and apparently wrong answers to simple questions, their foolish contradictions and obvious avoidance of certain points, were due to the fact that I was neither old nor sensible enough to understand. Whereas now I knew that they did not know; this teacher did not know; these lessons of hers were mostly mere chatter. She was a poor, ignorant creature pretending to be all-wise, and she was afraid of something—of our questions perhaps—and she hid her fear under a mask of sternness and acts of cruelty. She was merely a fool. I began to feel sorry for her. I had seen through her and beyond her and I knew so much more about her now than she knew about herself.

After he lost faith in his teacher and adults in general, God was the next domino to fall: “Now, in this big all-seeing, all-knowing, all-denouncing, all-threatening bully there was no substance at all. … And with this realisation was linked up the idea of a general falsity, in which all grown-ups—parents, teachers and elders—were included.”⁹⁵

On the other hand, among those who did not object to corporal punishment, it may have had the opposite effect, reinforcing and internalizing a set of conservative social values. One Leytonstone carman (b. 1899) affirmed that caning “taught us to respect those in charge and get on with the job and must have helped to turn out some fine craftsmen.” It taught him as well the basic literacy and self-discipline that enabled him to write his memoirs, “what I term an achievement, especially when I hear of children today [1979] when the school leaving age is sixteen, unable to read and write.”⁹⁶ Luton welder Aubrey Darby (b. 1905) loathed his school for its corporal punishment and its “sparse and insipid” curriculum, but his bitterness did not make him a radical. On the contrary, toward the end of his life he railed against an intelligentsia

obsessed with a need for stimulation, taking in its stride drugs, sexual abnormality and neurotic criminal tendencies. Meditation, sit-ins, protest and banner carrying, painting a picture called self expression, psycho-analysis, raping the mind, delving back to the mother’s womb, the parents getting the blame.

Could it be that our environment of ignorance, made for a more contented and stable society?⁹⁷

Lest we fall into the error of overcorrection, this point needs emphasis: a large minority of pupils suffered abuses of school discipline. Paul Thompson suggests that “a good quarter of Edwardian children left school to harbour resentments against their teachers for the rest of their lives.”⁹⁸ My own estimate is actually somewhat higher: 30.8 percent for the working class, slightly more for affluent pupils. (I placed in the “too severe” column anyone who made any complaint at all about school discipline, even if they could recall only one incident of unjust punishment.) Nevertheless, in both social classes, the resentful were outnumbered by those who reported that corporal punishment was invariably fair, or infrequent, or simply not done.

Parental Support

The statistics suggest that several other assumptions concerning working-class schooling should be modified or discarded entirely. According to Standish Meacham, neither parents nor children were much interested in further education: “Family and friends expected them to work as soon as the law allowed, and they themselves looked forward eagerly to doing so.”⁹⁹ That was true in the majority of cases, but as Table 5.7 (p. 173) indicates, 36.6 percent of working people recalled that they were unhappy to leave school, compared with 39.0 percent of middle- and upper-class respondents. J. S. Hurt was still farther off the mark when he concluded that “For the bulk of working-class children attending school firm [parental] support was lacking.”¹⁰⁰ Although parental interest in education did decline with class status, no less than 71.3 percent of working people described their parents as interested in their schooling, compared with 82.3 percent in other classes (Table 5.8, p. 174).

Table 5.7: Feelings on Leaving School (in Percent)
	Happy	Unhappy	Unsure	N
All	60.0	37.2	2.8	325
Sex:
Male	65.8	31.7	2.5	161
Female	54.3	42.7	3.0	164
Class:
ABC	58.5	39.0	2.4	82
DEF	60.5	36.6	2.9	243
A	50.0	50.0	.0	8
B	63.0	34.8	2.2	46
C	53.6	42.9	3.6	28
D	58.8	39.5	1.8	114
E	63.5	31.8	4.7	85
F	59.1	38.6	2.3	44
Party:
Conservative	57.1	35.5	5.4	56
Liberal	55.1	42.9	2.0	49
Labour/Socialist	59.0	39.7	1.3	78
Apolitical	60.2	37.6	2.2	93
Religion:
Anglican	59.8	36.2	3.9	127
Nonconformist	59.2	38.2	2.5	157
Catholic	68.8	31.3	.0	32
Religion and class:
Anglican ABC	58.6	37.9	3.4	29
Anglican DEF	60.2	35.7	4.1	98
Nonconformist ABC	62.2	35.6	2.2	45
Nonconformist DEF	58.0	39.3	2.7	112
Catholic ABC	33.3	66.7	.0	6
Catholic DEF	76.9	23.1	.0	26
Note—N excludes respondents who did not address the question.

Table 5.8: Respondents Reporting Parental Interest in Their Education
	Interested	Uninterested	N
All	74.4	25.6	390
Sex:
Male	68.4	31.6	196
Female	80.4	19.6	194
Class:
ABC	82.3	17.7	113
DEF	71.3	28.7	275
A	92.3	7.7	13
B	81.5	18.5	65
C	80.0	20.0	35
D	73.2	26.8	127
E	69.6	30.4	102
F	69.6	30.4	46
Party:
Conservative	82.8	17.2	64
Liberal	77.8	22.2	63
Labour/Socialist	69.7	30.3	89
Apolitical	72.1	27.9	104
Religion:
Anglican	74.0	26.0	146
Nonconformist	75.6	24.4	197
Catholic	69.7	30.3	33
Religion and class:
Anglican ABC	86.1	13.9	36
Anglican DEF	70.0	30.0	110
Nonconformist ABC	80.0	20.0	65
Nonconformist DEF	73.3	26.7	131
Catholic ABC	87.5	12.5	8
Catholic DEF	64.0	36.0	25
Note—N excludes respondents who did not address the question.

Table 5.9 (p. 175) confirms what appears to be a universal truth in educational research: that parental involvement strongly influences a child’s attitude toward school. Among those who reported that their parents were interested in their education, 70.9 percent found school a positive experience and only 10.9 percent found it a negative experience, compared with 51.6 percent positive and 24.2 percent negative for those with uninterested parents. Among children with interested parents, 44.2 percent were unhappy to leave school and 53.6 percent were happy to leave, compared with 20.5 percent and 76.9 percent of those with uninterested parents.

Table 5.9: Cross-tabulating Parental Interest (in Percent)
A. With Respondent’s Regrets
	Regret Schooling	No Regrets	N
Interested	42.6	45.6	208
Uninterested	39.5	50.0	68
N	131	146	…
B. With School Experience
	Positive Experience	Negative Experience	N
Interested	70.9	10.9	233
Uninterested	51.6	24.2	72
N	251	54	…
C. With Feelings on Leaving School
	Happy to Leave	Unhappy to Leave	N
Interested	53.6	44.2	219
Uninterested	76.9	20.5	76
N	180	115	…
Note—The totals for these tables do not add up to 100.0 percent because the percentages for some responses have been eliminated: “unspecified regrets” and “own effort” have been eliminated from pt. A; “mixed” has been eliminated from pt. B; and “unsure” has been eliminated from pt. C. Also, N excludes respondents who did not address the question.

It is remarkable that half of all children who received no parental encouragement nevertheless enjoyed school. That discrepancy could reflect the fact that the schools were doing too good a job, educating young people far beyond their parents’ understanding. For scholarship girl Elizabeth Flint, school was a place where “we were allowed to think for ourselves and to discuss things. Great long discussions we had about practically every topic under the sun. Each day the world opened out a little more, and again a little more.” But her East End family saw no value in books, would not set aside study space at the kitchen table, and could not understand the school play she performed in. Her mother promised to see her perform on Speech Day, but then lost heart at the door: “I didn’t go in, Liz. I meant to, honest I did. I meant to go in all right, I did, but it was too grand for me, it was. … It was them other mothers, Liz, that’s what. Why, some of them came in cabs, they did, right up to the door. I couldn’t go in with them, I couldn’t.”¹⁰¹ Even if they wanted scholastic success for their children, working people of that generation sometimes felt constrained to express any encouragement. A construction worker (b. 1888) recalled that attitude in his grandfather, a Cornish farmer who was very much a man of the Victorian era: “Dear old man! He did love us … [but] he was not a demonstrative man and would flatter nobody and he rarely gave us a word of praise. We ‘were never very clever’ and were ‘never going to be.’” Once, when the schoolmaster came to visit,

I happened to have a book in front of me and Master asked what I was reading. Before I could reply Grandpa began: “They are no great readers!” “Oh well, they won’t be much,” said Master. “No, no, they won’t be much,” agreed Gramp, yet in his heart he thought the world of us. He was always interested in our work at school and as we got older he would enquire about our respective jobs until he died.¹⁰²

That post-Victorian generation would be more interested in and more outspoken on the quality of schooling, at least through the Second World War. A 1944 poll in London revealed deep discontent with the existing educational system. In the upper working class 84 percent favored adult education, and hardly anyone was opposed to raising the school leaving age (Table 5.10).

Table 5.10: Attitudes toward Education, 1944 (in percent)103
	Middle Class	Upper Working Class	Lower Working Class
“What do you feel about the way education was run in the country before the war?”
Adequate	19	17	32
Inadequate	47	45	22
Bad	23	26	34
No opinion	11	11	12
“Do you think there are any changes which ought to be made after the war?”
Yes	90	85	79
No	7	4	16
Don’t know	3	11	10
“If yes, what changes?”
Equal and greater opportunity	35	39	48
“What do you feel about the school leaving age being raised?”
Approve	61	72	50
Qualified approval	21	24	32
Disapprove	14	4	16
No opinion	4	0	2
“What do you think about education carrying on after leaving school?”
Approve	41	43	32
Qualified approval	43	41	48
Disapprove	13	13	12
No opinion	3	3	8

That passion for education had, however, largely burned out just a few years later, when a WEA poll of 414 parents of Stockport schoolchildren found that 81 percent wanted the schools to put more emphasis on vocational training. Only a minority (42 percent) felt their children should do homework. A majority (56 percent) regretted that the school leaving age had been raised to fifteen in 1947, and most (84 percent) opposed raising it to sixteen.¹⁰⁴ By the early 1960s, a survey of affluent working-class parents (corresponding to Class D in Table 5.8, p. 174) would find that only 40 percent of them regularly discussed their children’s education. Fifty-four percent felt they could help their children with schoolwork, only 37 percent wanted them to pursue academic rather than vocational subjects, and a mere 27 percent had talked with teachers about their educational hopes for their children.¹⁰⁵ Social commentators who lamented the decline of the old working-class respect for education were not entirely the victims of false nostalgia.

Unmanly Education

When the Thompson–Vigne survey is broken down by sex, the results are even more striking and surprising. Girls were more likely than boys to find school a positive experience, more likely to praise their teachers, and less likely to have regrets concerning their education—perhaps because they were considerably less likely to suffer corporal punishment. More women (10.4 percent) than men (6.8 percent) felt they reaped no benefit from their education, but the proportion was small in both cases. Girls were more often unhappy to leave school than boys were, a fact that can be construed two ways: either girls enjoyed school more than boys, or they missed the opportunities that boys had for further education. The latter conclusion seems unlikely, for several reasons. First, Elizabeth Roberts’s study of Lancashire working women found that boys were not much more likely than girls to go on to grammar school.¹⁰⁶ In Wales, boys and girls were attending secondary schools in equal proportions in 1901, and the girls were slightly ahead by 1914.¹⁰⁷ Of course, there were fewer places for women at universities, but that was an unimaginable goal for slum children of either sex. This point is confirmed by the third column of Table 5.11 (p. 183), which gives the percentages of respondents who regretted that they did not receive more education. There is hardly any difference between the results for men and women—or, for that matter, between the working classes and the upper and middle classes.

It is usually taken for granted that “Parents and teachers colluded in believing that girls’ academic education mattered less than boys,”¹⁰⁸ but Table 5.8 (p. 174) reveals that 80.4 percent of the women interviewed felt their parents had taken an interest in their education, compared with 68.4 percent of the men. M. K. Ashby noted that though her Victorian paterfamilias was opposed to female suffrage, “he thought that fathers ought to provide for their daughters and to give a better schooling to girls than to boys.”¹⁰⁹ Girl pupils could find models for emulation in their female teachers, many of whom came from similar working-class backgrounds. “The teaching profession was greatly admired by all the people I knew,” recalled the daughter (b. c. 1912) of a London commercial traveller, who tremendously respected “the dedication of these single women, all devoting their lives to the education and training of children other than their own.”¹¹⁰

Obviously, girls in this period were trained to conform to a Victorian ideal of womanhood, and for many feminist historians it necessarily follows that these girls felt oppressed and confined by that style of schooling.¹¹¹ If one looks to the memoirs of emancipated women, such as minister of education Ellen Wilkinson,¹¹² one can certainly find protests against the limitations of girls’ schooling. But these autobiographies are hardly representative: they were mostly produced by a tiny minority of emancipated women, rarely by those who were contented with (or at least never questioned) their social roles. When Elizabeth Roberts resorted to oral interviews to get at these invisible women, she was compelled to abandon one working assumption: “As a feminist, in the face of the empirical evidence, I have been forced to conclude that it is not sufficient to indict the injustices of the past, nor allow one’s concern for women’s causes of today to obstruct the understanding of women’s roles and status yesterday.” Roberts found “that there was little feeling among the majority of women interviewed that they or their mothers had been particularly exploited by men”: they were much more likely to feel exploited by their employers. Nearly all of the women she interviewed disliked domestic science classes in school, but not because they rejected traditional domestic roles: they simply preferred to learn housewifely skills from their mothers.¹¹³

Other evidence suggests that Roberts may have underestimated the popularity of these classes. In a 1949 Gallup poll, 15 percent of all respondents identified domestic science as the most useful subject they had taken at school. Assuming that very few of them were men, they probably represented 30 percent of the women. A year later, 71 percent of housewives told Gallup they derived satisfaction from housework, while only 16 percent said they did not.¹¹⁴ Joanna Bourke reminds us that married working-class women in the early twentieth century valued domesticity and the opportunity to stay home. Only 14 percent of married women were employed outside the home in 1901, 1911, and 1921, partly because the jobs available to them were unattractive, but also because women enjoyed authority in the domestic sphere and found fulfillment in creating a comfortable home.¹¹⁵ Even a working-class feminist like Elizabeth Andrews affirmed that, while all professions should be open to both sexes, “Nevertheless to the majority of women, homemaking will still remain their chief and noblest contribution in life, for home is not only a place to eat and sleep in, it is the abiding place of the family where the character of our future citizens is made or marred.”¹¹⁶ As a scholarship girl at Christ’s Hospital in the 1920s, Kathleen Betterton was a trifle disappointed that the school disdained domestic science on feminist principles:

Though it was obvious that many of us would marry and have children, we were not supposed to think of this. The idea of any practical preparation for marriage would have seemed almost indelicate .… To have gained a degree, to be launched on a career—these were high achievements .… If any of us, when questioned in the choice of a career, had answered, “I just want to be an ordinary mother,” they would have felt that this was letting down the side.

We tend to assume that sex discrimination was to blame if a boy enjoyed further education while his sister did not, but often the situation was reversed. Kathleen Betterton ascended all the way to Oxford University via the scholarship ladder, while her brother, whom she considered brighter, only receieved an inferior secondary education at a Central school, owing to “the chanciness of the system.”¹¹⁷

Of course, slum girls were frequently ordered to get their noses out of books and attend to their chores. Adeline Hodges (b. 1899), a Durham stonemason’s daughter, loved The Last of the Mohicans and her other Sunday school prizes, “but Mother wasn’t keen on reading ‘trash.’ All books were ‘trash.’ She thought one’s time was better spent on mending, darning, knitting, etc.”¹¹⁸ But as Robert Roberts noted, the lower working classes discouraged reading among children of both sexes: “‘Put that book down!’ a mother would command her child, even in his free time, ‘and do something useful.’” If reading distracted girls from housework, in boys it was regarded as effeminate: “Among ignorant men any interest in music, books or the arts in general, learning or even courtesy and intelligence could make one suspect.” Roberts identified D. H. Lawrence as a victim of “this linking of homosexuality with culture”: his Eastwood neighbors “would have smiled to think that such a youth in later life could have set himself up as an expert on sex virility in the working classes.”¹¹⁹ Lawrence did accuse the Board schools of emasculating slum boys. “Everybody is educated: and what is education? A sort of unmanliness,” he sputtered, sounding very much like a scholarship boy impersonating a street tough. “Pitch them overboard, teach the three Rs, and then proceed with a certain amount of technical instruction, in preparation for the coming job.”¹²⁰ Vernon Scannell and his brother had to endure the same kind of sneers (“Head always stuck in a book, just like a girl. No wonder you’ve got spots!”) from their father in the 1930s:

“Put that book down and get outside. Go and chop some trees down!” This exhortation to deforest the landscape was issued quite frequently and after our first mild perplexity, since he must have known there were no trees in Kingsbury Square and we possessed neither the skills nor the tools of lumberjacks, we assumed the command was some kind of metaphor or simply further evidence of his doubtful sanity.¹²¹

It was a prejudice spoofed in A Hard Day’s Night (1964):

PAUL’S GRANDFATHER: Would you look at ’im! Sittin’ there with his hooter scrapin’ away at that book! …

RINGO: You can learn from books.

PAUL’S GRANDFATHER: You can, can ye? Bah! Sheepsheads! You can learn more by gettin’ out there and livin’! … But not her little Richard, oh no. … Yer tormentin’ your eyes with that rubbish!

RINGO: Books are good .…

PAUL’S GRANDFATHER: When was the last time you gave a girl a pink-edged daisy? When did you last embarrass a Sheila with your cool appraisin’ stare? …

RINGO: Ah, stop pickin’ on me, you’re as bad as the rest of ’em.

PAUL’S GRANDFATHER: Ah, so you are a man after all!

RINGO: What’s that mean?

PAUL’S GRANDFATHER: Do you think I haven’t noticed? … And what’s it all come to in the end? … A book!

RINGO [converted ]: Yeah, a bloomin’ book!

PAUL’S GRANDFATHER: When you could be out there betrayin’ a rich American widder, or sippin’ palm wine in Tahiti before you’re too old like me.

As a construction worker, Rowland Kenney (b. 1883) feared that his love of poetry might mark him as “effeminate,” until he heard his foreman reciting Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters” “in a powerful voice with a Lancashire accent, breaking the rhythm of the lines now and then with a long gurgling suck at an old clay pipe. The effect was tremendous. I hugged myself with delight. … If a fighting, drinking, you-go-to-Hell man like [him] could openly mouth poetry, so could I.” Thenceforth the two of them recited Omar Khayyam to each other on the job.¹²² Sid Chaplin had to be more circumspect when he broke into literature by writing essays on poets for local papers: John Greenleaf Whittier for a half crown. “It was very exciting,” he remembered, but “I never thought in terms of becoming a professional writer. In the first place it was somehow feminine, that’s why it had to be a secret occupation for me.” He wrote under pseudonyms for the next three years, “so nobody ever knew excepting the immediate family.” One might think that there was no need for Chaplin, a colliery blacksmith, to feel anxious about his masculinity, but “That was the feeling you got in a [Durham] mining village, a man found his place through his muscular strength and ability, or agility. Same whether it was the big hewer, or a good footballer, or a breeder of pigeons, or a leekman. These were masculine things, and writing was very effeminate, so I said nothing about it.”¹²³

For the same reason, merchant seaman Lennox Kerr (b. c. 1899) ditched overboard his early experiments in authorship:

If my shipmates had found them and read how I described them as having bodies like Greek gods they would have laughed me out of the ship. Because writing isn’t for a working man. It sets him apart. Makes him lonely among his own people. It is an extravagance a working man cannot afford. He isn’t such a good toiler if he knows too much or does things like writing. Even reading Shakespeare and the Bible and my Cobbett’s Grammar put me under suspicion. … I had to take up every challenge as soon as it showed: had to swipe a chap’s face when I did not want to, or boast about my splicing—just to prove that reading books was not making me any less a good sailor.

But underneath this philistinism, Kerr perceived a suppressed literary impulse among his shipmates. In groups they would conform to a rough anti-intellectualism, yet when they were alone on lookout the subconscious would start talking out loud:

The secret desires in men come out as they feel themselves alone and free from the screen of cynicism men don in public. That deep, creative wish to be more than merely an obedient worker appears, and men are romantic, noble, courageous, poetic in the secrecy of darkness. I have heard a man announce in dramatic tones: “Silas Blackadder, touch that maiden and I shall choke the life out of your foul body.” I heard a man, the most foul-tongued on our ship, reciting the Song of Solomon to the darkness and the rustle of the sea breaking against the ship’s forefoot. Alone, man becomes what he would be if he were not forced to a mould by the system he lives in.¹²⁴

By the early twentieth century, it was not unusual to find working-class families where the women were better read than the men. The son (b. 1890) of a barely literate Derbyshire collier recalled a sister, a worker in a hosiery factory, who was steeped in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and D. H. Lawrence. Their mother’s reading “would astonish the modern candidate for honours in English at any university,” he claimed. “Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgeniev, Dumas, Hugo, Thackeray, Meredith, Scott, Dickens, all the classics, poetry, etc., all these gave her immense joy. What she would have thought of today’s trivia I do not know.”¹²⁵ In contrast to workingmen of an earlier generation, Labour MP John T. Macpherson (b. 1872) was not ashamed to acknowledge that his mother-in-law had helped him make up his lack of schooling: “Well-educated herself, she was never too weary or tired to help me, and she opened up many avenues along which I trod, and continue to tread to-day.”¹²⁶

For all these reasons, it is hardly surprising that girls were often more reluctant than boys to leave the warm world of the classroom for a lifetime of manual labor. “I cried my eyes up at the idea of having to leave school,” recalled a houseservant (b. 1871) who had to begin work after only four years of schooling. “They were the happiest days I think I ever had, that was the freest time I have ever had in my life.”¹²⁷ Having failed the entrance examination for secondary school, gardener’s daughter Anita Hughes (b. 1892) had to become a cotton mill worker at 5s. a week: “I could never forget my last day at school—I was heartbroken and just sobbed.”¹²⁸

Some boys shared her feelings. Charles Shaw (b. 1832), in a memoir appropriated by Arnold Bennett for Clayhanger, remembered leaving school at age seven to work in a Staffordshire pot works, and his sharp resentment at seeing a man who could afford “reading of his own free will. … I felt a sudden, strange sense of wretchedness. There was a blighting consciousness that my lot was harsher than his and that of others. … I went back to my mould-running and hot stove with my first anguish in my heart.”¹²⁹ But for others, the first day of work was a rite of passage into manhood, a graduation into the ranks of wage earners, a liberation from schoolroom disciplines. This was particularly true in the mining districts of South Wales, where boys sang

Down the pit we want to go

Away from school with all its woe,

Working hard as a collier’s butty

Make us all so very happy!¹³⁰

Wil John Edwards (b. 1888) hated the “unsurpassed monotony” of school, where “the only time I felt myself identified as an individual was when I was caned. … I cannot help recalling the sense of exciting adventure I felt when, at the age of twelve, I was able to abandon school to work in the pit in the friendly, helpful, comradely environment of underground life.” There he discovered the intense intellectual debates so common in the mineshafts of South Wales: “a paradox if you like: because it was only when I began to work in the darkness of the pit that the true light of learning shone.”¹³¹ Though Bernard Taylor (b. 1895) loved his Mansfield school, he was equally happy to begin work in the mines: “This was an occasion, a red-letter day, an important milestone in life’s journey, a new venture; the routine of the past years at school was ended, the prospect of going out into the world was not unattractive, and the opportunity of bringing a little grist to the domestic mill was welcomed.”¹³² As another colliery boy (b. 1866) put it:

What on earth did I want with any more schooling? Couldn’t I read any other boy off his feet and gabble the newspaper over to my short-sighted elders! Couldn’t I, didn’t I, read everything that came within reach! And what more could any boy be supposed to do? Hadn’t I heard time and again that reading and experience were the great turnpike-road to knowledge? And wasn’t I travelling that way?—with the one always in my pocket and the other harvested by a perversity to be ever on the move.¹³³

Yet they may have changed their minds after a few years at work. “I was full of enthusiasm at the thought of going into the mill, and earning money,” recalled Thomas Thompson, who disliked his Lancashire school. But “the very first week I knew I had been led into a trap. … I loathed it, and the recollection of my mother and sister having to work in that noisy, steaming, smelly weaving shed when they were hardly fit to stand has shorn me of any enthusiasm for the success of factory life.” He made a desperate escape by taking Co-operative society classes, reading through the Sunday school library, joining a workingmen’s naturalist society, and even studying French Impressionism with an art teacher.¹³⁴

Regrets and Discontents

Table 5.11 (p. 183) quantifies such discontents as expressed in the Thompson–Vigne interviews. Unspecified regrets are tabulated in column 1, regrets concerning the poor quality of schooling in column 2, and regrets over the lack of opportunities for further education in column 3. Column 4 numbers those who regretted a personal failure to take advantage of available opportunities, such as a soapworks foreman born to an East End construction laborer: “That’s always up to the individual that is. If you can’t learn you can’t learn. And if you can learn you pick it up” (Interview 124). Those who explicitly said they had no regrets (not counting those who did not address the question) are in column 5.

Table 5.11: Respondents Expressing Regrets Concerning Education (in Percent)
	Unspecified Regrets	Poor Quality of Schooling	Regrets on School Leaving	Lack of Personal Effort	None	N
	(1)	(2)	(3)	(4)	(5)	(6)
All	1.8	9.8	33.2	9.2	46.0	337
Sex:
Male	2.5	11.7	34.0	9.9	42.0	162
Female	1.1	8.5	32.4	8.5	49.4	176
Class:
ABC	1.1	6.7	34.8	18.0	39.3	89
DEF	2.0	11.3	32.4	6.1	48.2	247
A	.0	.0	33.3	33.3	33.3	9
B	1.9	9.4	34.0	15.1	39.6	53
C	.0	3.7	37.0	18.5	40.7	27
D	.0	10.3	37.1	3.4	49.1	116
E	3.4	14.9	27.6	9.2	44.8	87
F	4.5	6.8	29.5	6.8	52.3	44
Party:
Conservative	.0	1.7	45.0	10.0	43.3	60
Liberal	.0	7.7	32.7	15.4	44.2	52
Labour/Socialist	3.8	11.4	30.4	8.9	45.6	79
Apolitical	1.0	14.4	30.9	8.2	45.4	97
Religion:
Anglican	1.6	8.0	34.4	9.6	46.4	125
Nonconformist	1.7	8.1	35.3	8.7	46.2	173
Catholic	3.0	27.3	18.2	9.1	42.4	33
Religion and class:
Anglican ABC	.0	6.5	29.0	12.9	51.6	31
Anglican DEF	2.2	8.6	35.5	8.6	45.2	93
Nonconformist ABC	2.0	8.0	38.0	22.0	30.0	50
Nonconformist DEF	1.6	8.2	34.4	3.3	52.5	122
Catholic ABC	.0	.0	50.0	.0	50.0	6
Catholic DEF	3.7	33.3	11.1	11.1	40.7	27
Note—N excludes respondents who did not address the question.

The results reinforce the conclusion that most children of this generation enjoyed their schooling, as far as it went. Respondents in all classes were far less likely to complain about the quality of their schools than the fact that they had to leave at such an early age. Of course, the totals of columns 2 and 3 show that a large proportion expressed some kind of grievance against the educational system: 43.7 percent of the working classes and 41.5 percent of other classes. “They didn’t care much about the child,” recalled an Islington carpenter’s son, “it was very elementary rudiments they taught you, and there wasn’t a great interest in your future” (Interview 245). “I feel that I was wasted from a social point of view in that I had the capacities that were not used, because [the] opportunity to develop them was not there,” complained the son of a Lancashire packer. “But I don’t feel sore about it or anything like that. I don’t feel any aggrieved. It’s just because it’s the way society [was]. There’s a lot of others the same as myself,” he noted, adding that he tried to catch up by studying with the WEA and the Marxist National Council of Labour Colleges (Interview 108).

At the same time, in every one of the six class strata, the discontented were outnumbered by those who either had no complaints or were sorry only that they had not invested more effort in their own education. Granted, some of these people regretted nothing only in the sense that Edith Piaf regretted nothing: they accepted a rough schooling as part and parcel of a hard life, because they neither knew nor expected anything better. The daughter of a Durham joiner could feel no bitterness about her limited schooling because “nobody seemed to go in for education in those days” (Interview 281). Some compensated by educating themselves: “I’ve managed without it,” said a Lancashire ironfitter’s son who hated his Catholic school, “I’ve been a great reader” (Interview 55).

On the other hand, many expressed regrets precisely because they enjoyed their schooling and were sorry that they did not enjoy more of it: “I think it’s one of the finest things out, education” (Interview 177); “The best years of your life, if you did but know it” (Interview 168); “I think it’s the happiest time we ever had .… I mean a good sporting teacher and you’re at home” (Interview 356). The son of an Essex silk mill laborer praised his headmaster as “a very, very artistic cultured gentleman” who whetted his appetite for a true liberal education. He never had an opportunity to continue in school, but “I’d always been very much interested in … well, what little smattering you got at an elementary school … of cultural things, you know”—meaning poetry and ancient Greek history (Interview 14). In a backhanded way, the stepson of an East End crane driver acknowledged his intellectual debt to the Board school teacher who told him, “‘You’ll have to do some homework, young man, there’s some good in you.’ And I never forgot those words. I thought to myself, well, that’s the first time any teacher ever said that to me” (Interview 417).

Working-class Catholics stand out as more critical of their schooling than Anglicans or Dissenters. They gave their schools and teachers a much lower positive rating, were much more likely to complain about corporal punishment, reported lower parental interest in education, were less likely to see any benefit in their education, were far more prone to regret the quality of their schooling, and were much happier to leave school. Alice Foley would eventually find an outlet for her frustrated intellectual energies in the WEA, after a “perfunctory and uninspiring” Catholic schooling:

History, that might have been exciting, began with the Roman Conquest and seemed to end mysteriously with the Reformation. Frequently I … tried to sort out the strange doings of early English Kings and Queens, so remote from everyday existence. Dictation and composition were more to my liking, especially poetry readings, but our young minds and spirits were rarely ever stirred or fertilised by the wonder and splendour of our great literary inheritance.¹³⁵

Growing up in a Catholic crofting family in the Grampians, Anne Kynoch (b. 1913) attended first a non-Catholic school and then a Catholic school. She clearly preferred the former for its intellectual freedom, incarnated in a homely piece of furniture:

Nothing has ever given me a greater thrill than the old school bookcase did. From the first day I was its slave. Even now I cannot think of it as a glass-fronted cupboard in a country school, some half-dozen shelves stacked with an odd collection of volumes, many bearing a record of fingerprints unwittingly left by generations of careless scholars. To me it was The Library, a silver fountain, a source of wonder from which indescribable satisfactions poured, the gateway to a kingdom of unending pageantry.

After that, however, Catholic school was “a prison and hell for me.” She felt insulted by the low academic standards, the history lessons grossly slanted in favor of Mary Stuart (“the blackmail of hate”), the time wasted on saints’ lives and catechism, her teacher’s sadistic bouts of caning (“which gave her great sensual pleasure”), and above all the restrictions on library privileges:

How I longed for the old bookcase! … Children are not a homogeneous mass equal in background, intelligence, or spiritual leanings but individuals, and thoughtless, unwarranted trespass on young minds is evil. … Despite being reverent and submissive there was still an intense longing to select my own reading, a longing that could not be quenched or denied. A deep-rooted love of freedom early implanted, for ever stirred. Something inside me called “freedom” and it attracted me.¹³⁶

Ultimately, how reliable are these recollections of experiences long past? Robert Roberts once warned oral historians that pensioners, interviewed in the 1960s, were liable to see “the Edwardian era through a golden haze.”¹³⁷ One could, however, just as legitimately argue that memories can grow sour with age: biographers have discovered that Cyril Connolly and George Orwell greatly exaggerated the evils of their old school.¹³⁸ Against both those objections, Paul Thompson cites a test that revealed that, when Americans were asked to recall school experiences that particularly interested them, there was no loss of accuracy over fifty years. Oral history, as Thompson notes, is much better at recording attitudes than “facts,” and here we are concerned chiefly with attitudes.¹³⁹

True, attitudes toward education can change over a lifetime. One way of taking that into account is to do what Thompson and Vigne did: ask some questions about childhood responses to school (Tables 5.4, p. 150, 5.5, p. 151, and 5.7, p. 173) and some about present-day opinions (Table 5.11, p. 183). The interviewees generally seem to have appreciated that distinction, since they gave very different answers to each set of questions. While many working people regretted (as adults) their lack of educational opportunities, fewer recalled that (as children) they disliked their schools or their teachers. Far from growing nostalgic with age, the interviewees seem to have become more aware and critical of their disadvantages. A slum child in 1910 would probably accept the existing social order since he knew nothing else, but by the end of his life, having witnessed the creation of the welfare state and the scholarship ladder, he was more likely to see the inadequacies of his own education. Many interviewees who were happy to leave school at thirteen or fourteen later came to regret it. “I would now … like to have been a bit better educated,” said a London servant woman, “but as it was in those days one had to take it as it came. One was satisfied” (Interview 53).

I would not argue with those who say that these people should have been dissatisfied with their education—but the fact remains that most of them were not. One may well wonder whether children living in poverty today, in Britain or the United States, would give their schools such high marks. Most late Victorian and Edwardian schools did a fair job of teaching the basics, and often something more than the basics. They succeeded in maintaining discipline, albeit via the cane. Granted, most of us would have felt stifled in an old Board school classroom, but we should avoid projecting our own needs and demands on past generations. My intention is not to suggest that these schools provided a wholly adequate education. It is to break our habit of viewing them through the dark glass of Hard Times.