THE MODERNISATION OF OUNDLE SCHOOL
§ 1
Oundle School, which was to be the material of Sanderson's life work,
which was to teach him so much and profit so richly by the reaction,
was one of comparatively old standing. It was a pre-reformation
foundation; a certain Joan Wyatt having endowed a schoolmaster in the
place in 1485. Its main revenues, however, derived from Sir William
Laxton, Lord Mayor of London and Master of the Grocers' Company, who
in 1556 left considerable property to that body on condition that it
supported a school in his native town of Oundle. The Grocers' Company
took over the Joan Wyatt school and schoolmaster, and has discharged
its obligations to Oundle with intermittent energy and honesty to this
day.
Oundle has always been a school of fluctuating fortunes. The district
round and about does not sustain a sufficient population to maintain
full classes and an efficient staff, and only when the prestige of the
school was great enough to attract boys from a distance had it any
chance of flourishing. Time after time an energetic head with more
or less support from the distant governing body would push it into
prominence and prosperity only to pass away and leave it to an equally
rapid decline. The London Grocers' Company is a very unsuitable body
for educational work. It is not organised for any such work. It was
originally a chartered association of city wholesalers, spice-dealers,
and so forth, who maintained a certain standard of honest trading and
protected their common interests in the middle ages; it commended
itself to the spiritual care of St. Anthony, and built a great hall
and acted as almoner for its impoverished members and their widows and
orphans; its normal function to-day is the entertainment of princes
and politicians. It is now a fortuitous collection of merchants,
business-men, and prosperous persons, and it is only by chance that
now and then a group of its members have had the conscience and
intelligence to rise above the normal indifference of such people to
the full possibilities of the Laxton bequest. Generally the Company's
conduct of the school has varied between half-hearted help and
negligence and the diversion of the funds to other ends; it has no
tradition of competent governorship, and the ups and downs of Oundle
have been dependent mainly upon the personal qualities of the masters
who have chanced to be appointed.
There was a period of prosperity during the second quarter of the
seventeenth century which was brought to an end by the plague, and
by the impoverishment of the school through the fire of London in
which various Laxton properties were destroyed. Throughout a large
part of the eighteenth century the school was completely effaced,
and the entire revenues of the Laxton bequest were no doubt expended
in hospitality. There was a revival in 1796. In the seventies of the
nineteenth century the school was doing well in mathematics under
a certain Dr. Stansbury, and in the eighties it had as many as two
hundred boys under the Rev. H. St. J. Reade. Then it declined again
until the numbers sank below a hundred. It was a time of quickened
consciences in educational matters, and some of the more energetic
and able members of the Grocers' Company determined to make a drastic
change of conditions at Oundle. They found Sanderson ready to their
hands.
§ 2
The world is changing so rapidly that it may be well to say a few words
about the type of school Sanderson was destined to renovate. Even in
the seventies and eighties these smaller 'classical' schools had a
quaint old-fashioned air amidst the surrounding landscape. They were
staffed by the less vigorous men of the university-scholar type; men of
the poorer educated classes in origin, not able enough to secure any of
the prizes reserved for university successes, and not courageous enough
to strike out into the great world on their own account. They protected
themselves from the sense of inferiority by an exaggeration of the
value of the schooling and disciplines through which they had gone, and
they ignored their lack of grasp in a worship of the petty accuracies
within their capacity. Their ambition soared at its highest to holy
orders and a headmastership, a comfortable house, a competent wife,
dignity, security, ease, and a certain celebrity in equation-dodging
or the imitation of Latin and Greek compositions. Contemporary life
and thought these worthy dominies regarded with a lofty scorn. The
formal mathematical work, it is true, was not older than a century
or a century and a half, but the classical training had come down in
an unbroken tradition from the seventeenth century. One of the staff
of Oundle when Sanderson took it over is described as a 'wonderful'
classical master. 'His master passion,' we are told, 'for Latin
elegiacs and Greek iambics fired many of his pupils, whose best efforts
were copied into a book that bore the title _Inscribatur_.' These
exercises in stereotyped expression were going on at Oundle right into
the eighteen-nineties. They had their justification. From the school
the boys passed on to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where
sympathetic examining authorities awarded the greater prizes at their
disposal to the more proficient of these victims. The Civil Service
Commissioners by a mark-rigging system that would have won the respect
of an American election boss, kept the Higher Division of the Civil
Service as a preserve for ignorance 'classically' adorned. So that the
school could boast of 'an almost uninterrupted stream of scholarship
successes at Cambridge' even in its decline in the late eighties, when
its real educational value to the country it served was a negative
quantity.
This seventeenth century 'classical' grind constituted the main
work of the school, and no other subject seems to have been pursued
with any industry. Most of the staff could not draw or use their
hands properly; like most secondary teachers of that time they were
innocent of educational science, and no attempt was made to teach
every boy to draw. Drawing was still regarded as a 'gift' in those
days. The normally intelligent boy without the peculiar aptitudes
and plasticity needed to take Latin elegiacs seriously, had no
educational alternative whatever. There was no mathematical teaching
beyond low-grade formal stuff of a very boring sort, and the only
science available was a sort of science teaching put in to silence
the complaints of progressive-minded parents rather than with any
educational intention, science teaching that was very properly called
'stinks.' It was a stinking imposture. The boy of good ordinary quality
was driven therefore to games or 'hobbies' or mischief as an outlet for
his energies, as chance might determine. The school buildings before
Sanderson was appointed were as cramped as the curriculum; old boys
recall the 'redolent' afternoon class-rooms; the Grocers' Company in
its wisdom had built a new School-House during the brief boom under St.
John Reade, between a public house on either side and a slum at the
back. It must have been pleasant for master and boys alike to escape
from the stuffiness of general teaching upon these premises, and from
the priggish exploits in versification of the 'inspired' minority, to
the cricket field. There one had scope; there was life. The Rev. H.
St. J. Reade, the headmaster in the eighties, had been Captain of the
Oxford Eleven, and drove the ball hard and far, to the admiration of
all beholders.
The Rev. Mungo J. Park, who immediately preceded Sanderson, is
described as a man of considerable personal dignity, aloof and
leisurely, and greatly respected by the boys. Under him the number
of the boys in the school declined to fewer than a hundred. That
dwindling band led the normal life of boys at any small public school
in England. Most of them were frightfully bored by the teaching of
the bored masters; the wonderful classical master lashed himself
periodically up to the infectious level of enthusiasm for his amazing
exercises; there was cribbing and ragging and loafing, festering
curiosities and emotional experimenting, and, thank Heaven! games
a fellow could understand. If these boys learnt anything of the
marvellous new vision of the world that modern science was unfolding,
they learnt it by their own private reading and against the wishes
of their antiquated teachers. They learnt nothing in school of the
outlook of contemporary affairs, nothing of contemporary human work,
nothing of the social and economic system in which many of them were
presently to play the part of captains. If they learnt anything about
their bodies it was secretly, furtively, and dirtily. The gentlemen
in holy orders upon the staff, and the sermons in the Oundle parish
church, had made souls incredible. There has been much criticism of the
devotion to games in these dens of mental dinginess, but games were
the only honest and conclusive exercises to be found in them. From the
sunshine and reality of the swimming-pool, the boats, the cricket or
football field, the boys came back into the ill-ventilated class-rooms
to pretend, or not even to pretend, an interest in languages not merely
dead, but now, through a process of derivation and imitation from one
generation to another, excessively decayed. The memory of school taken
into after life from these establishments was a memory of going from
games and sunshine and living interest into class-rooms of twilight,
bad air, and sham enthusiasm for exhausted things.
§ 3
Sanderson made his application for the headmastership of Oundle at
an unusually favourable time. There were several men of exceptional
enlightenment and intelligence upon the governing body of the school,
and they were resolved to modernise Oundle thoroughly and well. To
the innovators the very unorthodoxy of Sanderson's upbringing and
qualifications was a recommendation, to their opponents they made him
a shocking candidate, and the Grocers' Company was rent in twain
over his application. It requires a little effort nowadays for us to
understand just how undesirable a candidate this spectacled young
man from Dulwich must have appeared to many of the older and riper
'grocers.'
In the first place he was not in holy orders, and it was a fixed belief
of many people--in spite of the fact that few of the clerically-ruled
English public schools of that time could be described as hotbeds
of chastity--that only clergymen in holy orders could maintain a
satisfactory moral and religious tone. On the other hand, he had been
a distinguished theological student. That, however, might involve
heresy; English people have an instinctive perception of the corrosive
effect of knowledge and intelligence upon sound dogma. Then he was not
a public-school boy, and this might involve a loss of social atmosphere
more important even than religion or morals. The almost natural grace
of deportment that has endeared the English traveller and the English
official to the foreigner, and particularly to the subject-races
throughout the world, might fail under his direction. Moreover, he was
no cricketer. He had no athletic distinction; a terrible come-down
after the Rev. H. St. J. Reade. These were all grave considerations in
those days. Against them weighed the growing dread of German efficiency
that was already spreading a wholesome modesty throughout the
commercial world of Britain. This young man from Dulwich might bring
to Oundle, it was thought, the base but valuable gifts of technical
science. And there was apparent in him a liveliness and energy uncommon
among scholastic applicants. His seemed to be a bracing personality,
and Oundle was in serious need of a bracing régime. The members who
liked him liked him warmly, and he roused prejudices as warm; feeling
seems to have run high at the decision, and he was appointed by a
majority of one.
[Illustration: Interior in Science Block]
The little world of Oundle heard of the new appointment with mixed and
various feelings, in which there was no doubt a considerable amount
of resentment. No man becomes headmaster of an established school
without facing many difficulties. If he is promoted from among the
staff of his predecessor old disputes and rivalries are apt to take on
an exaggerated importance, and if he comes in from outside he finds a
staff disposed to a meticulous defence of established usage. And the
young couple from Dulwich came to the place in direct condemnation
of its current condition and its best traditions. There can be no
doubt that at the outset the school and town bristled defensively and
unpleasantly to the new-comers.
In one respect the old educational order had a great advantage over the
new that Sanderson was to inaugurate. It had a completed tradition,
and it provided the standards by which the new was tried. Whatever it
taught was held to be necessary to education, and all that it did not
know was not knowledge. By such tests the equipment of Sanderson was
exhibited as both defective and superfluous. Moreover, the new system
was confessedly undeveloped and experimental. It could not be denied
that Sanderson might be making blunders, and that he might have to
retrace his steps. People had been teaching the classics for three
centuries; the routine had become so mechanical that it was done best
by men who were intellectually and morally half asleep. It led to
nothing; except in very exceptional cases it did not even lead to a
competent use of either the Latin or Greek languages; it involved no
intelligent realisation of history, it detached the idea of philosophy
from current life, and it produced the dreariest artistic Philistinism,
but there was a universal persuasion that in some mystical way it
_educated_. The methods of teaching science, on the other hand, were
still in the experimental stage, and had still to convince the world
that even at the lowest levels of failure they constituted a highly
beneficent discipline.
I do not propose to disentangle here the story of Sanderson's first
seven years of difficulty. He found the school and the town sullen and
hostile, and he was young, eager, and irascible. The older boys had all
been promoted upon classical qualifications, they were saturated with
the old public-school tradition that Sanderson had come to destroy,
and behind them were various members of a hostile and resentful staff
inciting them to obstruction and mischief. Neither Mr. nor Mrs.
Sanderson was old enough or wise enough to disregard slights or to
ignore mere gestures of hostility.
Reminiscences of old boys in the official life give us glimpses of
the way in which the old order fought against the new. Everything
was done to emphasise the fact that Sanderson was 'no gentleman,'
'no sportsman,' 'no cricketer,' 'no scholar.' It is the dearest
delusion of snobs everywhere that able men who have made their way in
the world are incapable of acquiring a valet's knowledge of what is
correct in dress and deportment, and the dark legend was spread that
he wore a flannel shirt with a sort of false front called a 'dicky'
and detachable cuffs, in place of the evening shirt of the genteel.
Moreover, his dress tie was reported to be a made-up tie. Unless he is
to undress in public I do not see how a man under suspicion is to rebut
such sinister scandals. The boys, with the help and encouragement of
several members of the staff, made up a satirical play full of the puns
and classical tags and ancient venerable turns of humour usual in such
compositions, against this Barbarian invader and his new laboratories.
It was the mock trial of an incendiary found trying to burn down the
new laboratories. It was 'full of envenomed and insulting references'
to all the new headmaster was supposed to hold dear. Finally it was
rehearsed before him. He sat brooding over it thoughtfully, as shaft
after shaft was launched against him. 'It didn't seem so funny then,'
said my informant, 'as it had done when we prepared it.' It went to
a 'ragged and unconvinced applause.' At the end 'came a pause--a
stillness that could be felt.' The headmaster sat with downcast face,
thinking.
I suppose he was chiefly busy reckoning how soon he would be rid of
this hostile generation of elder boys. They had to go. It was a pity,
but nothing was to be done with them. The school had to grow out of
them, as it had to grow out of its disloyal staff.
He rose slowly in his seat. 'Boys, we will regard this as the final
performance,' he said, and departed thoughtfully, making no further
comment. He took no action in the matter, attempted neither reproof nor
punishment. He dropped the matter with a magnificent contempt. And,
says the old boy who tells the story, from that time the spirit of the
school seemed to change in his favour. The old order had discharged its
venom. The boys began to realise the true value of the forces of spite
and indolent obstructiveness with which their youth was in alliance.
§ 4
Not always did Sanderson carry things off with an equal dignity.
His temperament was choleric, and ever and again his smouldering
indignation at the obstinate folly and jealousy that hampered his work
blazed out violently. Dignified silence is impossible as a permanent
pose for a teacher whose duty is to express and direct. Sanderson's
business was to get ideas into resisting heads; he was not a born
orator but a confused, abundant speaker, and he had to scold, to thrust
strange sayings at them, to force their inattention, to beat down an
answering ridicule. He was often simply and sincerely wrathful with
them, and in his early years he thrashed a great deal. He thrashed hard
and clumsily in a white-heat of passion--'a hail of swishing strokes
that seemed almost to envelop one.' A newspaper or copybook at the
normal centre of infliction availed but little. Cuts fell everywhere
on back or legs or fingers. He had been sorely tried, he had been
overtried. It was a sort of heartbreak of blows.
The boys argued mightily about these unorthodox swishings. It was all
a part of Sanderson being a strange creature and not in the tradition.
It was lucky no one was ever injured. But they found something in their
own unregenerate natures that made them understand and sympathise with
this eager, thwarted stranger and his thunderstorms of anger. Generally
he was a genial person, and that, too, they recognised. It is manifest
quite early in the story that Sanderson interested his boys as his
predecessor had never done. They discussed his motives, his strange
sayings, his peculiar locutions with accumulating curiosity. Two sorts
of schoolmasters boys respect: those who are completely dignified and
opaque to them, and those who are transparent enough to show honesty at
the core. Sanderson was transparently honest. If he was not pompously
dignified he was also extraordinarily free from vanity; and if he
thrust work and toil upon his boys it was at any rate not to spare
himself that he did so. And he won them also by his wonderful teaching.
In the early days he did a lot of the science teaching himself; later
on the school grew too big for him to do any of this. All the old
boys I have been able to consult agree that his class instruction was
magnificent.
Every year in the history of Sanderson's headmastership shows a growing
understanding between the boys and himself. 'Beans,' they called him,
but every year it was less and less necessary to 'Give 'm Beans,' as
the vulgar say. The tale of storms and thrashings dwindles until it
vanishes from the story. In the last decade of his rule there was
hardly any corporal punishment at all. The whole school as time went on
grew into a humorous affectionate appreciation of his genius. It was a
sunny, humorous school when I knew it; there was little harshness and
no dark corners. No boy had been expelled for a long time.
§ 5
The official life gives a diagram and particulars of the growth of
the school during Sanderson's time, and there is no need to repeat
those particulars here. From 1892 to 1900 there was no very remarkable
increase in the number of boys; it rose from ninety-odd to a hundred
and twenty or so. Then as Sanderson's grip became sure there followed
a rapid expansion.
From 1900 onwards Oundle grew about as fast as it was possible to
grow. New laboratories were built, new subjects introduced so as to
furnish a wider and wider variety of courses to meet such intellectual
types as the school had hitherto failed to interest. There was a great
development of biological and agricultural work from about 1909 onward.
The attention given to art increased, and there was a great change and
revolution in the history teaching. By 1920 the numbers of the school
were soaring up towards six hundred. He wanted them to go to eight
hundred, because he still wanted to increase the variety of courses,
and the larger numbers gave a better prospect of classifying out the
boys effectively and making sure that each course of studies was
sufficiently attended to keep it active and efficient.
The prestige of the school grew even more rapidly than its size. From
1905 onward the inquiring parent who wanted something more than school
games and _esprit de corps_ was sure to hear of Oundle.
And Sanderson was growing with his school. Every installment of
success stimulated him to new experiments and fresh innovations. No
one learnt so much at Oundle as he did, and it is with that growth
of his conception of school method and his widening vision of the
schoolmaster's rôle in the world that we must now proceed to deal.