ANGLESEY
“You do yet taste
Some subtilties of the isle, that will not let you
Believe things certain.”--_Tempest._
It next became necessary to find out what an “Inspector of Returns” had
to do. What were these “Returns”? There was the Elementary Education
Act, 1870, to study, and there were Instructions of the vaguest kind.
In after years I became familiar with many dozens of such documents;
and I used to associate them with the words which (“with that universal
applicability which characterizes the bard of Avon”--to quote Mr.
Micawber) Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Macbeth:
But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor.
It appeared that the Returns were answers to questions sent by the
Department to every parish in the country; What was the population?
What schools had they in the parish? What schools outside the parish
did they use? and so on. When we had verified the answers, we were to
recommend recognition of such schools as we found to be efficient,
and to state what further provision was required, with detailed
suggestions. For Parliament had decreed that every child should have an
efficient school within reasonable distance of his home.
This seemed simple. But the word “parish” gave us endless trouble. When
we speak of a parish, we think of an ecclesiastical district; and we
picture to ourselves a cluster of houses, a long street, and an old
church, with the village inn and a butcher’s shop in the background.
But Parliament meant, or defined, a _civil_ parish; that is, a finite
area in which a separate rate can be collected. In most parts of
England the difference is immaterial; but in Anglesey, and sometimes
in other places, we were baffled at the outset. The people had long
ago left the old centres, and had settled down where four cross-roads
met, or near the railway station, or near a quarry, or a mine. There
they had put up two chapels, three beer-shops, and a general store:
they had called the place after the bigger chapel, Moriah, or Carmel,
or Bethesda; and, except for a wedding or a funeral, they ceased to go
up to Jerusalem.[1] Now Moriah was nearly always on the edge of two
or more civil parishes, and if it wanted a school, the two or three
parishes would have to pay for it, though they might have perfectly
efficient schools of their own in the old centres. This of course
roused protests.
Then there came another stumbling-block. If a school were ordered, it
would probably be built and managed by a School Board; and in Anglesey
the members of the Board would be five men whose opinion on a pig might
be accepted, if the pig belonged to a perfect stranger, but on school
matters the pig’s opinion would be equally valuable.
A third trouble. These parishes were often so small that one could not
hope to see a competent Board, unless several parishes were united.
But the parishes would often rather die single than live united to
their next-door neighbours. I cannot forget the fury of the Rector
of Llantwyddeldwm, when it was proposed to yoke him unequally with
Llantwyddeldy, and to build a joint school for the two parishes.
Lastly came the great question of rates. All the Dissenters were
determined to have School Boards elected everywhere; and, to calm
the minds of the small-souled brethren who feared for their pockets,
word had been passed round that the rate could not exceed 3_d._ in
the pound. To prove this they appealed to the declarations of Mr.
Gladstone and Mr. Forster, and to Section 97 of the Education Act.
That Section is nineteen lines long in the official copy, and there is
nothing bigger than a comma by way of relief from beginning to end. In
the seventh line occur the words “3_d._ in the pound.” Who can blame a
Welshman imperfectly acquainted with English, if after diving into this
sea of troubles he came up gasping for breath, but firmly clutching
the comfortable words THREEPENCE IN THE POUND? Finding that I
was a barrister, and supposing in the innocence of their hearts that
this implied some knowledge of the law, the combatants frequently
appealed to me; and I assured them, with all the self-assurance of the
briefless, that the Section did not limit the rate: it merely provided
an aid-grant for poor parishes. And it happened that I was right. When,
in the ’nineties, they came to pay rates of from one to three shillings
in the pound, they must have said a good deal.[2]
Our instructions said no word about any of these special difficulties.
But the difficulties faced us everywhere we went, and caused us no
little perplexity. At the same time the discussion roused much interest
among the leaders of the contending parties, as we moved about from
centre to centre. I think it was the most stormy month of my official
life.
There were few compensating pleasures. Anglesey is not a good county
for an uncommercial traveller. In 1871 it was almost wholly unknown to
the ordinary Briton. Travellers to Ireland were whirled through twenty
miles of desolation between the Straits and Holyhead. Yachting men
knew the beautiful coast facing the Straits. Occasionally a Liverpool
steamer full of sea-sick tourists called at Beaumaris. Once John Bright
visited that dreary capital, admired the fine view of the Snowdon
range, and deplored the deadness of the town. Finding that the landlord
was a Baronet, he snorted, and described it as “withering in the cold
shade of aristocracy.”
Also, of course, thousands of trippers visited the great bridges. But
the interior was, and is, wholly uninteresting, and the fine sea-coast
was at that time almost inaccessible by land, and had no accommodation
for summer visitors. The roads, except the great London and Holyhead
road, were generally atrocious, and there were only three or four
places where a carriage could be hired. Trees, even hedges, were rare,
and there was no shelter from the frequent gales. Marshes and moorland
divided villages apparently connected. Who could ask a child to go to
school across a mile of wind-swept “morfa” or “rhos”? I was told the
current, and recurrent, anecdote of the Tutor of Jesus College, the
Welsh College of Oxford. Jones, of Jesus, asked how it was that Tacitus
spoke of Anglesey as “insula umbrosa,”[3] whereas nowadays there is
hardly a tree to be seen inland. And the Tutor replied deprecatingly,
“Well, you know, Mr. Jones, it’s rather a _shady_ island still.” Also
William Williams, Ysgol-feistr, had said that in most parishes there
was “not a stick in the place except the parson.”
The inhabitants of this _terra incognita_ were themselves
incognitiores; for even the travellers who knew the railway and the
coastline had no dealings with the people. In those days Anglesey
was almost wholly ignorant of English. Our dealings lay, of course,
chiefly with the clergy and the parish overseers; but the latter
usually brought their own ministers and elders to support them. Then
the proceedings raged lengthily in the vernacular: my chief, or his
assistant, conducted the enquiries: “Druidaeque circum, preces diras
sublatis ad caelum manibus fundentes” (as Tacitus said of their
ancestors) denounced the Catechism, while I looked on and yawned.
Thanks to the freehold tenure of Church Benefices, the island
was in the hands of the Chapel. There were practically only two
Dissenting bodies in Anglesey; the Calvinistic Methodists and the
Congregationalists. The Wesleyans locally were a small body. The
Calvinists, like the Wesleyans, were an offshoot from the Church,
forced out by the folly of its rulers. They held all the vital
doctrines of the Church, and, even now, could accept the Thirty-nine
Articles and the Liturgy as freely and with the same mental
reservations as an orthodox Low Churchman. An intelligent Calvinist
told me that “Calvinistic” had ceased to be anything but an _epitheton
ornans_: but that may have been merely his own position. I imagine
there is no difference in doctrine between the Calvinists, the
Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, and the Wesleyans; but their
views on Church government vary.
However this may be, and my ideas on the subject are very hazy, there
is no doubt that the Chapel forms part of the Anglesey life, as the
Kirk (of whatever sort) does of the Scottish life. But it does not
produce the Scottish virtues, and the ministers of that date, 1871,
were not morally, intellectually, or educationally of the Scottish
type. Certainly Truth and Honesty were not well cultivated, or else the
soil was bad.
“The Chapel has stood between Wales and Heathenism.”
“The Chapel stands between Wales and Religion.”
These are the rival cries, and the reader may choose which he prefers.
There is no freehold in the Chapel pulpit: a minister who was carried
out of the “King’s Arms” would have short shrift. And morality is
not the only rock on which the preacher may strike. During the South
African War I was spending a Sunday at a Welsh watering place, and
after lunch I was talking to the landlord at the door of the hotel.
“See that chapel?” he said: “they had a new minister this morning;
preached his first sermon; turned out to be a pro-Boer, and preached
against the war. They had a meeting in the vestry after service, and
gave him the sack before dinner. Smart work, wasn’t it?”
Wales is chapel-ridden, but it is not priest-ridden: the wary minister
adopts the platform of The Cause: and there is a tendency to put The
Cause above the Great First Cause. Certainly there was a lamentable
want of truth and honesty in the “Returns” investigated by us in 1871,
and made by, and under the influence of, these ministers and elders:
and also in their ordinary school statistics.
These schools were always known as British Schools; and in theory
they were carried on in connexion with the British and Foreign School
Society, one guiding principle of which was that the children should
have plain, undenominational Bible teaching. Up to 1871 the inspection
of Elementary schools was carried on by three sorts of H.M. Inspectors.
The Church schools were inspected by clergymen; the Roman Catholic
schools by Roman Catholic laymen; and the other schools by laymen, of
whom the best known was Matthew Arnold. In Wales the British Schools
in receipt of Government grant were not numerous; and North Wales was
grouped with Lancashire and Cheshire. As a rule their inspector lived
in London, and, except when he paid his annual visit, they saw nothing
of him. Nor indeed had he, I believe, before May, 1871, the right to
enter the doors without due notice. And as the managers were for the
most part unlearned men, whose interest lay chiefly in the balance
sheet, the schoolmaster farmed the whole concern--that is, he took
the children’s school pence, the annual grant, and the subscriptions,
and paid the expenses, retaining the remainder for his salary--or,
alternatively, he had a salary varying with the grant. In either case
his income depended on the regular attendance of the children: for the
grant was paid in part on the unit of average attendance, and in part
on the success in examination of each child who had attended 250 times.
All these statistics were recorded in registers, and it is easy to
see that there were many temptations to fraud and few checks. In one
case the master of a large British school confessed to me that he had
had no registers for three months: he had recorded the attendance in
copybooks and he was “going to transcribe them.”
The religious instruction which these worthies were supposed to
give--and I believe that up to 1871 it was a condition precedent of the
Code grant in all schools, as it certainly was an essential feature of
British schools--often seemed to have been dropped. In one case I asked
casually and unofficially what the arrangements were, and the master
told me he read a chapter of the Bible every morning.
“In English or in Welsh?”
“Oh, in English,” he replied eagerly; for Welsh was discouraged by My
Lords.
“And do the children understand it?”
“Well, no, indeed; but it is just while they are coming in, and it
doesn’t matter.”
I made no remark. We were forbidden to make any enquiry.
A charge freely brought against these schools was that when the British
school inspector came down from London, capable children likely to earn
a grant were passed on from school to school to be examined under the
names of less capable children on the books of the recipient school.
The story was generally believed, and special precautions were taken
to thwart the conspirators. Detection would be almost impossible,
for children in the bulk are much alike, and in North Wales few are
so eccentric as not to be called by one of the six names, Jones,
Evans, Hughes, Davies, Williams, Roberts. Also the inspector would be
always in a hurry, and always ignorant of Welsh, and enquiries could
hardly be made. But I am bound to say that I never came across an
instance of this particular fraud. The only authentic case within my
knowledge occurred in a Church school in Liverpool, where an inspector
who had the royal gift of remembering faces, recognized a number of
children whom he had seen in another school. Let it be said for the
manager’s sake that he was asking for recognition only, not for grant.
Recognition, quotha! Well, he got that.
I believe the trick is more common in flower shows.
It will be gathered from the foregoing account that I was not
favourably impressed by the islanders, though in many cases “the
barbarous people showed me no little kindness.” This opinion was not
confined to visitors. I received a letter from a resident, who gave me
much help in my work, speaking doubtfully of the chances of success in
dealing “with these Cretan people.”
“Cretan”? or was it “crétin”? No: clearly C-r-e-t-a-n. Crete is an
island--ah, I have it--
Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται, κακὰ θηρία, γαστέρες ἀργαὶ.
I might add “Cretensis incidit in Cretenses”; the Anglesey man is down
on the Anglesey men. But I would rather not translate the Greek. You
will find it in St. Paul’s letter to the first bishop of Crete, Chapter
I.
This, of course, is all ancient history. More than a generation of men
has passed, and the new generation may be vastly different. Moreover,
there was a revival in the island not long since. The people are
changed in heart.
“Do you think a Tory candidate will be returned at the next election,
Mr. Jones, Ynys Fôn?” (Mona’s Isle).
“’Deed, I don’t know; yes, perhaps, I think.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Thus, to take a few prominent cases, Colwyn Bay, Bethesda,
Portmadoc, Barmouth, Bala were known officially as parts of the civil
parishes of Eirias, Llandegai--Llanllechid, Ynyscynhaiarn, Llanbedr,
Llanycil respectively.
[2] The Blue Book of 1902 gives the following returns:--
County Boards Rates over 9_d._ Highest Lowest (school owning)
Anglesey 34 20 23_d._ 4·4_d._
Carnarvon 30 20 25·5 1·5
Merioneth 20 15 26·8 5·9
In Anglesey the expenses of administration were £850 11_s._ 2_d._
In 1882 two parishes in Carnarvonshire, Criccieth, and Llanllyfni,
levied rates of 39·4 and 44 pence respectively. (See Blue Book, 1883.)
[3] But I cannot find the phrase in the _Annals_ xiv. 29; or in the
_Agricola_.