CHESHIRE
“Then there is the County Palatine.”
_Merchant of Venice._
Three profitable years I spent in Norfolk, learning my business,
and I became weary of exile. When on my appointment I received my
instructions from the Secretary, he said that, looking to my experience
gained as Inspector of Returns, it was not necessary that I should
serve any further apprenticeship: I “need not take up my headquarters
in Norfolk.” This in official language meant that as soon as possible
I should be given a district of my own; and in my ignorance of
official life I took no thought for the morrow. But, as my third year
of expatriation began to draw to a close, it occurred to me that the
Secretary was not personally interested in me, and that in the Civil
Service, as elsewhere, a man who wants promotion must see that he gets
it.
I reminded Sir Francis that I was hungry--not for promotion, but for
_amotion_ to less remoteness. He at once admitted my claim, and created
a new district for me, the headquarters of which would be King’s Lynn,
and the territory West Norfolk and East Cambridgeshire. I remember
that Wisbech and Whittlesey were included. I never saw either, but I
should class them with Timbuctoo and Borrioboola Gha. My capital had a
population of 17,000, and a member of Parliament: the grass grew in the
streets, and on Tuesdays the cattle from the Hinterland came to market
and ate it down. There was no Grand hotel, and no place where I could
lodge; it would be necessary to take a house, and manage it. Matrimony
stared me in the face. The greater part of the aforesaid Hinterland was
fen district, imprudently reclaimed from the great dismal swamp. I
pointed out these drawbacks to the Secretary, and he kindly suggested
that I should beguile the tedium of existence by shooting gulls. It
might have come to secretary-birds.
In a few weeks Providence intervened. I heard that H.M.I. at Chester
wanted, for family reasons, to live near Lynn: would I change? I felt
as Clive must have felt when the pistol, which he snapped at his
own head, failed to go off. “He burst forth (says Macaulay) into an
exclamation that surely he was reserved for something great.” Can it
ever at any other time have happened that a man wanted to leave Chester
to go to King’s Lynn?
With great difficulty I persuaded Sir Francis that to the Cheshire and
Norfolk people it must be a matter of profound indifference whether
Gyas or Cloanthus inspected their schools. Granted that Cheshire
suffered loss, yet how pleasant to think of the joy of Norfolk. He
grudgingly agreed, and in due course it was arranged. On October 1,
1877, I took charge of the Chester district.
We read at times in the history of great men that after some
turning-point in their career they “never looked back.” I am not a
great man, and in one sense I often looked back. There were many days
when I thought of my successor; in winter frostbitten in the fens;
in spring shivering in a dogcart, beating up against the east wind,
smothered with yellow dust on Roudham Heath; at any time of the year
wearily waiting for slow trains at dismal roadside stations: and at
such times the old pious ejaculation rose to my lips, “There but for
the Grace of God goes poor John Bradford.”
For I had got the best, or at least the most comfortable, district in
England. In six months I was relieved of the eastern side of Cheshire,
and my limit was a radius of from 10 to 20 miles round Chester. There
were eight railway lines centred in the ancient city to carry me about,
and on some of the lines trains were frequent. The school inspections
had been so craftily arranged that I could spend the winter months
in Birkenhead, where all the travelling was done in cabs; the spring
in and around Chester, where there were hansom cabs instead of the
perilous dogcart; the summer months in the more distant places at the
end of my chain; and the autumn in the Wirral peninsula, between the
Dee and the Mersey.
Late in the ’eighties an old colleague asked why I did not apply for a
London district, and so get rid of all the travelling. There was the
leading case of S. who used to inspect the four northern counties,
giving six months to Northumberland and Durham, and six to Cumberland
and Westmorland: now he had a compact area in East London, a mile
across one way, and a mile and a quarter the other.
“And a yellow fog by way of a change from a black fog, and absolute
monotony of schools all the year round,” I replied: “town children
differing only in degrees of dirt; school buildings which would not
be tolerated outside the large towns; and managers who take a cab
to Whitehall, if they don’t like their Report. And at the back, and
using private and political influence at the Office, a Debating
Society calling itself the London School Board. Here in Cheshire I get
variety. On Monday I had a town school of 400 boys in a black hole: on
Tuesday a suburban school of 150 girls in a beautiful building with a
lavish supply of teachers: on Wednesday I drove 10 miles to a country
village, where the whole 45 lambs of the flock were collected in what
an esteemed inspector called ‘a third class waiting-room and a jam
cupboard.’ I am going to get Monday’s school shut up in 12 months: in
London it would take 12 years. London! I had rather be a country dog,
and bay the moon.”
He admitted that the School Board was as bad as the fog. H.M.I. is all
but powerless in Board Schools; the Board inspectors hold the purse
strings and control the promotion, and if H.M.I. tries to raise the
standard of education to the level of other towns the Board combine
with the teachers to worry his life out.
“But,” he added, “H.M.I. sometimes has an innings and scores freely.
Did you hear about Bouncer? Member of the Board, you know: prominent
educational reformer. Went down to a Board School the other day, and
walked through the class-rooms. When he got to Standard V. he found
them sitting upright, and a middle-aged sort of man balanced on the
fireguard in front of the class.
“‘Hallo,’ said Bouncer, ‘what is this class doing?’
“‘At present,’ said the middle-aged man, not liking the Bouncerian
manner, ‘they are doing nothing.’
“‘Nothing! then they had better go home,’ snorted Bouncer.
“‘Not a bad idea,’ said the middle-aged man meditatively.
“Bouncer was furious. ‘Pray, sir,’ he asked, ‘do you know who I am?’
“‘Haven’t a notion,’ said the middle-aged man.
“‘My name is Bouncer, sir, John Bouncer; and I am a member of the
School Management Committee.’
“‘Ah,’ said the man on the fireguard, ‘and do you know who I am?’
“‘You, sir? No, I do NOT know.’
“‘I am the inspector, what you call Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools.
Now, boys, here is teacher with the map of Europe. What is the capital
of Herzegovina?’”
I thought I would do without Bouncer. No one behaved like that in West
Cheshire: I should be frightened.
“And then,” I continued, “look at my playground. There are three
railways to take me into Wales; eighty minutes to Llandudno, three and
a half hours to the foot of Snowdon, two and a half hours to the foot
of Cader Idris. Do you offer me Margate and Primrose Hill?”
So I abode in Chester for twenty-five years. This is not a
biography. I got to know the whole district topographically and
individually--managers, teachers, and children. A new generation of
managers sprang up; many of the teachers had been children under my
inspection; the children were the sons and daughters of my earliest
victims. The buildings had grown up with the teachers and children;
there were few, indeed, that had not been enlarged, modernised,
or practically reconstructed, and many of them brought pleasant
recollections of hard fought battles waged with managers for the sake
of the children, or with the powers of darkness for the sake of both
managers and children.
But I began to think that I had been there too long. We knew one
another too well, and there was an increasing danger of my standard
being regarded as the standard standard. So I mused, and waited.