UPHEAVAL
“Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee, thou art translated.”
_Midsummer Night’s Dream._
In 1902 came Mr. Balfour’s great Education Act, putting the whole
control of all Public Elementary Schools (_exceptis rebus divinis_, in
Baconian phrase) into the hands of the local authorities. This altered
the whole machinery of inspection. Hitherto our districts had been
limited by the boundaries of large boroughs, or of poor law unions,
though we had nothing to do with corporations, or guardians. Now, if I
might borrow the words of Froude in the purplest of his purple patches,
“the paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up.” Henceforth
our little domains were to be co-extensive with a county, or with one
or more large towns. A new Secretary to the Board of Education was
appointed, “with fear of change perplexing (our) monarch’s” inspectors.
Where is my _Ravenshoe_?
“When the head of a great family dies, relations are changed entirely
between some score or two of persons. The dog of to-day is not the dog
of yesterday.... Perhaps even the old hound wonders whether he is to
keep his old place by the fire or no; and younger brothers bite their
nails, and wonder, too, about many things.”
Towards the end of the year I, among others, was summoned to the Office
and had my interview. In a few days came the announcement that I was
appointed to the care of Manchester, and at the same time to the Chief
Inspectorship of the North-Western Division. The local paper, which
reported the change to a disconsolate city, declared in picturesque
language that I was to rule from the Mersey to the Solway, and from the
Pennine Range to the Calf of Man.
In other words, the Division included Lancashire, Cumberland,
Westmorland, and the Isle of Man.
There were advantages and disadvantages, with which I need not trouble
the reader. When Bishop Stubbs was moved from Chester to Oxford, he
said, with his accustomed humour, that, “like Homer, he suffered
from translation.” What should I lose or gain from my translation? I
soliloquised for a while, like Hamlet, whether to bear those ills I
had, or fly to others that I knew not of; but, unlike Hamlet, I chose
the latter, because, in any case, it could not be for more than four
years, whereas Hamlet contemplated a considerably longer stay in his
undiscovered bourne. I did myself the honour to accept, and assumed
charge of the children of 600,000 people in the district, and of about
5,000,000 in the Division. In a few months Cumberland and Westmorland
were, to my great regret, taken from me, and Cheshire, more convenient
but less beautiful, was substituted.
The Division then consisted of the two Counties Palatine[44] and the
Isle of Man. There was a staff of about forty-five inspectors and
sub-inspectors, whose diurnal and annual revolutions I was supposed to
oversee. At the time of this alteration I also exchanged the title of
Chief Inspector for that of Divisional Inspector. The substitution of
five syllables for one is always to be deprecated, but that was the
limit of my injury.
What are the duties of a Senior, or Chief, or Divisional Inspector? (I
have lived to see the three dynasties.)
It is difficult to sum them up concisely. The professional reader
knows them already: the unprofessional reader would not be interested.
Briefly I may say, that he has to see that the District Inspectors
and their staff do their work, and maintain the requisite standard
of education; he has to advise the staff in all cases of difficulty;
he has to hold enquiries in cases of dispute between the District
Inspector and the local authority. Also he has to attend conferences at
the Office, and to advise the Board “before any important change is
made.” Lastly, he had in alternate years to compile a Blue Book report
on the state of education in the Division.
I may say at once that the two last duties gave me little or no
trouble. When I resigned, there had been no conference for eighteen
months, and no divisional reports have been required for five years.
I cannot say that the conferences were profitable to the nation: in
fact, so far as I remember, they were chiefly confined to questions
of official organisation; but they gave one a convenient opportunity
of meeting old colleagues at the expense of the Consolidated Fund.
The Blue Book report--if I may quote Mr. Curdle[45]--“as an exquisite
embodiment of the (Inspector’s) visions, and a realisation of human
intellectuality, gilding with refulgent light our dreamy moments, and
laying open a new and magic world before the mental eye, is gone,
perfectly gone.” I cannot say whether the Board suspected that no
one read the reports; or whether in its positively Russian dread of
individual opinion, it disliked the appearance in print of such crude
ideas as might survive a triple censorship. So long as I was not asked
to compile the hateful thing, I was content.
The most important duty of the Divisional Chief has been forgotten.
It was to preside over an annual conference of his suffragans, which
began with discussion of educational topics of present interest, and
ended with lunch. I shall always retain pleasant recollections of those
spring meetings at Derby, when I sat at the hospitable board of my good
old chief, Mr. Blandford, and his successors, and I did my best to
carry on the tradition at Manchester. As for the “topics,” they served
their turn. Then the “agenda paper” evolved the menu.
It is obvious that an official who discharged these duties efficiently
would be very valuable; and the Royal Commission, which enquired into
Civil Service organisation, proposed[46] to assist him by relieving
him of his “small” district work; (SMALL, they said!). So
far from following this suggestion, the Board have steadily increased
the local work by enlarging the areas and diminishing the subordinate
staff; so that in my last half year, when the district population had
increased to 880,000, though I had a splendid staff in number and in
efficiency, I found my time and energies entirely absorbed by local
claims. Fortunately, the Division could boast an admirable body of
District Inspectors, and appeals and enquiries were exceedingly rare. I
gave myself up to Manchester and Salford.
Hitherto I had regarded Manchester as the place where one changed
trains if one wanted to go from Chester to York. The London and North
Western thoughtfully arranges an interval of an hour or more, and there
is time to stroll into the town. There is a river more gloomy than
the Styx, more foul than the Pegnitz of Nuremberg, or a back canal
of Venice at low water. Beyond that is a cathedral, smoke-begrimed
outside, filled with an impenetrable gloom inside. Beyond the cathedral
I had never ventured, for it usually rains, and there is an oft
recurrent fog. In this town I was to spend four years, if I survived.
When you have realised the rain and the fog, and the smoke, you begin
to grasp the ceaseless uproar of traffic. There are electric trams
screaming, and whirring, and clanging, and crashing. There are lorries,
chiefly laden with mineral-water bottles, which make a specially
irritating rattle, and jar. There are drays groaning under the weight
of huge bales of calico. And everywhere there is stone pavement;
granite setts, that multiply, and intensify the clanging and crashing
and groaning. And this granite paving is not confined to the main
thoroughfares, where the wear and tear of traffic might almost justify
a poverty-stricken corporation in its selection; might at least reduce
the charge of sleep-murder to culpable somnicide: it extends over the
whole town. A few, a very few favoured spots have a short stretch of
wooden pavement: everywhere else, even in the most remote side street
of a back quarter, there is granite.
This does not strike a Manchester man as being objectionable. How
could it do so? When the Romans built Mancunium they laid down a
stone-paved road, and the roads in Manchester have ever since been
stone-paved, and what Manchester has always done is right. They even
build schools on the edges of these “stony griefs”; and while I was
there, I used to watch day by day the gradual rise of an enormous
hospital bounded by one of the noisiest of main thoroughfares. That was
not my business, but the schools were my business, and I never ceased
to protest against the tortures inflicted on teachers and children in
those places.
My particular bugbear was a Board School in the Pandemonium Road, a
still noisier street than the one chosen for the hospital patients.
During school hours there is seldom a lull in the infernal din. And
there was no conceivable reason why the school should not have been
built at the back, except that the School Board wanted to shine
before men, and to allow the passer-by to see the magnificence of a
Manchester Board School. The noise of the street was so overwhelming,
that arrangements were made to work the school in “shifts,” each class
taking one month of noise in a class-room facing the street, and a
month of comparative quiet on the opposite side of the building. On
the noisy side you might see the teachers, with careworn faces and
outstretched necks, striving to make their voices cut through the cross
waves of sound; and you would see the children, with knitted brows and
open mouths, straining their ears to catch what was said, and at times
shaking their heads in despair, and sinking back into their seats with
resignation, as who should say, “I have done my best, but after all it
is your look-out more than mine.”
There were two other schools, both Board (or Council) schools, in the
same plight: many were but slightly less tormented. Some had been
planted in remote streets, and the electric tram lines had broken in on
their retirement, not only destroying their peace, but threatening the
children with dismemberment.
The obvious remedy was wood pavement outside the schools. This was
conceded to churches and chapels, that were open two or three times
on Sundays, and once or twice in the week: but schools, that were at
work for five hours and a half five days a week, and where it was
important that one should hear what was said, were denied so much
relief. Remonstrance was in vain. The inordinate self-satisfaction of
Manchester was never more apparent than in this instance: “Just look at
our traffic.” Their traffic! If they could only see Oxford Street, or
the Strand, and take the evidence of men who remembered the old granite
pavement there!
Noise was not the worst of their offences. Many of the school
buildings, church, chapel, Roman Catholic, and board, were incredibly
bad. In a note-book I have a record of my last visit to Hewitt Street
Council School, on a November afternoon in a thick yellow fog. One
hundred and forty-three boys in four classes were being taught in
a large hall: the windows were shut to keep out the fog, and from
eighty to a hundred gas-jets were adding pollution to the poisoned
air: thirty-two more boys were struggling for existence in a small
and vilely-lighted classroom. Both rooms were on the second floor: on
the ground floor india-rubber was stored: on the first floor there
was calico: there was only one staircase. If a fire had broken out on
either of the two lower floors, hardly a child could have escaped;
for the thick smoke mounting upwards would have proved as deadly as
fire-damp. After this it is hardly worth noting that there was not a
foot of playground; the boys played in the street. And this, remember,
was thirty-five years after the formation of the first School Board for
Manchester.
Two years later, in 1907, the school was closed.
Do not suppose that these horrors were confined to Manchester; many
less important towns in the district might plead that they had their
standards of comfort and decency lowered by the example of their
capital. There is a range of hills running from the Scotch border to
the Peak, known to geography book writers (but not locally) as the
Pennine Range. On the west side of this range lay my division, and from
Preston to Congleton there was a succession of large manufacturing
towns, differing from one another in some respects, but agreeing
in their notions of school building. The root idea was a large main
room, having, if possible, a raised platform, or daïs, at one end, and
several small classrooms. The main room should be from thirty-four to
forty feet wide: it would be admirably adapted for Sunday school, and
the superintendent should sit on the platform to direct the storm.
The classrooms would hold from twenty to thirty children on the eight
square feet allowance of the Education Department: the walls might be
lined with cupboards to hold the crockery for tea parties, and the
assorted literature of the Band of Hope and other societies; also
the Band of Hope’s big drum, and the huge tea-urns. The societies
would meet in the main room, and the best classroom would serve for
the committee to assemble in. There would be no cloak-room, and no
washing-room.
Incidentally the rooms would be used for day-school purposes: in this
way the repairs of the fabric, and a good deal of the gas and coal
bills, and cleaning expenses would be provided for; and if a really
energetic schoolmaster could be found to farm the school, he would
certainly relieve the managers of any financial liability, and might
even be induced to pay a comfortable rent, thereby strengthening the
Cause. A very convenient addition to the scheme was to build the school
underneath a chapel, more or less in a basement--this economised space.
For some years the plan worked well. Then trouble arose, as new
inspectors arose, and propounded startling theories of health and
comfort. Some men went so far as to assert that a schoolroom 34
feet wide, with four rows of desks on either side of a central
gangway--“double-banked” is the technical name--was intolerably
noisy: and that classrooms, which, even if cleared of the cupboards,
and tea-urns, held only twenty-five children, were insanitary when
sixty-five were black-holed in them. But the managers were very
powerful, and the school-farmers (lineal descendants of the Syrian
_publicani_) commanded many votes. Lancashire and Cheshire M.P.’s
wrote private letters to the Vice-President denouncing the misplaced
zeal of the Inspector: or they called at the Office and talked to
the Secretary. All the powers of obstruction were used. The Roman
Catholics kept an Archbishop, a Duke, and an Earl in readiness:
“With belted sword and spur on heel
They quitted not their harness bright,
Neither by day, nor yet by night,”
and the Wesleyans had their doughty champion at the Westminster
Training College, who
“Carved at the meal
With gloves of steel,
And he drank the red wine through the helmet barred.”
These flocked to the Office, and the Secretary for the time being threw
all his children to the wolves, on condition that the wolves went away.
Do you call this exaggeration? Well, I will not insist on the barred
helmet; and the “red wine” may have been toast and water. But for
the rest, the story is true in essentials. In 1903 I was taken by
a colleague to a Wesleyan school in one of the cotton towns, and
was shown the buildings which, in a former year, Mundella, when
Vice-President of the Department, had denounced to the managers: he had
added the offensive remark, in the presence of the District Inspector,
that he “could not understand how H.M. Inspector allowed such a
building to be recognised.” That official placidly murmured, “I will
tell you about that downstairs,” and when they were outside, he said,
“I have done all I could to get the place shut up, but your Office has
always blocked me.” Did Mundella go by an early train to Whitehall
to insist on immediate justice? “That,” continued my colleague, “was
twenty-five years ago, and the school has gone on ever since.”
The Circular of 1893, issued by Mr. Acland with the aim of securing
sanitary buildings, has already been mentioned. How other places
escaped just condemnation I know not; but from careful study of
portfolios I discovered that Manchester won through the nineteenth
century by the policy of Fabius. In 1904 I visited a horrible den,
squalid, noisy, noisome, then under the Manchester Committee, and I
reported its defects in full. The Committee replied that they had
appointed a sub-committee to look out for a site for a new school. What
more could be expected? But I turned to the previous correspondence,
and there I read that in 1894 my predecessor had denounced the school,
and that the School Board had replied, “A sub-committee has been
appointed to look out for a new site.”
One can picture the relief of the Department in 1894 on finding that
their suggestion had received due attention, and the relief of the
School Board on finding that the Department was so easily pacified. As
a searcher Diogenes was not more unsuccessful.
In the twentieth century the patience of Whitehall had been exhausted.
On my predecessor’s report a considerable number of these dens had
been condemned, and their dates of execution had been fixed. But, like
Prior’s Thief, they
“Seem’d not in great haste that the show should begin:
Now fitted the halter, now traversed the cart,
And often took leave, but seem’d loath to depart,”
and, as in the well-known Rheims case, “nobody seem’d one penny the
worse.”
The Act of 1902, however, gave new life to the champions of health. We
demanded execution of the condemned, and proceeded to draw up a fearful
list of new indictments against other offenders. Looking down the list
of schools, though time and imperfect memory have already confused
North Street with South Street, and St. John’s C.E. with St. John’s
R.C., it is easy to pick out 50 habitual criminals, who were brought up
for correction.
The contest raged fiercely over the whole town; emissaries from the
local authorities hurried up to London and besieged the doors of the
Board; the Post Office groaned under the protests; architects of the
Board visited and reported; the great Panjandrum himself, with the
little round button on top, was called in; and still we fought. In some
parts of the field we won easily; every Wesleyan school in the town was
condemned and temporarily transferred; after a desperate fight a group
of four of the worst offenders received sentence. Hewitt Street, as
I said before, is gone; reversing Disraeli’s epigram,[47] it is not
only d----d, it is dead. The others are, I suppose, still in the former
stage.
And all the time the usual struggle with the Code went on, varied
now with resistance to an attack from the local authority; now with
presentment of a cold shoulder to obstruction offered by the Teachers’
Union; now with the soothing of indignant managers, upon whose toes all
the other parties were treading. It was only in the intervals between
the recitation of Standard V. and the geography of Standard VI. that
one had time to notice that the rooms in which both classes were taught
were unfit for human habitation; it was only on a chance visit to a
cookery or woodwork class that one discovered, that the instruction
was given in what the local authority called a basement, and I called
a cellar; it was only on a similar chance visit to a school that I
discovered abominations which almost took away my appetite for dinner.
And it was only after escaping from the day’s drudgery that I had even
short leisure to study the people, far too short a time to be able to
give any reasoned account of them. A pilgrim may report his impressions
of manners and customs, but he cannot generalise on character. True
that the Manchester folk made no attempt to conceal their failings,
or to conciliate the casual visitor. I have mentioned the “inordinate
self-satisfaction” of the city, but it would be better to describe it
as an over-full recognition of its own surpassing merits: let us not
suppose that it went far beyond a just claim. There went with it a
certain consciousness that in the wear and tear of crowded life the
amenities of society were a little neglected. It was told me with a
strange delight that the commercial travellers, and others, speak of
Manchester _men_, and Liverpool _gentlemen_, and it was averred that
the former put on silk hats when they journeyed to do business with the
latter. I mentioned this double tribute to a Liverpool resident, and
he replied that _he had not noticed it_. Now, what did he mean? Was it
that the Liverpool gentlemen...? or that he had not seen the silk hats?
It is better not to ask too many questions.
But the absence of pretence is sometimes itself a pretence, and the
people are not so black as they paint themselves. Let us be reasonable.
If the dwellers in Manchester had been more richly endowed with
beauty, grace, courtesy, and so on, would they have continued to live
in Manchester? Or would not other cities have enticed away men who
combined these merits with the intelligence and activity which have
produced the Ship Canal, and the Technological Museum? We do not expect
to find pine-apples in the Hebrides, or violets in the Sahara.
Dipping into a volume of Burns, I came to some lines so exactly
suitable to the occasion, that I cannot do better than conclude with
them, after the manner of Addison:
“But fare ye weel, auld Nickie-ben,
O wad ye tak’ a thought an’ men’
Ye aiblins might--I dinna ken--
Still hae a stake:
_I’m wae to think upo’ yon den,
Ev’n for your sake_.”
FOOTNOTES:
[44] Note that I fully admit the right of the County of Durham to this
meaningless title, and also to immunity from me.
[45] “Nicholas Nickleby,” chapter xxiv.
[46] “That it would tend to secure a greater uniformity of standard
among the Inspectors, if the chief Inspectors ceased to have charge of
small districts of their own, and confined themselves to the larger
areas which they have to supervise, &c., &c.,” p. 76, Report.
[47] “Protection,” said Mr. Disraeli, “is not only dead, it is d----d.”
A modern Protectionist would lament that the statesman did not read
_Alton Locke_, published before the utterance, ch. xxii: “And sae the
deevil’s dead.... At ony rate I’d no bury him till he began smell a
wee strong like. It’s a grewsome thing, is premature interment, Alton,
laddie!”