The status of teachers in England is illustrated in the case studies which brilliantly enliven Pamela Silver’s The Education of the Poor. In 1905, Mr H. Sprigge was appointed head of Saint Mark’s, Kennington Oval, National School. It seems that he discharged his duties creditably for seven years and worked amicably with his committee of management. Then, in 1912, a disagreement arose and he discovered his proper place in society. ‘Vicar called: discussed service for Ascension Day. Instructed the headmaster to inform the staff that a special communion service for teachers would be held after the children’s service. He stated that staff were expected to attend. Headmaster replied that he could exercise no power over staff in this respect. The vicar said, “Do not argue, you must remember that you are here to obey me.’”32
Mr Sprigge had studied for two years at Cheltenham Training College and obtained his teaching certificate in the second division, and was therefore one of the better qualified members of a ‘profession’ which still contained many products of the ‘pupil-teacher’ system – beneficiaries of an apprenticeship which no craftsman in industry would have regarded as adequate. By and large, Morant’s Oxford-educated administrators regarded teachers in general with undisguised contempt. In 1905, Edmund Holmes, the Chief Inspector of Schools, was sufficiently unwise to express his opinion in writing. Describing to Morant the difficulties faced by the inspectorate, he began his litany of problems by stating, ‘Apart from the fact that elementary school teachers are, as a rule, uncultured and imperfectly educated and that many, if not most, of them are creatures of tradition and routine …’ His memorandum became public as a result of one of those errors which almost seem intentional. It was sent, by mistake, to one of the department’s political critics. The National Union of Teachers, already offended by Morant’s de haut en bas attitude, joined forces with the Tory Party to force the Chief Inspector to resign. Morant felt that honour required him to do the same. So ended one of the careers which helped make Edwardian England a time of positive change.
Of course, the change was greater for boys than for girls, men rather than women. By 1914 there were more than four thousand secondary schools in England and Wales. Only 586 of them admitted girls – 349 exclusively and 237 alongside boys. But the ancient universities were beginning to accept the idea of women as undergraduates – slightly improbably under the influence of George Nathaniel Curzon, Chancellor of the University of Oxford.* The colleges of the new Victoria University in the northern provinces were co-educational from the start.
The Universities of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield had all begun as part of Victoria University, a federation of existing colleges that came together gradually during the 1890s. Manchester University began as Owens College, Leeds University as the Yorkshire College of Science, Sheffield as Firth College and Liverpool as a new institution of learning created by the Municipal Corporation in 1881. All were helped by the existing medical schools in the cities’ great hospitals and advised by the ‘external delegacies’ of the ancient universities. The Victoria University – then incorporating only Liverpool but intended to embrace other colleges – received its Royal Charter in 1880. Its pioneers believed that it might exist in its federated form for ever, but religion intervened. Manchester wanted to create a Faculty of Theology. Leeds and Liverpool objected. The solution was separation. So each of the northern universities was an Edwardian creation – Manchester and Liverpool in 1903, Leeds in 1904 and Sheffield in 1905. Birmingham can claim seniority over all four. The Mason College and Queens College in that city had amalgamated in preparation for applying to join the Victoria University. But, inspired by Joe Chamberlain and the civic pride which he embodied, its governors decided that they should be independent from the start. Supported by a gift of £5,000 from Andrew Carnegie, they applied for, and received, a charter in 1900. The first Chancellor was, of course, the Right Honourable Joseph Chamberlain.
Ruskin College, Oxford, was founded – materially to provide young men and women with ‘a training in subjects which are essential for working-class leadership and which are not a direct avenue to anything beyond’. The founders – Mr and Mrs Vrooman and Professor Beal – were American idealists who (although they spoke of teaching ‘men who have merely been condemning our institutions … to transform those institutions … so that they will begin methodically and scientifically to possess the world’33) at heart believed in a liberal education. Many of their early students did not. They wanted to learn about the Marxist dialectic and how the victory of the proletariat (which, although certain, nevertheless had to be brought about by a popular revolution) could be hastened. After a long and bitter dispute about aims and objectives, the Marxists on the staff, who had formed themselves into the Plebs League, resigned in order to encourage ‘independent working-class education on Marxian lines’. The result, in 1909, was the Central Labour College in London which, despite the support of the South Wales Miners and the Society of Railway Servants, never prospered. It dwindled into the National Council of Labour Colleges which provided tutors for trade unions but, because of its overt political commitment, never enjoyed the success which government support and public money would have guaranteed.
The failure of the Central Labour College was an unhappy exception in an age when adult education prospered and adult colleges multiplied. The Mechanics Institutes (founded by Lord Brougham during the first half of the nineteenth century) had been taken over by the emergent middle classes. Cambridge University pioneered what it called a ‘University Extension Movement’. It attracted only a small percentage of the potential army of eager working-class students. It was too formal and therefore too forbidding. The Adult School Movement, pioneered by the Society of Friends, made some progress among men and women who were hungry for learning, but there was still a need for a dynamic movement which promoted and provided liberal adult education. It was met by what became the Workers’ Educational Association.
The WEA was the creation of three organisations and one man, Albert Mansbridge – a junior civil servant who became a clerk with the Co-operative Wholesale Society – who brought together the trade unions, the Co-operative movement and the universities which sponsored ‘extension’ courses. They formed the Association to promote the Higher Education of Working Men, with Mansbridge as honorary secretary. The first branch was established in Reading in 1904, the second in Rochdale. In 1905 Mansbridge successfully argued for a change of name. By 1908 the Workers’ Educational Association had fifty branches and two influential recruits. William Temple (soon to become Bishop of Manchester and eventually Archbishop of Canterbury) became the WEA’s President, and Robert Morant persuaded New College, Oxford, to make the organisation an annual grant on the understanding that it adopted Oxford ways. So the tutorial system infiltrated adult evening classes – reinforced by the stern regulation that financial support would be available only to groups of thirty or more. The need to learn came together with the urge to teach. For a year R. H. Tawney taught at Longston, in Staffordshire, on Friday evenings and Rochdale, in Lancashire, on Saturday afternoons.
The urge to improve was not confined to adults too old to benefit from the new secondary schools. At the turn of the century the mood of the whole nation – whether the product of hope or fear – was to prepare for the future. Indeed, one of the strangest organisations of self-improvement – devoted entirely to the moral and physical development of young people – was built on the injunction ‘Be Prepared’. The Boy Scouts were not the first benign military youth movement in Britain. Indeed their inspiration was provided by the Twenty-First Birthday Parade of the Boys’ Brigade. The inspecting officer was General Robert Baden-Powell, the hero of Mafeking who had – or so he claimed – been considering ways of occupying aimless youths since he had recruited boys for various duties during the siege. The Boys’ Brigade seemed to him concerned with the wrong sort of military training – parade ground drill rather than the encouragement of the initiative and resourcefulness which had been so v
aluable on the veld. What he achieved has often, unfairly, been the subject of derision and sometimes questions about the passions which drove ‘BP’ on. But Baden-Powell is one of the few men who, in their own lifetime, created a worldwide movement.
It all began with an ‘experimental camp’ on Brownsea Island, off the Dorset coast, in 1907. Boys of every social class lived for a week under canvas and received instruction in the subjects which Baden-Powell believed produced ‘manliness’ – physical fitness, personal hygiene, field-craft (most of it based on what he had learned with the Army in India and South Africa), patriotism, good manners and the Christian faith. Pursuit of these harmless objectives might not have spawned an international movement had ‘BP’ not been taken up by Arthur Pearson, the newspaper tycoon, who published the movement’s textbook, Scouting for Boys, and its magazine, The Scout. Pearson was motivated by real enthusiasm for an idea which he found both morally inspiring and good business. Northcliffe, his great (and in many ways more successful) rival had been a competitor for the sponsorship of the new organisation. The Scout sold 100,000 copies a week.
In 1910, the Boy Scouts colonised America, taking over, at its foundation, the Sons of Daniel Boone and the Woodcraft Indians. Theodore Roosevelt became the Scouts’ vice-president. Membership rose to 300,000 in three years. Soon there were to be Scout ‘troops’ all over the world. All of them propagated the ideals of the Edwardian Empire.
It is easy enough to laugh at the bare knees and the classes in knot-tying, the camp fire ‘yarns’ and the habit of teaching boys from the East End of London how to survive on the plains of Matabeleland. And there were other aspects of early ‘Scouting’ – philistinism chief amongst them – which were unequivocally deplorable. But in its bizarre way it was an attempt to make things better. Like the new universities and the secondary schools, the Boy Scouts were a proclamation of the belief in progress. The optimism which characterised their view of life was typical of the Age of Improvement in which they were created.
*For details of women and the professions see Chapter 10, ‘Votes for Women!’.
PART FOUR
‘Everybody Got Down off their Stilts’
The Edwardians took their pleasures seriously. For all their supposed frivolity, the years before 1914 heralded a cerebral, if not sober, century.
The poetry of the age was generally trivial and jingoistic. Only Yeats could stand comparison with the great Victorians. But every year between 1900 and 1914 at least one great novel was published. They were the stories of real people living in a real country. That country was England and much of Edwardian fiction was written in its praise.
The stage became serious in a different way. The turn-of-the-century drawing-room dramas were gradually superseded by the theatre of ideas. Vesta Tilley and the Gaiety Theatre caught the public imagination, but Shaw, Galsworthy and Granville Barker were all making the playgoing public think. At the same time they were challenging the Lord Chamberlain’s right to prevent them stimulating thought about the subject that Victorians had believed should never be mentioned in public – sex. It was an age of robust realism. In Yeats’s words, ‘Everybody got down off their stilts’.
The great institutions of national sport (with the exception of cricket, an essentially eighteenth-century foundation) had been created in Victoria’s reign. In the years immediately after her death, games reached out to the people in a new way. Edwardians, with more leisure than previous generations, became paying spectators. A hundred thousand football fans watched the 1901 Cup Final at Crystal Palace. Some games were becoming a trade as well as a pastime.
In the countryside, traditional ‘sport’ prospered as never before. It was the age of the ‘shooting party’ and the long country-house weekend. Racing became literally ‘the sport of kings’ – at least for the one King whose horses won the Derby and the St Leger. Everybody who was anybody played croquet and tennis. People who were nobody hiked. The whole country found time for pleasure.
CHAPTER 13
Ideas Enter the Drawing Room
Some drama is for an age, not for all time, so it is not altogether surprising that The Heart of Achilles (the story of how the Russian plan to annex India was foiled by a playboy turned patriot) and A Queen for a Wife (in which the future of a backward Balkan state is determined by the amorous adventures of a central European princeling) should have been immensely popular in Edwardian Britain and then forgotten after the world turned upside down in 1914. And, during the early years of the twentieth century, the British stage reflected more of national life than the politicians’ preoccupation with ‘the great game’ and ‘the eastern question’. Edward’s reign was a time of great social change. Britain – particularly England – was struggling to come to terms with a new class structure and altered class relationships. The stage reflected the growing doubts about deference and the increasing enthusiasm for radicalism and reform by abandoning its preoccupation with ‘drawing-room drama’ and replacing it with ‘the theatre of ideas’.
The old values died hard. In 1904 J. T. Grein, regarded in his time as a serious critic, expressed strong doubts about the merits of J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton. ‘Was it necessary’, he asked, ‘to contrast a very lowly type of kitchen maid with refined society?’ Grein was at least consistent. In 1910, when ideas were in vogue, he acknowledged that Smith was ‘in many ways the best of Somerset Maugham’s plays’, though he had one reservation about its construction. ‘The fact that his central figure is a servant somewhat lowers the standard of the comedy.’1
At the beginning of the century the working classes were usually allowed on stage only as members of the full supporting cast – butlers, policemen and rude mechanicals. Bernard Shaw, who had satirised the Balkan obsession in Arms and the Man, explained (we must assume ironically) in his preface to You Never Can Tell that he felt a sudden obligation to gratify the playgoing public’s appetite for watching ‘eating and drinking by people with an expensive air attended by an impossible comic waiter’.2 He was contributing to a well-established tradition. The stage directions for The Liars by Henry Arthur Jones specify ‘Lady Rosamund’s drawing room, Cadogan Gardens, a very elegant apartment, furnished in good taste.’ The Return of the Prodigal by St-John Hawkin is set in ‘The Jacksons’ drawing room at Chedleigh’. Hubert Henry Dawes’s Lady Epping’s Lawsuit begins in ‘The drawing room at Epping House’ and much of the action in his Captain Drew on Leave takes place in Mrs Moxon’s drawing room. It was not only the now forgotten playwrights who leant heavily on that device. The cast of Arthur Wing Pinero’s Mid-Channel were marooned in ‘A drawing room decorated and furnished in the French style’ and Maugham’s Smith (despite, according to Grein, reflecting the author’s inclination to vulgarity) at least allowed the actors to perform in ‘Mrs Dallas-Bower’s drawing room at Crediton Court, Kensington’ where the furniture ‘is in excellent taste’. Drawing-room drama deserved its name.
The stage drawing room had a purpose. It facilitated the movement which both the comedy and the melodrama of the time required. In Rudolf Besier’s Don the stage directions were precise and specific: the drawing room in the Oldwick Rectory had ‘a door at the middle of the back’ and ‘on the right, windows looking out onto a short drive’ – a convention which, when real life began to force its way across the Edwardian footlights, was derided as the defining characteristic of formula drama. For while it facilitated the standard progression of betrayal, revelation, confession and repentance, it certainly inhibited (and probably prevented) innovation and experiment. All those limitations are to be found in the work of the now largely forgotten Henry Arthur Jones, co-author of The Silver King, perhaps the most popular melodrama in Victorian England. His last success was Mrs Dane’s Defence in 1900. Twenty-three years later, he was still complaining about the emergence of plays which were written ‘for a clique or coterie of superior persons’.3
Established playwrights defended the convention of plays for plebs about patricians. Piner
o, who had made his name in Victorian England with The Second Mrs Tanqueray and Trelawney of the Wells, believed it essential to write about people who ‘lived at the rate of five thousand pounds a year … Wealth and leisure are more productive of dramatic complication than poverty and hard work.’ That judgement was based less on the demands of the stage than on the perceived inadequacies of the lower orders. ‘You must take into account the inarticulateness, the inexpressiveness of the English lower and lower-middle classes – their reluctance to analyse, to generalise, to give vivid utterance to their thoughts and their emotions.’4
That view of the theatre and of life was shared by most early-Edwardian playgoers. It certainly represented the dramatic judgement of the King himself. Edward preferred dining with actors to watching them perform on stage. His most celebrated theatrical excursion was a visit to the Haymarket Theatre to support Lillie Langtry on the occasion of her ‘acting debut with a professional company’. He found her performance in Squire Bancroft’s production of She Stoops to Conquer ‘a great success’ and confided in a letter to his young brother, ‘She is so very fond of acting that she has decided to go on the stage.’5 But he almost certainly took less pleasure from the play than the players. He most enjoyed ‘modern society pieces containing plenty of caustic and subtle psychology’.6
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