The social world of the school: Education and community in interwar London 9781526150769

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The social world of the school

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The social world of the school Education and community in interwar London Hester Barron

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Hester Barron 2022

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The right of Hester Barron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 5075 2 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover credit: Board of Education, Syllabus of Physical Training for Schools (HMSO, 1933). Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

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For Glyn

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Contents

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations  Map of Inner London

page viii x xi

Introduction1 Part I: School and community 1 The school as a community 2 The school in the community

33 60

Part II: What were schools for? 3 4 5 6 7 8

Preparing for the future Fighting poverty Brightening lives Making citizens Teaching morals A sense of place

91 126 155 185 214 244

Conclusion272 Bibliography281 Index298

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Acknowledgements

It was 2010 when I first started to think about the elementary schools of interwar London. I was grateful for the award of a British Academy small grant that year (reference SG-090782) that enabled me to scope out some of the archival material. Then and since, the London Metropolitan Archives proved a lovely place to work, with welcoming and helpful staff and Exmouth Market just around the corner. It was also a pleasure to spend time at the various other archives and libraries that I visited over the course of the research: the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Essex Record Office, the Institute of Education, the London School of Economics, the Mass Observation Archive, the National Archives, and Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives. Mass Observation material is reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the trustees of the Mass Observation Archive. The last couple of months of the British Academy grant period were cut short by the birth of my son. He is now approaching his tenth birthday. Other projects, articles and books have been started and finished in the meantime, but I have lived with this book for many years, and – surely as with any project that is a decade in the making – I have become indebted to many along the way. I have  always felt lucky in my friendships; thank you to all those who gave advice, support, or just time away from it all. You are too many to name, but you know who you are. Sussex University granted me a period of research leave to complete the manuscript and was a stimulating place to work throughout, not least because of the support and intellectual generosity of colleagues. In particular, I am thankful for the friendship of my

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Acknowledgements ix

Sussex sisters, especially Flora Dennis, Carol Dyhouse, Liz James, Katharina Rietzler, Emily Robinson, Lucy Robinson, Claudia Siebrecht and Catherine Will. Carol was always willing to act as a sounding board – as she is with everything I write. I valued her advice from the very beginnings of the project and she read the complete manuscript at its end. I owe her an enormous debt. Friends and family elsewhere were generous with their time and their suggestions. Chris Jeppesen and Chris Prior also read and commented on the final draft; I am ever so grateful to them both. Over the years, I have spoken to Claire Langhamer about this book more than anyone else. Closest of friends and wisest of counsellors, she listened to my half-formed thoughts, read and re-read various drafts, and encouraged and inspired me I felt overwhelmed; I have leant on her at every stage. I cannot thank her enough. My parents, Audrey and Bob Barron, and my sister Cleo have been a constant source of support, particularly in the difficult conditions of the last couple of years. My mum is now long retired as a primary school teacher, but even when I was a small child I was aware of her belief in the importance of education in all its creative forms. Idris – nearly ten – has shown me the other side. His love of learning and enjoyment of school life has been precious to watch. His childhood may have slowed the progress of this book quite considerably but I would not have exchanged it for the world. Finally, to Glyn I owe more than I can say. Thank you for everything.

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List of abbreviations

ARCS BLSA ERO GPO HMI LCC LMA LNU MOA NUT THLHLA TNA

Archives of the Royal Commonwealth Society British Library Sound Archive Essex Record Office General Post Office His Majesty’s Inspectorate London County Council London Metropolitan Archives League of Nations Union Mass Observation Archive National Union of Teachers Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives The National Archives

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Map of Inner London

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Introduction

In 1932, the American sociologist Willard Waller began his classic study of schools and teaching by suggesting that What this book tells us is what every teacher knows, that the world of school is a social world. Those human beings who live together in the school, though deeply severed in one sense, nevertheless spin a tangled web of interrelationships; that web and the people in it make up the social world of school. It is not a wide world but, for those who know it, it is a world compact with meaning. It is a unique world. It is the purpose of this book to explore it.1

I can remember the moment when I read this passage. I was in the Social Sciences reading room at the British Library, at the beginning of a new project examining schools and schooling in interwar London. I decided there and then that this was the quotation with which I would begin my own eventual book, for Waller’s ambition to explore the social world of the school, was – at that point – my ambition too. I wanted to chart the lived experience of the classroom and I saw its everyday interactions as being at the heart of my research. The quotation survived to make it to the opening, but, several years later, my ideas around it have changed. Slowly, I realised that the ‘social world’ of the school was much wider than the passage allowed. The ‘tangled web of interrelationships’ in my own book stretches outwards to include families and the wider local community and economy; the chronological focus widens to encompass past scholars as well as the future parents, workers and voters that pupils would become. It has become a story of the social

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relationships that shaped interwar Britain: the overlapping interests of children, parents, neighbours, teachers, school managers, inspectors, welfare workers, medics, clerics, local businesses and local government officials. And so this book turned out not to be a microhistory of the classroom after all, although much of the source material is beautiful in its ability to conjure up particular moments of classroom life. In fact, it could claim to be the opposite: about what happens if we refuse to let the history of the classroom be constrained by the walls of the school. My first book, stemming from my PhD, explored meanings of community in the Durham coalfield during the 1926 miners’ lockout.2 In the years following its publication, my attention increasingly turned to the history of schooling and childhood and I lost count of the number of academics who commented that this was a big shift in direction. There were new historiographies to get to grips with, of course, but I wondered why it was seen as a greater change than any other. In fact, one of the chapters in my first book had been on education: about how schools functioned during the strike, the messages that miners’ children received, and the relationship between school activities and what pupils learnt at home. One reviewer specifically noted that ‘the chapter on education is perhaps unexpected in a study of 1926’.3 In his recent book on education after 1945, Peter Mandler argues that the best social, economic, cultural and gender histories too often ‘relegate education to an afterthought’.4 Regarding the interwar years specifically, historical accounts were once dominated by assessments of employment, living standards, and arguments over the 1930s as either ‘healthy’ or ‘hungry’. More recently, historians have been better attuned to the complexities of the period, continuing to acknowledge the importance of class but also sensitive to the ways in which experiences were fractured by race and gender in particular. But despite an ongoing concern with issues of community and identity, most social, cultural and political histories of interwar Britain pay scant attention to children’s experiences or the social history of schooling. Jon Lawrence has argued that the concerns of interwar social

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Introduction 3

inquiry, rightly dominated by the challenge of combating the misery of poverty and chronic unemployment, have continued to contour studies of the period, encouraging a ‘tendency to see social change from above rather than below – as a result of shifts in state policy, rather than as the product, at least in part, of democratic impulses from below, including rising expectations and subtle shifts in social norms’.5 In righting this balance, an examination of educational institutions – from below – is critical. To quote Mandler again, schools and universities in the twentieth century were ‘not only motors of economic growth and cockpits of citizenship but also the most important theatres of socialisation outside the family. They stand, therefore, on the front line of social change.’6 This book argues that the school is an essential lens through which to view the social history of interwar Britain. Education now mattered more than ever in ordinary people’s lives. When the 1918 Education Act abolished exceptions to the compulsory ­school-leaving age, all children aged 5–14 received a standardised experience of schooling for the first time. It may only have been one way in which parents and children were becoming familiar with a more visible and interventionist state, following welfare reforms in the years before 1914 and a vast increase in state power during the First World War. Yet for many people, whose interactions continued to be informed by the local, the experiential and the quotidian, it was the most important. Schooling – or a son or daughter’s experience of schooling – was now a constant of everyday life. Expectations of state institutions had also changed. The relationship between citizens and government had been altered by war service and was further transformed by the suffrage reforms of 1918 and 1928. Schools were places where parents might exercise increased power as ratepayers, voters and consumers. The extension of the franchise suggested new, democratic and egalitarian concepts of citizenship and social inclusion, which competed with an older, anxious rhetoric that valued state education for its ‘civilising’ benefits to the urban masses. By the interwar period more attention was being given to the individual child and particularly to children’s emotional development and welfare. Scientific, medical and educational groups were moving away from a primary focus on children’s bodies to an increasing

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concern with the ‘management of minds’, as Harry Hendrick puts it.7 By the 1930s, child-centred education had ‘become the intellectual orthodoxy of the primary school and of the training college’, even if it was not yet practised in every classroom, and many young teachers were drawn to the ‘romantic excitement about … psychologically informed pedagogy’.8 Schools were increasingly credited with a more formative role in the creation of adult citizens. Meanwhile, young people themselves responded to a changing world. David Fowler has suggested that these years saw the emergence of the ‘first teenagers’, as school-leavers enjoyed higher levels of affluence than earlier generations and spent more on leisure. Pamela Cox quotes an MP who worried that ‘girls are getting better wages, they dress themselves rather more flashily … One can hardly ever go down a street without seeing girls of 13, 14, and 15 with powder on their faces and rouge on their lips.’9 Younger children enjoyed less disposable income, but their habits remained concerning to the political class. In 1931 an MP cited a questionnaire which asked Birmingham schoolchildren for their impressions upon leaving the cinema. ‘What a very good time a girl can have’, was one of several replies to alarm him.10 Nowhere might children be better placed to take advantage of new opportunities for leisure and consumption than in London, with its proliferation of chain stores and picture palaces. Yet the new consumerism of the interwar period sat alongside instances of appalling deprivation; contrasts of socio-economic wellbeing that were accentuated by the common experience of the classroom. Schooling mattered in the interwar years. Educational experiences were not background noise; they were drivers of significant social change. What happened inside schools affected not just children (not that children’s experiences are any less valid than those of other historical groups) but also the broader workingclass communities around them. Telling the story of the interwar period through its schools therefore changes the way we think about modern Britain. It challenges accepted chronologies of social change and questions a narrative that privileges the Second World War as the transformative moment that changed public perceptions of the possible. This book argues that the genesis of attitudes and ideas more often associated with the era of the welfare state lies in



Introduction 5

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the interwar period, influencing and influenced by the generation of schoolchildren who would vote for change in 1945. For many decades, histories of education were dominated by discussion of political and administrative change, with attention given to the 1918 and 1944 Education Acts in particular as ‘major signposts along the road to the English welfare state’.11 Studied in this way, the interwar period was an uninspiring one, a time of ‘much talk, many plans, and little effective legislation’.12 But, from the late twentieth century onwards, historians became increasingly wary of ‘official’ sources – the parliamentary reports, education committee accounts and textbook evidence on which much earlier work had been based. Several began to explore the ‘silences and images’ of lived school experience.13 Many turned to written testimony and oral history, allowing them to challenge historical interpretations based on traditional sources. Following an extensive analysis of memoirs, for example, Jonathan Rose was able to contest an image of working-class schooling as miserable and oppressive, suggesting that schooldays were more commonly remembered as happy and fulfilling, while Philip Gardner’s interviews with ex-teachers provided a different perspective on corporal punishment, arguing that, for teachers themselves, ‘even the landmark 1944 Education Act often appears as a marginal moment against the more intimate rhythms of daily life in schools’.14 The use of memoir also allowed a turn to topics that were otherwise virtually invisible. Jacob Middleton explored schoolyard fights, which barely register in official sources in contrast to autobiographies that ‘frequently pay more attention to playground battles than to what occurred in the classroom’.15 Other historians sought different approaches. Ian Grosvenor made a plea for a widened research agenda ‘to embrace the grammar and the “choreography”, the routines and the rituals, and the symbolic events of everyday schooling’.16 He and others welcomed the ‘pictorial turn’ in histories of education; the ‘spatial turn’ which gives attention to the physical materiality of the classroom; or have called for a ‘sensory history’ of schooling.17 Several historians have engaged with approaches from the history of emotions, overlapping with exciting work being done by historians of

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childhood and youth.18 New methodologies allowed a fresh return to earlier themes. Schools have long been seen by historians – and either praised or feared by contemporaries – as powerful socialising agents. In his seminal account of turning ‘peasants into Frenchmen’, Eugen Weber credited nineteenth-century French schools as ‘a major agent of acculturation’.19 In the British context, Brian Simon’s fourvolume history of the English education system quoted the Labour intellectual R.H. Tawney, writing of the expansion of education in the 1870s: ‘The elementary schools … were intended in the main to produce an orderly, civil, obedient population with sufficient education to understand a command.’20 As long ago as the late 1980s, Marjorie Lamberti, in her study of German education, was already describing the concept of the ‘school as an instrument of social control to train the lower classes to be obedient and loyal … industrious and contented’ as a ‘belabored theme’.21 The role of the school in the transmission of values has nonetheless continued to be important to historians across different geographical and temporal settings, though the trend has been towards a broader emphasis on national identity rather than class conformity: of Austrian schools in which ‘the impressionable young – the future of the nation – learn the national history, the national literature, and civic values’; Hawaiian teachers appointed because they were ‘effective Americanizers’; ‘learning to be loyal’ in schools in Alsace and Lorraine; or the ‘learning to forget’ done by Italian immigrant children at school in New Haven, to give just a few examples.22 However, the turn towards spatial and material analysis persuaded some authors to return to Foucaultian ideas of discipline and social order, arguing that school buildings themselves were appropriated for this purpose: School was a universalised space specifically designed to hold children … Control was in the buildings, the space created, and in the material contents of this space – furniture and equipment. Under the influence of school architecture the child was transformed into a schoolchild, into a subject of school culture. Children were segregated with their peers according to age and levels of attainment, and sequentially progressed through regulated structures. The school day



Introduction 7

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was structured into timetabled units and cultural knowledge orientated towards the values and norms of society at large was transmitted. In sum, the school was an instrument of social order, regulating the body and social relations.23

Meanwhile, a bottom–up approach gave visibility to resistance. ‘As anyone who has spent more than a few minutes in a classroom will know’, commented the editors of one collection, ‘human beings who populate those spaces refuse, subvert, invent, negotiate, and resist the terms of their subjectification in pedagogical practices and discourses.’24 In 1981, Stephen Humphries’ study of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British youth provided an early example of children and young people rebelling against the ‘control and manipulation’ faced in the classroom.25 In the introduction to their edited collection, Laurence Brockliss and Nicola Sheldon concluded that, across Europe, state objectives in education were disrupted by (among other factors) ‘parental indifference or cunning’.26 Dina Copelman, writing about schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, included teachers’ resistance to goals articulated by educational administrators as another factor in the ‘contested world’ of the school and the ‘classroom struggles’ therein.27 Numerous works have engaged with this theme, emphasising – often in nuanced and sensitive ways – the acts of resistance, subversion or opposition to the imposed values of an education system; the ways in which historical actors ‘attempted to resist the narrow, unequal and unjust offerings of education’.28 These mirror a similar trend among historians of childhood and youth, who have, in recent years, been rightly keen to stress the agency of children against the adults whose voices are almost always privileged in the sources.29 It is in this context, however, that Mona Gleason has warned against the ‘agency trap’: ‘confining historical analysis to a binaried interpretive framework, perhaps too simplistically juxtaposing adult actions and perspectives against those of children and youth’.30 I do not want to deny that tensions existed between formal educational institutions and children, parents and other local interests; they clearly did in interwar London as elsewhere. My evidence reveals a tone among officials that was often condescending to

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working-class families; disagreements between teachers and parents over issues such as the acceptance of scholarships or the teaching of domestic subjects; and anger over, for example, the excessive use of corporal punishment. But the following chapters also foreground the dynamic, fluid and negotiated nature of the relationship between schools and their communities: the tailoring of lessons to the needs of local employment firms, the working-class parents who helped out, and the children who felt grounded in their schools and retained an attachment to them long after they had left. The focus of this book is London, which has always claimed a unique place in the national imagination. ‘London is not so much a county or a town as a small state – its population is as large as that of Belgium’, stated an interwar history of the London County Council (LCC).31 The London Teacher, the journal of the London Teachers’ Association, simply declared that ‘London is a microcosm of the world’.32 Contemporary and historical analysis has often focused on the East End, ‘Britain’s most famous urban neighbourhood’.33 From the fascination of late Victorian ‘slummers’ to the interwar photography of Edith Tudor Hart, by the 1920s and 1930s the poverty and suffering of many East Enders had long been documented.34 But the East End did not have a monopoly on suffering. In 1930, as the national economic crisis deepened, it was Bermondsey, south of the river and dependent on casual dock labour that had the highest percentage of unemployment at nearly one fifth of adult men.35 In 1932 Cyril Garbett, the Bishop of Southwark, published In the Heart of South London, describing ‘the wretchedness, the discomfort and the suffering’ of the ‘large population – possibly a quarter of a million – living in overcrowded or insanitary houses’.36 Similarly appalling levels of congestion could be found in parts of north London such as Finsbury and Paddington. Indeed, Londoners across the capital might fall in and out of poverty. Sally Alexander has noted that ‘London’s poor were not a class apart. Few working people in London could remain confidently above the poverty line for long in the twenties and thirties … The rhythms of London’s seasonal and casual labour markets threw many close to destitution at intervals, throughout those decades.’37

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Introduction 9

Yet if poverty could be overwhelming in certain places and at certain times, a study of London benefits from its variety. While boroughs dependent on dock and port labour suffered, Greater London became Britain’s principal manufacturing centre across the same period. Alexander suggests that by the late 1920s the image of the metropolis, capital city of Empire, was of a vital economic force, ‘risen from the ashes of the Great War’. She points out that the  New Survey of London Life and Labour at the end of the decade recorded higher incomes, a shorter working day, improved health and literacy and reduced poverty compared to Charles Booth’s survey of forty years earlier, while Labour’s 1934 victory in the municipal elections promised a new progressive impetus in local government.38 My focus is on London’s elementary schools, which were the Council’s ‘largest responsibility’, according to the LCC inspector P.B. Ballard writing in 1930: It is the largest from every point of view. In the mere tale of human units the elementary schoolchildren stand supreme: they vastly outnumber all the other schoolchildren put together. Nine children out of every ten receiving full-time education in London are attending elementary schools … [they] are destined to form the vast bulk of the citizens of London. They are at this moment 600,000 strong – enough to fill the whole of London as it was in the days of Wren, or the whole of Sheffield as it is today.39

Elementary schools provided compulsory education for children aged 5–14. Around a third of London’s elementary schools were ‘non-provided’: maintained by the LCC, but with site and fabric not provided by the authority. Most were Anglican, but there were several Catholic schools in interwar London and one Methodist.40 Two schools were reserved for Jewish children; several others had a majority of Jewish pupils. For most of the population these elementary schools were the only schools they would ever know; only a minority accessed a more advanced education in central or secondary schools, available from the age of 11 to fee-payers or scholarship holders.41 The experience of children in these selective schools goes beyond the remit of this book, as does schooling for physically disabled children and school-

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ing within the penal system: in addition to the ‘ordinary’ elementary schools, the LCC also maintained over one hundred special schools, for the mentally and physically ‘defective’, plus several residential reformatory or industrial schools for delinquent youth.42 However, I have included schools for the ‘mentally deficient’ in the analysis. ‘Mentally deficient’ children made up about one per cent of London pupils in the mid-1920s, and ‘mentally deficient’ schools taught a special curriculum in smaller classes until the age of 16 (rather than 14).43 Pupils might move between these schools and the mainstream elementary schools according to the most recent assessment of their ‘backwardness’ – a backwardness which a modern audience would recognise as often due to poverty and circumstances, and which some contemporaries, too, acknowledged was hard to diagnose. ‘It has always been a difficulty … to say which boys should be presented to the doctor [for assessment and possible referral to special school]’, wrote the headteacher of a mainstream elementary school. ‘There were always as many near the margins, some of whom did eventually make it good.’44 London’s schools reflected its diversity. The Gordon School at Eltham had an average attendance of nearly 1,700 in the ­mid-1920s, for example, whereas St Bride’s and Bridewell in the City possessed just one schoolroom and at times served as few as twenty children. It was periodically threatened with closure but survived owing to its natural boundaries of river and busy roads.45 Nor was size constant; fluctuations were a symptom of the changing city. Inner parts of the capital saw a drop in population in the 1920s as residential areas were taken over by businesses, while elsewhere, particularly in the 1930s, boroughs were swelled by migration. The London Teacher disliked the processes of ‘­re-re-reorganisation’ of schools that followed, though acknowledged that ‘in former days it took from ten to twenty years for the character of a neighbourhood to change or for movements of population to become noticeable. Now these things happen in the course of a year’.46 LCC officials bemoaned the mobility in parts of the capital that meant children never settled within a school and so was ‘spoiling much of the very best work done by teachers’.47 In South Kensington, schools ‘wedged in among mansions’ were attended ‘by the most



Introduction 11

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migratory child population of London, the children of chauffeurs, gardeners, and domestic servants’.48 One headteacher, whose pupils came largely from these groups, estimated that only 55 per cent of them remained on the roll throughout the year.49 And yet other parts of the capital were characterised by immobility. As the headteacher of Cubitt Town School explained: Our school is situated in an isolated area of the Metropolis. The Isle of Dogs is one of London’s pockets, and Cubitt Town lies at the bottom of this deep pocket … Needless to say, visitors seldom make their way in this direction, so that Cubitt Town remains a selfcontained little corner with the characteristics of a village in many respects. The stationary population consists mostly of old scholars now become parents and grandparents.50

She was not the only headteacher to feel a sense of detachment. A report in the London Teacher noted the isolation of schools hemmed in by factories, cut off by poor transport links or situated ‘in a backwater’.51 A handful of schools, from such varied parts of the capital as Greenwich, Streatham, Hackney and Lewisham, had special permission to finish their schoolday earlier, as their ‘isolated position’ left children at risk of ‘accidents and molestation’ when travelling to and fro.52 The Redriff School in Rotherhithe was judged so inaccessible that extra pay was allocated to its teachers.53 A London study cannot encompass the experience of the tiny rural classrooms in parts of England and Wales, but not all of the capital’s schools necessarily felt part of an urban metropolis; their histories are a reminder of London’s growth. Burnt Ash Hill School in southeast London was opened in 1914, ‘almost on the outskirts of the county in the midst of fields, orchards and hedgerows’. Within twenty years, the spread of housing required the building of a second school in the area.54 Despite the poverty that blighted parts of the capital, some schools served relatively prosperous areas. London’s wealthiest children were educated at prep schools followed by grammar or public schools, but elementary schools included those such as the Sudbourne School in Lambeth where children were ‘not only well clothed and well-fed, but accustomed to the luxury … of separate cots or beds and even separate rooms of their own’, or Craven Park

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School in Hackney, whose inspectors reported on parents who are ‘distinctly well-to-do and some send their children in private cars’.55 Affluence could even be a source of concern, as in the case of Peckham schoolboys on a trip to the Isle of Wight. They came from good homes, wrote an inspector, who worried that ‘many of them seemed well provided, perhaps too much so, with pocket money’.56 The particular circumstances of London meant that different social conditions often existed side by side. ‘London is such a thing of shreds and patches that striking differences may be observed in the schools of even the same borough’, commented one report.57 In Islington, a school inspection noted the relative prosperity of its intake while another school ‘within a stone’s throw [faced] … the problem of acute poverty and squalor’ among its pupils.58 Significant variety could exist within individual schools: differences were physically visible in a Fulham school where ‘some of the girls are strikingly tall and well-nourished, many are under-sized and obviously in poor health’.59 The size of the London education service meant that it could offer facilities and organisation that were unmatched across most of the rest of the country. As the president of the London Teachers’ Association commented in 1928: ‘The size of the problem in London is vast, but our resources are also vast. It is easier to provide a variety of opportunity in London, and to do the thing well than it would be in a lesser city.’60 London’s education service had long been self-consciously progressive. The capital had made elementary education compulsory in 1871, when it was still only discretionary to do so; offered free elementary education from 1891, five years before it became a national requirement; and committed to a ‘40 and 48’ scheme in 1912 (aspiring to a maximum of 40 senior pupils or 48 infants per class).61 Over three-quarters of London classrooms were judged compliant by the mid-1920s, even if large numbers continued to characterise the remainder.62 The LCC became one of the first authorities to experiment in the reorganisation of elementary schools into junior and senior departments with a break at the age of 11. By December 1926, when the Hadow Report advocated national restructuring, eighteen London schools had already been reorganised and reform thereafter proceeded rapidly and more swiftly than elsewhere.63

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Introduction 13

Young Londoners further benefited from the length of their schooling. A child was required to attend school from the age of 5 but was permitted to attend from the age of 3, dependent on local provision. By its own estimate, London was ‘exceptionally generous’.64 Over one-third of London children aged 3–5 were enrolled in school in 1923; at one infants’ school in Bethnal Green, nearly half the scholars were under 5 when it was inspected in 1928.65 At the other end of a school life, options were also less limited than elsewhere. In addition to secondary schools, the LCC established central schools in 1911 to provide four years of instruction with a commercial or industrial bias. Following the 1918 Education Act, the LCC had also set up day continuation schools, providing part-time education to children aged 14–18, before most were discontinued in 1922 following the financial crisis and subsequent spending cuts.66 The LCC was keen to publicise its achievements. A jubilee history of the Council in 1939 contrasted ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs of schoolchildren, with boys in ragged clothing replaced by smart classes of uniformed pupils; serried ranks of girls practising drill replaced by active children in gym kit; and rows of infants in dark rooms replaced by small groups working in the open air.67 The President of the London Teachers’ Association echoed the sense of pride and ambition: ‘We have justifiable claim to be in the service of the leading educational authority in the country – maybe the universe!’68 This book is less concerned with the progressive pedagogies increasingly promoted by educationalists in this period, and the extent to which they were (or were not) beginning to affect classroom practice. Laura Tisdall has recently completed an examination of this, although her case studies do not include London.69 She is one of a number of historians to have lately turned their gaze away from the capital, aware that attention elsewhere is overdue.70 Certainly, the progressive nature of the London education service was unusual. Other authorities also aspired to innovation, such as Glamorgan, Bradford and Manchester, but were stymied by the economic misery of the interwar years that hit their regions particularly hard.71 London’s economic fortunes were more mixed; and so it is in the capital, then, that we can perhaps see most clearly the changing attitudes and practices that would be adopted more

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commonly by local education authorities only when national state investment after the Second World War made them possible.72 Julia Laite has written about the challenges and rewards of writing ‘global microhistory’.73 I cannot claim a global, or even national, perspective, but London’s scale allows the construction of a mosaic of evidence that criss-crosses the capital and cuts back and forth across the period. It allows the capture some of the individual moments that made up the minutiae of classroom life, amidst the diversity of the largest city in Europe. Some of the sources used in this book have been used by historians of education for many years – the ‘official’ documents of LCC minutes and Board of Education reports. In his study of teachers in the first half of the century Gardner argues that most ‘professed no interest and little knowledge of governmental educational policy’.74 But some, at least, were not only receptive to official pedagogy but involved in its creation. One London headmaster was a member of the committee responsible for the 1921 report, The Teaching of English in England. It is fortunate that, a few years later, inspectors were impressed with his school’s English lessons.75 Another headmaster was on the editorial board of History, the journal of the Historical Association, which was, as Laura Carter has shown, part of ‘a lively debate’ within the history profession after 1918.76 A dismissal of textbook research as ‘top–down’ also assumes too strict a division between their authors and the teachers. Some books were written by teachers and placed on LCC requisition lists, such as the Reading Charts and Primers by the headmaster of a St Pancras school, or the four geography books authored by a headmaster from Fulham.77 Other teachers wrote books not necessarily intended for schoolchildren but which reveal interests that – it can surely be assumed – would have influenced school life. One headmaster had edited and annotated The Songs in Shakespeare’s Plays; another was the author of A Hundred Chess Problems.78 Perhaps the best reminder of the overlap between classroom practice, pedagogy and even the writing of its history can be seen in the career of H.C. Dent, who taught in secondary and grammar schools between 1911 and 1931, became a journalist, then editor of the Times Educational Supplement, and ended his career as Professor

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Introduction 15

of Education. Over his lifetime he experienced schools as a London pupil, a teacher, a prominent advocate of educational reform and, finally, as their historian. However, such teachers were in a minority, and in an attempt to get closer to a greater number of classrooms I have drawn upon over one thousand individual school inspection reports. These include reports by His Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) – praised by the Norwood Report in 1943 as ‘the eyes and ears of the Board’79 – and those of the LCC’s own inspectors, who acted independently. As with textbooks, the value of inspection reports has also been doubted. David Cannadine et al. argue that, though valuable, they remain ‘official accounts of teaching as pedagogy, and do not get close to the experience of being a pupil in the classroom’; they also point out that inspectors in this period were overwhelmingly male, public school and Oxbridge-educated.80 Cross-referencing the reports of visiting inspectors with the accounts of teachers who inhabited the school daily can certainly illuminate disparities. The logbook of a Shoreditch school, for example, contains references over a period of years to the difficulties caused by the open layout of the girls’ hall, which meant that noise echoed through the building and disturbed lessons in the boys’ department. ‘A very unsatisfactory morning owing to friction with headmaster re. use of hall’, is a typical comment by the headmistress. Yet inspectors saw only the good intention, noting the ‘advantage of a large and lofty hall which runs up through the boys’ department to the roof of the building’.81 Teachers also knew their children better than these infrequent visitors. When one inspector commented on the ‘evident enjoyment’ with which a choir of junior boys sang action songs, he also thought that ‘less success attended the singing of other songs, such as “England” and “Jerusalem”, which, to be effective, require richer and more resonant voices’. The school duly dropped such songs, despite the headteacher’s misgivings. Just over a year later she felt vindicated: ‘I asked for a choice of songs during carol singing this morning. One boy of 7 years chose ‘Jerusalem’, another, 8 years, ‘Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord’ – two songs considered “too difficult”. This is one of many proofs I have had of children’s inherent good taste.’82

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Furthermore, inspection reports provide only a snapshot of a particular day, for which teachers might adapt their practice. One logbook records that children were dismissed early ‘as a special reward for their excellent behaviour during yesterday’s visit of HMI’; one wonders if they were bribed with this before the inspection commenced. Another teacher wrote in his diary that ‘I order “No talking for the whole lesson”, unprecedented command for geometry. I feel that I must do something to please an HMI whose ideas on discipline I regard as out-of-date.’83 Undoubtedly some practices were so bad that inspectors did not see them. ‘I must have been quite bright because the teacher often sent me on errands to buy her a cheese roll for her lunch and would reward me with a half-penny’, remembered one memoirist. It is probably safe to assume that the teacher bought her own roll on inspection day.84 Nerves might also influence performance. Reacting to a critical report, one headmaster apologised that it could ‘only be explained by an attack of “inspectionitis”.’85 Children might be affected too. ‘The girls … tended to whisper inaudibly’, noted one inspector. ‘Possibly this defect was due to shyness. It wore off somewhat on the second day.’86 Inspection reports nevertheless remain a crucial source for information on classroom life. Classed assumptions frequently colour their accounts, but, despite Cannadine’s claims, inspectors were not always ex-Oxbridge, and it may be that the London context made a difference here, with local LCC inspectors coming from more diverse backgrounds. Occasional references to headteachers appointed to inspectorships were made in the London Teacher, suggesting a continuity between headteachers’ and inspectors’ expectations.87 Female inspectors were appointed to inspect girls’ schools or support inspections of mixed schools, though they remained subordinate to male colleagues.88 Some inspectors had very real roots in London’s working-class communities. One district inspector appointed in 1920 had been educated at Oxford and was a former teacher at Aldenham and St Paul’s schools, but his early years had been spent at Bellenden Road elementary school in Peckham.89 Even without these links, relationships between schools and their inspectors could be warm, and logbooks record the occasional visits of inspectors outside of official inspections, keeping in touch to offer advice or support.

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Introduction 17

Inspection reports could have a concrete effect on practice. Inspectors did not shy from criticism – that would have invalidated their purpose. One Islington school held a staff conference to discuss their inspection report and ‘many of the suggestions were adopted’.90 For another school in the East End, it took a critical report to force change. A subsequent inspection welcomed the ‘serious endeavour … made to remedy weaknesses indicated in earlier report’.91 Admittedly, some things were easier for inspectors to advise than teachers to enact. One headmaster wrote to an inspector for further advice, worrying about the conflicting demands that he was being asked to juggle: We have received our report which is very pleasing to us all. Now, we have to act upon the suggestions made and I feel the main thing at present is books. You kindly promised to let me have a list of suitable books for reference and general reading … I shall draw up a new History Syllabus on the lines suggested … but it is very difficult to give each subject the time one would like. I think I shall have to cut out some physical exercise time … at this the Physical Training organisers will not be very pleased. Anyhow, we must do the best we can.92

I have sought to get closer still to the classroom through school logbooks. Headteachers across the country were required to keep logbooks and were informed that their entries should be a bare record of the events which constitute the history of the school … [noting] such events as the introduction of new books, apparatus or courses of instruction, any plan of lessons approved by the Board, the visits of managers, absence, illness or failure of duty on the part of any of the school staff, or any special circumstances affecting the school that may, for the sake of future reference, or for any other reason, deserve to be recorded … the log-book should contain statements of fact only, and should contain no expressions of opinion on conduct or as to the efficiency of the school.93

Logbook research is time-consuming, requiring a trawl through repetition and irrelevance. In the 1930s, when headteachers in Islington were asked for information about the history of their schools in preparation for an exhibition, few found the old logbooks particularly helpful. One replied: ‘I’m afraid the history of this school is totally devoid of interest (at least the interesting titbits

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from the logbook are hardly of historical import – such as Mary Smith being awarded a large iron saucepan as a cookery prize).’ I sympathised with another headteacher who gave up, defeated: ‘There are so many old logbooks – all difficult to read.’94 Yet, as Sascha Auerbach has commented, logbooks allow us to see differences in the attitudes ‘between those who had to interact with working-class children and parents on a daily basis [teachers] and educational policymakers whose personal contact with their constituents was relatively infrequent and much less intimate’.95 While some headteachers stuck to the ‘bare record’ brief, recording only teacher absences, pupil accidents and suchlike, others wrote daily entries and left a detailed diary of school life. Sometimes I found that I could follow individual children through the school. One poignant example concerned William, ‘a small boy in Cl 4 [who] has now appeared with his eye blackened by bruises. Recently he came with a cut and swollen head. On both occasions he said that “daddy had done it” … The child is well behaved in school … It is a difficult case, requiring watching.’ Another entry, nearly four years later, felt sadly inevitable. By then, the same William was ‘giving trouble – stealing, lying and truanting … [He is] a wild character, robs mother and frequently stays out all night.’96 Events external to school life were rarely recorded, save for the most momentous occasions. Then, the headteacher might use this ‘diary’ to express palpable relief, as when one – whose logbook was otherwise barely touched – noted the signing of the Munich Agreement in September 1938.97 Another concluded on 31  August 1939 that ‘evacuation has been ordered for tomorrow … I trust that I may soon be writing again in this book.’ Empty pages follow.98 The logbooks are also a treasure trove of unexpected material. Some teachers used them as a place to file away newspaper cuttings, sports day programmes or LCC circulars; other material might be tucked inside momentarily by a teacher who never got round to filing it properly. Many of the more ephemeral sources cited, and often the most illuminating – a child’s school report, a parent’s letter, a pupil’s essay – were preserved serendipitously in this way. Some are frustrating for their promise, such as the first half only of a letter from an ex-scholar, or a set of examination questions given to pupils at the end of term, with no accompanying answers: ‘Explain

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Introduction 19

in a few words the differences between: A thief and a robber; A pair and a couple; A man and a gentleman; A native and a foreigner; Wanting food and needing food.’99 One problem with relying on school logbooks is that research privileges those schools that were most active. Schools which did little just have empty logbooks. It also privileges the headteacher’s voice over that of other staff members. A slanted authorial viewpoint is particularly obvious when disputes arose between headteachers and their staff. In one case, the very basis of the headteacher’s authority was challenged when an assistant mistress ‘went on to say I thought far too much of myself, she was older than me and had taught longer in Fulham.’100 The headteacher might also act as the gatekeeper to the wider community. ‘We didn’t see much of the parents’, remembered a woman who taught in Hackney during and after the First World War. ‘Where the parents were not satisfied they could come up to the school, but we never saw them. The headmistress would deal with it.’101 But the headteacher’s perspective is perhaps particularly ­important for a study of the interwar years, which saw a reduction in centralised directives. The Board of Education’s primary influence over teachers was via its Handbook of Suggestions for the Consideration of Teachers, first issued in 1905. ‘I wonder how many people realise today what a revolution in attitude that title implied?’, wrote H.C.  Dent years later, ‘“Suggestions”? “for the consideration of’?”102 Revised editions were issued periodically, and by the time a compulsory elementary curriculum was withdrawn completely in 1926, it was hailed as merely the ‘finishing touches’ to a process of gradual deregulation.103 The London Teacher approved: ‘We believe it was a French Minister of Education who said he could, at any given moment of the school day, name the subject which was  – or ought to be – occupying the attention of every school child in France. We are glad to know that no English Minister of Education could ever make a statement like that.’104 The primacy of the headteacher can make historical conclusions harder, of course, as so much depended on their individual personalities, priorities and effectiveness. One inspection report questioned the difference in achievement between Erconwald Street and Mellitus Street schools, which not only shared the same site in

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Hammersmith, but were separated ‘by a sliding partition across the hall, using the same playground, constructed on the same structural pattern, taking in children from the same homes, promoting them to the same senior schools, and being in every way a duplicate’. The reason for Mellitus Street’s better performance, it concluded, was its exceptional headteacher.105 Admittedly, classroom life could be influenced by individual teachers as much as any head. In one school, for example, it was ‘the master in charge of class II’ who was credited ‘for steam engines which work and plants which grow in the classroom’.106 The importance of individual teachers was even greater when a weak headteacher was in charge. One inspector despaired when he found of a school’s schemes of work that ‘the headteacher did not seem to know what was in them’.107 An inspection of a Camden school reported that teachers were given no syllabus and so were forced to improvise: in one class English was limited to one composition a week, while another was ‘embarking on a programme which goes back to Egyptian picture writing, includes the work of Bede and Alfred, Chaucer and Spenser and comes down to the origin of newspapers’.108 Equally, weak classroom teachers might thwart a head’s ambitions. One headteacher was disappointed after observing a geography lesson: ‘I could not help forming the opinion that my geography schemes were not being consistently and adequately worked out.’109 A detailed syllabus, therefore, was not necessarily an accurate indication of actual lessons. At a Lewisham school, the headteacher happily acknowledged that his subject syllabuses were ‘long and full’, so that his teachers could have ‘some liberty to pick and choose’.110 Children’s reactions might also contradict a headteacher’s instructions. One ex-pupil remembered the busy exchange of comics and magazines that took place at breaktimes, ‘in spite of headmistress’s regular edicts banning such periodicals’.111 Finally, I have also used retrospective sources. Schooldays, particularly descriptions of starting school, are a common trope of memoir and elicit a range of responses, from a chapter entitled ‘School – “happiest days!”’ to bleaker accounts: ‘The only thing different between prison and school as far as I could see was that to get into prison you had to go before a magistrate or a judge and jury

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Introduction 21

whereas with us the sentence was automatic.’112 For most, schooldays were probably somewhere in between. As Herbert Morrison, Labour leader of the LCC and ex-London elementary schoolboy, wrote in 1938: ‘I think I must have been a very average scholar, doing nothing very brilliant, and I hope nothing very shocking.’113 As well as published memoirs and oral history testaments found in all the usual places, I was particularly grateful for the hundreds of written reminiscences held by Essex Record Office, a result of essay competitions run by Age Concern Essex from the 1950s onwards. Entrants in the 1980s and 1990s were asked to write about ‘Childhood memories’, ‘School days’ or ‘Highlights of a school year’, and I have used these whenever the author wrote of a specifically London childhood. Many Essex residents grew up in the East End or other parts of London, it seems, before moving out into more genteel suburbia as they got older. Written and oral retrospectives have obvious disadvantages. One woman apologised: ‘I don’t know, this is all very dim. I was five and I’m 78! I’m trying to remember 73 years back!’ She had dug out her old school reports: ‘I was under the impression I was always in the top ten but looking back I wasn’t! That’s how my memory’s let me down.’114 But, in an early defence of oral history, Alessandro Portelli commented that ‘oral sources tell us not just what people did,  but  what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did’.115 Respondents themselves are often conscious of this process. ‘Looking back on my school days, I realise a hate has turned to love of them’, commented one man.116 Harold Rosen’s memoir of growing up in the interwar East End is described as ‘autobiographical stories’: perhaps just a more candid way of describing memoir.117 The most remarkable example of self-awareness that I have come across is by a teenage boy, writing in Middlesbrough in 1937 when asked to imagine what it would be like when he left school. He was already aware that his perspective would change, and he fantasised: At last I walk out of the gates of the school for the last time … I leave many happy memories in my mind, of friends who I may not see again, but I try to forget the many little incidents that brought about pain and remorse … Then, my thoughts turn to the masters, and

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somehow they appear in a different light and instead of remembering how they seemingly made us work too hard, I remember how they laughed with us, how they were willing to help us and finally how they wished me the best of luck upon my leaving the school.118

Nevertheless, the proliferation of schoolday accounts in retrospective memoirs attests – at the very least – to their importance. Writing in the 1990s, one man explained how ‘1942 was a year which history records as being the halfway stage of World War Two. For myself, and thousands of others, it was a time of even greater significance – the year we started school.’119 Over the course of writing this book my own child started school. In a meeting for new parents, the headteacher – a veteran head who had led the school for nearly three decades – asked us to think about what school was for. He emphasised the importance of involving parents in a shared endeavour. Indeed, he said, in some respects schools get in the way: children will learn with or without them; what happens outside their walls is as important as what happens within them. My son moved up through the years (too quickly) and the manuscript grew (not quickly enough), and then the COVID-19 pandemic forced a more intense look at the same questions: what were schools for? As we moved in and out of lockdowns, politicians invoked the mantra – admittedly somewhat belatedly – that school was the best place for children to be; the footballer Marcus Rashford became a hero for his campaign to extend free school meals; children’s charities warned about the ‘invisibility’ of vulnerable children; fraught experiences of homeschooling gave parents a new respect for teachers; and children missed their friends. This book takes that question – what are schools for? – as its central organising principle. The first two chapters explore the nature of the school as a community, and the nature of the school in the community. The subsequent chapters examine different aspects of schools’ remits: to prepare children for their futures as, potentially, secondary school scholars but more often for work or domesticity (Chapter 3); to address poverty and provide welfare (Chapter  4); to offer cultural and intellectual stimulation

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Introduction 23

(Chapter 5); to raise good future citizens – particularly important in this new era of mass democracy (Chapter 6); to teach them how to behave (Chapter 7); and to ground them in their local and national communities (Chapter 8). Questioning what schools were for – and who got to decide  – necessarily requires a consideration of the local community around them. The view offered by educational officials and inspectors was often modified by teachers who had a more pragmatic sense of their district. Parents – emboldened by their own experience of education, by the vote they could cast at the ballot box and perhaps, for some fathers, the soldier’s uniform they had worn for  their country  – might have different ideas. Children had their own thoughts about how school might be useful, which might change as they grew older, and was different for boys and girls. Local industrial firms demanded good workers; local mistresses good servants; politicians good citizens. What is clear is that the range of activities in which the school was involved and its ability to influence the community extended far beyond its educational remit. As the London Teacher remarked in 1934, there had been ‘great changes which have taken place within one or two generations in our ideas about the functions and the purpose of the school. The idea that a school is merely a place of instruction where the appliances are pens, paper, ink, books and slates, has gone for ever.’120

Notes 1 Willard Waller, The Sociology of Teaching (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1932), preface. 2 Hester Barron, The 1926 Miners’ Lockout. Meanings of Community in the Durham Coalfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 3 Steven Thompson, ‘Review of The 1926 Miners’ Lockout’, Journal of British Studies 50:2 (2011), 507. 4 Peter Mandler, The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 8. 5 Jon Lawrence, ‘Class, “Affluence” and the Study of Everyday Life, c.1930–64’, Cultural and Social History 10:2 (2013), 274. 6 Mandler, Crisis, 15.

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7 Harry Hendrick, Child Welfare: Historical Dimensions, Contem­ porary Debate (Bristol: Policy Press, 2003), 4. See also John Stewart, Child Guidance in Britain, 1918–1955 (London: Routledge, 2013); Deborah Thom, ‘Wishes, Anxieties, Play, and Gestures. Child Guidance in Inter-War England’, in Roger Cooter (ed.), In the Name of the Child. Health and Welfare, 1880–1940 (London: Routledge, 1992); Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 109–39; Adrian Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c.1860–c.1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Gillian Sutherland, Ability, Merit and Measurement. Mental Testing and English Education 1880–1940 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). 8 Peter Gordon, Richard Aldrich and Dennis Dean, Education and Policy in England in the Twentieth Century (London: Woburn, 1991), 59; Thomson, Psychological Subjects, 110. 9 David Fowler, The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young WageEarners in Interwar Britain (London: Woburn, 1995); Pamela Cox, Bad Girls in Britain. Gender, Justice and Welfare, 1900–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 3–4. 10 Hansard HC Deb, v.257, c.929. 11 D.H. Akenson, ‘Patterns of English Educational Change: The Fisher and the Butler Acts’, History of Education Quarterly 11:2 (1971), 14. 12 D.W. Dean, ‘Conservatism and the National Education System, 1922–40’, Journal of Contemporary History 6:2 (1971), 150. 13 See the collection of essays in Ian Grosvenor, Martin Lawn and Kate Rousmaniere (eds), Silences and Images. The Social History of the Classroom (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). 14 Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 146–86; Philip Gardner, ‘The Giant at the Front: Young Teachers and Corporal Punishment in Interwar Elementary Schools’, History of Education 25:2 (1996); Philip Gardner, ‘Teachers’, in Richard Aldrich (ed.)¸ A Century of Education (London: Routledge/Falmer, 2002), 124. 15 Jacob Middleton, ‘The Cock of the School: A Cultural History of Playground Violence in Britain, 1880–1940’, Journal of British Studies 52:4 (2013), 887. 16 Ian Grosvenor, ‘“There’s No Place Like Home”: Education and the Making of National Identity’, History of Education 28:3 (1999), 248. 17 Sjaak Braster, Ian Grosvenor and María del Mar del Pozo Andrés, ‘Opening the Black Box of Schooling. Methods, Meanings and

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Introduction 25

Mysteries’, in Braster, Grosvenor and Pozo Andrés (eds), Opening the Black Box of Schooling. A Cultural History of the Classroom (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011), 16; Ian Grosvenor, ‘Geographies of Risk: An Exploration of City Childhoods in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, Paedagogica Historica 45:1–2 (2009); Ian Grosvenor, ‘Back to the Future or Towards a Sensory History of Schooling’, History of Education 41:5 (2012). Many works could be cited here, but for recent collections of essays that put these approaches into practice, see the History of Education special issue, ‘Sight, Sound and Text in the History of Education’, 47:2 (2018) and the Paedagogica Historica special issue, ‘Images and Films as Objects to Think With: A Reappraisal of Visual Studies in Histories of Education’, 53:6 (2017). 18 For example Joakim Landahl, ‘Emotions, Power and the Advent of Mass Schooling’, Paedagogica Historica 51:1–2 (2015). Stephanie Olsen’s important essay, ‘The History of Childhood and the Emotional Turn’, History Compass 15:11 (2017), surveys the recent literature and emphasises the importance of the emotional turn to historians of childhood and youth and related fields such as the history of education (and vice versa). 19 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), 330. 20 Brian Simon, Education and the Labour Movement, 1870–1920 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1965), 119. 21 Marjorie Lamberti, State, Society, and the Elementary School in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 7. 22 Peter Utgaard, Remembering and Forgetting Nazism: Education, National Identity and the Victim Myth in Postwar Austria (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 25; Michelle Morgan, ‘Americanizing the Teachers: Identity, Citizenship, and the Teaching Corps in Hawai’i, 1900–1941’, Western Historical Quarterly 45:2 (2014), 153; Stephen L. Harp, Learning to be Loyal. Primary Schooling as Nation Building in Alsace and Lorraine, 1850–1940 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998); Stephen Lassonde, Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven’s Working Class, 1870–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). See also the History of Education special issue, ‘Education and National Identity’, 28:3 (1999). 23 Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, School (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 65. For several essays that engage with this theme see Kate Rousmaniere, Kara Dehli and Ning de Coninck-Smith

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(eds), Discipline, Moral Regulation and Schooling: A Social History (London: Routledge, 1997). 24 Kate Rousmaniere, Kara Dehli and Ning de Coninck-Smith, ‘Moral Regulation and Schooling. An Introduction’, in Rousmaniere et al., Discipline, Moral Regulation and Schooling, 9. 25 Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 29. 26 Laurence Brockliss and Nicola Sheldon, ‘General Introduction’, in Brockliss and Sheldon (eds), Mass Education and the Limits of State Building, c.1870–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 9. 27 Dina M. Copelman, London’s Women Teachers. Gender, Class and Feminism, 1870–1930 (London: Routledge, 1996), xvi, 82. 28 Jessica Gerrard, Radical Childhoods: Schooling and the Struggle for Social Change (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 8. 29 This is often the case, for example, in studies of children in institutional care, a particularly vulnerable and silenced group. See Shirlee Swain, ‘Institutionalized Childhood: The Orphanage Remembered’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8:1 (2015); although Birgitte Søland gives a more positive perspective in the same special issue. Søland, ‘“Never a Better Home”: Growing Up in American Orphanages, 1920–1970’. 30 Mona Gleason, ‘Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth and Education’, History of Education 45:4 (2016), 448. 31 Sir Ioan Gwilym Gibbon and Reginald W. Bell, History of the London County Council (London: Macmillan, 1939), 87–8. 32 London Teacher, 10 March 1939. The London Teacher was the fortnightly journal of the London Teachers’ Association, founded in 1903 and agreeing joint membership with the National Union of Teachers in 1922. It claimed a readership of over 22,000 teachers in the ­mid-twenties. London Teacher, 11 April 1924. 33 Benjamin J. Lammers, ‘The Birth of the East Ender: Neighborhood and Local Identity in Interwar East London’, Journal of Social History 39:2 (2005), 331. 34 See Seth Koven, Slumming. Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Val Williams, Women Photographers. The Other Observers 1900 to the Present (London: Virago, 1986). Some of Tudor Hart’s images were reproduced in Margery Spring Rice’s interwar account of the working

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Introduction 27

conditions of married women, Working-Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1939). 35 London Teacher, 18 July 1930. 36 Cyril F. Garbett, In the Heart of South London (London: Longmans & Co., 1931), 76, 5. 37 Sally Alexander, ‘A New Civilisation? London Surveyed 1928–1940s’, History Workshop Journal 64 (2007), 309. 38 Alexander, ‘A New Civilisation?’, 297, 301. 39 London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), LCC/EO/GEN/01/147, P.B. Ballard, ‘Report on 25 years of LCC education’, 1930. 40 The one Methodist school was Eden Road Wesleyan School in West Norwood. London Teacher, 6 Nov. 1936. 41 For more detailed figures, see Chapter 3. 42 London County Council, Education Service Particulars for the Year 1918–19 (London, 1919). 43 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 16 March 1927. 44 LMA, LCC/EO/SS/01/5, Headteacher to Education Officer, Oct. 1936. 45 London Teacher, 13 Jan. 1928, 8 May 1931. 46 London Teacher, 24 March 1933. 47 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 28 April 1920. Dudley Baines and Paul Johnson suggest that there was a significant amount of geographical mobility in interwar London. Baines and Johnson, ‘In Search of the “Traditional” Working Class: Social Mobility and Occupational Continuity in Interwar London’, Economic History Review, 52:4 (1999), 709–10. 48 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 1 April 1925. 49 The National Archives (TNA), ED21/34887, Inspection report, 9 Nov. 1923. 50 London Teacher, 9 Dec. 1927. 51 London Teacher, 24 April 1925. 52 London Teacher, 14 Nov. 1924, 12 Dec. 1924, 11 March 1927. 53 London Teacher, 28 Oct. 1921, 13 April 1923; LMA, LCC/EO/ STA/2/17, LCC documents, 3 Dec. 1936. 54 TNA, ED21/34995, Inspection report, 8 Feb. 1935. 55 TNA, ED21/34934, Inspection report, 8 Aug. 1934; ED21/34737, Inspection report, 20 June 1933. 56 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/43, Inspection report, 6 July 1927. 57 LCC, Report of a Conference on the Teaching of Geography in London Elementary Schools (London: LCC, 1911, 1923), 24. 58 TNA, ED21/34874, Inspection report, 4 April 1928.

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59 TNA, ED21/34681, Inspection report, 6 Jan. 1935. 60 London Teacher, 24 Feb. 1928. 61 Copelman, London’s Women Teachers, 65, 87; LCC Education Committee Minutes, 16 July 1924. 62 London Teacher, 30 Oct. 1925. 63 LCC, Senior Elementary Schools in London: Report by the Council’s Chief Inspector, Mr J. Brown (London: LCC, 1939), 4. 64 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/147, P.B. Ballard, ‘Report on 25 years of LCC education’, 1930. 65 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 30 Jan. 1924; TNA, ED21/34542, Inspection report, 10 March 1928. 66 Peter Gordon, ‘Policy Formation and the Work of His Majesty’s Inspectorate, 1918–45’, in David Crook and Gary McCulloch (eds), History, Politics and Policy-Making (London: Institute of Education, 2007), 90–1. 67 Gibbon and Bell, History. 68 London Teacher, 22 Feb. 1935. 69 Laura Tisdall, A Progressive Education? How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth Century English and Welsh Schools (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). 70 For example, Brad Beaven, Visions of Empire. Patriotism, Popular Culture and the City, 1870–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 71 Mandler, Crisis, 27. 72 For a general survey, highlighting the tension between ‘economy’ and reform in the interwar LCC, see Malcolm Richardson, ‘Education and Politics: The London Labour Party and Schooling between the Wars’, in Andrew Saint (ed.), Politics and the People of London: The London County Council, 1889–1965 (London: Hambledon Press, 1989). 73 Julia Laite, ‘The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age’, Journal of Social History 53:4 (2020). 74 Philip Gardner, ‘Reconstructing the Classroom Teacher, 1903–1945’, in Grosvenor et al., Silences and Images, 140. 75 TNA, ED21/34604, Inspection report, 12 May 1925. 76 London Teacher, 2 May 1919; Laura Carter, ‘The Quennells and the “History of Everyday Life” in England, c.1918–69’, History Workshop Journal 81:1 (2016), 119. 77 London Teacher, 9 June 1922, 22 Feb. 1935. 78 London Teacher, 23 April 1926, 6 June 1930. 79 Gordon, ‘Policy Formation’, 100.

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80 David Cannadine, Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon, The Right Kind of History. Teaching the Past in Twentieth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13, 85. 81 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/STJOH2/LB/003–4, Logbook entries, 22 April 1920, 1 Nov. 1923, 4 Dec. 1923; Inspection report, 4 Dec. 1925. 82 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/VIC/LB/002, Inspection report, 15 Oct. 1927; Logbook, 14 Dec. 1928. 83 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/FRI/LB/001, Logbook, 17 June 1921; Mass – Observation Archive, University of Sussex (MOA), DS385,  Day survey, 13 Dec. 1937. 84 Essex Record Office (ERO), T/Z 25/4227. 85 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/WIL/LB/014, Logbook, 27 July 1931. 86 TNA, ED21/35044, Inspection report, 12 March 1936. 87 For example, London Teacher, 3 July 1925, 8 May 1931. 88 Helen Jones, Women in British Public Life, 1914–50 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 60–1. Women also had prominent roles on the LCC Education Committee. See Jane Martin, ‘Gender, Education and Social Change: A Study of Feminist Politics and Practice in London, 1870–1990’, Gender and Education 25:1 (2013). 89 London Teacher, 26 March 1920. 90 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/ROT/LB/006, Logbook, 24 Jan. 1933. 91 TNA, ED21/34521, Inspection report, 20 April 1925. 92 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/MON/LB/003, Headteacher’s letter, 20 Feb. 1936. Original emphasis. 93 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HOD/LB/004, Logbook 1913–22. 94 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/145, Headteachers’ letters, May 1939. 95 Sascha Auerbach, ‘“The Law Has No Feeling for Poor Folks Like Us!”: Everyday Responses to Legal Compulsion in England’s WorkingClass Communities, 1871–1904’, Journal of Social History 45:3 (2012), 698. For a detailed discussion of logbooks as a source, see also Susannah Wright, ‘Teachers, Family and Community in the Urban Elementary School: Evidence from School Log Books c. ­1880–1918’, History of Education 41:2 (2012). 96 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MOW/LB/012, Logbook entries, 2 June 1921, 23 Jan. 1925. 97 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/GRE/LB/001, Logbook, 29 Sept. 1938. 98 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/COM/LB/002, Logbook, 31 Aug. 1939. 99 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STE/LB/004, Examination questions, Oct. 1933. 100 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/HAL/LB/007, Logbook, 24 Sept. 1934.

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101 The People’s Autobiography of Hackney, Working Lives, I, 1905–45 (London: Centerprise Trust Ltd, 1976), 28. 102 H.C. Dent, ‘To Cover the Country with Good Schools: A Century’s Effort’, British Journal of Educational Studies 19:2 (1971), 129. Original emphasis. 103 Quoted in Ron Brooks, ‘“No Mistakes in Dictation and Four Sums Right”: The Political Debate over the Compulsory Curriculum in Elementary and Private Schools, 1922–32’, History of Education 31:2 (2001), 167. 104 The Schoolmaster, 18 Jan. 1919. 105 TNA, ED21/34788, Inspection report, 27 Oct. 1924. 106 TNA, ED21/34537, Inspection report, 23 Oct. 1931. 107 TNA, ED21/34765, Inspection report, 12 April 1924. 108 TNA, ED21/35169, Inspection report, 20 Nov. 1924. 109 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/HUG1/LB/004, Logbook, 30 Jan. 1928. 110 TNA, ED21/35041, Inspection report, 30 Jan. 1934. 111 Kirsten Drotner, ‘Schoolgirls, Madcaps and Air Aces: English Girls and Their Magazine Reading between the Wars’, Feminist Studies 9:1 (1983), 48. 112 Jim Wolveridge, ‘Ain’t it Grand’ (or ‘This was Stepney’) (London: Stepney Books, 1976); Johnny Speight, It Stands to Reason: A Kind of Autobiography (London: Michael Joseph, 1973), 31–2. 113 London Teacher, 25 Feb. 1938. 114 British Library Sound Archive (BLSA), Violet Wallace. 115 Alessandro Portelli, ‘The Peculiarities of Oral History’, History Workshop Journal 12 (1981), 99–100. 116 ERO, T/Z 25/4286. 117 Harold Rosen, Are You Still Circumcised? East End Memories (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 1999). 118 MOA, TC Children and Education 1937–52, 59/5/A. 119 ERO, T/Z 25/4355. 120 London Teacher, 7 Sept. 1934.

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Part I

School and community

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1

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The school as a community

Early in 1923, Cormont Road School in Brixton was visited by a team of LCC inspectors. The resulting report was critical. Noting that the school drew its pupils from ‘fairly good’ homes, it stated that ‘the most noticeable defect is also the most vital, namely, the absence of genuine continuous life. The school at present is not a school but a collection of classes.’ Seven years and a change of headmaster later, the inspectors returned. This time they were happier: ‘This is a most admirable school … the boys … live and move with a sense of responsibility for the little state of which they are proud to be part.’1 This chapter considers the ways in which a sense of belonging was fostered in London’s schools and the sense of loyalty that could develop. The interrogation of ideas of community, identity and belonging are staples of social history. Historians of modern Britain have frequently explored their meaning in relation to class identities and a classed politics and culture, including the way in which these might be rivalled – or reinforced – by ethnic, religious or gendered identities.2 Following Benedict Anderson’s influential work on ‘imagined communities’, these concepts have similarly preoccupied imperial historians and historians of national identity, or those examining more local civic or regional ties.3 ‘Community’ has also become a key theoretical underpinning in the history of emotions, following Barbara Rosenwein’s influential model of ‘emotional communities’.4 However, in much of the literature, the school – if it is discussed at all – is often posited as disruptive to a sense of unity, acting as a battleground for the clash of different ‘communities’; be those class-based,

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School and community

as is often the case in histories of British schooling, or grounded in national or ethnic identities.5 Instead, this chapter suggests that the interwar period saw consistent efforts by schools to nurture a sense of collectivity. This construction of community was not straightforward; the boundaries of emotional, disciplinary, social and classed communities did not always overlap. Communities cut across from the political right and left: from the public school models on which ideas about uniform and house systems were based, for example, to a more holistic notion of the value of education as a resource for life, and schools as centres which would welcome former pupils returning for support and advice. Michael Billig’s influential concept of ‘banal nationalism’ is helpful here. In his study of nationalism, he suggested that it is the mundane and everyday symbols of nationalism that most effectively create a sense of national belonging: ‘not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building’.6 This chapter argues that the deliberate construction of school traditions, paired with the conscious fostering of a sense of historical continuity, meant that everyday efforts to build a community – a ‘little state’ – around the elementary school were often very successful. The interwar period saw a dedicated effort by schools to foster a sense of identity. This was a particular challenge in London, where the area around any particular school could encompass significant social differences. As an inspection team wrote of a Fulham school, the surrounding district ‘includes homes which differ very widely in character and not the least important work … has been … ­breaking down prejudice and welding together the various sections to form a harmonious whole’.7 In a period when school admissions were at the discretion of the headteacher – catchment areas were organic and pragmatic – there was no guarantee that children could replicate at school the community they knew at home. A 1919 LCC report found of two schools in Wandsworth that, though more than 1,400 children lived within half a mile of one and 900 children within the same distance of another, they were scattered among no fewer than 27 and 31 different schools respectively; while in one block of buildings in Hackney, 780 children attended 22 schools.8

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The school as a community 35

Consistency was further disrupted by administrative change, as the LCC began reorganisation around the principle of a break at the age of 11. One headmaster, taking charge of a newly reorganised department consisting of an amalgamation of the senior sections of four different schools, told his staff that the first six months would ‘be a time for welding the four component parts of the School … into one established whole … we shall be starting what is practically a new school, and we have to build up anew. I rank Tone as highly if not higher than Discipline.’9 One way in which a community was actively fostered was through the encouragement of school uniform. As a journalist commented: Many people cannot think of a uniform without thinking of an unlovely reduction to a level drabness. Yet … a uniform can be pleasing as well as healthy … Eton and Christ’s Hospital cling resolutely enough to their uniforms … With the great public schools the common pride in a common tradition – esprit de corps – is the origin and support of the fashion. And it is exactly the better aspects of that spirit that need to be imported into the elementary schools.10

If public schools were the model, a degree of sartorial uniformity was present even in the poorest of schools. St Peter’s School in Lambeth, for example, ‘a rather dismal building in a rather dismal region’, could still persuade many of its boys to wear school caps.11 Around one hundred of the girls at Central Street School in Finsbury, ‘situated in a crowded district … of … unwholesome streets’, were willing to purchase school hats.12 There were some critics: a school manager who objected to the headteacher’s insistence on uniform, for example, citing the cost to parents. The dispute was referred to London’s Education Officer, who responded with the reminder that, although compulsion was not sanctioned, the ‘wearing of uniform by children attending elementary schools is … becoming very general … The gain in neatness and general appearance is obvious and the uniform has, it is believed, the further advantage of fostering a co-operative spirit.’13 The benefit of uniform in nurturing a sense of belonging was emphasised to pupils. ‘In wearing it the girls are trained to realise that they are not thereby merely identified with the school as a

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whole but that they have in addition a personal responsibility for its reputation and traditions’, commented one inspector.14 This became even more important when trips were undertaken. One school required all children participating in a school journey to borrow a uniform for a small sum, while those involved in music, dancing or drama performances were lent one for free.15 The idea of uniformed pupils as ambassadors for the school was explicitly encouraged. The pupils of Hanover Street School were required to wear a school badge as a minimum in order to join a school journey to Portsmouth in 1924. ‘Remember that the good name of the school is in your hands’, they were told before they left.16 The interwar period also saw the widespread adoption of school houses. As early as 1927 the London Teacher noted that the house system had ‘become an integral part of the life of many schools’.17 Again, this was partly in conscious emulation of a public school model and also to ‘help all the pupils to feel some responsibility for the good name of the school’.18 Some schools displayed banners in the hall to indicate house positions in a school-wide competition; others initiated a prefect system alongside, with badges worn by class and school representatives. A common identity might further be promoted through the production of a school magazine. In a wartime report, the social research organisation Mass Observation dismissed school magazines as a source for investigation because they ‘are produced only by public and secondary schools, they are written mostly by the older boys and the masters, [and] they have usually an official ring’.19 However, when the London Teacher appealed for copies of school magazines in 1923, a number of elementary schools submitted work.20 For one school, situated in a congested district of north London, a school magazine was seen as ‘an excellent means of enlisting the practical support of boys and parents’.21 A few schools went further in their deliberate cultivation of tradition. Ivydale Road School in south London had its own song, written by the daughter of a previous headmaster and set to music by a current teacher: ‘Ivy leaves, green ivy leaves / Linked in one spray together’, began the chorus. The song was sung at school events, including Empire Day when ‘the children were drawn up in the formation of the school badge – an ivy leaf’. Presumably an ivy

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The school as a community 37

leaf also featured on the school caps, badges and buttons available for pupils to purchase.22 Not all schools had names that lent themselves so easily to representation, but a handful of others also boasted school songs, flags or mottoes, some of which further suggested a sense of community, such as ‘Fellowship is Life’ or ‘Pull Together’.23 ‘The school motto, “I am only one: there are others”, is symbolic of the happy spirit that prevails’, gushed the inspector of a school in Hackney.24 Such symbols were felt to matter, however artificially constructed. Netherwood Street School in Hampstead was attended ‘by children from homes of a depressed social grade and has had to combat a rather unenviable tradition in this respect’. Using the opportunity provided by reorganisation in 1931, the school signalled a fresh start by changing its name, becoming the Harben School ‘to help overcome this tradition’.25 Whenever possible, pride in school achievements was consciously fostered. One headteacher assembled all classes in the hall every Friday ‘to inculcate a school spirit and to encourage a healthy pride in the school and its doings’.26 London headteachers were permitted to grant up to two half-day holidays each year ‘on the occasion of some local event of importance to the school or in celebration of any excellent achievement’, such as a sporting or scholarship success.27 Most schools had honours boards to record educational accomplishments and later recollections testify to the impression that these might make. One autobiographer remembered how the names of scholarship winners ‘were painted on a big roll of honour hung in the school hall, and it had been my ambition to see my name there for as long as I could remember’.28 This particular schoolgirl eventually did see her own name added, but pride went beyond the personal. As another memoirist wrote, ‘I enjoyed school and reckoned that Millfields was the best school in England. I suppose that was because we had about eight honours boards hanging in the hall.’29 When national economies meant that school prizes were cut from the LCC budget in the early 1930s one headmaster lamented that it removed the opportunity for children to ‘see that managers and local magnates are proud of them, no chance for enthusiastic parents to become impregnated with the will to win that the boys have gained’.30

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School sports further encouraged both loyalty and rivalry. One headmaster used the occasion of a swimming gala to address the boys ‘on the importance of working for the team, and upon the honour of a boy being chosen to represent the school’, while an inspector commented of another school that it had ‘more than held its own in sport of all possible kinds and has rapidly won for itself a distinctive school pride which has knit it well together’.31 He was one of dozens of inspectors to note successes in local championships or other sporting achievements. One congratulated a school in a very deprived district of north London for winning the Mayor of Finsbury’s Cup, awarded for the highest percentage of pupils taught to swim that season.32 Children might be just as proud. In written recollections, one former pupil explained that he had attended ‘Holborn Road! The football school! If one checked the number of professional players in the twenties and thirties who had been pupils at Holborn, the list would be quite long, and of course, they were our heroes.’33 Again, the positive benefits extended to schools in the poorest of areas. An inspection report of a school in area characterised by ‘much squalor’ praised the headmaster who had arrived a few years previously and devoted much attention to creating in the minds of the boys an esprit de corps and sense of pride in the school. The lever of sports was mainly employed at first for this purpose, and the school has now reached championship level in football and swimming, with the result that the boys and their parents, and the neighbouring schools, now hold Popham Road School in some estimation.34

Communal feeling could be further enhanced by the memory of the First World War, not least when headteachers celebrated the distinctions gained by old boys or teachers. From 1916, the LCC permitted schools to grant a half-day holiday if a member of staff or former pupil won a military distinction; over four thousand such closures had been authorised before the practice was ended in 1920.35 There were other ways, too, in which public recognition could be made such as presentations, memorials, or school prizes set up in memory of an individual. Schools embraced the reflected glory: when an old scholar of Waterloo Road won the Military

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The school as a community 39

Cross, the managers wrote to the headteacher to congratulate him ‘upon the honour conferred on this school’.36 Military achievements were also celebrated more quietly. Headteachers frequently noted the award of distinctions in the logbook; one headmaster kept a list of decorated former pupils on its back cover.37 Another kept a letter received from the family member of an ex-pupil killed in 1917. ‘He has died the best death a soldier can’, wrote the relative; and the headmaster reflected that preservation of the letter ‘appears to me a fitting tribute to the “old boy”, his masters and the St Dunstan’s Road School’.38 Female contributions were celebrated too. In 1919, the headteacher of a school in Bow recorded that an ex-pupil, recently of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, had been mentioned in despatches the previous year, and that two more former scholars had received war medals.39 Despite such efforts, there were factors which inhibited the building of community. Notwithstanding the renovation and remodelling programme of the interwar period, many schools were hampered by the state of their buildings. A minority possessed no hall, such as at Calvert Road in Greenwich, where the headmaster, if he wished to address the whole school, was obliged either to use the playground or to assemble the boys in two classrooms and stand in the doorway between them.40 North of the river, Gillespie Road School was similarly disadvantaged, with the headmaster forced to borrow the hall of a neighbouring school when required. An inspection report commented that this was all the more unfortunate given his desire ‘to make a strong feature of collective and parental activities’.41 Other obstacles were demographic. The LCC felt that the relatively low child population in certain areas of central London, for example, led to ‘Council schools being sufficiently distant from each other to make it difficult to establish that healthy rivalry between schools which is found in other districts’.42 Tensions might also exist between the individual departments of the same school. Ivydale Road, which worked so hard to cultivate its school traditions, was noted by inspectors as enjoying an unusual degree of cooperation between the three departments: from the progressive schemes of work between infants and juniors, to the shared use of empty rooms, to the organisation of joint activities.43 Not all schools were so fortunate, and logbooks sometimes record tensions

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between departments over noise or the use of space, or simply a lack of communication. Sometimes coordination was impeded by  the Council, to the chagrin of the headteacher of a ‘mentally defective’ school, who requested permission to close his department for the afternoon, given that the senior and junior departments were shutting for a football match. This was refused; ‘consequently the attendance dropped and two of the dinner boys  … actually ran out of school at 1.30 in order to go. I caned them the following morning.’44 Indeed, schools for the ‘mentally defective’ probably felt more isolated than most, due to local prejudice. ‘The “silly school” was a somewhat frightening mystery’, remembered one ex-schoolgirl, whose own school adjoined it. ‘The gates seemed always to be locked, as was the gate between these grounds and our school playground … We never saw those who went there. They seemed to be “let out” much earlier than we were and probably arrived later.’45 In 1929, the headteacher of such a school reported that stones and rubbish were frequently thrown into the playground after hours and suggested that the culprits were pupils in the neighbouring boys’ school. He was not the only headteacher of a ‘mentally defective’ school to report such issues.46 Even for those schools which did not face such obstacles, children did not always respond to cues in the way that was hoped. Understanding (or cynicism) might only come with hindsight. One woman, reminiscing about her childhood in East London in the 1930s, had enjoyed physical training: ‘We wore a white blouse, navy blue knickers, with a blue, yellow, red or green band over our shoulders.’ She added wryly, ‘teacher called this team-work’.47 Ruth Adler remembered the mismatch between her school’s intentions and parents’ responses. She attended Stepney Jewish School and remembered how the headteacher ‘wanted us to look like secondary school children’: She didn’t say so, of course, but I can now interpret it that way. She issued an edict that we were to have uniforms, navy-blue gymslips and white blouses. Well, I could go on for a week about the trouble this caused … Our parents didn’t have the wherewithal to keep a stock of white blouses and give us a fresh one every day, so by the time Friday came, they were pretty grubby. The teacher would say,



The school as a community 41

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‘You should have clean blouses on, girls, even on a Friday.’ But our mothers would say, ‘It’s the last day of the week; it’s not worth putting on a clean blouse.’48

There are other indications too, that children did not invest in their schools as intended. In 1926, inspectors of a school in a poor district of Paddington lamented the ‘uninviting and forlorn appearance’ of the building, which was in a bad state of repair both inside and out. It was not helped, they suggested, by the 127 broken windows, ‘due to the fact that recent repairs to the adjoining roads provided material to throw about’.49 A lack of respect for the school building from those in the community was similarly implied by another school’s request to the LCC for a corrugated iron fence to replace the current wooden one. ‘The character of the neighbourhood is such that the wooden fence is frequently subject to wilful damage’, it explained.50 Nevertheless, contemporary evidence suggests that some children, at least, bought into the rhetoric of unity, team spirit and belonging. ‘This school is a really fine example of what a junior girls’ department can be’, wrote inspectors of a school situated in more favourable district near St Pancras. ‘These young girls do not seem so much to attend the school as to possess it. The school and they are one, and their pride in it is patent even to the occasional visitor.’ Their words are, of course, those of adult visitors and can only be judged as their impression of the children, but that impression was informed and genuine; there was no reason for them to exaggerate.51 Most striking, perhaps, is a surviving copy of the 1925 edition of Stepney Jewish School’s magazine – produced when Ruth Adler would have been a 13-year-old pupil there – which demonstrates loyalty to school, house and uniform. It reported on the recent school inspection: ‘We hope we have given a good account of ourselves. When compared with other schools, “Stepney” must come out on top.’ In a section written by prefects, the girls bade farewell to a friend who was leaving and hoped that she would ‘remember her many cousins at her old school and favour us with a visit and an occasional magazine article in her spare time’. The prefect of ‘Lesser’ house noted with regard to the house competition that ‘ours is the smallest family … yet we can hold our own. We depend on

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loyalty, not numbers.’ Finally, the same prefect warned her readers that ‘We still have to remind an occasional Lesser girl about her white blouse and House button – and even I regret to say – for boots not cleaned.’52 It was not just teachers who pressured Ruth to present a clean appearance. Teachers and educationalists spoke generally of the ‘increasing loyalty of children and parents’ towards schools, and other specific examples also survive in the archive.53 Loose in the logbook of Ivydale Road School, for example, is an agenda for one of its monthly house meetings. Attended, presumably, by the school or class prefects, the meeting included a count of top exam marks awarded, the winners of sporting events and the number of entries in the punishment book. Only two pupils from Ruskin House had been punished that month. ‘Well done Rus’, a boy had scribbled.54 In the creation of a school community, the attitude and influence of teachers was critical. As Philip Gardner has commented, rather than legislative, administrative and institutional aspects of schooling, ‘for most citizens, the practical meaning of the history of education is inscribed not in these things, but more intimately, in the names of their former teachers’.55 Teachers, and particularly headteachers, bore substantial responsibility for the tone of a school, and for carrying the loyalties of children with them. In 1935, the London Teacher reported the death of George Godley, headmaster of Queensmill Road School in Fulham from 1901 until after the First World War, in typically effusive terms: All who knew him will agree that he was a great headmaster. Children loved him, and parents respected him, bringing their troubles to him and seeking his advice and counsel. Old boys delighted once again to walk into the school and tell him of their successes, and he was as pleased to receive them as they were to come … Nothing pleased him better than to go into the playground and take part in the school games. He was eagerly sought as judge in school sports and always gave complete satisfaction.56

The following year, another article in the London Teacher, entitled ‘Teacher’s Unpaid Labour’, highlighted the extensive

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The school as a community 43

extra-curricular activities coordinated by teachers. It claimed that nearly every school had a football team, with games on Saturdays or early evenings, with girls’ mistresses ‘busy with netball and lawn tennis’. Most swimming lessons were completed inside school hours, but competitions were not: ‘all this is freely and cheerfully undertaken by teachers’. It noted school entertainments made possible ‘by the ungrudged devotion of the teachers for hours and hours beyond the normal working day’. Then there was the work undertaken in connection with care committees and juvenile organisations and the ‘hundreds of little parties that we see every day’ visiting museums and galleries. If teachers purely worked timetabled hours, it suggested, there would be no school journeys, few educational visits and hardly any school gardens, while ‘the school magazine is a labour of love, cheerfully edited and compiled out of school hours’.57 The London Teacher was duty bound to celebrate teachers in such ways, and was constantly stressing the additional labour shouldered by teachers to support its campaigns for better pay. Nevertheless, many teachers clearly played full and significant roles in their schools. Examples of extra-curricular activities undertaken by staff were often highlighted in inspection reports and logbooks. One head praised a staff member who had taken a party of children ‘on Saturday’ (her emphasis) to St James’s Park; another was grateful to the ‘self-sacrificing’ work of a colleague who had taken girls swimming every week in her dinner hour.58 There is also no doubt that many teachers felt genuine dedication towards their pupils. As Gardner found of the ex-teachers he interviewed, most ‘actively liked children, enjoyed being with them and took pleasure in watching them grow and develop in their charge. This was what they had come into the profession for’.59 Hundreds of London’s teachers volunteered every summer to assist the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, a charity which organised holidays for poor children. Others accompanied pupils on ‘school journeys’, educational fieldtrips of a fortnight’s duration taken during term time, requiring teachers to be ‘constant in supervision, taking practically no leisure for themselves from early morning until the children were safely in bed’.60 The fortnight was ‘quite long enough for the teachers too!’ remembered one ex-teacher, although

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another was particularly enthusiastic about the results: ‘The school journey gives the opportunity of widening the school environment’, he wrote, ‘knocking down classrooms, wiping out the desk which is something of a wall between teacher and pupil, and bringing us suddenly into touch with our charges as fellow human beings and comrades in the journey of life.’61 Such interaction was directly linked to positive outcomes by an inspector, who noted of one school that ‘staff and pupils share in netball matches and other sports, and thanks to the good spirit thus created corporal punishment is not needed’.62 Other schools held ‘masters v boys’ football matches, or ‘staff v school’ cricket competitions. At Fulham Palace Road School, five members of the staff even started violin lessons alongside the children, subsequently performing with the school orchestra.63 More casual – and perhaps regular – participation is hinted at in a logbook entry detailing a teacher’s sick pay: he had been injured while playing football with the boys during the midday interval.64 Teachers might donate money as well as time. In some schools, Christmas parties were made possible through their monthly subscriptions. Other costs were more hidden. The headteacher of a school in Poplar, for example, quietly subsidised the cost of school journeys from her own pocket for years before it was noticed by the school managers.65 There was also disquiet over the way in which spectacles were provided for schoolchildren, with headteachers often paying ‘the initial 1/- out of her own pocket in order that the child may get his glasses more quickly with no thought as to whether she will ever see it back’.66 At least for some teachers, commitment was driven by affection. ‘At the time of my departure from this beloved school … I should like to leave on record that my experience of service here has been one of great happiness … to leave it brings heartache’, wrote one headteacher, retiring in 1924 after 23 years in post.67 Other departing headteachers recorded their sorrow, referring to the years spent at the school as ‘extremely happy ones’, or, in one case, as ‘the happiest years of my life’.68 One wanted a physical memento, requesting special permission to purchase one of the school’s handbells, with which she had rung children in and out of play for thirty years.69 Other teachers left reminders behind them. Several schools

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The school as a community 45

benefited from memorial funds used to provide prizes, subsidise holidays, or support old scholars.70 The retirement of long-serving teachers might also come with a one-off gift, such as the donation of football boots for the school team, or money for the purchase of a gramophone and records.71 The impression that teachers made upon their pupils varied. Descriptions of teachers are a staple of autobiographies and memoirs. They are often reimagined in considerable, sometimes novelistic, detail: ‘a short, chunkily built woman with straight dark hair, and glasses astride a powerful nose … a boxwood ruler permanently grasped in one hand’; ‘masses of grey, white and fair hair, piled on top of her head … A white starched lace collar stood stiffly round her neck’; ‘Grey-suited … and as tall and as tidy as a guardsman, with a neat moustache and the shiny pate that gave him his nickname [“Baldy Allen”].’72 Descriptions of women in particular often conform to stereotype, even by reflective narrators: ‘[She] looked, to my childish eyes, like a storybook witch. She was tall, thin and sharp-featured, with dark hair drawn back into a tight bun, and wore pince-nez spectacles. At least, that is how I remember her.’73 Some recall the fear inspired by teachers of their childhood. Harold Rosen later painted the blackest of pictures of his old headmaster: A single stony glace from him could set your heart quaking … That awesome man could beam his terror across the full width of the Whitechapel Road or from the far end of the playground … He haunted my dreams, stalking across vast halls, swishing his cane to winkle me out from a hidey-hole in the cloakroom, contrite and guilty, not of any identifiable crime but of having committed the sin of being … He inhabited the brown chipped-tile world of Myrdle Street Elementary School, ruled over it and at nights, roosted immobile in a gruesome eerie, eyes open, probing the darkness for cowering sinners and backsliders.74

But just as frequently come tributes from men and women who remember their teachers with affection, who reference infant teachers in particular as their first love, an old headmaster as ‘a legend in his own lifetime’ or whose appreciation came later in life: ‘I know it isn’t possible now, but I would like to have met Mr Nolan and

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Mr  Hains, just to thank them for their guidance and wisdom all those years ago.’75 Perhaps the greatest tribute comes from one expupil who went on to become a teacher himself: I made up my mind when I was eleven that I wanted to be a teacher. Mr Pritchard that I’ve spoken about was the chap I wanted to emulate and in consequence I wanted to be a teacher in an elementary school. I wasn’t bothered about secondary education or anything of that kind. I wanted to follow him in that way.76

Contemporary evidence is sparser but presents a similarly chequered picture. An assumption of some degree of affection or appreciation can be read into descriptions of retirement occasions, often attended by current and past scholars. When the headmaster of a Battersea school retired after a tenure of thirty-eight years, the London Teacher remarked on ‘the enthusiasm with which he was greeted in the school playground on his departure … Nearly all the boys assembled on their own initiative in the road adjacent to the school and sang “For he’s a jolly good fellow”.’77 When a teacher left a Hammersmith school in 1937, pupils and parents were invited to a farewell tea. They presented her with a set of glasses as a leaving present, having ‘made the collection for the present out of school hours.’78 Stronger bonds are also hinted at. A headteacher’s report on the death of a young teacher on his staff may have been sentimentalised in grief – ‘to the children he was an elder brother and to us a younger brother, and we miss him’79 – but in some cases teachers did assume a status akin to family. One gets the sense that another headteacher was herself surprised when she recorded that she had been to visit a sick pupil in hospital: ‘The child in her delirium called so frequently for “Miss Baines” that hearing this on Monday morning I visited her and found her just recovering consciousness.’80 Strong feelings were not universal, and, in contrast, an elementary school teacher in a west London suburb, writing for Mass Observation in 1937, was struck by the lack of acknowledgement by an ex-pupil: late for work, ‘I walk and run alternately the two hundred yards to school, passing a boy of twelve whom I once taught at another. He gives no greeting.’81 It is hardly surprising that opinions differed due to numerous factors, not least the

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The school as a community 47

individual personalities concerned. However, even some of those who remembered teachers with dislike still acknowledged their commitment to the job. Phyllis Willmott’s teacher was a Miss Cole, ‘the fiercest and strictest teacher in the school’. But, ‘unpleasant and unpopular as she was, she had one outstanding quality in my eyes: she was a ballet enthusiast, and gave lessons once a week to any pupils from the school who could afford the sixpenny fee’.82 Alexander Hartog remembered some of the ‘sadist’ teachers at his old school with similar distaste, but also remembered how, ‘when school came to an end, many of the teachers volunteered to do two or three hours, a couple of evenings a week, to teach the violin, purse making, boot repairing, woodwork, metalwork, pottery, musical appreciation, printing’.83 Most consistently, perhaps, comes a sense of the teacher’s role as protector. The name of one particular teacher in Hammersmith was recorded in his school’s logbook in 1928 following a parental complaint of undue violence, and then again in 1931, when another complaint led to his being cautioned by the Council. He must, undoubtedly, have been a brutal teacher – complaints against teachers were not uncommon, but it was rare that they were taken seriously enough for teachers to receive a caution – but an easy stereotype is challenged by another entry four months later, when a boy got into trouble at the swimming baths and it was the same teacher who jumped in to get him out. (‘The teacher’s suit was damaged but no harm was done to the boy.’)84 Protection could take different forms. When a headteacher explained to the Education Officer why she had suggested that a particular child might be ‘mentally deficient’ only as the girl approached school-leaving age (14 in a mainstream elementary school; 16 in a special school), the idea of the school as a safe place was implicit: ‘Although she had made some slight progress in reading and number, she was so inadequate in the management of general affairs, that I put her forward for medical examination again, mainly to protect her from being plunged into the world of industry at fourteen years of age, equipped with the mentality of a small child.’85 In more than one instance, a headteacher was protective of his children and took their side even against uniformed representatives of the state. When a policeman complained of noise during the

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school dinner hour, for example, one headmaster was dismissive: ‘As the police constable was very abusive and had already “clumped” one or two boys on the head, [I] ordered him off the premises and asked him to come again when he could speak civilly.’86 Even for more serious infringements, a headteacher claimed responsibility for his pupils. When detectives arrived at a school to arrest two boys accused of stealing, the headteacher ‘had to remonstrate with officers for … intercepting the boys in school premises without first consulting the headteacher in whose charge he understands the boys are on arriving in the school’.87 However brutally or capriciously teachers may – or may not – have wielded their power, the community defined by the school gates remained a powerful one. If considerable effort was made to persuade children to feel part of a school-wide whole, this also extended back in time with an attempt to connect children to a shared past. A handful of London schools were very old indeed. Greencoat Church of England School had a continuous history from 1706 and derived its name from its former uniform. If so inclined, children might have visited Camberwell Art Gallery to see the two statues, the Greencoat Boy and Girl, which had once stood outside the school.88 Most voluntary schools dated from the early nineteenth century onwards, and the old Board schools had been erected after 1870. However, many schools attempted to raise awareness of their specific history, whatever their age. An inspector’s comment about one – that ‘no one seems to know when the school was erected, for all records were destroyed about thirty years ago’ – stands out for its rarity.89 More usually, the anniversary of a school’s opening was noted in logbooks and special events might be held. One school marked its first and subsequent birthdays with songs and a candle-lit cake; the children of another were given additional playtime to celebrate their school’s twentieth anniversary.90 In 1935, the pupils of an East End school engaged in displays of dancing, singing, physical exercises and acting to mark its golden jubilee, culminating in short addresses on the school’s history in the hall ‘which was absolutely crammed with parents’.91 A birthday also provided an opportunity to reflect in more detail on a school’s history through the production of souvenir booklets.

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The author of one such pamphlet was both an ex-pupil and current teacher at the school he celebrated, while another was printed by present scholars and contained reminiscences from a woman who had been a manager of the school at its birth alongside those of a current manager – also an ex-pupil.92 These histories not only celebrated the individual school but were a way of marking historical continuity. In a changing world, the school was familiar and stable. Dalgleish Street School in Stepney was reorganised in 1931 and, in the first subsequent logbook entry, its headteacher reflected on past, present and – implicitly – future continuities: ‘After opening as an Elementary School to accommodate 200 Boys at 2d per week on January 5 1880 with the object of training them to become reasoning citizens, which work and aim has been pursued through nearly 52 years; today it is reorganised to teach children until they have passed Scholarship age, with 180 children.’93 A celebration of past achievement bolstered pride in a historical school community. Early in 1939, a questionnaire was sent to Islington headteachers requesting information about their school’s history for a proposed exhibition. One question asked for details of any distinguished ex-pupils. The way in which teachers chose to respond varied. The headteacher of Montem Street highlighted the number of children who had won scholarships, with several proceeding to university and careers in education or the civil service. The head of a Catholic school included a cutting from the Radio Times earlier that year, with details of a piano recital on the BBC; the pianist had been a pupil at the school before the First World War. The headmaster of Chequer Street noted the teacher and fiftyseven old boys who had given their lives during the war and detailed the various military awards won. The head of Hanover Street – situated close to the Grand Union Canal – wrote that a number of pupils and ex-pupils had been given awards by the Royal Humane Society for rescues from drowning.94 Interwar logbooks are further dotted with records of the deeds of old scholars. One headmaster’s pride is evident following the success of ex-pupil and swimmer Albert Dickin in setting a new national record in the 100 yards freestyle, following competition at the Olympics earlier that summer. He sent copies of press cuttings to half a dozen people, including the Education Officer, district

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inspector, and the organiser of physical education at the LCC.95 Current scholars were reminded of the successes of their forbears. When J.C. Wilmot, an ex-pupil of Hither Green, was elected MP for East Fulham, for example, the news was announced to the school, and the headmaster ‘spoke of Mr J.C. Wilmot as he was known to him in school – when Jack Wilmot’.96 A direct physical connection to the past might further be encouraged through a school’s ex-pupils more generally. A Hammersmith school celebrated its diamond jubilee with an open afternoon attended by old pupils from the 1870s and 1880s, noting that many of the parents who attended were also former scholars.97 To celebrate fifty years of a Westminster school, its first headteacher returned, as did several of its earliest scholars ‘who were there to greet their old headmaster’.98 In fact, the relationship of schools and ex-pupils is worth exploring further, both as testament to the cultivation of a historical school community, but also as evidence of ex-pupils’ engagement with their old school. Numerous interwar logbooks refer to the establishment or post-war revival of old scholars’ clubs. These could foster a sense of continuity over generations, as when a reunion of ex-scholars took place at a Sydenham school in 1922. About 120 old boys attended, including three who had left as distantly as 1882.99 However, most such associations catered to ex-pupils who had left more recently, providing social events and support for continued learning. In one school a lending library was set up for members of the old girls’ association, opening with 185 volumes donated by teachers and friends.100 Another school permitted the old girls’ club to use the playground on Saturdays for netball and the hall for a monthly social evening.101 In 1925, the Old Scholars’ Association of Everington Street School in Fulham used school premises to study A Midsummer Night’s Dream and act out scenes, ‘much to the delight of the girls’, who gave three performances, one to the school’s senior scholars, one to other ex-pupils, and one to their parents.102 The philosophy of the old scholars’ clubs was partly about the school’s continued delivery of welfare and social training, to be discussed in later chapters. Upon the revival of one old boys’ club, the headteacher praised the master responsible in precisely such terms, congratulating him ‘on the resuscitation of a splendid piece of

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The school as a community 51

social work’.103 In 1935, Evelyn Lowe, Chair of the LCC Education Committee, noted that the old scholars’ club was ‘the one social unit which directly reflects the training in citizenship so earnestly attempted in our London schools … the old scholar carries over into the Old Scholars’ Club all the rich potentialities of intellectual and character training which are the bases of true citizenship’.104 Of course, encouraging visits by ex-scholars could also be seen cynically, and in response to an enquiry from the LCC about the decline of girls going into domestic service, one headmistress replied that: Having successfully placed many of my own scholars in Domestic Service, I have learned by experience … The sympathetic ‘following up’ of the girl is most important, her leisure time both in the house and outside needs catering for and she must also feel that her old school is also a ‘home’ where she is welcomed and honoured. (A few well-clad, nice mannered, contented maids paying visits to their old school soon changes the whole attitude towards Domestic Service.)105

But old scholars’ clubs were also about the maintenance of tradition, and the role of the school as a site of identity for life. Lowe continued: What the Prefects’ Council does for the public schoolboy, and the College Union for the undergraduate, so does the Old Scholars’ Club … for the old scholar … The school as the vital spark in the community life of the neighbourhood, with the Old Scholars’ Club as its link with the adult community: what sounder basis for true citizenship; what finer consummation of all that is crystallised in that precious phrase – ‘the school tradition’!106

The success of these clubs varied. Some attracted members in considerable numbers. When inspectors visited the Forster School, situated in a poor and overcrowded part of Islington, they were impressed by the weekly meeting of the old girls’ club at which over one hundred attended, while a Brixton school reported an attendance of 223 ex-pupils at a one-off reunion in 1930.107 Others met only infrequently, fell into inactivity or were discontinued. One school in the East End was used every night by the local evening institute, meaning that ‘although the neighbourhood is one in which there is a crying need for an Old Scholars’ Club, none can be formed for lack of a home’.108 However, even when formal clubs did not

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exist, old scholars might still be encouraged to remain in touch with the school through occasional socials, concerts or sports events. In 1933, children of a school in Kensington performed The Mikado, with the help of an orchestra composed entirely of old boys.109 The headteacher of another school was keen to keep old scholars up to date with its news, posting an annual letter to all those who had left in the last five years.110 The engagement of ex-pupils can be taken as one indication of success in schools’ attempts to elicit some kind of loyalty and longterm sense of belonging. It was certainly hailed as such by inspectors, who highlighted the visits of old scholars in their reports. ‘It is clear that the school means a good deal to them [pupils]’, wrote one. ‘The frequent visits which old scholars pay to the school afford evidence of their affection for it.’111 Other sources also suggest a sense of attachment amongst former pupils. Logbooks occasionally record the visits of old scholars, sometimes bearing gifts: £1 for the purchase of school prizes; a cup for the football championship; sufficient money to give every child a shilling; a box of wild flowers from an ex-pupil now living in the countryside.112 Others gave their time, and logbooks occasionally record expupils visiting to give talks, particularly after travelling or living abroad. In 1921, a man who had left a school in West Norwood on a scholarship in 1910 had gone on to success at Cambridge: ‘At a recent visit to his old school he expressed in a speech to the boys his firm conviction that the education they receive in the LCC school forms the best foundation for their success in after life.’113 Nor was it unknown for former pupils still resident in the area to take a more active role in their old school’s life by joining the board of managers.114 Some ex-pupils wrote or visited for no other purpose than to stay in touch, assuming that their old school would be interested in their progress. Headteachers duly fulfilled that expectation by recording their news in the logbook. ‘Three old boys visited. All doing well’, wrote one headmaster for that day’s entry, while another noted of a visitor that he had been ‘very anxious to see his old school’.115 Accidentally surviving by being tucked into the logbook of Kenmont Gardens School is half of a handwritten letter from an old boy to his headmaster, describing his experience in the Russian navy during



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the First World War. ‘Can you realise that an old “Kenmont boy” was the only Englishman working in the Russian Fleet at that time’, he wrote proudly, ‘However, it’s a very long story and one which I would sooner tell to you than write.’116 In 1931, T. Payten Gunton, headmaster of a school in Tooting, laid out his thoughts on what a senior school should look like. He was perhaps inspired by knowledge of the village college movement pioneered by Henry Morris, and the opening of the first village college in rural Cambridgeshire a year earlier.117 Payten Gunton did not go quite so far as Morris, for whom the village college was envisaged as a social, educational and cultural centre for the whole community, of every age. But Payten Gunton’s view was still expansive. The senior school, he suggested, should be ‘the veritable centre of the youthful universe’: Its doors should not close upon its pupils from 4.30pm to 9am. It must become, not only the centre for education in the usually accepted sense of the term, but also for social activity … Its organisations and associations should supply the means by which a pupil can satisfy the desire for fellowship, amusement, instruction and intimate, sympathetic guidance and help … We are training pupils to live in society, hence no aspect of this social life must be neglected … We must attempt to make our school a real training-ground for life.118

We cannot know if Payten Gunton’s deeds matched his words, nor has the interwar logbook for his school survived. However, efforts to build a school community could certainly work. A few miles away in Deptford, inspectors visited Canterbury Street School in 1934. They recorded that its children were ‘poor and many are illclad … poor in physique, with few home advantages, and the neighbourhood is drab and uninspiring’. They suggested that the school community itself, however, was ‘vigorous and alive’: Open Days, Parents’ Meetings, the circulation of a Report on school doings, Boxing Contests, School Performances, etc., etc., etc., are evidence of the spirit informing the whole organisation … School notices, for example, are beautifully printed and illustrated and are continuously changed and renewed; a stage has been constructed; the aid of outside social agencies has been obtained; a boot club

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gives very necessary help; a very popular homework class is held; and hobby circles, each exhibiting in turn in the school hall the work done, are a popular part of the school organisation.119

Dissenting voices from children themselves are generally missing from the contemporary record, if not from memoir. ‘Your Head Teacher and Class Teachers at school are your very best friends’, wrote one headteacher with particular warmth, concluding a short booklet giving employment advice for school-leavers. ‘Always keep a soft spot for the old school, and do not hesitate to go back at any time for advice. You will find a welcome awaiting you, and everyone will always be ready to help you to the best of their ability.’120 But we have no way of knowing what his pupils thought when they read their teacher’s words: grateful that they were led by such a man and ready to take up the offer? Or bemused by the contrast between the welcoming words and the headmaster they knew? One could probably have found pupils in his school who adhered to each opinion. An absence of evidence is tricky to quantify. Contemporary sources such as logbooks privilege those pupils who remained engaged with their old schools. Others whose emotions sat on the spectrum between hostility and indifference – surely many – are much less likely to appear in the sources. Initiatives taken were also more likely to be recorded than those that were not. If many schools encouraged ex-pupils to stay in touch, others made less of an effort. In 1922, as many schools were erecting memorials to old scholars or teachers lost to the war, one headteacher was sorry that he could offer only an incomplete list of names ‘owing to the difficulty of getting information’.121 Nor was continued contact always positive. One logbook records a call to the police: a former pupil had used a visit to his old teachers as a chance to steal thirteen coats.122 Yet the sustained engagement of many ex-scholars with their school remains striking. Former pupils returned to make use of the opportunities still available to them, to offer their own time or money back, or simply to keep in touch. Further evidence comes from reports of pupils reluctant to leave a school even if families moved away from the area. Inspectors were convinced of one school, ‘in a poor neighbourhood near Camberwell Green’, that pupils ‘obviously feel at home here: in some cases, boys leaving the

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The school as a community 55

district take long walks or tram rides in order to finish their school days in the school they like’.123 The conclusion of the inspection team quoted at the beginning of this chapter cannot, therefore, be dismissed as hyperbole. For those who worked and studied within them, many elementary schools of the interwar period did take on the characteristics of ‘little states’, successfully cultivating their own formation myths and histories, and commanding at least a degree of loyalty. In response to the 1939 questionnaire sent to Islington schools requesting details of any distinguished ex-pupils, two headmasters struck a humble tone. ‘As a school, we seem to be extremely humdrum’, wrote one. ‘We have had no scholars or teachers who have risen to be Prime Minister, or anything like that, so are unable to shine in their reflected glory. Nevertheless, it has a tradition for respectability and hard work lasting over many years.’ A colleague gave a similar response, which, better than anything, perhaps sums up the banal loyalty (following Billig) commanded by the elementary school: ‘I am afraid we cannot record any distinguished persons or deeds, but most of our pupils make good citizens, and return to bring their own children to us.’124

Notes 1 TNA, ED21/34937, Inspection reports, 1 May 1923, 12 March 1930. 2 There is a vast amount of literature here. For recent works see Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-War England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Class, Politics and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 4 Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Modern Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 5 As discussed in Introduction. 6 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 8. 7 TNA, ED21/34682, Inspection report, 25 Sept. 1933. 8 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 23 July 1919.

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9 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/QMR/LB/002, Logbook, 31 March 1931. 10 Manchester Guardian, 28 July 1919. 11 TNA, ED21/34975, Inspection report, 11 May 1928. 12 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/CEN/LB/005, Inspection report, 11 April 1927; Logbook, 27 Oct. 1927. 13 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/333, Managers’ minutes, 2 Dec. 1935, 3 Feb. 1936. 14 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/WOD/LB/004, Inspection report, 22 Dec. 1926. 15 TNA, ED21/34835, Inspection report, 20 Sept. 1935. 16 TNA, ED21/34847, Inspection report, 14 Sept. 1932; LMA, LCC/EO/ PS/11/047, School Journey Guidebook, June 1924. 17 London Teacher, 14 Oct. 1927. 18 TNA, ED21/34687, Inspection report, 22 Jan. 1931. 19 MOA, FR299, ‘Children and the War’, June 1940, 26–7. 20 London Teacher, 2 March 1923, 28 Sept. 1923. 21 London Teacher, 3 May 1935. 22 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/IVY/LB/002–3, Empire Day programme, 1922; House meeting notes, April 1925. 23 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/FRI/LB/001, Logbook, 23 Nov. 1921; LCC/ EO/DIV01/FPR/LB/004, Logbook, 21 May 1926. 24 TNA, ED21/34750, Inspection report, 26 Sept. 1931. 25 TNA, ED21/34808, Inspection report, 6 Sept. 1934. 26 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/SIR/LB/002, Logbook, 7 Sept. 1923. 27 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 14 March 1923. 28 Doris Bailey, Children of the Green: A True Story of Childhood in Bethnal Green, 1922–37 (London: Stepney Books, 1981), 79. 29 Doris Knight, Millfields Memories (London: Centerprise Publishing Project, 1976), 21. 30 London Teacher, 12 Feb 1932. 31 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/ROM/LB/001, Logbook, 8 Oct. 1929; LCC/ EO/DIV07/BRO/LB/002, Inspection report, 18 Nov. 1932. 32 TNA, ED21/34652, Inspection report, 5 Jan. 1935. 33 ERO, T/Z 25/4294. 34 TNA, ED21/34860, Inspection report, 11 Nov. 1925. 35 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 10 March 1920. 36 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/115, Managers’ minutes, 17 Dec. 1918. 37 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/NER/LB/002, Logbook, 1913–31. 38 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/CAP/LB/002, Letter to headmaster, n.d., c.1918. 39 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/OLG/LB/007, Logbook, 30 Oct. 1919.

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40 TNA, ED21/34698, Inspection report, 20 March 1928. 41 TNA, ED21/34848, Inspection report, 7 June 1929. 42 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 1 April 1925. 43 TNA, ED21/34569, Inspection report, Nov. 1926. 44 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/NOR/LB/008, Logbook, 8 Feb. 1923. 45 Angela Rodaway, A London Childhood (London: Virago, 1985 edn [1960]), 13. 46 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAN1/LB/012, Logbook, 15, 22, 23 May, 16 Sept. 1929. 47 ERO, T/Z 25/4334. 48 Ruth Adler, ‘Woman of the Eighties’, in Jewish Women in London Group, Generations of Memories: Voices of Jewish Women (London: Women’s Press, 1989), 31. 49 TNA, ED21/35065, Inspection report, 30 Nov. 1926. 50 TNA, ED21/34726, Letter from Education Officer, 20 Oct. 1925. 51 TNA, ED21/35182, Inspection report, 1 Feb. 1935. 52 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STE/LB/003, School magazine, March 1925. 53 London Teacher, 12 Nov. 1926. 54 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/IVY/LB/002, House meeting notes, April 1925. 55 Gardner, ‘Teachers’, 117. 56 London Teacher, 13 Dec. 1935. 57 London Teacher, 12 March 1920. A similar article (quoting from The Times) appeared in the London Teacher, 29 May 1936. 58 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/SOM/LB/003, Logbook, 30 Oct. 1926; LCC/ EO/DIV05/APP/LB/002, Logbook, 21 Dec. 1933. 59 Gardner, ‘Giant at the Front’, 160. 60 TNA, ED21/34531, Inspection report, July 1925. 61 People’s Autobiography of Hackney, Working Lives, 24; Teresa Ploszajska, ‘Down to Earth? Geography Fieldwork in English Schools, 1870–1944’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (1998), 770. 62 TNA, ED21/35204, Inspection report, 4 Dec. 1925. 63 TNA, ED21/34671, Inspection report, 30 April 1930. 64 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 27 April 1921. 65 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/341, Managers’ minutes, 4 Nov. 1936. 66 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/02/013, Headmistresses’ meeting, n.d., probably 1939. 67 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/LB/005, Logbook, 19 Dec. 1924. 68 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SCA/LB/001, Logbook, 1 June 1934; LCC/ EO/DIV05/GEE/LB/001, Logbook, 21 Dec. 1933.

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69 London Teacher, 9 March 1928. 70 LCC Education Committee Minutes 24 Oct. 1923, 16 Dec. 1925; 16 March 1927; London Teacher, 1 July 1927, 17 Jan. 1930. 71 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STH/LB/001, 23 Oct. 1936; London Teacher, 25 March 1927. 72 Bryan Magee, Clouds of Glory: A Hoxton Childhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003), 50; ERO, T/Z 25/4251, T/Z 25/4343. 73 ERO, T/Z 25/4217. 74 Rosen, Are You Still Circumcised?, 20–1. 75 Emanuel Litvinoff, Journey Through a Small Planet (London: Penguin, 2008 edn [1972]), 23; ERO, T/Z 25/3008, T/Z 25/4294; T/Z 25/4341. 76 Cited in Peter Cunningham and Philip Gardner, Becoming Teachers: Texts and Testimonies, 1907–1950 (London: Woburn, 2004), 161–2. 77 London Teacher, 2 May 1919. 78 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/FLO/LB/004, Logbook, 12 April 1937. 79 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/WIL/LB/014, Logbook, 20 July 1933. 80 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/MOR/LB/005, Logbook, 15 Dec. 1919. 81 MOA, DS385, Day survey, 13 Dec. 1937. 82 Phyllis Willmott, Growing Up in a London Village. Family Life Between the Wars (London: Owen, 1979), 120. 83 Alexander Hartog, Born to Sing, ed. Clive Murphy (London: Dobson, 1978), 28. 84 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/STST/LB/003, Logbook, 11 Jan. 1928, 8 Jan., 18 May 1931. 85 LMA, LCC/EO/SS/01/5, Headteacher to Education Officer, Oct. 1936. 86 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/ROM/LB/001, Logbook, 27 Sept. 1923. 87 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/CEN/LB/004, Logbook, 11 Dec. 1923. 88 TNA, ED21/34564, Inspection report, 5 May 1932. 89 TNA, ED21/34724, Inspection report, 6 Jan. 1935. 90 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/GEE/LB/001, Logbook, 26 April 1928; LCC/ EO/DIV01/QMR/LB/001, Logbook, 3 March 1924. 91 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MAL/LB/005, Logbook, 11 July 1935. 92 London Teacher, 26 March 1926; TNA, ED21/34895, Jubilee souvenir, 1928. 93 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAL/LB/013, 30 Oct. 1931. 94 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/145, Headteachers’ letters, May 1939. 95 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/STST/LB/002, Logbook, Oct. 1920. 96 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HIT/LB003, Logbook, 26 Oct. 1931. 97 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/VIC/LB/005, Logbook, 30 Jan. 1936. 98 London Teacher, 5 July 1929. 99 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HAS/LB/003, Logbook, 8 Feb. 1922.

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100 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STSAV/LB/002, Logbook, 4 May 1925. 101 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STPAU1/LB/007, Logbook, 23 Sept. 1929. 102 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/EVE/LB/005, Notes on old scholars, n.d., c.1925. 103 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/HAN/LB/001, Logbook, 14 July 1919. 104 London Teacher, 3 May 1935. 105 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/04/012, Headteacher’s letter, 1922. 106 London Teacher, 3 May 1935. 107 TNA, ED21/34858, Inspection report, 24 May 1929; ED21/34937, Inspection report, 12 March 1930. 108 TNA, ED21/35150, Inspection report, 30 Sept. 1926. 109 London Teacher, 10 Feb. 1933. 110 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/CRE/LB/005, Logbook, 14 Sept. 1926. 111 TNA, ED21/34895, Inspection report, 7 Sept. 1934. 112 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 19 Nov. 1924; London Teacher, 5 June 1925, 29 Oct. 1926; LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/BRO/LB/007, Logbook, 27 April 1937. 113 London Teacher, 2 Sept. 1921. 114 London Teacher, 11 Jan. 1929; London Teacher, 13 Jan. 1933. 115 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/OLG/LB/003, Logbook, 29 Aug. 1927; LCC/ EO/DIV01/POR/LB/002, Logbook, 27 May 1925. 116 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/KEN/LB/011, Letter to headteacher, n.d. 117 On the village college movement, see Harry Rée, Educator Extraordinary: The Life and Achievement of Henry Morris, ­1889–1961 (London: Longman, 1973). 118 T. Payten Gunton, The New Senior School (London: The Grant Educational Company, 1931), 19, 35. 119 TNA, ED21/34629, Inspection report, 7 Sept. 1934. 120 S. Nugent, Vocations for School Leavers: A Class Reader (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1926), 20. 121 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/BAT/LB/001, Logbook, 31 Jan. 1922. 122 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MOW/LB/012, Logbook, 1 Oct. 1924. 123 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/048, Inspection report, 29 July 1938. 124 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/145, Headteacher’s letter, May 1939. Billig, Banal Nationalism.

2

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In October 1925, parents were invited to an open day at the boys’ department of Central Street School. Leaflets were prepared for distribution: The primary object of ‘open day’ is to give the parents of our children an opportunity to come and see the boys at work. What you see is not presented as perfect work nor in the nature of a show or entertainment, but that you may see how from day to day we carry on our work, striving to shape your boys into true men and good citizens. You have a part to play in this. Be interested in your children’s progress and attendance, talk to the teachers about them, encourage them in every way you can and remember that to the schoolboys, school should come FIRST, as later on will come the occupation he will follow. Remember also that thousands of other London boys are out on the journey of life. Why should they beat your boys for lack of your efforts and ours?1

The children of Central Street School were among the poorest in London, living in ‘a crowded district on the borders of the City, a district of narrow, drab, unwholesome streets and high buildings’. Their headmaster was pleased with the open day, counting forty-odd attendees and noting that ‘interest by parents appears to be  increasing’. A few years later, an inspection report commented that his school exercised ‘a beneficial influence in the neighbourhood’.2 In 1929, Ralph Crowley, senior medical officer at the Board of Education, suggested that ‘homes do not function nowadays as they used to. The old-time home was a strong organisation and the old-time school was a weak organisation. The reverse happens

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today. It is the new-time school which is the strong organisation and the new-time home which is the weak one.’3 He was speaking at a meeting of the Home and School Council, the organisation established to encourage ‘the formation of parent–teacher groups and local home councils, active co-operation between parents and teachers in all matters relating to education and the upbringing of the child’. It was essentially a middle-class organisation which sought to persuade working-class parents to engage with their children’s education and it remained marginal in the 1930s, with only 137 national affiliations by the end of 1935 (representing a tiny percentage of the 32,000 schools in Britain). A regional council for London was formed in 1936.4 The sense of separation between home and school arguably increased in the interwar period, and Crowley was perhaps thinking of the sense of loyalty and identity that schools were encouraged to develop among their pupils when he emphasised the strength of the school organisation. He might also have been referring to the professionalisation of education, which had reinforced hierarchies. As sites for the collection of medical data and psychometric testing, schools had become associated with the increasing professionalisation of child welfare more generally, further distancing them from working-class households and providing a scientific and medicalised language with which to assert authority over parents.5 With respect to American schools in this period, William Cutler writes of the ‘blizzard of research’ that emboldened educators and experts, and increased pressure on parents ‘to defer to the wisdom of those professionally trained’.6 Nicola Sheldon has pointed to a gendered element: in the late nineteenth century the (usually male and untrained) school attendance officer chased truants through their fathers; by the early years of the twentieth century, the pressure was increasingly on mothers, with new groups of professional female workers such as school nurses and health visitors leading interactions with families.7 In both contemporary discussion and much of the historiography, the elementary school has frequently been represented as very different to home and street, with children required to negotiate the competing demands of each.8 Several historians have documented the way in which schools, particularly those of poor, urban areas,

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were seen as part of a broad civilising mission in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.9 Historians in earlier decades often assumed that this led to an inherent tension between home – a proxy for the community – and school – a proxy for the state. ‘The first public schools were alien institutions erected in hostile territory’, wrote Michael Katz.10 According to Standish Meacham, school was yet another obstacle for poorer pupils to negotiate: ‘family and friends expected them to work as soon as the law allowed, and they themselves looked forward eagerly to doing so’, while J.S. Hurt argued that ‘for the bulk of working-class children attending school firm [parental] support was lacking’.11 Later scholars modified such judgements, notably Jonathan Rose, who cited both Meacham and Hurt before providing evidence for a significant level of workingclass support for education.12 When considering working-class attitudes to schooling, the majority of the literature is concerned with late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain.13 The introduction of compulsion in particular changed the dynamic between schools and their communities which, as Sascha Auerbach has argued, ‘clashed ceaselessly over the board’s decision to compel parents to send their children to school’.14 ‘School stories’ from this period as ‘embedded in countless autobiographies and oral histories’, writes Ellen Ross, are each ‘a variation on the theme of school versus family and especially mother’.15 But attitudes were already changing, even before the First World War. As Philip Gardner has suggested, attendance officers might initially have been resisted, but ‘time was on their side … Their collective influence was like a steady drip into popular consciousness … fundamental animosity … gave way to acceptance and ultimately to concurrence.’16 By the interwar years, an interaction with state officials had become routine for working-class families, and by the early 1930s the Home and School Council was suggesting that The classic antagonism between parents on the one hand and masters and mistresses on the other is out of date now. Parents, according to the old-fashioned school master, were unmitigated nuisances, and schoolmasters were either avoided by parents who shared their children’s awe of those fearsome autocrats, or were attacked by parents



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who found fault … Today parents and teachers realise that it is far more sensible to pool their experience and in schools all over the country associations are being formed between them.17

This chapter explores the everyday interactions, conflicts and negotiations between schools and their working-class constituents, and the ways these relationships were managed. As the request for parental involvement by Central Street School makes clear, schools did not always seek to impose their values in a straightforward way and cooperation between home and school was often visible, even if relationships were complex and the power balance unequal. In official circles, it is unsurprising that the school environment was usually valued over that of home and street. One inspector described the district of a school in Poplar as dull and overcrowded, if not ‘outwardly squalid’. But, he thought, ‘within this drab and monotonous environment the school is in happy contrast. It has life, colour, and individuality’.18 Some inspection reports condemned the families from which children came: congratulating a headteacher on her school’s success given that ‘much of the raw material admitted in this district is of a very low grade’; or suggesting that a school had to work with ‘the somewhat lethargic material that comes in from the surrounding neighbourhood’.19 The pupils of a Finsbury school were described as exhibiting ‘characteristics which arise from such [slum] conditions, namely muddle, unpunctuality, irregularity, uncleanliness and a “don’t care” attitude’, with inspectors referring to the possible ill-effects of ‘inferior heredity’.20 Parents might be disparaged even in schools which were socially mixed. One set of pupils in Lewisham came from a variety of backgrounds but ‘practically none of them can be regarded as coming of cultured parentage, or as receiving much cultural stimulus at home … they depend wholly on school for information and general culture’.21 Indeed, the school might be idealised as a place which conformed more closely to a (middle-class) vision of ‘home’ than the houses from which their working-class pupils were drawn. One report praised a school for performing ‘many of the functions of an ideal home in an area where home life is hardly possible’.22 Others spoke

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of ‘a happy, home-like atmosphere … [for] children whose social lives are so limited outside’; characterised a class of infants as ‘­comparable to a happy family’; or praised the school’s ‘delightful family environment’.23 The contrast with a child’s usual environment was often explicit. In order ‘to create an environment approximating to a well-ordered home’, one Whitechapel school still had some work to do, inspectors thought, and they warned that ‘the school is in competition with the street.’24 The London inspectorate often made their preferences clear, but they came into irregular contact with children and their reports were not circulated to parents. Teachers were part of the everyday life of pupils. In fact, they, too, often felt separate from the communities in which they taught. By the interwar period, teachers benefited from systematic training, affecting both their class makeup and their age, and differentiating them from schoolchildren compared to the pupilteachers of a generation or two earlier. The training of teachers was particularly effective in London, where the London Day Training College (later the Institute of Education) was founded in 1902. By 1919, 94 per cent of London’s elementary school teachers were certificated (compared to 56 per cent in England and Wales), having successfully completed a two-year training programme.25 Many schools boasted at least one or two teachers who were more highly qualified, and by the 1930s it was becoming common for inspectors to make congratulatory reference to schools with graduates among their staff, or those who possessed diplomas or other qualifications.26 Elizabeth Edwards argues that the enhanced status of the teaching profession in the early twentieth century saw the profile of elementary school teachers change from ‘in the main, clever ­working-class girls … to clever and ambitious girls from the lower middle class’.27 Dina Copelman charts a similar shift and describes teaching – by 1914 – as ‘one of the quintessential l­ower-middle-class occupations’.28 Peter Cunningham and Philip Gardner note that salary levels after the 1919 Burnham settlement pushed most certificated teachers towards a typically lower-middle-class income; they also comment on the training reforms of the 1920s which continued the ‘incremental closure of the profession to the working class’.29 The result might be a sense of separation from pupils and their families. When a deputation from the National Union of Teachers



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(NUT) attended Downing Street in 1923, one member – who also belonged to the LCC Education Committee – decried the threat of salary cuts: We come from the upper working class or the lower middle class as a rule. We go to a secondary school; we go to a training college; some go to the University and come out with a University Degree. The whole of our training gives us ideas immeasurably greater probably than those of the people from whom we originally sprang … I look upon that as a vital point in the life of a teacher, that he must be able to maintain a certain standard of home comfort and he must be able to indulge in a certain standard of mental culture and he cannot do that if his standard of living is to be materially decreased.30

The memories of ex-pupils suggest that many children also felt a sense of social difference. ‘I think she had MA after her name’, recalled one woman of an ‘adored’ teacher, while another was in awe of ‘the first posh person I had ever been clearly associated with’.31 One memoirist remembered a teacher telling him that his sister had ‘messed’ her drawers: ‘I had never heard it put that way – “messed” was real upper class’.32 The memories of expupils are corroborated by those of an ex-teacher interviewed by Stephen Hussey. His background was ‘middle class, no doubt about that’, but he was amused when, teaching in Dagenham in the late 1930s, ‘one of the boys, I can remember to this day, wrote in it [his essay], that a bottle of ink was spilled in Mr Potter’s [teacher’s] house and servants rushed to wipe it up! That was their visual idea of a teacher.’33 A sense of teachers and the education service as separate from the concerns of the communities around them was particularly apparent during the general strike of May 1926. The disruption recorded in dozens of logbooks as teachers (but rarely pupils) struggled to get to school in the absence of public transport is a reminder that living outside the neighbourhood was common. ‘Had an assembly – long one’, noted one head, whose staff were late to arrive.34 The efforts made by teachers to get to work, walking long distances and, in some cases, bedding down in schools overnight, was praised by the Education Officer, who wrote afterwards of his ‘deep appreciation of the self-sacrifice and devotion to duty displayed by

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the London teaching staff’.35 This was despite the disturbances of the streets, described in one logbook as ‘a state of rioting, attempted rioting and excitement’.36 One headteacher and her colleagues had had their car mobbed. ‘After a good deal of explaining that we were LCC teachers … we were bundled into the car again and allowed to proceed. The same thing happened again a few yards on.’ Another complained that she had been charged by mounted police after being caught up in a crowd. ‘Surely the police could not mistake teachers for rioters, for one’s energy is scarcely sufficient to appear riotous when walking home after “carrying on” all day.’37 Some teachers fiercely opposed the strike. The LCC forbade them to join the special constabulary, ‘the claims of the education service being at present paramount’, but a handful volunteered anyway.38 Others were less certain of their position. ‘A General Strike “to help the miners” commenced today’, one headteacher recorded on 4 May, adding the inverted commas as an afterthought (revealed by the fact that the pen ink was running out).39 Among the strikers, fears that schools were instruments of the state were reinvigorated. Rumours circulated, such as the claim that some schools had replaced Scripture lessons with the reading of Sir John Simon’s speech, in which the Liberal politician and former Attorney General declared the strike illegal.40 That rumour could have been true; others were certainly false, as when one headmaster reported a tense stand-off with strikers who thought that beds arriving at school were to be used for troops; in fact they were for teachers.41 On the other hand, worries over teachers’ subversive tendencies were also revived. The Teachers’ Labour League was placed under police surveillance but few charges were brought. A rare conviction was that of Marjorie Pollitt, a teacher at a Hoxton school, who was accused of ‘publishing false information’ in the Workers’ Bulletin. The wife of Communist leader Harry Pollitt and a Communist activist in her own right, she declared that she had never taken her politics into the classroom but was nevertheless dismissed from her employment.42 Overall, the strike seems to have done little to upset the sense of the school as a world set apart from the politics of the London streets. It is rare to find a comment which suggests that the two overlapped, as in one East End teacher’s logbook entry: ‘Neighbourhood excited.

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Strikers asking scholars to strike and inciting teachers to strike.’43 Children, of course, were negotiating both worlds, and also preserved in the archives is a photocopied letter from four children calling for a school strike and asking their classmates to ‘do all we can to help the strikers’.44 But in most schools, activities proceeded more-or-less as normal. When an inspector visited several schools in the poorer districts of Camberwell and Deptford he was reassured: ‘At one school a May day celebration was in full swing … at another department all the children were present at 8.30am and the headmistress carried on a sing-song.’45 In fact, while the experience of the strike supported the idea of the school as an apolitical space, it was perhaps even more effective in reinforcing the view of school as protective, at least among those who taught in them. Children were warned of the dangers of crowds; at least one school fitted new locks. Several cancelled outings or sports activities to keep children away from the ‘dangerous’ streets: ‘the children would be better and safer in school’.46 When boys from a Limehouse school were caught up in a baton charge their teacher reported them ‘much frightened but unhurt’.47 The school’s protective role might even trump that of parents: as hometime approached on 5 May, one headteacher was aware of skirmishes between strikers and police in the streets outside. Children were forbidden to leave until all was quiet, and ‘parents attempting to enter to get their children were locked out’.48 The school was represented as an emotional refuge too. ‘Many children are showing the strain of the strike’, wrote one headteacher, ‘I have asked the teachers to read suitable fairy stories to them if they find the children too weary for other lessons’; while in another school, ‘attractive lessons to take their minds from the strike are being given’.49 Inspectors and teachers might view the school as a protective space, but others saw a very different kind of symbolism. ‘The playground was more like a prison yard with a high wall around it with broken glass embedded in the top’, remembered one Londoner, while another wrote of the way in which the elementary school building embodied its power: ‘those old London three-deckers loomed over the area like Bastilles, designed to resist the barbarian natives who surrounded them’.50

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The physical and ideological separation between home and school was frequently accompanied by an expectation of hostility, sometimes culminating in physical confrontation. A common trope of childhood memoir is that of the schoolchild cringing as their parent arrived at school. Bernard Kops, born in Stepney in 1926, remembered: I’d see her burst into the classroom, five feet tall and four feet across, shouting, ‘Where’s that master who hit my boy? I want to see the headmaster!’ She always came up to school, even though we always tried to keep it from her, or beg her not to come, and even though she promised she wouldn’t, she always did.51

Every year London’s police courts hosted successful prosecutions of parents for physical assault. The violence could sometimes be serious: in one instance a female teacher was rendered unconscious; in another a headmaster needed three weeks’ absence to recover.52 The vast majority of minor incidents never made it to court. During 1919–20, the LCC sent out sixty-three cautionary letters to those ‘behaving in a disorderly manner, using threats, or abusive or obscene language’, and school logbooks across the period record hundreds of instances of the verbal or physical abuse of teachers.53 However, disputes between parents and teachers did not mean that hostility was irreconcilable. Many disputes were not resolved by the stereotypical response of a parent storming into the school and assaulting a teacher. Dissent was regularly voiced through letters, whether to the headteacher or direct to the Education Officer. Several that survive are courteous, articulate and impressively restrained, such as that from a father whose son attended a school in Poplar: It is with regret that I have to write to you on such a matter. But my son … returned home from school with his nose swollen and several weals on the back of his neck caused by his teacher punching him … I realise and understand that a boy must be checked and made to understand, but I do protest against violence of this kind.54

Another parent wrote to the Education Officer to protest the way in which scholars had been selected to view the royal jubilee

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procession. He added, ‘if you feel disposed to take up this question, I hope, for the sake of my child … you will not mention my name’.55 Others asked for clarification of the rules, seen in several letters to the Education Officer related to the wearing of jewellery. One parent was upset that her daughter had been made to remove her ring and bracelet: ‘If the LCC Regulations state that children must not wear jewellery, I readily submit, and will see that [she] does not wear it to school again, on the other hand she will continue to wear it, until I tell her to take it off.’ The sentiment was echoed by another mother, who complained about a similar incident: ‘If it was the LCC rules I should certainly abide by them.’ A third parent made a more explicit reference to the power relationships between home and school. Writing to the Education Officer, he explained that ‘I do not like to cause trouble but I appeal to you that it is your duty to inform this woman [headteacher] of the provision of the Education Acts that she is a paid employee of the ratepayers to educate their children and not to make silly regulations that tend to make the children’s life a misery.’56 The reminder that parents paid the wages of teachers derived from a sense of entitlement rooted, perhaps, in the newly democratic context of interwar Britain. Declarations as overt as the one above are rare in the sources, but parents assumed a certain degree of power in the very fact of composing such letters or in approaching the school, even if their concerns were ultimately dismissed. One mother complained because her son’s teacher ‘said he was lazy, and [she thought] the master had to apologise to her!?’ snorted one headteacher.57 Even the more bad-tempered incidents of parent–teacher confrontation reveal a belief that parents might trump a teacher by appealing to a higher authority. One headmaster recorded the visit of a father who assaulted a teacher, used obscene language and then announced ‘in a rude manner … that his boy had been marked and he was “going to Court”’.58 Another, perhaps with a raised eyebrow, noted the visit of a furious parent who ‘said he should take it to [Education Officer] Sir R. Blair – “officially”’.59 The outcome of any confrontation was affected, of course, by the personalities of those involved. When Harold Rosen’s socialist mother kept him off school for May Day, he was furiously berated by his headmaster. ‘The next day she was up at the school  …

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My  guess is that Mr Margolis got an earful.’ Nothing was said when he missed it again the following year.60 But teachers were also aware of due process, particularly when complaints concerned corporal punishment. In 1937, an exasperated headmaster warned his staff that he would no longer ‘intervene between parents and teacher in any future complaints of illegal punishment, and that future complaints would be forwarded direct to the Divisional Officer. This especially applied to “clapping of ears”’.61 It was a comment that attested to a culture of casual violence but also the headmaster’s best efforts to mediate. The balance of power unquestionably lay with the school. When one mother, for example, made repeated complaints that her son was being victimised by teachers, the head promised to investigate and subsequently questioned the child ‘in front of all boys and class teacher’. With such an audience, it surely came as no surprise that ‘Boy stated that he had nothing to complain of at all and could not understand nature of Mother’s letter.’62 Even when evidence seemed stacked against them, teachers were often given the benefit of the doubt and the discussion of school discipline in Chapter 7 reveals occasionally vicious levels of violence that went without sanction. Sometimes, it was the parent who was required to apologise. In at least one instance following a disturbance made by a father, the headteacher approached the mother, requesting that she ‘use her influence with her husband to warn him of the danger to himself of a repetition of his conduct’.63 But there were other ways of resolving disputes which might appease parents. A headteacher might quietly move a child between classes, ‘due to friction between the parent and teacher’.64 In a small number of cases children were transferred to neighbouring schools. And many concerns raised by parents were acknowledged as reasonable. An infants’ headteacher, for example, reminded her staff to allow time for children to put on outdoor clothing before break, following parental protests that they had been sent out in winter without coats.65 Another received complaints ‘about the coldness of the baths’. She investigated and was dismayed to discover that the water was unheated (in April) following a coal shortage.66 Some complaints had a moral force. One memoirist remembers being mocked by a teacher following an absence to care for her sick grandmother;

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her father ‘wrote a letter to the school about it and nobody was sarcastic to me again’.67 Parental complaints were  often  made in relation to a child’s referral to a special school and could delay the process, if not prevent it.68 ‘I think very often it is the earnest solicitations of the parent which prevent the Junior School headteacher from taking the initial step [of requesting medical examination]’, one headteacher believed.69 For children already classified as ‘mentally deficient’, it might be pressure from parents that led to re-­ examination and a possible return to a normal elementary school.70 The angry parent appears far more frequently in surviving sources than those hundreds of thousands of parents who never had (or acted upon) any grievances. Yet many had a positive relationship with their children’s teachers. Parents could play a significant role in school life: mothers made costumes for school plays or sent in fruit and flowers for harvest festivals; fathers helped decorate a school hall or tended the school garden.71 Some parents might offer expertise, as when a father visited to talk to pupils about Ceylon, from where he had recently returned; or when another parent, with access to a printing press, produced song books for the school.72 Others gave gifts, and many logbooks record resources such as lantern slides, gramophone records or sporting equipment purchased either out of funds raised by parents or donated by individual mothers or fathers. Increasingly, schools encouraged such involvement, as in the case of the school cited at the beginning of this chapter. It was one of many elementary schools to initiate open days in these years: ‘Object: to see the school, meet the boys’ teachers and obtain co-operation and promote understanding of parents.’73 The LCC encouraged the practice, seeing it as an opportunity to counter any prejudice that parents might have carried over from their own childhoods: ‘parents should be invited and thus be afforded an opportunity of seeing the present-day activities of the schools and contrasting them with the activities of years ago when they themselves were school children’.74 Parents attended these events in their hundreds. Of a Lewisham school, at which pupils came from a mix of backgrounds but many were recorded as ‘delicate’ and their families suffering from

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unemployment, inspectors reported that attendance at open days and other functions ‘is so large as to be embarrassing’. Three hundred parents had attended the nativity play (the school roll was only 336).75 The attendance of fathers as well as mothers was sometimes explicitly recorded and some schools tried to encourage this by holding evening or Saturday sessions.76 Schools might also reach out in other ways, such as via a school magazine, ‘which has proved a valuable link between the school and the parents’, or newsletters ‘sent to the parents, who by this means are kept well informed of all school matters’.77 Parental interest could be strong even in the most deprived areas. Bath Street School in Finsbury was described by inspectors as situated ‘in one of the worst “slum” areas in London’, but 307 out of 318 individual reports sent home to every scholar in 1934 were returned with a parent’s signature: ‘a most gratifying response’, wrote the headteacher.78 Participation in school events was all the more impressive in poorer areas since mothers were more likely to be casually employed. A inspection report in 1929, of an infants’ department in Bethnal Green, noted that it catered for about 370 children, drawn from ‘a population living largely in a state of poverty, constant unemployment, and unsatisfactory housing conditions’. Teachers were devoted to the school, it claimed, ‘and so are the children and their parents’. The school had held its firstever open day in 1923 (possessing no hall, it used that of a nearby church), which 150 parents attended. In 1928 it experimented with another event, inviting parents of one class to tea. Thirty women attended, ‘waited upon by their own children. The afternoon was a complete success … Each child had brought a cup and saucer for his own mother and was responsible for her comfort.’79 Special occasions provided further opportunities for contact. At one school, which drew its children ‘from the slums and mean streets of Lambeth’, about one hundred mothers attended to see the May Day festivities. The headteacher reported that many of them ‘were overcome when watching their little ones and expressed great enjoyment at the close of the celebration for being invited to witness the ceremony’.80 Elsewhere, sports’ days might include a mothers’ race.81 A few schools took the additional step of inviting parents to join their annual excursion. Five hundred children and 127 parents

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attended a trip to Epsom in 1921; 169 girls and 36 parents went to Worthing in 1925, ‘where they spent a happy and profitable day’.82 Parents were not present for the Armistice Day commemorations at a Lewisham school in 1919, but the school tried to involve them in another way. Special lessons included the discussion of the Bible passage: ‘the men were very good to us and we were not hurt … They were a wall unto us both by night and day.’ Afterwards, recorded the headteacher, the children ‘wrote it out to take home for their parents to read’.83 Such initiatives did not take place everywhere. A substantial minority of schools lacked the space, facilities or enthusiasm to host events regularly, if at all. Others failed to attract parental interest. As late as 1938, inspectors criticised the parents of a school in Rotherhithe for their apathy, but hoped that the newly formed parents’ association and new initiatives such as open days and concerts might change this.84 Sometimes it was the teachers who lacked enthusiasm. After organising a successful social for two hundred parents in 1927, one headteacher grumbled – underlined for emphasis – that ‘unfortunately no member of the staff of boys’, girls’ or infants’ department attended’.85 Even with the best intentions, communication between school and home might break down. In the 1930s a 6-year-old Peckham schoolboy won a prize in a local art competition. His headteacher sent a congratulatory letter to the boy’s home address, enclosing the prize, but the letter was returned and his father had added at the bottom, ‘Dear Teacher, Tony received this on Friday, but he doesn’t seem to know how he won it, would you kindly let him know, as he has not done anything of the kind here at home and I’m a little puzzled about it.’ One wonders if the teacher ever did tell Tony. Certainly the letter was never returned.86 However, where they did take place, school events were credited with reducing potential friction. ‘Some of them [parents] begin to take a new interest in their children after hearing and seeing what they do in school’, wrote the inspector of a ‘slum’ school, while a headteacher wrote after two successful open days that ‘much eagerness to help on the part of the parents was encouraged and will I am sure be more pronounced even than in the past’.87 Certainly, increased contact and interaction between teachers and parents

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was thought by one of Cunningham and Gardner’s interviewees to be significant in improving relationships. She remembered that her headmaster ‘always volunteered to be in charge of the polling office [when school building used for elections] because it gave him a chance of meeting parents who otherwise wouldn’t come up to the school’.88 Reviewing samples of inspection reports across a range of schools suggests that relationships with parents were positive more often than not. The National Archives holds reports for twenty-five schools from the north London borough of Hackney, for example, for inspections conducted between 1922 and 1935. Thirteen of them explicitly mentioned parents, and all were positive, describing appreciation or cooperation: ‘parents are now very definitely on the side of the school’.89 Reports survive for thirty-three schools in Stepney, in the East End, covering the same period. Fewer of these mentioned parents at all – perhaps indicative of nothing more than a different inspection team – but of the eight which did, seven were positive; ‘the happiest relations exist between pupils, staff and parents’, claimed one. The eighth was ambivalent, noting ‘the comparative apathy or lack of ambition on the part of the parents who, while apparently appreciative of the good work done by the school, are in practice unable to co-operate very effectively with the staff in the general upbringing of the children’.90 There are no surviving reports for either Hackney or Stepney schools that despaired of parental attitudes, even though many pointed out the difficult conditions in which children lived, and could be derogatory of those environments in different ways. Such reports give the views of the inspection team – presumably informed by headteachers’ comments as well as their own observations. It is harder to get direct impressions from parents. However, there are other ways to chart working-class support for particular schools and, indeed, this could be strong enough that conflict might occasionally flare up because of it, especially following the reorganisation schemes of the mid-1920s onwards. An inspector of a Lambeth school suggested that a proposed reorganisation had caused upset: ‘In this region the parents are strongly attached to the schools … Perhaps the finest testimony to the general good work done by the school is shown in the respect of the parents, who find

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in it not merely something to make use of, but something to be proud of. It is, in a singular way, “our school”.’91 Sometimes parents registered opposition more formally. In 1925, the decision to convert a Wandsworth junior and infants school into a central school provoked an unsuccessful petition from 337 parents, who protested that they did not want to send their children elsewhere.92 Church schools were perhaps most likely to attract loyalty and several inspection reports noted that pupils might travel from a distance to attend. St John’s in Lambeth was ‘so eagerly sought that parents put down the names of children long before the age of which they can be taken’. Its pupils tended to perform well academically and the inspector thought it disappointing that so few were allowed to go to progress to central schools, another indication of the fact that ‘parents and children are specially attached to this school’.93 In 1932, the managers of St Peter’s in Stepney asked the Board of Education for permission to add a senior department so children could stay until the age of 14: the majority of their parents ‘were educated at S. Peter’s Schools, and are keen about them’, he explained. Still lobbying two years later, the vicar enclosed a petition signed by 143 parents, completed as ‘the spontaneous effort of distressed parents … the managers and clergy have had no part or lot in it’. He begged action: ‘They [parents] are restless, have lost all patience now. They are depressed, sad. They are beginning to suggest that we are indifferent to the needs of their children.’ The Board decided in their favour six months later.94 Individual teachers also inspired affection and gratitude. Following an invitation to visit a school journey party in 1936, two sets of parents wrote happily to the headmaster: We should like to bring to your notice how much we appreciate the care which is being taken by the two masters in charge of the boys … The boys have every confidence in the masters and obey their word of command and do not fear them, we feel sure this also prevails at school and the boys could not wish for two better masters, who have made every effort to teach the boys apart from ordinary lessons good comradeship and self-reliance.95

Also indicative of good relations is the fact that in May 1926, when the general strike hampered travel, a report on the Southwark

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division noted that several dozen teachers had made arrangements to sleep locally: ‘Accommodation has been secured in several cases with the parents of children.’96 Perhaps the most compelling evidence of parental trust, however, was the reaction of parents to the possibility – and then reality – of wartime evacuation in the late 1930s. During the Munich crisis of 1938, schools were placed on warning and parents called in for briefings: ‘attitude of parents shows remarkable trust in teachers’, recorded a headteacher.97 At least one inspector also saw proof of parental loyalty, commenting a couple of months later of a headmaster that he ‘is an important and highly respected figure in the neighbourhood and when war seemed inevitable, the parents almost without exception wanted the children to be in his care’.98 The most persuasive tribute came from a mother, however, whose letter to the school was valued enough by the headteacher that she copied it into her logbook: Dear Madam, may I express my heartfelt thanks to you and your splendid band of helpers throughout our recent anxiety, of the great worry and load you have been endeavouring to take off our shoulders as regards our children … I’m sure hundreds of mothers are saying the same. It would have been my family’s first time away from their parents, but you had all put it so nicely that they did not mind and were looking forward to going.99

Ties might be particularly strong in those parts of London which registered little mobility among its population. Lines of continuity forged by generations of a single family attending a particular school were noted by several inspectors, and the school could therefore become a reference point across decades. The result could be seen on occasions such as Armistice Day, when school memorials or events might become a rallying point for the community beyond its immediate pupils. Relationships were further reinforced when there was also continuity among a school’s staff. The introduction of more generous teachers’ pensions in 1918 encouraged the changeover of staff, as did the reorganisation of schools from the late 1920s onwards. However, an LCC inquiry of 1936 found that 3,597 of the 9,771 assistant teachers in London council schools had spent over ten

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years in the same school, 1,402 over twenty; 519 over thirty, and 21 over forty. Longevity was subject to geographical variation, with more movement in poorer districts, and generally older, more settled staffs in the more desirable neighbourhoods.100 This immobility could be seen as stultifying.101 But the benefits were also recognised. One inspector commented of an East End school that many of its children had parents and grandparents who had attended before them. He suggested that ‘there is a strong local attachment to the school, due not merely to tradition, but to the influence acquired by the past and present headmistresses, and by the assistants, most of whom have been on the staff for many years’.102 ‘There is a close bond between the neighbourhood and the school for many parents and grandparents of the present pupils attended the school themselves’, wrote another.103 When one headteacher updated his logbook with the progress of a former pupil, he demonstrated both his interest in the boy’s subsequent career and the good relationship with his family over time: the young man was working at ICI, he wrote, following a chat with ‘Mr Harris (aged 72, a gardener of Sydenham) re. his son’s progress’.104 Memoirs also comment on the respect and affection fostered. ‘The headmaster of the boys’ was the same man as when Dad was a boy’, remembered one woman. ‘He was now able to clump another generation of Noble boys over the knuckles with his long ruler … Old boys, like Dad, were very fond of him, and always pleased to have a word with him when their paths crossed.’105 Another memoir suggested that such contact promoted understanding, if not affection: ‘Whole families followed each other. Teachers also stayed at the same school for many years … Both sides were therefore able to get to know each other’s reflex actions very well.’106 Nor was there a strict boundary between those who made up the school hierarchy and the communities who attended the schools. Teachers were part of the local community too. It is not unusual to find examples of elementary school teachers whose sons or daughters were elementary school pupils. The London Teacher frequently reported notable achievements of teachers’ children such as the successful completion of a higher degree or Oxbridge success, but almost always their schooling had begun in the elementary system.107 Other clues can be found in details of staff absences,

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such as the headmaster of a Peckham school who had to leave early to attend to his son who had broken his leg in the playground of another elementary school – admittedly a couple of miles down the road in more prosperous Dulwich.108 Some children attended the same school at which their parent taught. One teacher, ‘in the Infants Department of the elementary school at which my boy attends’, wrote to the Education Officer to complain after her son’s application to secondary school failed (she received a sympathetic reply but the rejection was upheld).109 And teachers themselves, of course, had also once been pupils, often London elementary school pupils; sometimes at the very same school at which they now taught. For these men and women, the school retained continuity as a workplace over generations and gained further significance within the life cycle. One teacher at an Islington school, which closed in 1931, ‘had the unique distinction of entering that school as a scholar on the day it was opened. He left it as a member of staff on the day it was closed’, while the headmaster of a Catholic school in Fulham was not only an ex-pupil but also the son of the previous headmaster.110 The overlap of identities was recalled decades later by a woman who remembered her school hall’s ‘huge wooden board with the names of scholarship winners from year dot on it and how we giggled because we actually knew the Christian name of one of our teachers for she had been a former pupil’.111 None of this is to suggest that social divisions between teacher and parent were removed. When, in 1938, one headmaster received a letter from a satisfied parent, he copied it into his logbook: ‘On Tuesday afternoon has (sic) George was leaving he slipped down the school stair and has sprained his ancle (sic). He was brought home by two of your class. I thank them very mutch (sic) for doing so as it was quite an accident and no one to blame.’ The letter is clear evidence of the positive relations between school and parents, but the headmaster’s addition of ‘(sic)’ remains a small, semi-­ private reminder of his superior status.112 In fact, the increasing contact between parents and teachers could actually reinforce a sense of hierarchy. One teacher complained of the ‘great number of parents that bring their children in and out … they bring in a large amount of mud and dirt. I might

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just as well throw the mat in the playground for all the notice they take of it.’113 Another reflected on parents’ conduct on Empire Day. ‘Owing to the petty and insolent attitude adopted by a small section … it is very probably the last ceremony to which they will be invited.’114 Some headteachers might have preferred to ignore parents altogether. ‘Mr X … tells me he is disgusted with the interfering attitude of some parents. He opposes Parent–Teacher Unions’, wrote a Mass Observation teacher-diarist.115 But many others were keen to conduct their work with consideration, and tried to be responsive to parents’ needs. In July 1919, for example, one headteacher dismissed her girls’ department early, aware that the shops would be closed the following day for the peace celebrations and so ‘many mothers want their children early’.116 Pragmatic consideration of home life led to shufflings of the school day, to fit better with the lunchtime shifts of local factories, or to coordinate with other local  school departments attended by siblings. In January 1924, many schools altered their timings on account of the rail strike; when the strike ended, mid-week, at least one ‘decided to continue same until the end of the week, to give mothers due notice of the change of meal time’.117 Occasionally, individual teachers even put the parent’s needs above what was seen as being in the best interests of the child. This was demonstrated in 1936 when the Education Officer conducted an enquiry into the certification of ‘mentally deficient’ children, to ascertain why some children were assessed late and therefore not placed earlier into what was deemed more appropriate education. A headteacher replied to his enquiry: I did not submit her name to the School Doctor … The mother … was attending Hospital with her heart and was ordered to bed to rest for long spells. Joyce was a great help and spared her much exertion. The husband told me the Doctor had warned him she was liable to fall dead at any time. I knew I was probably doing wrong, but the child was getting patient individual help [in the elementary school] and by being so near home could be useful to the mother.

Other teachers had similar stories to tell, such as that of a boy whose mother had ‘begged me not to act at once [in putting him forward

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for examination] as the boy’s father was in a highly nervous state owing to shrapnel injuries to the head’. The headteacher acquiesced, lending him books to take home and asking teachers to spend extra time with him. Ultimately both children were transferred to special schools.118 A straightforward division between ‘parents’ and ‘teachers’ or ‘home’ and ‘school’ belies the complexity of the everyday relationships and identities within London’s classrooms. The staff room was not a homogeneous bloc; teachers might be as riven by jealousy and dislike as any group of colleagues. In one logbook a headteacher recorded an incident which, at first glance, appeared to be a dispute with a disgruntled parent. In fact, following several months of altercations with another teacher, it was her colleague’s husband who had ‘entered this school, and … addressed me in most insulting and abusive terms’.119 Nor were teachers united by social class: some came from poorer backgrounds or continued to struggle to make ends meet.120 Inspectors might air the same prejudices about teachers as they did about pupils, as did one who commented that ‘not only is bad speech prevalent among the children but it is also not absent among the teachers.’121 Families were also heterogeneous in their circumstances and aspirations. Several memoirs attest to social divisions within the classroom, such as the memory of a mother’s horror when a nurse’s visit revealed cases of fleas, ringworm and scabies among the other children in her daughter’s class.122 Children, of course, were acutely aware of status divisions, and the traumas this caused could linger long beyond schooldays. Eileen Slade started school in south London: ‘No other children at the school came from our road, or even near it, so it became established amongst the others that we were “posh” … I never made a single friend.’123 Further examples could be drawn from contemporary evidence, such as the mother who requested permission in 1932 for her daughter to leave school early on Fridays to attend elocution lessons. ‘Her manner of speaking leaves much to be desired’, she explained. ‘This is no reflection upon her teachers but the fact remains that she is beginning to speak in the same way as some of the “rougher” children who attend the school.’124 In a comment

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which then revealed his own added sense of difference, an educational official noted his impression of the mother: ‘pleasant bearing, Jewish extraction, slightly over-ambitious, perhaps, for her daughter, but keen on education’.125 Sometimes the best efforts of the school to eliminate division were thwarted by parents. One woman remembered being sent to school on prize day wearing her best dress and a starched pinafore. The ‘lousy’ girl she sat next to was poorly dressed and she was asked to give her the pinafore; her mother ‘never let up about it for days.’126 In other cases, the school became an ally of one parent against another, as when a headteacher summoned a mother and father (‘the schoolkeeper waited in the playground in case he was needed’) following parental complaints of their son’s rough treatment of other children in the street.127 Multi-layered, complicated identities were reflected in multi-­ layered, complicated experiences. Conflicts between parents and teachers did not necessarily define their relationship. To read the logbook of a school for ‘mentally defective’ children in Wandsworth, for example, is to read one entry after another describing abusive or threatening parents. However, in 1933, when a Christmas party was held, about sixty-five parents attended, representing a majority of the hundred pupils on the roll.128 Of course, the personalities of individual teachers and parents mattered. No doubt some disputes were caused by personal dislike as much as structural hierarchies; perhaps this was the case for the headteacher who diagnosed a child as ‘suffering from inefficient, irritating and irritable parents’.129 But attitudes were also variable: a brief conflict did not necessarily determine relations for a child’s entire school life. In 1921, a headteacher recorded that a mother had been ‘abusive in hall and instructed her son to defy teachers [after] he had a bath in school last week’. Two years and several pages later, she recorded a playground accident, in which the same boy twisted his arm: ‘Headteacher provided first aid … [later] the mother visited and thanked the teachers.’130 The contrast in entries might not have been noticed by the headteacher; both remain equally valid as testament to parental attitudes. A similar change can be seen in the repeated entries in another logbook across June and July 1933 detailing a dispute with a parent. The final entry

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records the mother’s request to add her younger child to the school roll. The head took this ‘as a sign that all trouble with this family is now over’.131 The space defined by the school remained different to that of home and street in significant ways: the educational hierarchy – always implicitly, often explicitly – placed greater value on the former; while parents did not necessarily see themselves as unequal partners but had their own expectations, even demands, regarding their children’s education. But rather than the constant state of mutual enmity or hostility with which they are often portrayed, the relationships between parent and teacher, home and school, and community and classroom were dynamic and fluid, changing over time and dependent on the issue at stake. Most importantly, they could be constructive as often as confrontational. When the inspectors quoted at the beginning of this chapter praised the ‘beneficial influence’ that Central Street School exerted in the neighbourhood, it was their positive assessment of the school’s relationship with its parents that informed their judgement. Amidst the complexities of these various and varying relationships, it was perhaps a tension over the role of the school – what, and who, was it for? – that almost always lay at their heart. The following chapters address the different ways in which the school’s role was defined, and the various interests that shaped it.

Notes 1 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/CEN/LB/004, Open day leaflet, 22 Oct. 1925. Original emphasis. 2 TNA, ED21/34662, Inspection report, 11 April 1927, 12 Feb. 1932; LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/CEN/LB/004, Logbook, 22 Oct. 1925. 3 The Observer, 30 June 1929. 4 The Observer, 19 Jan. 1936. 5 See Stewart, Child Guidance, 58. 6 William W. Cutler III, Parents and Schools. The 150 Year Struggle for Control in American Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 58. 7 Nicola Sheldon, ‘The School Attendance Officer 1900–1939: Policeman to Welfare Worker?’, History of Education 36:6 (2007), 743.

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8 On negotiation of different spaces, see Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer, ‘Feeling through Practice: Subjectivity and Emotion in Children’s Writing’, Social History 51:1 (2017). 9 Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 132–42; Wright, ‘Teachers, Family and Community’, 155–73. 10 Michael Katz, ‘Review of School Attendance in London 1870–1904: A Social History’, Victorian Studies 14:1 (1970), quoted in Philip Gardner, ‘“Our Schools”; “Their Schools”. The Case of Eliza Duckworth and John Stevenson’, History of Education 20:3 (1991), 164. 11 Standish Meacham, A Life Apart: The English Working Class ­1890–1914 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977); J.S. Hurt, Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1918 (London: Routledge, 1979), 212. 12 Rose, Intellectual Life, 172–6. 13 As well as references above, see also Auerbach, ‘The Law has No Feeling’; Sascha Auerbach, ‘“Some Punishment Should Be Devised”: Parents, Children and the State in Victorian London’, Historian 71:4 (2009); Christine Heward, ‘The Class Relations of Compulsory School Attendance: The Birmingham Jewellery Quarter, 1851–86’, History of Education Quarterly 29:2 (1989); Jane Lewis, ‘Parents, Children, School Fees and the London School Board 1870–1890’, History of Education, 11:4 (1982); Siân Pooley, ‘Parenthood, Citizenship and the State in England, c.1870–1914’, in Hester Barron and Claudia Siebrecht (eds), Parenting and the State in Britain and Europe, ­c.1870–1950: Raising the Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Jonathan Rose, ‘Willingly to School: The Working-Class Response to Elementary Education in Britain, 1875–1918’, Journal of British Studies 32:2 (1993). 14 Auerbach, ‘Some Punishment’, 758. Kim O’Flynn’s work is concerned with the introduction of compulsory continuation education in the later period. ‘Continuation Education and Parental Antagonism in West Ham, 1920–1’, History of Education 27:2 (1998). 15 Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 163–4. 16 Gardner, ‘Our Schools’, 168. 17 Daily Mail, 7 June 1932. 18 TNA, ED21/35082, Inspection report, 17 June 1927. 19 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV06/CAT/LB/003, Inspection report, 20 Jan. 1929; TNA, ED21/34998, Inspection report, 11 Sept. 1933. 20 TNA, ED21/34648, Inspection reports, 14 June 1932, 30 May 1928.

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21 TNA, ED21/34998, Inspection report, 11 Sept. 1933. 22 TNA, ED21/34858, Inspection report, 24 May 1929. 23 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAL/LB/013, 13 May 1935; TNA, ED21/ 35137, Inspection report, 29 Sept. 1934; ED21/35341, Inspection report, 25 Sept. 1932. 24 TNA, ED21/35341, Inspection report, 25 Sept. 1932. 25 Board of Education, Salaries of Teachers in Public Elementary Schools, England and Wales [Cmd. 513] (London: HMSO, 1920), 4–5. 26 For two examples from several, see TNA, ED21/34518, Inspection report, 3 March 1930; ED21/34895, Inspection report, 7 Sept. 1934. 27 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘The Culture of Femininity in Women’s Teacher Training Colleges, 1914–1945’, History of Education 22:3 (1993), 278. 28 Copelman, London’s Women Teachers, 35. 29 Cunningham and Gardner, Becoming Teachers, 91, 112. 30 TNA, ED24/1757, Board of Education papers, 20 Nov. 1923. 31 Dorothy Scannell, Mother Knew Best: An East End Childhood (London: Macmillan, 1974), 79; Rose Gamble, Chelsea Child: An Autobiography (London: BBC, 1979), 51–2. 32 Max Bygraves, I Wanna Tell you a Story! (London: W.H. Allen, 1976), 15. 33 Stephen Hussey, ‘The School Air-Raid Shelter: Rethinking Wartime Pedagogies’, History of Education Quarterly 43:4 (2003), 527. 34 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/LOW/LB/003, Logbook, 4 May 1926. 35 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/WAL/LB/006, Letter from Education Officer, 28 May 1926. 36 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STMAT/LB/001, Logbook, 17 May 1926. 37 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/067, Headteachers’ letters, 5 May, 1926. 38 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/064, LCC memo, 10 May 1926. 39 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/THO1/LB/004, Logbook, 4 May 1926. 40 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/067, Islington Strike Bulletin, 12 May 1926. 41 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/065, Strike report, 10 May 1926. 42 Mark Starr, Lies and Hate in Education (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1929), 90; Also entries in LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/STJOH2/LB/004, Logbook, 10–21 May 1926. 43 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MOW/LB/012, Logbook, 5 May 1926. 44 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/067, Children’s letter, n.d. 45 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/064, Strike report, 7 May 1926. 46 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/OBA/LB/005, Logbook, 5 May 1926; LCC/ EO/DIV01/WAT/LB/002, Logbook, 5 May 1926. 47 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/065, Strike report, 11 May 1926. 48 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/QUE/LB/002, Logbook, 5 May 1926.

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49 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV06/CAT/LB/003, Logbook, 14 May 1926; LCC/ EO/DIV04/STJOH2/LB/008, Logbook, 6 May 1926. 50 Speight, It Stands to Reason, 31; Rosen, Are You Still Circumcised?, 24. 51 Bernard Kops, The World is a Wedding (Nottingham: MacGibbon & Kee, 1963), 35–6. 52 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/SOM/LB/003, Logbook, 16 Nov. 1926; LCC Education Committee Minutes, 17 Nov. 1920. 53 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 20 Oct. 1920. London was not unique here: see W.R. Meyer, ‘School vs Parent in Leeds, 1902–44’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 22:2 (1990). 54 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/341, Managers’ minutes, 6 Nov. 1935. 55 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/081, Parent’s letter, 10 May 1935. 56 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/077, Parents’ letters, 21 May 1930, 19 May 1932, 5 June 1924. 57 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HIT/LB/009, Logbook, 12 Nov. 1924. 58 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/AVO/LB/001, Logbook, 11 Nov. 1938. 59 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV09/BRO/LB/003, Logbook, 20 Feb. 1923. 60 Rosen, Are You Still Circumcised?, 12–13. 61 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/OXF/LB/003, Logbook, 21 Jan. 1937. 62 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SCA/LB/001, Logbook entries, Nov. 1932–Feb. 1933. 63 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MON/LB/006, Logbook, 31 May, 2 June 1932. 64 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/VIC/LB/002, Logbook, 15 Feb. 1929. 65 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/PAG/LB/001, Logbook, 15 Dec. 1919. 66 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/BOW1/LB/001, Logbook, 20 April 1921. 67 The People’s Autobiography of Hackney, The Island. The Life and Death of an East London Community, 1870–1970 (London: Centerprise Trust Ltd, 1979), 36. 68 For example, LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/LFD/LB/003, Logbook, 28 June 1932. Kevin Myers has documented the rare case of a Hertfordshire boy diagnosed as mentally defective in the late 1930s, whose father successfully fought against his removal to a residential special school. Kevin Myers, ‘Contesting Certification: Mental Deficiency, Families and the State in Interwar England’, Paedagogica Historica 47:6 (2011). David Parker also records the upset among Hertfordshire parents when children were moved to a residential special school in the early 1920s, though very few had the ‘time, funds, knowledge and determination to resist the actions of the School Medical Officer and LEA for very long.’ Parker, ‘“A Convenient Dispensary”: Elementary Education and the Influence of the School Medical Service 1907–39’, History of Education 27:1 (1998).

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69 LMA, LCC/EO/SS/01/5, Headteacher to Education Officer, Oct. 1936. 70 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/BUR/LB/002, Logbook, 9 July 1918; LCC/ EO/DIV03/BAL/LB/003, Logbook, 24 Jan. 1919. 71 TNA, ED21/34982, Inspection report, 9 July 1930; ED21/34596, Inspection report, 10 Aug. 1934; ED21/34982, Inspection report, 9 July 1930. 72 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/MON/LB/002, Logbook, 22 Dec. 1920; TNA, ED21/34670, Inspection report, 11 May 1928. 73 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/ADD/LB/002, Logbook, 9 Nov. 1937. 74 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/081, LCC circular, 16 Feb. 1935. 75 TNA, ED21/35014, Inspection report, 5 April 1933. 76 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 7 Nov. 1923; TNA, ED21/34895, Jubilee souvenir, 1928; ED21/34560, Inspection report, 25 April 1935. 77 TNA, ED21/35151, Inspection report, 15 April 1930; ED21/35147, Inspection report, 2 Feb. 1935. 78 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/BAT/LB/002, Logbook, 26 March 1934. 79 TNA, ED21/34524, Inspection report, 9 Dec. 1929; LMA, LCC/EO/ DIV05/HAG/LB/009–10, Logbook, 2 April 1923, 19 Dec. 1928. 80 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/VAU2/LB/003, Logbook, 5 June 1930; TNA, ED21/34976, Inspection report, 18 May 1932. 81 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/LEW/LB/005, Sports’ day programme, n.d., early 1930s. 82 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/QMR/LB/001, Logbook, 7 July 1921; LCC/ EO/DIV01/EVE/LB/005, Logbook, 19 June 1925. 83 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HIT/LB/009, Logbook, 11 Nov. 1919. 84 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/CRE/LB/006, Inspection report, 5 April 1938. 85 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HLB/LB/002, Logbook, 28 Feb. 1929. 86 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/BEL/LB/010, Correspondence, n.d., mid1930s. 87 TNA, ED21/34952, Inspection report, 14 Nov. 1924; LMA, LCC/ EO/DIV01/BEA/LB/007, Logbook, 8–9 March 1933. 88 Cunningham and Gardner, Becoming Teachers, 183. 89 TNA, ED21/34729–34774; quotation from ED21/34750, Inspection report, 26 Sept. 1931. 90 TNA, ED21/35266–35344; quotations from ED21/35329, Inspection report, 10 Oct. 1930; ED21/35325, Inspection report, 21 Oct. 1931. 91 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/118, Inspection report, 8 Feb. 1937. 92 London Teacher, 20 Feb. 1925. 93 TNA, ED21/34939, Inspection report, 28 Nov. 1927.

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94 TNA, ED21/35290, Correspondence, 1932–35. 95 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/CAP/LB/003, Parents’ letter, 9 July 1936. 96 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/065, Strike report, 6 May 1926. 97 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/GRE/LB/001, Logbook, 26 Sept. 1938. 98 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/341, Inspection report, 26 Nov. 1938. 99 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/DUR/LB/002, Logbook, Sept. 1938. 100 LMA, LCC/EO/STA/2/17, LCC documents, 3 Dec. 1936. 101 TNA, ED21/34710, Inspection report, 22 July 1927. 102 TNA, ED21/34518, Inspection report, 31 Jan. 1927. 103 TNA, ED21/35016, Inspection report, 22 Sept. 1933. 104 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SYD2/LB/003, Logbook, 3 Dec. 1935. 105 Willmott, Growing Up, 117. See also ERO, T/Z 25/4227, T/Z 25/4271; Peckham People’s History, The Times of Our Lives: Growing Up in the Southwark Area, 1900–1945 (London: Peckham Publishing Project, 1983), 115; Magee, Clouds of Glory, 50. 106 Peckham People’s History, Times of Our Lives, 122. 107 For example, London Teacher, 22 June 1928; 6 Sept. 1929. 108 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HOD/LB/004, Logbook, 2 Nov. 1919. 109 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/083, Correspondence, 20–23 Sept. 1927. 110 London Teacher, 27 Nov. 1931; TNA, ED21/34686, Inspection report, 9 April 1932. 111 ERO, T/Z 25/4324. 112 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/KEN2/LB/001, Logbook, 25 Nov. 1938. 113 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/334, Logbook, 25 March 1936. 114 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/IVY/LB/003, Logbook, 22 May 1932. 115 MOA, DS385, Day survey, 12 Oct. 1937. 116 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/STJOH2/LB/003, Logbook, 18 July 1919. 117 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/NAP/LB/003, Logbook, 28 Jan. 1924. 118 LMA, LCC/EO/SS/01/5, Headteachers to Education Officer, Oct. 1936. 119 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/MIL/LB/001, Logbook, 18 Feb. 1927. 120 Magee, Clouds of Glory, 177. 121 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/023, Inspection report, 17 April 1936. 122 ERO, T/Z 25/4362. 123 Eileen Slade, Middle Child: The Autobiography of Eileen Slade (Andover: J.A.C. Productions, 1979), 28. 124 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/WAT/LB/001, Parent’s letter, 24 Oct. 1932. 125 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/WAT/LB/002, Logbook, 27 Oct. 1932. 126 ERO, T/Z 25/4297. 127 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/FIN/LB/002, Logbook, 12 March 1931. 128 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV09/BRO/LB/004, Logbook, 20 Dec. 1933.

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129 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/ROC/LB/002, Logbook, 16 Nov. 1926. 130 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MOW/LB/012, Logbook, 23 May 1921, 17 May 1923. 131 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SYD2/LB/008, Logbook, June–July 1933.

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Part II

What were schools for?

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3

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Preparing for the future

In 1922, the headmaster of Priory Grove Boys’ School sent a letter to the parents of that year’s leavers: Your son is today leaving this school and takes with him the heartiest good wishes of myself and the staff, for his future success and happiness. I know it is not very easy just now to find suitable employment for boys leaving school, and I would suggest to you that if your son is not able to get work just at present you would do well to send him half time to The ‘Brixton’, day continuation school, 54–56 Brixton Hill, SW9. Here he would receive Technical or Commercial Instruction which would be an enormous advantage to him later on. Don’t turn down this opportunity without enquiry, try and take the boy with you and interview the Principal, and find out for yourself what they can do for your lad.1

The industrial benefits of an educated workforce had long been promoted by advocates of educational reform. Debating the Education Bill in 1918, one MP argued that ‘we simply cannot afford to let our industries lack the better mental equipment which all those engaged in them will obtain [if Bill is passed]’. In 1944, another told the House that investment in education ‘will oil the wheels of industry and will bring a new efficiency’.2 But despite the legislation which bookended it, much of the interwar period was a time of retrenchment. Earlier in 1922, before the headmaster quoted above wrote his enthusiastic endorsement of Brixton’s day continuation school, national education spending had lost out significantly in the financial cuts forced by the Geddes Axe. The day continuation schools, set up in 1918 to provide continuing part-time education to young

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workers recently out of school, were one of the casualties. Despite the loss of funding, the LCC continued to run a handful of such schools – including that at Brixton – with voluntary rather than compulsory attendance; henceforth school-leavers would have to be persuaded of their merits. Harry Hendrick has suggested that elementary schools ‘assumed a new role’ in the interwar period: rather than simply providing an ‘elementary’ schooling, they were increasingly seen as a step to secondary education.3 If this was the view among educationalists and policy makers, Peter Mandler has also charted a popular growth in ‘educational aspiration’ during this period. He argues that ­twentieth-century Britons increasingly conceptualised secondary education as a ‘universal benefit’ rather than a privilege to be accessed on ‘merit’, as ‘better-paid and more secure employment in the clerical and retail sectors expanded, and mothers especially sought education for their children as an alternative to entry into the manual labour market facilitated by fathers’ workplace connections’.4 Others such as Carol Dyhouse, Siân Pooley, Selina Todd – and myself and Claire Langhamer – have commented on similar trends, particularly the increasing aspirations of parents that their children might have better employment opportunities than themselves.5 For the vast majority of pupils, of course, elementary schools played no significant role in furthering social mobility in this period, nor could they have done. Most children between the wars would never step inside a secondary school, at least until they became parents themselves and their own sons and daughters benefited from the opening up of secondary education after 1944. But schools catered for other futures too, and there were other ways in which aspirations could be realised. This chapter considers the ways in which schools prepared children for their lives beyond the elementary school. In particular, schools had to strike a balance between academic, vocational and domestic training, and the lines between these frequently blurred. Both children and their parents had their own opinions about what that balance should look like, and schools were also influenced by local employers. The national economies that led to cuts in post-14 vocational training meant that the influence of the school was, if anything, even more critical.

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Preparing for the future 93

For most children in the interwar period, educational opportunities beyond elementary school were extremely limited. The vast majority stayed on in the senior departments of elementary schools until they reached the leaving age of 14. An investigation in the mid-1920s by the educationalist Kenneth Lindsay found that only 9.5 per cent of English and Welsh elementary s­ chool-leavers moved on to secondary schools, of whom one-third were exempt from fees. One per thousand would reach university.6 The capital’s extensive educational infrastructure offered better odds than elsewhere. Lindsay estimated that in London about 7.7 per cent of an age group proceeded to county secondary schools, for which the most coveted award, the junior county scholarship, remitted or partly remitted fees; and a further 7 per cent to central schools, which taught a curriculum biased towards industrial or commercial work and of which the Council was a pioneer.7 As one former pupil remarked of the exam, taken at the age of 11, with a further chance at 13: ‘If you got fairly high marks you went on to a grammar school. If you did not get quite such high marks, you went to the central school; which was a bit lower than the grammar, and a bit higher than the elementary’.8 There was, of course, considerable variation within London: when Lindsay amassed his statistics, one single school in prosperous Lewisham – Stillness Road – had won as many scholarships as every school in Bermondsey put together.9 It was acknowledged that parental circumstances played a significant role. One school in Wandsworth, for example, was situated among ‘a fairly well-to-do population, and the children attending the school are mostly from good and (in many cases) ambitious homes … [with] much expected of the school by the parents’. It was no surprise to its inspectors, then, that it had been able to ‘speedily build up a reputation for the successful preparation of children for secondary and central schools’.10 In contrast, inspectors despaired of a school in north London, where children suffered from malnutrition and lack of sleep and whose parents, they explained, ‘are slack, aimless and casual’.11 In schools such as this, secondary schools might ‘not seriously enter the horizon … it was a frequent occurrence to be told [by old boys] that they knew nothing of scholarships at school; they were never told’.12

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But even among deprived surroundings, the elementary school might be presented as an agent through which to realise aspirations. One girls’ school was situated in a very poor neighbourhood in Belsize Park, but inspectors commented on the ‘much higher standard than might have been expected in a school situated thus’, citing the 48 junior county scholarships achieved since the appointment of a new headteacher nine years previously.13 It was sometimes explicitly suggested that children were achieving despite – rather than because – of their parents. A meeting of East End headteachers in 1926, for example, decided that mothers should not be invited to interviews for trade scholarships, ‘as this may tend to detract from the poorer child’s chance of success’.14 Academic achievement was proudly celebrated across a range of schools, with early dismissal or half-day holidays often granted to celebrate scholarship awards. Successes were so rare at Bath Street School, whose pupils’ lives were characterised – according to an inspector – by ‘overcrowding, malnutrition, [and] lack of cleanliness’, that when one boy won a scholarship he was presented with a leather briefcase from teachers and classmates.15 Pride is also evident in the references to academic success scattered across logbooks. In 1924, one headmaster recorded the news that an expupil had secured a place at Christ’s Hospital School. Eleven years later, he wrote that the same ex-scholar had successfully completed a BA in English at Cambridge.16 Another headteacher recorded the Cambridge success of an ex-pupil: ‘Phyllis’ career was well begun in this Dept’, she noted with satisfaction.17 The prestige awarded to scholarships – to which many teachers probably owed their own social mobility – shaped the experience of the classroom. The headteacher of one school recorded the preparation as the exam approached: ‘For the next three days, classes 3–6 suspend the normal timetable … to give the children practice in doing a two-consecutive-hour test.’18 Yet alongside the feting of secondary schools and scholarship winners, some simultaneously regretted the side effects. ‘The evil is … [that] examination subjects loom so large … that the educational values of the curriculum as a whole, for all children, are not considered’, wrote an inspector in 1937. He was quoted in a Board of Education pamphlet on the homework ‘problem’ in elementary schools, which highlighted

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Preparing for the future 95

concerns about children’s stress and suggested that pressure came not only from the school, but from ‘parents of Junior School children encouraging teachers to coach their children out of school … [which] defeats the purpose of the scholarship examination, and gives a most unfair advantage to those children whose parents are able to afford it’.19 There were also early manifestations of the ‘parity of esteem’ rhetoric that would characterise attempts to equalise the tripartite system after the Second World War. In 1936, the LCC issued a pamphlet to boys entitled ‘Now you are ten’, explaining the different educational pathways they faced. It reassured those who would likely stay on at senior elementary schools: Do not make the mistake of thinking … that the senior [elementary] school is a less important kind of school. Each kind of school is as important as every other kind of school. The only difference is that each kind deals with children whose interests are different and whose minds work differently. So each kind of school has to teach its children in a different way.

The booklet gave an illusion of choice, suggesting to boys that when they had read it, they should ‘show it to your father and mother and talk over with them what they would like you to do and what you think you are likely to be able to do best’. In fact, most children’s ‘choice’ would be determined by the scholarship examination.20 More locally, individual headteachers might seek to raise the status of senior pupils. One Lewisham headmaster organised a supplementary class composed of the handful of boys over 14 and the smartest boys in the final year, prompted by his desire ‘to combat the sense of inferiority which he feels exists in the minds of boys who have failed to reach secondary and central schools’.21 Indeed, one report, which listed various reasons why children might turn down scholarships, also blamed the ‘lack of encouragement on the part of certain headteachers who are not anxious to lose their brightest pupils, and who think they can provide as good an education in their schools as can the central schools’.22 But an implicit hierarchy remained impossible to eradicate. In particular, the celebration of scholarship winners was usually in marked contrast to attitudes towards those remaining in the

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elementary system. Referring to 14-year-olds applying for trade scholarships, who would already have failed, aged 11, to secure places at secondary or central schools and then failed again, aged 13, to win supplementary scholarships, London’s chief examiner described such candidates as ‘a residuum of the children of London’.23 His views were shared by at least one inspector, who commented of a Catholic school that following the transfer of ‘a small leaven of better-class children’ to central schools, ‘the top classes consist almost altogether of slum children’.24 Inspectors implied that teachers might also assume such attitudes. ‘Some of the boys are better than their teachers realise’, commented one.25 If the elementary school was presented as an agent of social mobility for the exceptional child, this was often contrasted with the supposed ill-advice of parents. Inspectors and teachers made frequent references to scholarships rejected by parents, usually on financial grounds. In 1933, for example, a trade scholarship offered to a Hammersmith schoolgirl was declined by her mother, ‘as Doris has commenced work at Harvey Nicholls at 7/- per week’.26 The economic recovery of the 1930s increased the temptation to prioritise immediate employment and inspectors worried of at least one school that a ‘strong historical record of scholarship’ was being jeopardised by an improvement in local employment prospects.27 The dominant narrative was of parental apathy combatted by a headteacher’s vigorous efforts, such as at a school in which scholarship take-up had increased ‘as a result of the headmaster’s persistent advocacy’.28 In the week following the announcement of scholarship results in 1925, one headteacher claimed to have ‘spent several hours persuading parents to send children to the central school’.29 Comments such as these supported a narrative which criticised working-class parents for failing to value their children’s education more generally. Lateness and sporadic absences were a frequent complaint, particularly in girls’ schools in poorer areas, where mothers were more likely to work and daughters to be needed at home. One child was moved to a school for the ‘mentally defective’ as a result. ‘The girl came from a home where conditions were bad’, explained the headteacher who recommended her transfer. ‘She had to do far more housework than a child of her age and physical condition should. She was kept at home for weeks together to do the

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Preparing for the future 97

housework. She was naturally very dull, and her deplorable attendance resulted in the child being totally unable to do any schoolwork here.’ The teacher contrasted what she saw as the mother’s thoughtlessness with her own good intentions: ‘I had her examined for a special school, feeling that she would do better with individual attention, and that where numbers were small her physical condition could receive more care and attention.’30 The familiar disparagement of parents was clear in another headteacher’s note in July 1919: ‘Some children are in the country – some are ill – and the others are kept at home as the parents have “welcomed” the Peace Proclamation every night this week.’31 Sometimes the initiative came from the child: Edith Evans, growing up in the East End in the 1920s, disliked school but found a willing accomplice in her mother, who enjoyed her company when she skipped lessons.32 Fickle parents were criticised for transferring children between schools for ‘purely frivolous reasons’, as one group of headteachers put it.33 In one instance, a mother pressed for a daughter to be examined for ‘mental deficiency’ in the hope that she might be eligible to attend the ‘mentally deficient’ school with her sister. In another, a headteacher recorded the transfer of a child to a different school because his father ‘was afraid of child crossing the roads in bad weather’.34 Similar reasons might be offered for rejecting scholarships. A 1919 report noted that places might be declined due to the ‘unwillingness of parents to allow their children to travel long distances to school, which render it impossible for them to return home to midday dinner’.35 Decades later, one woman was still rankled by the fact that her parents had not allowed her to attend the grammar school ‘because it meant crossing a road; instead, I was sent to a rough, slummy area school in Bermondsey where some of the children were spiteful and bullies’.36 A contemporary remembered the offer of a central school place and being ‘so excited I fell over twice on the way home’. Her parents refused it because it was a mixed school: ‘My father had seen the boys and girls “larking” about on the way home.’37 In fact, parents were often making informed and rational choices about their child’s wellbeing, both current and future, even if ­teachers – and sometimes children – disagreed. In the late 1920s,

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the diocesan authorities requested permission to convert one of their elementary schools in Stepney into a central school. The proposal drew significant opposition and in 1927 three members of the ‘Ratcliff School Defence Organisation’, ‘all mothers with little ones attending the school’, wrote themselves to the Board of Education, though to no avail: We assure you, Sir, that we are not opposed to higher education, some of our residents if our position permits, do send children to school up to the age of 16 years but others of us know from experience that the far greater number of our boys and girls have a better chance in life by going to situations at 14 years … Our home cares give us limited time to watch over the passing of the little ones to school, and to have them transferred to schools at a greater and more dangerous distance is to put a deal of worry upon our already burdened lives.38

Of course, many parents were much more appreciative of the opportunities offered to their child than officials sometimes allowed. If numerous working-class memoirs of childhood recall parental descriptions of further education as a ‘waste of time’,39 then an equally common trope – even in accounts which might not mention formal schooling at all – is that of the parent as role model, often as an avid reader who inspired a love of education, encouraged visits to the library, or passed on knowledge. Parental help is often credited in the achievement of a scholarship or grammar school place, or simply to support a child’s learning: ‘Mum always had time to help me with schoolwork, especially with spelling and sums.’40 Tales of mothers abetting absences can be also contrasted with those who insisted on school attendance. In 1932, one headteacher recorded that a child had tried to engineer his escape from lessons by announcing that his father was in isolation with scarlet fever, prompting immediate dismissal. The boy may have been smart enough to exploit the strict quarantine rules around infectious disease but he reckoned without his mother, who sent him straight back to school with assurances that her husband was in good health.41 The response to ‘homework’ or ‘library’ classes – authorised from 1919 onwards to be run by schools in poor districts twice a week after school – suggests the same appreciation of school. A Board of Education pamphlet in 1937 praised them, explaining that they were

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intended to produce ‘the atmosphere of a quiet and well-ordered home’, and headteachers consistently reported them as popular, often with waiting lists for places. A school in Fulham ran classes from 1928 onwards (‘5.30–6.30: mainly arithmetic. ­ 6.30–6.45: break with country dances etc. 6.45–7.30: drawing, painting, needlework and English’). When letters were sent to parents asking for their opinions, sixty replied with appreciative thanks. Although the headteacher found that enthusiasm waned through the year – ‘novelty always wears off’’ – the classes continued.42 Inspectors and headteachers were particularly gratified when poorer parents welcomed scholarships. When three trade scholarships were accepted by pupils from a deprived area of Kensal Green, the school ‘congratulate[d] the parents of these girls on their self-sacrifice and foresight in arranging for their children’s future rather than the immediate present’.43 Examples could be found across the capital, such as a school in Camberwell, where ‘there is much poverty … [but] the majority of the parents are interested in the work of their children and are ambitious for them’, or one in Bethnal Green, where parents ‘are anxious that their children shall receive as good an education as possible. Advantage is always taken of scholarships and free places.’44 Some grateful parents wrote to express thanks. In 1932, the headteacher of another Bethnal Green school received a letter from the father of a boy who had left the school as many as twelve years earlier. The ex-pupil had recently qualified as a solicitor and his father ‘wished to thank the masters concerned as he recognised the foundation of the lad’s success was laid in this school’.45 One letter survives from a father whose child attended school in a deprived area of Rotherhithe. It was tucked into the 1913–23 logbook and is poignant enough to merit quoting it here, although it comes from the beginning of that period. Addressing the headteacher as ‘madam’, the father wrote following his daughter’s award of a scholarship: ‘Naturally I am pleased, but I don’t conceit myself with the credit. What honour and credit accrues from the result of the examination is undoubtedly due to those who have had the direction and trouble of her tutelage.’ In a rambling letter, he went on to explain that he had also won a scholarship, yet ‘what was the result’? He remembered the ‘old dons in gown and mortar

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board … God knows what they taught us’, as well as the ‘farce’ of learning Latin and Greek, the difficulty of finding money for books and the social ostracism of being a scholarship boy. But ‘things may have altered with the passage of time’, he conceded, concluding that ‘I have no objection to leaving her education in compliance to what you consider best. If you are of opinion that she would benefit by a Grammar School course, I will endeavour to make arrangements accordingly.’ He closed by ‘thanking you again for your kindness, patience and trouble.’46 The prestige of a secondary education remained the preserve of a few, but elementary schools were tasked with preparing a much larger group of pupils for employment.47 One of the mechanisms for doing this was through the care committees attached to virtually every school in London. ‘I am often asked, “What is a Children’s Care Committee and what does it do?” wrote one headteacher in 1928. ‘It is a body of ladies and gentlemen, directly responsible to the LCC, appointed by them in every school to deal with all sorts of things connected with the children which will help them to get the utmost benefit out of the Education given to them by their teachers.’48 The duties of care committees included the organisation of school-leaving conferences, attended by a representative of the local Labour Exchange, and the arrangement of follow-up visits once the child was employed. At one local committee meeting in 1927, which included a lot of grumbling about members ‘with plenty of “gas” and very little “do”’, one volunteer reiterated the need for dedication, for ‘in these days of unemployment it was impossible for a child leaving school to obtain a decent appointment unless it had a little influence at the back of it’.49 Care committee minutes provide brief and sometimes touching glimpses into children’s aspirations: of Cyril, who was anxious to join his brother on a farm in Australia and was promised the committee’s help in securing passage; of Kathleen, who was ‘very anxious to get into the post office’ and was advised that ‘great attention should be paid to clear enunciation as being most important in preparation for post office work’; of Willie, whose heart was not strong, and who was interested in surgical instrument making.50

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Parents were encouraged to attend. ‘Whereas a few years ago it was rare for a parent to avail himself of this privilege, today in the better parts of London it is unusual for the parent not to attend; and even in the very poorest districts, quite forty per cent of the parents do attend in person’, commented one observer in 1931.51 Nevertheless, the belief in the suitability of school-based guidance over parental advice is implicit in one headteacher’s comment: ‘All leavers interviewed and advised and all but one … (whose parents prefer “to look about” for her) engaged for employment.’52 The care committees remained external to the school organisation, though headteachers were usually involved. But actions to prepare children for their working futures were also taken within the school. Inspectors praised headteachers who cultivated links with local employers, such as a school where ‘reputable employers’ were ‘encouraged to apply to the headmaster when they require the services of boys leaving school’, or another from which ‘a number of firms systematically recruit their younger employees’.53 Firms encouraged such links in turn. Eleven boys from his school had recently joined the silversmithing trade, wrote one headmaster: ‘The employers seem to be pleased with the boys and … presented to the school a silver cup made by two ex-scholars.’54 At Queensmill Road School, the headmaster’s pride was tied up with a sense of school identity: ‘We have little difficulty in placing our boys in employment, despite existing trade conditions – in fact, we often have to refuse posts offered, often by employers who already have Queensmill boys in their service and are well satisfied with them and desire others like them.’55 Snapshots of advice and support can be found in occasional logbook entries: the science lesson cancelled so that boys could be taught ‘how to fill up an “information form” correctly as required for Evening Institutes’; or the lecture given to girls in which a representative of the Labour Exchange spoke on ‘what is expected by the Employer for any particular work and how to choose according to your own ability and desire’.56 These activities were obviously most common in senior schools, but even in one junior school, ‘a list of local factories, with indications of their type of work, is hung in the corridor and gives the boys an impression of the industrial life of the borough’.57 In 1926, the headmaster of Catherine Street School in

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Hoxton sought a wider audience with his publication of Vocations for School Leavers. ‘The greatest difficulty teachers experience in trying to give children vocational guidance is that the boy, for example, does not know what he wants to be and does not know what there is to want’, commented the London Teacher, reviewing the book. ‘We are quite sure that this excellent volume … will be of the greatest value to the boy, his teacher, and to his parents.’.58 It is impossible to know how widely the publication was referred to in London classrooms, but one assumes that it will have been well used, at the very least, at Catherine Street. Vocational training was particularly important in ‘mentally defective’ schools, where the placing of a school-leaver into employment was seen as the best measure of success. In 1922, one headteacher proudly reported on seven pupils who were leaving that summer. A couple were ‘very poor’ and were to be moved into adult institutions, but ‘the others will go to work. Good children with good control should fill a useful place in the world’.59 ‘A good training in handwork is their only salvation’, noted the London Teacher of ‘mentally deficient’ children more generally, adding casually that ‘the mentally defective boy has the merit of his defect in that he is satisfied with humdrum occupations which would bore a normal boy to tears.’60 But despite the condescension, teachers hoped that the education they provided could make a difference. In 1936, the headteacher of a Clapham school reported on one of her success stories, describing a child who was a most uncontrolled backward girl and unsuitable for ordinary elementary school … To begin with she had some spark of intelligence but her environment, lack of parental control (illegitimate) and poor health were too much for the girl … this is a definite case where girl made good at a mentally deficient school. She is now working in a box factory with other girls of her own age.61

For all pupils, school might remain a place of advice even after leaving. Several headteachers kept in touch with ex-scholars, visiting them at work or keeping particulars of their careers. In 1934, a young man who had left school in 1927 called to see his old headmaster, who recorded the visit: ‘has been out of work and used the

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time for study. He has passed London Matriculation. Noteworthy feat. He came for advice.’ A week later the headmaster added an update: he had obtained employment.62 A further opportunity to introduce pupils to the world of work was provided through school trips. Five hundred responses to a 1936 questionnaire found that 54 per cent of boys’ departments, 45 per cent of girls’ departments and 27 per cent of mixed departments (which were more likely to be junior) had made educational visits to industrial firms over the previous two years, although these figures may be over-representative: four hundred departments did not reply, possibly because of a negative answer. Destinations included gas works, dairies, electric lamp works, candle works, match factories, power stations, furniture factories, marine engineering works, newspaper printing offices, retail stores and bakeries.63 The LCC permitted trips for educational purposes only, having either ‘some cultural value which will widen the pupils’ experience or be illustrative of some physical, chemical, biological, geographical, historical or other data’.64 But often the line between educational and occupational purpose blurred. Indeed, the instigators of the 1936 inquiry recognised the difficulty of distinguishing between visits educational and otherwise, noting that ‘a lad might fall in love with a compositor’s job when, on an educational visit, his teacher was doing his best to remind him of his own and his school’s debt to Gutenberg’.65 Teachers themselves might conflate the two purposes, evident in one comment about a visit to Bryant and May’s match factory, that the trip was ‘useful and enjoyable. Two of our old girls were at work there.’66 Another headteacher, writing to local factory owners to ask if his boys might visit, was even more explicit in acknowledging two different aims: (a) giving them an insight into modern process and methods of manufacture and (b) helping them to choose their trade … We feel sure that you will realise the value both to the boys and to their future employers of the knowledge gained and we hope to inspire enthusiasm in them and give them a sense of the need for co-operation between employer and employee.67

One inspector suggested that ‘the large amount of trouble the headmistress takes to place the girls in satisfactory employment when

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they leave school’ was a considerable factor in securing parental appreciation.68 But the choice of employment could be contentious. Concern about ‘blind alley’ occupations – in which children found easy employment aged 14 but were dismissed when they reached adulthood – flourished in interwar Britain. In his Vocations for School Leavers, Nugent advised his readers to avoid such jobs ‘as you would the plague’. He included a message to parents, who might be ‘anxious that their children should earn big wages as soon as they leave school. Although the money is very welcome in a large number of homes, parents who have the true welfare of their children at heart should remember that it is their duty to forgo high wages in favour of future prospects.’69 Children might be encouraged to stay at school even beyond the compulsory leaving age, although only a small minority of schools successfully sought permission to teach shorthand or typing and thus improve career prospects. At a Chelsea school the headteacher gave extra training ‘in simple business methods’ to overage pupils who had expressed an interest in secretarial work – ‘at her own expense she has provided a typewriter for their use’ – but this was exceptional.70 Several inspection reports did, however, highlight the close contact maintained between schools and local evening institutes, and here again the personal contacts forged at school were valuable. The fact that two teachers at Queensmill Road School in Fulham, including the teacher of the leavers’ class, also taught at the local evening institute explained why over one hundred of the institute students were ex-Queensmill Road boys, out of a total roll of 132.71 A disconnect between the school’s advice and the preferences of working-class families appears most obviously in the case of domestic service. In 1922, fifty-one headmistresses responded to an LCC questionnaire inquiring about attitudes to domestic service following a decline in the number of girls taking up placements. ‘Parents round here are very decided in their antipathy and nothing seems to remove this. I’ve tried many times and often’, explained one. She and others could list several reasons why parents and pupils rejected the opportunity, including a lack of freedom, loneliness, and the separation of girls from their homes. A rare stance was that of the headteacher who placed the blame on mistresses, who, she felt,

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needed to treat their young servants better. But the most important factor, many headteachers believed, was parents’ and girls’ belief in the low status of the job. One quoted a mother who had told her that ‘I should never think of sending her out to service to be a little slave and drudge to other people.’ This was at odds with the teachers’ views: ‘It is for the teachers to eradicate the deep-rooted idea that service is slavery and a disgrace’, wrote one, while another encouraged ex-pupils to return to school after being in service so that other girls could ‘see and hear the improvement’. But a telling comment comes from the headteacher of a Deptford school, who commented that parents ‘do not like the idea of their children becoming servants. Desire something better.’ It is a reminder that it was differences over the meaning of ‘better’ that lay at the heart of disagreements over children’s futures.72 It seems likely that, in the end, parents’ views were probably more influential than anything that teachers could say, particularly when employment meant leaving home. During at least one care committee meeting, a girl who wanted to be a nursemaid but not to sleep away from her family was advised to reconsider: nonresidence ‘would deter Lily entering a household where she could be trained properly’. Two more girls were advised similarly by the same committee, which urged them to take ‘the better opportunities afforded by resident service’. They did not, and later entries registered their employment at a chocolate factory and in the jewellery department at Selfridges.73 An emphasis on vocational training bled into more traditional academic subjects. Maths lessons, for example – according to the Board of Education – should address the needs of everyday life: ‘What is needed by the ordinary man is an intelligent power of dealing with numbers whenever and wherever he meets them.’74 London inspectors agreed, typically suggesting that instruction should be ‘guided by the practical needs of the pupils now and in the future’.75 In 1924 the Education Officer sent questionnaires to over three hundred London firms, asking how useful they found the arithmetic taught in elementary schools. The 158 replies did little to change opinion that abstract and advanced mathematics was inappropriate: ‘The first important fact is that only 14% of boys and 17% of girls use

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any arithmetic at all during the first two years of employment after leaving school. Chief requirements are the first four rules, the first four rules in money, cost calculations and fractions.’76 The frequency with which oral and written memoirs reference the constant repetition of multiplication tables and the like, often with satisfaction, suggests a common emphasis on such basics. As one man remembered, many years later: We learned things by rote … Not only the multiplication tables, you had tables of measurement and inches and feet and yards and furlongs and all the rest of it … and tables of measurement of volume and that kind of thing … you used to get those tables on the back of the exercise book, which was handy. But certainly we learned them and we never forgot them.77

Once the fundamentals had been covered, the official line was that maths lessons should remain strictly utilitarian. The maths syllabus of one senior girls’ school, for example, was based ‘on the practical applications of straightforward arithmetical processes to the everyday life of the girls … easy graphs, household accounts, bills, current prices … ready money purchases, hire purchase, thrift, the Savings Bank System, national Savings Certificates’.78 Boys might get a little more: in at least one school, boys did ‘Geometry and a little Algebra while the girls are taking Needlework’.79 However, for every inspection report that I read which praised schools for its maths lessons, there was another that was critical of the way maths was taught, suggesting that many schools were not, in fact, conforming. The children do ‘long and difficult sums which no one outside a school ever does’, complained one.80 Inspectors urged that science lessons, too, should engage with children’s everyday experiences; the ‘ideal of Science as the reasonable explanation of familiar phenomena’.81 One headteacher seemed to agree when he wrote about taking his boys to a nearby lecture series: a lecture on the vacuum was ‘very interesting, but too many experiments attempted’; one on high tension electricity ‘interesting and impressive, but of course much above the heads of our boys’; one on ‘metals’ was more successful, and ‘held the audience’; but most popular was that on vision, appreciated ‘especially [by] lads wearing spectacles’.82



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As T. Payten Gunton, headmaster of a boys’ school in Tooting, argued in a publication of 1931, science topics for senior children should be chosen based on relevance to everyday life and experience. For pupils to know how and why the windmill, the water wheel, the train, the bicycle, the motorcar, the lever and the wireless apparatus work is assuredly more interesting, more essential, and of more value and significance as scientific training than juggling with test tubes and meaningless substances for no other apparent reason than that at some future time equally meaningless facts and figures may be reproduced on demand.83

Certainly the status of school science had increased significantly with the proliferation of new technologies in interwar Britain. ‘That “Science for all” is a national need has been one of the outstanding lessons of the War’, one LCC committee reported in 1919.84 When, in 1932, the General Post Office (GPO) staged a ‘Young People’s Telephone Exhibition’ in South Kensington, it was aimed particularly at schoolchildren, ‘to make the younger generation more “telephone-minded”’.85 One teacher took forty of her senior pupils: ‘One girl was allowed to speak to New York.’86 By the late 1930s, the GPO was loaning telephone equipment to schools. ‘Every boy is having practice in use of telephone directory, dialling, and general use of the telephone’, wrote a headmaster whose department benefited.87 Also at South Kensington, of course, was the Science Museum, where an interactive Children’s Gallery opened in 1931.88 Even before that, the museum was already recording regular use by schools. During the 1920–21 academic year, 5,326 schoolchildren visited its Engineering galleries and 2,733 its Science ones.89 Science lessons were assumed to be an easier sell for boys, given their ‘natural interest … in steam and motor engines, in dynamos and electrical apparatus’.90 Again, a vocational purpose underlay what was seen as best practice, with one school focusing on magnetism and electricity in its top classes: ‘very suitable subjects, for in the neighbourhood there are important electrical works, including the Central London Railway Power Station, and the Osram Factory. The latter is close to the school and has recently been visited by the boys.’91

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But girls were increasingly likely to find future employment in the manufacture of these products too. Many of the country’s ‘new’ industries were concentrated in London and the south-east, where women workers might find themselves assembling vacuum cleaners, telephone apparatus or scientific instruments.92 Payten Gunton, the Tooting headmaster, noted that girls’ schools traditionally focused on nature study in their science lessons. But, he argued, ‘There seems little reason why this should be so today, especially as girls are entering more and more into the business world.’93 He would surely have approved of a colleague who took female pupils to the Women’s Electrical Association ‘to see uses of electricity in the home’ or a group of girls who were shown films detailing steel manufacturing processes.94 Not all girls’ schools thought this appropriate. When inspectors observed a science lesson at a school in Lambeth, they found that it was based on ‘practical matters connected with the preparation of a midday meal, and it really got down to the children’s own experience and interests. The education of the children in matters of Science is thus conducted in a useful and practical way.’95 Nor was the hope that children would be enthused by science always fulfilled. ‘London boasts of a Faraday Road, a Darwin Street, and a Kelvin Road. It would be interesting to know how many of the boys and girls living in them know anything of the men who have honoured their districts by this dedication’, wondered LCC officials.96 As ever, much depended on teachers’ ability and enthusiasm, while some schools were hampered by lack of equipment or space. St Peter’s School in Lambeth was a fifteenminute walk south of Darwin Street, for example, but inspectors suggested that its science work seemed ‘calculated to give boys an extreme distaste for and a complete misconception of Science’, with lessons ‘entirely given to the study of Length, Area and Volume … so obviously uninteresting to young boys’.97 A report on a school in Fulham was even more damning, finding that out of thirty-odd weekly lessons, fourteen were spent on relative density, nine on various measurements, seven on oxygen, one on nitrogen and one on pulleys. Not only was the syllabus ‘seriously defective’, commented the inspectors, but even by its end, ‘not a single boy could explain the formula used or the meaning of the term “density”’.98

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In addition to more academic subjects, practical work was another way in which vocational training might be given. According to the 1918 Education Act, ‘practical instruction’ meant ‘instruction in cookery, laundrywork, housewifery, dairywork, handicrafts, and gardening, and such other subjects as the Board declare’.99 These others might include tailoring, cobbling, printing, bookbinding, leadwork, weaving and millinery, though for most boys it was restricted to woodwork and, for girls, needlework, cookery, laundry and housewifery.100 In the 1920s most children were taught in special centres, as had been the case since the nineteenth century, with classes from several different schools attending a central building. By 1929 there were 287 centres for boys – mostly teaching woodwork, but also, occasionally, metalwork – and 431 domestic economy centres for girls, though this system began to decline in the 1930s with the reorganisation of schools and the development of senior departments, which were increasingly designed to include practical instruction as an integral part of the curriculum.101 Practical lessons could be exploited for the school community: boys were tasked with strengthening the bindings of reading books or making duckboards for the open-air classroom; girls might stitch school tunics or decorate their own hats in advance of a school journey.102 But in at least some schools, lessons were framed explicitly around employment. Geometry was included in the art curriculum of one boys’ department, for example, ‘as the neighbourhood has many piano and other factories in which geometrical drawing is very necessary’, while another was praised for teaching art ‘well adapted to the requirements of the cabinet-making industry practised in the district’.103 Future employment was also a consideration for girls. Of a school near Marylebone, an inspector praised the neatness of the needlework, noting that many girls would likely end up employed in the various needle trades nearby; a Finsbury school even chose its sewing machines to match those used in local factories.104 Success was measured in similar terms: ‘The excellence of the craft training provided is seen in the fact that eight old girls of the school are now in the embroidery or leatherwork studios of one of the most famous London firms’, commented an inspector.105 There is some evidence that lessons were appreciated by pupils. A report on education in north London in 1925 found that children

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were more likely to remain at school after the age of exemption if they were offered facilities for more vocational training such as technical drawing, handicraft or needlework.106 It was rare but not unknown for girls to try subjects more typically associated with boys. In the late 1920s a school in St Pancras employed a mistress with ‘unusual qualifications in mechanics and engineering’ and made ‘use of her special knowledge in school’.107 ‘Even girls do woodwork’, the NUT claimed in 1935, in a celebratory booklet of English and Welsh schools more generally, alongside a photograph of a girl bent over a craft table.108 The opposite might also be the case. In 1932, a class of boys from Kennington received cookery instruction for a year because of a low number of girls in the district to fill the classes.109 At least two schools for ‘mentally deficient’ children also introduced cookery for their boys – although at least one parent complained.110 Practical instruction was not always effective. Several schools were handicapped by old-style ‘stepping’ in rooms, consisting of tiered seating and immobile desks. Two thousand classrooms were still waiting for stepping to be removed in 1944, while in one domestic economy centre a gas cooker had been installed at a height too great for children to reach.111 Centres were frequently criticised, not only, in some cases, for their old or outdated equipment, but because the system lacked continuity due to the frequent rotation of classes and the difficulty of coordination with individual schools. The expertise of teachers was another variable, particularly with regard to the more unusual handicraft subjects. Nor was it granted the same status as academic work. ‘About midway in the school are two “craft classes”: the name appears to be a convenient euphemism for “specially slow or backward”’, wrote one inspector.112 Yet if this implied disapproval, the educational structure reinforced such hierarchies. Such activities were thought to be particularly appropriate for ‘mentally deficient’ children, for example; one such boys’ department had only one academic class, with the other three classes focusing on manual work, bootmaking and tailoring.113 As well as vocational guidance, other futures were also borne in mind. For boys at a Lewisham school, practical instruction included the study ‘of such things as taps, gas fittings and locks with the view

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of making the boys handy in household repairs’.114 A Camberwell school set its girls and boys tasks that would mirror the gendered domestic roles of their adulthoods: ‘The Boys’ department undertakes small carpentering tasks; marks out the playground, helps to keep games apparatus in order, etc, whilst the Girls’ department reciprocates by undertaking small needlework repairs for the boys, etc.’115 Homemaking might be taught from the earliest years, and one inspector watched a ‘babies class’ (children below compulsory school age) engage ‘with great pleasure … on a programme of free activities which included not only play with toys but the cleaning, polishing and dusting of the room’.116 It was girls, of course, for whom practical training was most importantly a training for domesticity.117 A future domestic role was clearly envisaged by schools which taught girls ‘to plan, cook and serve a variety of family meals’ or provided ‘definite instruction  … on the planning of the family budget’.118 Inspectors criticised one school which failed to provide housewifery lessons, ‘for the importance of bringing the girls into contact with the simplest amenities of a home cannot be over-emphasised’.119 The cost of materials caused problems in poorer districts. In needlework, the Council’s expectation that schools would recoup costs through the sale of garments was criticised as unrealistic, particularly as ready-made shop-bought clothing was increasingly affordable by the 1930s. In 1934 a group of headteachers lobbied the Council to reduce fabric costs, noting ‘the inordinate amount of time and effort which a headmistress has to expend to secure the sale of garments … and the constant trouble in collecting the pence and half-pence of poorer children whose circumstances render this task both distressing and repugnant’.120 The restriction on materials was remembered by one ex-schoolgirl, who recalled that ‘we had to use some strange colour brown wool. It was always the same colour. No variation. I always disliked this.’121 Cookery lessons also suffered, with activities constrained by what might sell. One HMI inspector, reporting to the Board of Education on elementary lessons more generally across the country, criticised the quality of dishes made but realised that any food cooked ‘has to be of the type which makes an appeal to the children, for they are the purchasers. “Good” food to a child is undoubtedly something sweet.’122

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A rare find in the archive is a 12-year-old pupil’s ‘Domestic Subjects’ exercise book, from Northwold Road School in 1924. The tattered volume contains her handwritten instructions on how to wash flannels and woollens, ‘fine whites’ and stockings, how to ‘peg out’ correctly, and for the ‘ironing and folding of a pocket handkerchief’. Cookery entries include recipes for dishes such as Irish stew and batter puddings, and budgets for ‘dinner for 6 persons’. In housewifery she learnt how to arrange cupboards (‘keep articles of a kind together and have all drawers and shelves lined with white’), which china to choose (‘select … a serviceable pattern and shape. If possible choose a standard pattern, so that breakages can be replaced’), and how to air and make a bed. She knew how to correctly lay the table for dinner, and a neatly drawn diagram showed the proper placing of the main knife and fork, small knife, dessert spoon and fork, bread plate, serviette, bread knife and tumbler.123 Such lessons were often at odds with the cramped conditions and tight budgets which characterised home life in many parts of London, as recorded by historians for earlier generations.124 ‘Emphasis is laid upon the use of practical and dainty objects in the home’, recorded the inspectors of a housewifery centre that served several schools in the East End.125 Some memoirists recalled their mother’s disapproval. As one woman remembered so that we should be doing proper washing, we brought up soiled garments from home. Mother sent me with a little tray-cloth and a clean pair of stockings, and was horrified when I told her some of the girls brought the most filthy things and big bundles from home … Mother said her tray-cloth was dirtier than when she sent it, and she sniffed, and put it in the scullery to give it a good boil-up when she did her washing.126

Criticism that the best person to teach domestic skills was a girl’s mother, not her teacher, had a long history.127 One woman later remembered of cookery lessons that ‘I didn’t go. Can’t remember how I got out of it. My mother said I didn’t need to go.’128 I have only come across one logbook entry that formally recorded parental refusal for a daughter to attend housewifery classes, but absence may not have been uncommon.129 Yet most officials continued to assume that the school provided the best training. The Board of

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Education emphasised that lessons were so important in senior schools because ‘this is the only time when we can make sure that a girl shall have some teaching in mothercraft. Once she has left school she may perhaps attend classes, but she is far more likely to have no encouragement or even opportunity to learn about infant care until after she has a baby of her own.’130 Similarly, when a Bermondsey child’s description of how to bath a baby – ‘Shut all windows and doors … be careful always to support the back of his neck’ – was reproduced in the London Teacher as the prize-winning essay in a local competition, both her school and teacher were credited. The journalist failed to wonder whether or not, perhaps, the girl also had experience of minding younger siblings, cousins or neighbours’ children, hardly uncommon for working-class girls in this period.131 Parental hostility must have been disappointing to those who thought that a secondary benefit of training girls in domesticity was that it might also influence their mothers. Helen Sillitoe, a campaigner for increased domestic training in schools, argued that housecraft lessons, for example, would instil ‘a vision of beauty’ into pupils that would then influence their home life and ‘help the community to acquire a finer sense of values’.132 London inspectors agreed. One praised the science lessons of a girls’ department in Lambeth for the instruction given in personal hygiene, first aid and mothercraft, which were both valuable to the girls and ‘helping to disseminate modern ideas in their homes in the neighbourhood’.133 Another was impressed by a school that had taken children to see the room displays set out in large department stores: ‘At the end of the school year a model flat was set up in the hall, and all the work of the children has been there displayed in its right setting, parents and friends being invited to view it and thus incidentally to improve their own taste.’134 However, schools were often aware of the need to be flexible and opposition to domestic training was shared by some teachers.135 At a local meeting of the Croydon branch of the National Federation of Women Teachers in 1919, a resolution was passed that it be removed from the curriculum altogether, not least due to tasks that were often ‘utterly unpractical and uneducational’, such as cleaning ‘over and over again a small house which was kept solely for the

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purpose of being cleaned, but never dirtied’.136 One observer, the journalist and suffragist Evelyn Sharp, was also critical of vocational training in elementary schools – such as girls being taught how to wash wooden dolls when at home they washed real babies – but was reassured that, ‘fortunately, elementary school teachers are for the most part far better educationists than the school code requires them to be’.137 Some logbooks do show sensitivity to local conditions. One school decided to introduce the ‘teaching of mending’ into needlework classes; another changed the cookery class from the afternoon to the morning so that the food could be used for school dinners.138 Some were pragmatic. Following a sale of needlework in 1919, one headteacher noted that darker garments sold most quickly. ‘Evidently parents want things that won’t shew the dirt’, she recorded. ‘Remember this for future requisition.’139 Following similar struggles to sell items, another school was advised by inspectors to call a meeting of parents ‘and their criticisms invited with a view to modifying the shape and style of the garment if necessary’.140 Such measures meant that, for all the tales of hostility, there are also memories of appreciation. ‘My favourite lessons were reading, needlework and knitting’, wrote one woman years later. ‘We learnt to darn and patch and make garments, which helped at home as we did not have much money.’141 In 1923, a group of Lambeth schoolchildren were set essays entitled ‘What you are going to do when you leave school?’142 Frustratingly, their answers have long since vanished, nor is it easy to discover what their destinies might have been, as employment data on school-leavers was not consistently collected.143 Certainly the elementary schools were not influential agents of social mobility. Academic scholarship was prized above all, but the limited opportunities for elementary schoolchildren were rarely challenged and the vast majority were fated for more mediocre futures. Sometimes that mediocrity was too readily assumed: ‘The children come from average Bethnal Green homes’, wrote one inspection team. ‘They are not difficult children to handle nor exacting in their demands from life.’144 But we might hope that the children’s essays would have shown some interest and ambition; and we might guess that

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their teachers would have been disappointed if not. For, within limited horizons, many schools demonstrated a genuine interest in facilitating decent futures for their pupils. Whatever their level of academic achievement, therefore, the value of hard work was constantly stressed. A report on London’s senior elementary schools in 1939 outlined the general principle that ‘long before pupils leave school they should have tasted the joy that comes from a job well done. They should accordingly be so trained that they will not be satisfied with any work which is below their best.’145 That this message filtered down through individual schools is demonstrated by the frequency with which some version of it was incorporated into school mottoes: ‘There is no failure except ceasing to try’; ‘Still achieving, still persevering’; ‘Do your best, your very best, and do it every time’, ‘DO IT NOW’; ‘Success comes not by wishing but by hard work bravely done.’146 Old Palace School in the East End was one of the poorest in London; its inspection report in 1930 described a school in which threequarters of fathers were regularly unemployed and ‘in the homes overcrowding abounds; the surroundings are sordid’. Its school motto was ‘Be up and doing.’147 The message was repeated at events such as prize days, as when one speaker ‘advised the boys to see they got something out of their school’, or at another, when an LCC councillor returned to his old school to tell his younger counterparts that ‘if they applied themselves zealously to their work at school there was no telling what heights they would attain when they went out in the world’.148 Indeed, a secondary education was not the only measure of success, as the boys of a west London school were reminded in 1939 when a scholar of sixty years earlier paid his first visit back: ‘He is now retired having become – without secondary education – the ­secretary of a public company.’149 If the children’s essays on future ambitions have long since been lost, a loose essay tucked into the logbook of a Kensington school suggests that one child, at least, absorbed the message that hard work mattered. Written sometime in the early 1920s by a boy aged  12, it is entitled ‘Myself’ and describes his life with his widowed mother and brother. Describing himself as ‘a fair arithmetician and geometrician’ with ‘a passion for reading books

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of adventure’, he hoped to become an engineer, suggesting that ‘when I grow up I am determined to succeed at anything I lay my hands to. It is an easy thing to do if you persevere with it.’150 If this ­12-year-old appreciated the value of education – despite the fact that he had already missed out on the chance of attending secondary school aged 11 – it is also common in memoirs to find tributes to schooldays that, it was felt, had set the author up for life. Rose Gamble was born into poverty in Chelsea in the early 1920s and later won a scholarship to private school. She remembered that ‘most of the girls in my class who had come up from the kindergarten were rotten at arithmetic and did not know their tables. The girls from the elementary schools were far ahead of them, and this gave me my first feeling of being able to cope.’151 This is not to romanticise. Gamble also wrote of the shortage of money and resources that made learning difficult: We had no exercise books and received half a sheet of paper … for dictation. This was collected at the end of the lesson and redistributed the next day for use on the other side. For arithmetic the sheets were cut lengthways, and we worked our sums down the narrow strip of paper. If we wanted a second piece we had to hold up our paper to show it had been properly used on both sides. All through the infants school we worked in pencil, and these were counted as they were collected and locked in the cupboard. We had very few books, and those we did have were limp bound for economy. They were distributed, collected, counted and locked away after each lesson.152

Hers was not an isolated experience. ‘It is to be hoped that there are few schools so badly equipped with material as this’, despaired an inspector of a St Pancras school in 1930. ‘Even ordinary exercise books for the written work are lacking.’153 Elsewhere, school accommodation itself made learning difficult and, despite the Council’s aspirations, some class sizes remained high. ‘The largeness of the rooms, coupled with the local demand for school places, makes it necessary to have close upon sixty children in nearly every room’, reported one inspector, while the teacher of a ‘mentally deficient’ school wrote that so many children had recently been sent to her that ‘on Tuesday and Wednesday seven children had to sit on the floor’.154 Some classes were just

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badly managed. An inspector gave a Stepney teacher a particularly damning report in 1925, despairing that the children could answer virtually no questions correctly, that he could not hear them read because of the ‘din’, and that ‘copying’ was universal.155 Those who remained most bitter about their school experience  are those who might, in a different context, have aspired to greater achievement but found themselves constrained by systems and assumptions that were rigid and inflexible. Mark Benney was born in 1910 and lived with his violent and alcoholic mother and various ‘uncles’ before being passed to a succession of foster mothers. Of his LCC elementary school he later remembered that I was uninterested in most lessons, or, where I was interested … my progress was impeded by the relative disinterest of my classmates. I might have carried on such studies as appealed to me at home, for I used always to envy the secondary schoolboys their task of ‘homework’. But I had not yet realised the possibility of buying and borrowing books, was not even aware of the existence of reference libraries; and the schoolmasters made no attempt at enlightenment on these points. Consequently, having reached the highest class of the elementary school early, I spent the last three years in them retracing old ground; and Mother’s imprisonment [for theft], with my subsequent removal to another [industrial] school, precluded me from the scholarship solution of these difficulties.156

Another ex-schoolchild found the later years of elementary school similarly fruitless. She won a scholarship but her parents turned it down on financial grounds. So she stayed in elementary school, ‘and I was used as stand-in for the teacher: ‘“Violet, go and sit in there, I’ve got to go to the headmistress, go and sit in there, in that class”, which I did … I hated it.’157 Other children, meanwhile, had different reasons for their aversion to school initiatives. ‘I dislike Handwork because it makes me dirty and it takes half my playtime to wash it off’, a (Worcestershire) schoolboy told a researcher in 1936; surely there were London children who would have said the same.158 Opportunities were beginning to widen by the end of the period. By 1939, anticipating a raising of the school-leaving age that autumn, officials were beginning to change their expectations. An LCC report suggested that senior elementary schools should consider teaching foreign languages and commercial subjects. It should

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be remembered, its authors noted, that schools which contained about 70 per cent of London’s children must necessarily contain about 20 per cent of children who were above the average.159 However, even before this, the evidence suggests that many teachers thought carefully about the futures that lay before their pupils and, limited though these might be, sought to prepare them for it. In 1928 the London Teacher published a letter sent in by a headteacher, who had received it from an ex-pupil, aged 15 and living ‘in one of the so-called “slum” districts’. There is no way to check its veracity, but there is no obvious reason for it to have been fabricated, and at the very least it testifies to the idea of the school that the journal was keen to promote: as a place where children might learn skills which – combined with hard work and ambition – would set them up for life and whose lessons, crucially, they would later feel welcome to revisit: Dear Madam, I expect you will be very surprised to hear from me after such a long time. I’ve heard that you enquired after me the other day, so I thought it about time I wrote. I wish I could do better and come to see you, but I’m sorry I am unable to do so. As you have already been told, I have started Evening Classes to study Shorthand, English and Arithmetic … Do you know why …? Well … I want to get on. I’m not satisfied where I am now. I don’t mean with the work or wage. It’s just that I want to climb higher … I am studying English and Arithmetic. The former I can get on with alright, but Arithmetic, my goodness! I have almost forgotten all my little quick ways, so I would like to ask you a favour. Is it possible for me to have one of my old Arithmetic books for awhile? If I am able to borrow one, I would be exceedingly thankful to you, for I could then look up one or two things I may have forgotten … I close now with fond love and good wishes to my one-time Headmistress.160

Notes 1 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/PRI/LB/005, Headteacher’s letter, 6 Nov. 1922. 2 Hansard HC Deb, v.104 c.339; v.396, c.215. 3 Harry Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society, ­1880–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69.

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4 Peter Mandler, ‘Educating the Nation I: Schools’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 24 (2014), 13. 5 Carol Dyhouse, ‘Family Patterns of Social Mobility through Higher Education in England in the 1930s’, Journal of Social History 34:4 (2001); Pooley, ‘Parenthood, Citizenship and the State’, 40–1; Selina Todd, ‘Poverty and Aspiration: Young Women’s Entry to Employment in Inter-War England’, Twentieth Century British History 15:2 (2004), 122; Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer, ‘Children, Class and the Search for Security: Writing the Future in 1930s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History 28:3 (2017), 379–81. 6 Kenneth Lindsay, Social Progress and Educational Waste. Being a Study of the ‘Free-Place’ and Scholarship System (London: Routledge, 1926), 7. 7 Lindsay, Social Progress, 66–7. 8 ERO, T/Z 25/4287. 9 Lindsay, Social Progress, 8, 95. 10 TNA, ED21/35354, Inspection report, 18 July 1933. 11 TNA, ED21/34858, Inspection report, 24 May 1929. 12 Lindsay, Social Progress, 90–1. 13 TNA, ED21/35168, Inspection report, 9 Feb. 1926. 14 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/03/006, Headmistresses’ meeting, 27 April 1926. 15 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/BAT/LB/001, Logbook, 13 Sept. 1920; Inspe­ ction report, 30 May 1928. 16 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/OXF/LB/002–3, Logbook, 11 Dec. 1924, 24 June 1935. 17 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/CAP/LB/008, Logbook, 25 July 1939. 18 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/BOU/LB/002, Logbook, 5 July 1921. 19 Board of Education, Homework (London: HMSO, 1937), 10–11. 20 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/11/040, LCC pamphlet, 1936. 21 TNA, ED21/35001, Inspection report, 28 May 1934. 22 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 15 Oct. 1919. 23 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/03/022, Report by the Chief Examiner (London, 1924), 1. 24 TNA, ED21/34853, Inspection report, 22 June 1933. 25 TNA, ED21/34719, Inspection report, 23 April 1923. 26 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/EVE/LB/006, Logbook, 8–23 May 1933. 27 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/FLO/LB/003, Inspection report, 20 Nov. 1937. 28 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/WAT/LB/003, Inspection report, 26 Feb. 1939. 29 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/STJOH2/LB/004, Logbook, 25 Feb. 1927. 30 LMA, LCC/EO/SS/01/5, Headteacher to Education Officer, Oct. 1936. 31 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/BOW1/LB/001, Logbook, 4 July 1919.

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32 Edith L. Evans, Rough Diamonds (Bognor Regis: New Horizon, 1982), 69. 33 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/02/013, Headmistresses’ meeting, 24 Jan. 1939 34 LMA, LCC/EO/SS/01/5, Headteacher to Education Officer, Oct. 1936; LCC/EO/DIV04/NOR/LB/008, Logbook, 19 Jan. 1925. 35 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 15 Oct. 1919. 36 ERO, T/Z 25/4297. 37 Scannell, Mother Knew Best, 84. 38 TNA, ED21/35277, Letter to Board of Education, 30 Nov. 1927. 39 Ted Willis, Whatever Happened to Tom Mix? The Story of One of My Lives (London: Cassell, 1970), 102. 40 ERO, T/Z 25/3292. 41 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/COE/LB/003, Logbook, 31 Aug. 1932. 42 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/EVE/LB/006, Headteacher’s observations, 1928–29. 43 TNA, ED21/34895, Jubilee souvenir, 1928. 44 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/047, Inspection report, 22 May 1939; LCC/ EO/PS/07/334, Inspection report, 2 April 1938. 45 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MOW/LB/004, Logbook, 12 Jan. 1932. 46 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/CRE/LB/004, Parent’s letter, 3 Feb. 1913. 47 Vocational training drew interest from researchers and experts such as Cyril Burt in this period. See Pamela Dale, ‘A New Approach to Vocational Guidance for School-Leavers in the 1920s? Exploring Key Themes from an Influential 1926 Report’, History of Education 41:5 (2012). For vocational guidance in Hertfordshire schools, see David Parker, ‘“Just a Stepping Stone” – The Growth of Vocationalism in the Elementary School Curriculum, 1914–39’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 35:1 (2003). 48 TNA, ED21/34895, Jubilee souvenir booklet, 1928. 49 LMA, LCC/EO/WEL/03/03, Care committee minutes, 16 May 1927. 50 LMA, LCC/EO/WEL/02/012, Care committee minutes, 26 Jan. 1925; 19 Oct. 1925; 16 June 1924. 51 S.F. Hatton, London’s Bad Boys (London: Chapman & Hall, 1931), 67. 52 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/EVE/LB/007, Logbook, 22 July 1936. 53 TNA, ED21/35160, Inspection report, 20 Nov. 1935; ED21/35084, Inspection report, 1 Dec. 1925. 54 TNA, ED21/35323, Inspection report, 24 April 1931. 55 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/QMR/LB/002, ‘Report of progress, 1930–31’. 56 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HOD/LB/005, Logbook, 16 Dec. 1924; LCC/ EO/DIV08/PRI/LB/007, Logbook, 29 Nov. 1936.

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57 TNA, ED21/34750, Inspection report, 26 Sept. 1931. 58 Nugent, Vocations; London Teacher, 15 Oct. 1926. 59 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAN1/LB/011, Logbook, 26 July 1922. 60 London Teacher, 25 Feb 1938. 61 LMA, LCC/EO/SS/01/5, Headteacher to Education Officer, Oct. 1936. 62 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/RIC/LB/002, Logbook, 14 Sept. 1934. 63 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/071, Inspector’s report on enquiry into visits to industrial firms, March 1936. 64 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/071, Inspector’s report on enquiry into visits to industrial firms, March 1936. 65 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/071, Inspector’s report on enquiry into visits to industrial firms, March 1936. 66 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/TOL/LB/001, Logbook, 19 April 1921. 67 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/EVE/LB/002, Headteacher’s letter, Sept. 1926. 68 TNA, ED21/34808, Inspection report, 6 Sept. 1934. 69 Nugent, Vocations, 12. 70 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/PLA/LB/003, 18 Jan. 1922; London Teacher, 15 Jan. 1926; TNA, ED21/34615, 4 April 1928. 71 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/QMR/LB/002, Inspection report, 7 April 1936. 72 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/04/012, Headteachers’ letters, 1922. Original emphasis. 73 LMA, LCC/EO/WEL/02/012, Care committee minutes, 22 Feb. 1926, 20 June 1927, 17 Oct. 1927. Selina Todd has emphasised the importance of familial recruitment networks in these years. Todd, ‘Povety and Aspiration’, esp. 124–33. 74 London Teacher, 8 Feb. 1935. 75 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/OLD/LB/002, Inspection report, Sept. 1937. 76 London Teacher, 6 March 1925; 2 July 1926. 77 BLSA, A.J. Gardner. See also Magee, Clouds of Glory, 175. Jonathan Rose noted the same appreciation of rote learning in his autobiographical research. Rose, ‘Willingly to School’, 127. 78 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/DUR/LB/002, Inspection report, 17 Dec. 1936. 79 TNA, ED21/34618, Inspection report, 24 Dec. 1935. 80 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STBAR/LB/001, Inspection report, 29  July 1938. 81 TNA, ED21/34547, Inspection report, 20 Dec. 1923. 82 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/BAT/LB/002, Logbook, 24 Feb, 13 July, 8 Dec. 1937; 6 July, 16 Nov. 1938; 15 March 1939. 83 Payten Gunton, New Senior School, 71.

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84 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/021, ‘The Teaching of Science in Elementary Schools of the London County Council’, 11 July 1919. 85 London Teacher, 11 Dec. 1931. 86 Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), 1/GUA/1/1/3, Logbook, 28 Jan. 1932. 87 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAN1/LB/003, Logbook, 9 April 1937. 88 Carter, ‘The Quennells’, 126. 89 Board of Education, Report of the Board of Education for the Year 1920–1921 [Cmd. 1718] (London: HMSO, 1922), 67. 90 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAL/LB/013, Inspection report, 13 May 1935. 91 TNA, ED21/34778, Inspection report, 26 Jan. 1926. 92 Alexander, ‘A New Civilisation?’, 305. 93 Payten Gunton, New Senior School, 71. 94 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/PRI/LB/007, Logbook, 24 Jan. 1939; LCC/ EO/DIV01/EVE/LB/006, Logbook, 17 June 1929. 95 TNA, ED21/34952, Inspection report, 14 Nov. 1924. 96 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/021, LCC report, 11 July 1919. 97 TNA, ED21/34975, Inspection report, 11 May 1928. 98 TNA, ED21/34667, Inspection report, 16 April 1924. 99 A Bill [As Amended in Committee] to Make Further Provision with Respect to Education in England and Wales and for Purposes Connected Therewith (1918). Parliament: House of Commons. Bill No. 57, 29. 100 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 15 Oct. 1919. 101 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/147, P.B. Ballard, ‘Report on 25 years of LCC education’, 1930; London Teacher, 3 July 1931. 102 TNA, ED21/35081, Inspection report, 3 March 1924; LMA, LCC/EO/ DIV05/BOW4/LB/001, Inspection report, 10 Feb. 1927; TNA, ED21/ 34518, Inspection report, 31 Jan. 1927; ED21/34802, Inspection report, 17 Sept. 1929. 103 TNA, ED21/35169, Inspection report, 20 Nov. 1924; ED21/35191, Inspection report, 13 Dec. 1925. 104 TNA, ED21/35122, Inspection report, 19 Dec. 1933; ED21/34654, Inspection report, 2 April 1928. 105 TNA, ED21/35022, Inspection report, 13 Nov. 1929. 106 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 1 April 1925. 107 TNA, ED21/35162, Inspection report, 14 Dec. 1928. 108 National Union of Teachers, The Schools at Work: Being a Pictorial Survey of National Education in England and Wales (London: Evans Brothers, 1935), 29. 109 London Teacher, 11 March 1932.

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110 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/JAN/LB/001, Logbook, 18 Nov. 1919; LCC/ EO/DIV06/CAT/LB/003, Logbook, 2 March 1926; 17 Oct. 1927. 111 Stuart Maclure, One Hundred Years of London Education, 1870–1970 (London: Allen Lane, 1970), 148; LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/ NOR/LB/004, Logbook, 30 Sept. 1926. 112 TNA, ED21/34845, Inspection report, 21 Feb. 1925. 113 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/ROM/LB/001, Inspection report, 5 June 1928. 114 TNA, ED21/35012, Inspection report, 3 Sept. 1924. 115 TNA, ED21/34594, Inspection report, 13 Dec. 1932. 116 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/048, Inspection report, 20 April 1935. 117 There has been much written on this. For formative work, see Carol Dyhouse, ‘Good Wives and Little Mothers: Social Anxieties and the Schoolgirl’s Curriculum, 1890–1920’, Oxford Review of Education 3:1 (1977) and Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1981); Davin, Growing Up Poor; Felicity Hunt (ed.), Lessons for Life. The Schooling of Girls and Women 1850–1950 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 118 TNA, ED21/34786, Inspection report, 15 Feb. 1933; ED21/34775, Inspection report, 19 Sept. 1932. 119 TNA, ED21/34899, Inspection report, 15 April 1929. 120 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/02/002, Headteachers’ meeting, 19 July 1934. 121 ERO, T/Z 25/4287. 122 TNA, ED136/109, Board of Education memo, Aug. 1937. 123 LMA, ACC/3095, Exercise book, 1924–25. 124 For example, Davin, Growing Up Poor, 151–2; Annmarie Turnbull, ‘Learning Her Womanly Work: The Elementary School Curriculum, 1870–1914’, in Hunt, Lessons for Life, 92, 97–8. 125 TNA, ED21/34520, Inspection report, 19 July 1930. 126 Scannell, Mother Knew Best, 136–7. 127 See, for example, Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman’s Place. An Oral History of Working-Class Women 1890–1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 32–4; Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, 90–1; Diana E. St John, ‘“Educate or Domesticate?” Early Twentieth Century Pressures on Older Girls in Elementary School’, Women’s History Review 3:2 (1994), 197. 128 BLSA, Polly Howell. 129 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/MUN/LB/009, Logbook, 12 May 1919. 130 Board of Education, Handbook of Suggestions on Health Education (London: HMSO, 1933), 82. 131 London Teacher, 28 Oct. 1932.

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132 Helen Sillitoe, A History of the Teaching of Domestic Subjects (London: Methuen & Co., 1933), 223–4. 133 TNA, ED21/34980, Inspection report, 17 Jan. 1927. 134 TNA, ED21/34744, Inspection report, 23 Jan. 1936. 135 For the resistance of some women teachers and educationalists to domestic tuition over a longer period, see St John, ‘Educate or Domesticate?’; Felicity Hunt, Gender and Policy in English Education. Schooling for Girls 1902–44 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 106–8; Hilda Kean, Deeds Not Words: The Lives of Suffragette Teachers (London: Pluto, 1990), 54–6; Hilda Kean, Challenging the State? The Socialist and Feminist Educational Experience 1900–1930 (London: Falmer, 1990), 126. 136 The Schoolmaster, 25 Jan. 1919. 137 Evelyn Sharp, The London Child (London: John Lane, 1927), 81. 138 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/SOU/LB/001, Logbook, 9 Jan. 1929; LCC/ EO/DIV05/STPAU1/LB/006, Logbook, 5 March 1920. 139 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/LAW/LB/003, Logbook, 31 March 1919. 140 TNA, ED21/34717, Inspection report, 8 May 1928. 141 ERO, T/Z 25/3459. 142 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/WAL/LB/006, Logbook, 20 June 1923. 143 Dale, ‘A New Approach’, 603. 144 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STBAR/LB/001, Inspection report, 29 July 1938. 145 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/015, LCC report on senior elementary schools, 9 June 1939. 146 Archives of the Royal Commonwealth Society, University of Cambridge (ARCS), GBR/0115/RCS/ARCS/20/1/2–4, Essay competitions, 1923–5; LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/CEN/LB/004, Open day programme, 18 Jan. 1928; LCC/EO/DIV07/IVY/LB/002, School flyer; TNA, ED21/35104, Inspection report, 27 Nov. 1928. 147 TNA, ED21/35087, Inspection report, 1 May 1930. 148 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/PET/LB/001, Logbook, 28 May 1937; LCC/ EO/DIV07/LEW/LB/004, Logbook, 1 July 1925. 149 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/VIC/LB/003, Logbook, 9 June 1939. 150 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/WIL/LB/013, Child’s essay, n.d., early 1920s. 151 Gamble, Chelsea Child, 172. 152 Gamble, Chelsea Child, 57. 153 TNA, ED21/35150, Inspection report, 22 Dec. 1930. 154 TNA, ED21/34616, Inspection report, 27 Oct. 1925; LMA, LCC/EO/ DIV06/POW/LB/003, Logbook, 30 Jan. 1920. 155 TNA, ED21/35321, Inspection report, 9 April 1925.

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156 Mark Benney, Low Company, Describing the Evolution of a Burglar (London: Peter Davies, 1936), 134. 157 BLSA, Violet Wallace. 158 J.J. Shakespeare, ‘An Enquiry into the Relative Popularity of School Subjects in Elementary Schools’, British Journal of Educational Psychology 6:2 (1936), 162. 159 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/015, LCC report on senior elementary schools, 9 June 1939. 160 London Teacher, 2 Nov. 1928.

4

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Fighting poverty

When inspectors reported on Johanna Street School in 1933, they painted a grim picture of its neighbourhood: [the school is] closely surrounded by the very mean streets of small and densely overcrowded houses off the Lower Marsh, itself a thickly obstructed street of coster-stalls and cheap shops … Most of the children in the school exhibit the defects, natural and acquired, arising from dirt, neglect, unsuitable and insufficient food, late hours, insanitary and scarcely decent homes (one small room being frequently the ‘home’ of a family), the general domestic atmosphere of insecurity, indifference, shiftiness, sheer poverty, degradation, and sometimes vice and crime … At Johanna Street much of the work must be done in a missionary spirit.1

Conditions varied considerably across the capital, but the area of north Lambeth from which Johanna Street drew its pupils was not the only part of London to suffer appalling poverty in the interwar years, with overcrowded housing and fluctuating levels of unemployment. In 1932 the School Medical Officer for London reported that while the number of ‘definitely ill-nourished’ children was only about one in 6,000, the number with ‘subnormal nutrition’ was almost one in twenty.2 ‘Food is poor and insufficient, overcrowding and sickness almost endemic … The physique is poor; clothing is pathetically meagre’, inspectors wrote of the children of another school, a few miles away in Deptford.3 Sometimes poverty was only incidentally discovered, as when a Camberwell schoolboy was taken ill in class: ‘found mother was in hospital and father in prison. Home being “run” by sister aged twelve.’4

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Such conditions obviously affected children’s school attendance. In poorer areas a lack of boots could keep children from school in bad weather, as could the infectious diseases to which malnourished or anaemic children were particularly vulnerable. ‘There may be 46 on a class roll but it may not be the same 46 children two weeks together’, an inspector wrote of a school in Paddington.5 Even more significant were the absences of up to a month of 25,000 children from east London whose families decamped to Kent every summer to earn money hop-picking. Between 1927 and 1930, ‘hopping holidays’ were trialled, in which schools whose populations were badly affected could change their summer holiday from August to September. The experiment was discontinued in 1931 as fewer schools took part each year, in part due to ‘the stigma of being a hop-picking school’.6 Once inside the classroom, poverty continued to mark children out. When a new bathing attendant started at one school, for example, she worked only one day before resigning as ‘children’s condition made her sick’; her replacement managed three weeks.7 There are occasional reports of children sent home as ‘too dirty to sit in class’ or ‘smell most offensive, even children complained’.8 One headteacher wrote of a girl sent to the cleansing station whose ‘head was in such a terrible condition that it was necessary to have all her hair cut off’.9 It is not surprising that children’s learning was affected. ‘In the circumstances, it is only to be expected that an exceptionally large number of boys are backward and dull almost to the point of mental deficiency’, wrote the inspector of a school near St Pancras.10 His colleagues elsewhere blamed the inability to sleep well in crowded, noisy neighbourhoods ‘for the inertia shown by some of the children’ or their ‘mental listlessness’.11 The difficulty of recruiting and retaining teachers in poorer neighbourhoods caused further problems. In 1921, a headteacher led her Camberwell school for only a year before applying for transfer, stating that ‘the conditions under which she is now working are so depressing that she cannot continue without breaking down’.12 Other teachers requested transfers to schools ‘in a brighter, healthier and less depressing neighbourhood’, or ‘where the conditions are of a less trying and depressing nature’.13

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It was common to find comments – as with Johanna Street – that ‘social work is the first duty’.14 They spoke to a central belief in the school’s role as a provider of welfare that was at least as important as its role as an educator. In 1922, when a proposal was put forward to exclude children under 6 from school for economy purposes, a school manager’s argument in opposition made no reference to education at all: ‘It means that all medical supervision is postponed for a year. It means that the children are consigned for another year without any alleviation of a defect in health. I might even say consigned to insanitary homes or to the still more dangerous streets.’15 At another meeting, the President of the London Teachers’ Association was similarly concerned if the proposal went ahead: In London 100,000 young children will be robbed of warmth … The argument used in the Economy Report for the exclusion of the young children is that their attainments at the age of 14 would be no less if they began school life at a later age. Attainments! Do we measure the value of an education solely on attainments? I think not.16

Once seen as stepping stones on the road to Beveridge, historians have since re-evaluated the motives for school welfare provision before the Second World War. James Vernon, for example, suggests that while the availability of school meals ‘acknowledged children’s new social right not to be hungry, it did so in return for educating them in a new set of social responsibilities and obligations: of eating the correct foods in the right way and becoming healthy and civil citizens’.17 Peter Atkins goes further, arguing that ‘the hard economic logic of school milk’ – with the dairy industry the most obvious beneficiary – was more important than ‘any conceptual recentring toward social welfare in the sense of an antipoverty drive’.18 Several historians have noted the increasing association of good citizenship with physical efficiency in the years before and after the First World War, and the pursuit of citizens who were productive as well as loyal.19 John Welshman quotes the introduction to the handbook on health education issued to teachers in 1928, which concluded that ‘the first duty of a citizen to the State is to make himself a strong, long-lived, capable citizen, able to work and produce, the guardian and maintainer of a home, an all-round man, loyal, patriotic, a “friend and helper of mankind”’.20 Jane Pilcher

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Fighting poverty 129

has quoted the same passage, arguing that, despite the gendered assumptions within it, it was more often ‘feminine childhood not masculine childhood that remained the socially constructed embodiment of responsibility for the present and future avoidance of dirt, disease, malnutrition, ill-health and immorality’.21 There is no doubt that these considerations influenced policy makers, as well as some teachers. One head, whose school was participating in an LCC scheme to provide baths for children considered ‘the baths of great value as a means of training in citizenship in this particular district’.22 But motives should not solely be read cynically. Another headteacher, whose school was also experimenting with baths, agreed that they had an ‘educative influence’, but also expressed pleasure at seeing ‘children return from their morning dip not only cleaner but much happier and more at ease, with that healthy glow about them which children ought to have’.23 In her case-study of a Birmingham school in a slightly earlier period, Susannah Wright found that the school remained ‘central to joined-up welfare provision in the area’.24 In interwar London, too, it is evident that, whatever the motives of policy makers, inspectors or teachers, schools played a critical role in welfare provision. This chapter examines the social function of the school as a site for medical inspections, the distribution of boots and spectacles, the provision of meals and milk, and changing attitudes towards openair schooling and physical education. It also examines the way that children and their families responded, finding that while some initiatives were viewed with hostility, most efforts were welcomed. Individual schools varied in the effort and time they could devote to social problems, of course. While schools undoubtedly made a difference, the poverty of the urban evacuees which shocked middle-class householders in September 1939 would not, perhaps, have been so surprising to their teachers. Elementary schools had been a site of welfare long before the New Liberal reforms allocated them a systematic role; the informal efforts of individual teachers had always been able to make a difference to individual pupils. But by the interwar period welfare was becoming one of the school’s primary and formal functions. In 1934, during

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an LCC discussion about the provision of supply teachers, it was pointed out that ‘a school today is an entirely d ­ ifferent place from what it was twenty, fifteen or even ten years ago … Headteachers [now] are … accounting officers in many cases  … they are constantly required to interview officials, inspectors, care committee and after-care workers, managers and parents.’25 The most important duties were defined by legislation before and after the war, and included the provision of milk and meals, the medical inspection and treatment of children, and measures to rid children of vermin. By 1937, about 320,000 children in London were benefiting from free or subsidised milk and tens of thousands were inspected and/or treated each year for eye defects, ringworm, dentistry or other minor ailments, or referred to cleansing stations for the removal of lice or worse.26 In addition to these central functions, many schools took on a number of other welfare duties: liaising with charities such as the Children’s Country Holiday Fund, for example, or managing the charitable donations of clothes and boots, which ‘takes up a good deal of the headmaster’s time’.27 More than one school ran bootrepairing classes out of school hours. Many infants schools incorporated nap time into their afternoon routine; for some, this meant putting heads down on desks, but in the best schools children lay ‘on beds provided by private funds, the headmistress having spent much energy on getting up jumble sales etc. in order to raise money for this equipment … [for] children, who can rarely have a quiet night’s rest at home’.28 There were also a wealth of miscellaneous and ad hoc activities, such as the distribution of one hundredweight of coal among pupils, following a private donation, or the negotiations undertaken by one headteacher with the manager of the local baths to allow her girls to get a subsidised hot bath during certain hours: ‘Many already are taking advantage of the facility.’29 The care committees to which most schools were affiliated assisted with these activities. Their duties included advice about future employment (as discussed in Chapter 3), but also liaising with parents and medics regarding the provision of milk, meals or treatment. The majority of volunteers were middle-class women, and at least one set of managers thought it inadvisable to appoint members to schools ‘if they lived among the parents of children

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attending them’.30 Their focus was on self-help rather than charity, and in their work ‘every effort is made to preserve and to increase parental responsibility’.31 Welfare activities were intended to have an instructive purpose for pupils as well as parents, and a ‘practical training in cleanliness’ was also incorporated formally into the curriculum through ‘hygiene’ lessons.32 Indeed (and not unproblematically, the inspectors felt), one school had taken everything but hygiene out of its science lessons, for which the scheme of work listed ‘Food, clothing, ventilation, exercise, care of the eyes, ears, teeth, skin. Treatment of common ailments, elements of first aid.’33 In 1927, informal enquiries were made by inspectors in 199 departments regarding the teaching of hygiene. The results showed a large majority of the schools doing ‘valuable work … in inculcating healthy habits’ – though more often in girls’ than in boys’ departments: A ‘Clean Hands’ chart is used in one school; in several others nit combs, soap, toothbrushes or toothpaste are on sale, and while the attendance of boys and girls at the local Baths for a hot bath is very generally encouraged, in one case arrangements are made for regular attendance for this purpose … In many classrooms, coloured health mottoes are exhibited. In one girls’ school a junior Red Cross branch of sixty girls … has been formed and the Red Cross code of health laws adopted.34

One ex-schoolgirl, born in Stepney in 1922, remembered the teacher whose ‘first act of the day was to have a three-minute gargle with TCP … We all watched her in silence.’35 A contemporary remembered his class being shown a box of tissues. The teacher ‘demonstrated how to pull one sheet out, leaving the next exposed … I was fascinated, I had never seen anything like this before.’36 Physical education was at the heart of the drive for healthy bodies.37 At a school in Deptford, where children were ‘poor and many are ill-clad’, the ‘Pobs’ – Pride of Body – society was formed ‘for those boys who wish to devote extra care to their Physical Education’. It met out of school hours and ‘exacts a high standard and obtains eager members’.38 If this was unusual, the practice of physical education within most schools had changed significantly

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since the drill lessons of the late nineteenth century, reflecting the greater concern for public health amid fears of national decline. As the Board of Education explained in 1919, ‘it is now recognised that an efficient system of education should encourage the concurrent development of a healthy physique, keen intelligence and sound character’.39 Inspection reports reveal the usual variety of activities across different schools and the variation in skills and interests among teachers were perhaps even more important here than in other subjects. The Forster School in Islington, for example, was led in the 1930s by a headmaster who had played cricket for his county, coached numerous schoolboy teams and had published an illustrated book on ‘Cricket for Boys’; one assumes that he encouraged his pupils to share his love of the game.40 Another headmaster, this time in Lewisham, was a boxing fan: ‘in the lunch period eight rings are kept going with the result that the school is winning some distinction in this activity’.41 A Marylebone school even had a rowing tank, constructed by staff and pupils.42 Girls might enjoy netball or rounders, or ‘folk dancing in the hall with gramophone music  … [which] is improving the physical carriage and poise of the pupils’.43 One of the most common activities for both boys and girls was swimming and by the mid-1920s schools could take advantage of three LCC-owned swimming baths or make arrangements with local private provision.44 Statistics were occasionally recorded in the London Teacher: in 1930, for example, nearly 39,000 London schoolchildren were taught to swim.45 When, a few years later, 73 junior departments from across London replied to a questionnaire from the Education Officer, 64 said that they took their pupils swimming; only 9 did not.46 For debilitated children, open-air education was advocated, tied to new ideas about hygiene that were influential across Europe in the early part of the century.47 Before the First World War, much of the impetus had come from individuals and pressure groups. Margaret McMillan’s camp school at Deptford – initially just an open space where local children could spend the night – was one of the most famous, and where she hoped to show that it was possible ‘to take a dirty, malnourished, swollen-eyed child and make it healthy and beautiful’.48

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The first British open-air school was opened by the LCC in Woolwich in 1907 and was soon followed by others. By 1929, the LCC owned twelve open-air schools, of which three were residential.49 Bow Road was one of the day schools and was educating 194 children from 87 different schools when it was inspected in 1926. ‘The headmaster has made it his special aim to keep the children out of doors as much as possible’, commented the inspector. ‘The conviction and enthusiasm that are needed to carry out so complete an open-air policy can be fully appreciated only by those who, like the inspectors … have spent days in the school during a period of heavy rain, cold wind and sunless skies.’50 As well as dedicated open-air schools, the interwar years also saw the inauguration of an increasing number of open-air classes. Some were based at a centre, bringing together children from several surrounding schools, but the majority were organised within an existing school. In 1919, eighty-seven open-air classes were sanctioned by the LCC. Although adopted primarily as a means of recuperation for ‘weak’ children, the assumed health benefits to all were reflected in the fact that only seven of these were for children specially selected as ‘delicate’; the vast majority were ‘ordinary’ classes held outside, albeit usually in deprived areas.51 By the early 1930s, two hundred open-air classes were authorised in London schools. One doctor credited them with a ‘tremendous’ improvement on children’s health.52 The LCC’s interwar rhetoric – and that of the Board of Education nationally – vigorously asserted the success of child welfare programmes. Their claims were challenged in the 1930s by nutritionists such as John Boyd Orr and were later dented by the revelations of wartime evacuation.53 Historians have since picked over the details of welfare legislation and found it lacking. Charles Webster, for examp le, notes that the term ‘meals’ was used to cover both solid meals and milk when the vast majority served were the latter; that food was of poor quality and eaten in the dreary environment of the feeding centres; and that eligibility criteria were harsh.54 Linda Bryder has suggested that one of the reasons that the open-air movement was popular was because ‘fresh air was far cheaper than food’.55 London was hailed as a progressive authority, but the statistics sometimes reflect poorly. When the senior boys’ department of a

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Hampstead school was inspected in 1935, for example, there were 338 boys in the school of whom 67 had fathers who were unemployed, 33 had no father, 110 had mothers who had to work and ‘about 40 show distinct traces of under-development’. Yet only four boys were in receipt of free meals and twelve took free milk.56 Indeed, despite the fanfare around milk and meals, it is striking that some memoirs of London childhood have no memory of such schemes. ‘There was no school milk in those days and, in fact, no school meals’, declares more than one autobiographer.57 Others recall its unpleasantness: ‘[The milk] had skin on top and was warm’; or remember the cups of cocoa passed through the railings by a grandmother at breaktime: ‘She used to try and feed me up because my mother had died of TB.’58 School buildings and equipment could thwart the best intentions. More than one inspector criticised the state of children’s toilets: ‘on the two days of the inspection soap and towels were not available and the water was turned off most of the day … an opportunity of valuable education in good habits is being lost’.59 Inspectors often lamented the lack of proper sleeping equipment for younger children: in one school they lay ‘on the floor on rugs, but many of them fail to sleep – probably owing to ground draughts’; in another ‘some of them sleep on tables (an unsafe plan), others on sheets of paper on the ground’.60 Memoirs attest to this, as well as cynicism over motives, and one woman remembered that ‘we simply rested our little heads on folded arms on our desks to refresh us … or was it to give our poor teacher some peace and quiet?’61 Dozens of inspection reports bemoaned the lack of playground space in particular, such as at one Holborn school where ‘the boys’ playground is considerably below the level of the street; most of it is under rather massive and forbidding arches … the sun never reaches it. The girls use the playground on the roof and this gets very dirty from the soot deposited from neighbouring chimneys.’62 Another school had no playground at all and physical training was taken in the road ‘which, fortunately, is very little used’.63 Others had no hall, meaning that physical training on wet days ‘consists merely of some deep breathing exercises in the classrooms’.64 Physical education was further hampered by children’s lack of appropriate footwear, although inspectors were generally positive about the

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combined efforts of teachers, council, and parents – particularly by the 1930s – to provide plimsolls. There were some improvements over the period: the LCC acquired a playing field at Streatham in 1931, which local schools could use, and similar spaces were later provided elsewhere, but no such facilities were available in the 1920s.65 This might be one reason for the popularity of swimming, which could be easier to arrange if schools were close to local baths. Not all were: in 1938 one headteacher recorded that sixty boys had been to the cinema that day to watch a film illustrating swimming strokes and diving methods.66 Open-air education was also difficult to resource. The open-air shelter used by one East End school had a tarpaulin roof which made it very dark on dull days and offered little side protection from rain. Complaints were made by the school managers to no avail.67 At a school a couple of minutes away, another headteacher complained about the conditions for her pupils attending the open-air class in Victoria Park. The windscreen was almost useless, she noted in the logbook; a few days later the blackboard was blown over and broke.68 Some classes were authorised to run throughout the winter: at a school in Notting Hill, where children came from poor homes and were more likely to be inadequately dressed, the openair class moved indoors for a fortnight when the mercury dropped so low that the ink wells froze. Outdoor work resumed in late February, but one imagines that it remained rather cold.69 Even if resources were available, activities still depended on teachers’ enthusiasm and ability. In 1929, inspectors lamented of a newly built school in Camberwell that no use was made of the new baths installed, despite the neighbourhood’s poverty.70 Another school, a five-minute walk from Regent’s Park, was criticised for not using the space for games.71 At other schools, apparatus for physical education lay untouched because older staff were unable to use it.72 One medical officer suggested that teachers were using open-air referrals cynically, recommending (and therefore losing from their classes) those ‘who are backward and unable to keep up’.73 And sometimes there was no obvious reason why ‘the boys are not adequately exercised. On the day of the inspection they were slow in response and slovenly in their movements.’74

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Similarly, formal ‘hygiene’ lessons were variable in their quality: in the early 1930s, hygiene lessons at a boys’ school consisted ‘mainly of admonitory talks on personal hygiene’; at another, the lessons ‘suffer from being too theoretical; the boys were keen, however, and eager to explain what action was necessary in cases of accidents or burns’.75 At a girls’ school, inspectors heard hygiene lessons which ‘were quite sound’, but found them ‘remote from the facts of the children’s lives. If some of them live in overcrowded homes … hygiene lessons should be “how to be healthy though overcrowded”.’76 In most schools, however, improving the welfare of pupils remained an aspiration even if, in practice, this was hindered by space and resourcing. And in the best schools, creative solutions could be found despite these challenges, as in the case of an Islington headteacher, whose girls were still lacking plimsolls even into the 1930s. She changed her lessons instead, obtaining ‘a large carpet for the hall, so that the children can dance to the pianoforte in bare feet’.77 The welfare provisions of the school were often cast explicitly as ‘compensating’ for the home lives of pupils, a ‘happy refuge’ from the slum conditions of the streets.78 The headteacher has ‘provided a school in which maladjustments due to unsatisfactory home conditions are being remedied’, wrote one pleased inspector.79 Unemployment was frequently recognised as a cause of poverty and some inspectors were sympathetic. ‘There is reason to believe that behind the appearances there is much poverty courageously met and largely concealed’, wrote one of a Hackney school.80 Far more often, however, acknowledgement of poverty went alongside criticism of parents: the poorest children of one school, for example, were described as the offspring of casual labourers, street sellers, the unemployed and ‘unemployable street loafers’.81 Of another school, many of whose children ‘live in one room and have fathers who are out of work’, the inspector was still disappointed that ‘many hands and faces were dirtier than they should be even in this poor area’.82 Some educational officials found confirmation of a belief in the inadequacy of working-class parenting in responses to welfare

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initiatives, with parental ‘apathy’ frequently condemned.83 One inspector described children who were ‘very poor and very illkept  … less than half in one class had handkerchiefs’.84 Another noted the lack of sleep: ‘parental control appears to be very weak, and the children are allowed to be in the streets until late at night’.85 Persuading parents to contribute to treatment costs was a particular bugbear and the fact that poorer children were more likely to suffer ill-health made it all the more unfortunate that ‘it is difficult to persuade the depressed parents to have their children’s eyes, teeth, etc., treated’.86 It is possible that parents were more willing to attend events which celebrated their child’s education (discussed in Chapter 3), than those which focused on their health. Stewart Headlam Boys’ School, for example, whose pupils came ‘from rather poor homes even for the East End’, held a successful open day in the autumn of 1935 when around 260 parents and friends visited to see the work of the school. A month later, only 47 parents attended the dental inspection of 134 children, 107 of whom had defects.87 Hague Street School, a couple of minutes down the road, also boasted parental interest in its open days, yet struggled to get numbers in for dental inspections: when 149 boys were inspected in June 1925 (nearly one hundred of whom needed treatment), only about forty parents attended.88 Officials might express incredulity at their apparent disregard. When a meeting was held for parents of children being treated for stammering, it was noted that ‘one of the chief difficulties … is the lack of interest – if not direct opposition – shown by some of the parents, e.g. one mother did not attend the meeting because she “had to wash up”, and another because she “forgot”!’89 In some cases, teachers, too, showed a lack of understanding. One woman, born in Hackney in 1910, recalled getting caught eating her sandwiches in class. Her teacher threw them on the fire, to her mother’s fury: ‘she wants to go and stand down those bloody relieving offices like I have to for two bloody loaves’.90 Contemporary evidence also suggests that some teachers might be insensitive to the difficult choices faced by struggling families. When a child wearing old, over-sized boots fell in the playground, for example, her headteacher accepted that ‘father’s work is very

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irregular’, but nevertheless asked the girl’s mother to promise ‘to clothe and shod this child more satisfactorily’.91 The headteacher of a school in a poor district of Camberwell was also dispirited after abandoning a scheme to take boys to a playing field an hour’s walk away, following parental objections over ‘the boys’ lack of suitable boots, the expense of a midday meal away from home, and their need of the boy at midday to run errands’.92 Another headteacher bemoaned the state of a boy who she sent home ‘because he was so dirty … parents make no effort to keep him clean’. His home situation becomes clear to the historian in an entry made eighteen months later when he failed to attend the residential school to which he had been referred: ‘Parents have been turned out of house, so that at present there is no trace of him.’93 Sometimes misunderstanding slipped into contempt, and in 1939, a Camberwell headteacher complained that she had been unable to secure spectacles for pupils who needed them, including one boy who had been waiting for glasses for months but whose parents ‘wish Peter to have rolled gold frames’.94 A few officials did realise that a lack of engagement with welfare measures – aside from any practical difficulties that families faced – might not be a parental decision. In 1925 the School Medical Officer recorded that, across London, only 29 per cent of mothers attended the final medical examination for leaving-age boys. He was sensitive enough to note that this was not, however, ‘due to want of interest on the part of the parents, but is due to the fact that the leaving boy hates to be thought to be tied to his mother’s apron-strings’.95 An inspector also realised that it was the boys themselves, not their parents, who needed persuasion to enrol in the new milk scheme introduced in 1934: ‘When the  scheme was   first introduced not more than one third of the [senior] boys availed themselves of the opportunity to purchase the milk ration. There was a feeling among them that the drinking of milk involved some loss of dignity.’96 In his memoirs, one exschoolboy – who had never been keen on milk – remembered the deal he made with a friend. ‘He drank my milk whilst we spent his milk money on sweets. This was to go on for ages, until the doctor decided that the free milk had done its job and took me off it, a sad day.’97



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Other officials suggested that ‘nearly all the mothers are making an effort to do well by their children’, but that ‘they need education’. As the School Medical Officer explained: They believe that meat is bad for children, and that having a little flavouring of it in a stew is what they need. Milk, in their view, is only a pleasant drink, good for infants and not necessary for children who can eat with the family. Plain Empire or Dutch cheese by the pound is not so good a bargain, they think, as an expensive kind in silver paper wrappings. There is a very common notion that a little of the water in which greens have been boiled is a good substitute for the greens themselves … There is a strange prejudice against the white of an egg, and a child who asks for the yolk to be cooked solid must be refused.

He also suggested that advice was sometimes misconstrued: ‘The word “nutrition” still raises animosity in the minds of some parents. They think it suggests that they starve the children.’98 But of all the welfare activities undertaken by schools, it was the subject of cleanliness which had the greatest potential to bring families and schools into conflict. Children’s anxiety around inspections and the stigma of being labelled ‘unclean’ is attested to in several memoirs and oral history accounts, voiced in descriptions of ‘Nitty Norah’ – the nit nurse – as ‘a thin and angular woman, hair scragged tightly into a bun … Her lips were set in a continuous snarl and her nose twitched as though assailed by a permanent nasty smell.’99 As an LCC report of 1920 acknowledged, the system was ‘very much resented by both parents and children, and the cleansing stations are in consequence unpopular. Serious disturbances and considerable damage to property … have quite recently taken place and the Council’s nurses have been subjected to physical violence at the hands of irate parents.’100 At least one headteacher complained after a routine inspection: ‘spent next morning in sending off senseless parents’.101 Throughout the interwar period, the number of cases in which children were compulsorily cleansed – meaning parents had twice ignored requests to remedy the matter themselves, either at home or at a cleansing station – fluctuated between 14 per cent and 20 per cent of all those found to be verminous, indicating a significant minority of parents who, by choice or circumstance, failed

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to cooperate. In the most extreme cases, police proceedings were brought and a few hundred parents prosecuted each year.102 In some cases, schools really were protecting children against cruel or neglectful parents. Teachers might contact the NSPCC when concerns were raised about a child’s welfare. Some attempted to deal with the problem themselves: when one discovered that a pupil was periodically beaten at home, she requested a meeting with the mother and urged her ‘not to cane the girl as in view of her delicate health this was most dangerous’. There is no subsequent record to show whether or not her advice made any difference.103 Ultimately, it might be the children who lost out. In December 1930 the headteacher of a school for ‘mentally defective’ children recorded that a 14-year-old girl had come to school ‘in a very hysterical condition screaming out accusations against mother and home conditions’. Over the next couple of months there were a series of entries about the girl and her 11-year-old sister, detailing a wave of inquiries and interviews, including the charging of a man for assault. The charge was dismissed for want of corroboration and eventually both girls were sent to (different) residential schools.104 A minority of abusive parents aside, other families might find that intervention came in other ways. Under legislation in place since 1904, the LCC could investigate further when children were found to be in particular states of uncleanliness, with power to disinfect homes or destroy bedding. Several thousand homes were visited between 1920 and 1927 (after which precise figures were not recorded), and each year a significant proportion were subject to action.105 In 1921, for example, an analysis of 140 cases of ‘slightly verminous heads’ dealt with by Hammersmith Borough Council showed that in 28 per cent of cases family members other than schoolchildren were cleansed, and in 47 per cent action was taken such as disinfecting articles or serving notices on owners.106 Explaining the policy in 1921, the London Teacher approved: ‘An infected child may be cleansed ad infinitum but if it comes from dirty surroundings, the evil will recur.’107 More generally, inspection reports referred to the need to ‘win over’ parents, to treat them with ‘patient sympathy and some firmness’ or ‘tactful handling’.108 Headteachers took advantage of opportunities to inform parents on welfare matters, such as the

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infants’ headteacher who used an open day ‘to address the mothers for a few minutes … [giving] words of encouragement and advice to continue their efforts to send the children clean and tidy to school’, or another who had ‘a little friendly talk … and advised them to see that their children had a good breakfast before coming to school’.109 A third used the excuse of Empire Day celebrations ‘to request parents to refrain from keeping children out so late on Sunday that they are unable to get up in time for school on Monday’.110 A few schools found the time and resources to target mothers more directly, establishing classes which drew on longer traditions of ‘schools for mothers’ (and, more rarely, fathers) set up by ­middle-class women in the 1900s and earlier.111 One inspector praised a Finsbury headteacher who established a Mothers’ Union: ‘[She] holds the view that her duty extends, to a certain extent, outside school.’112 In 1931, an infants school in Islington started a needlework class for mothers, with about forty women in attendance. It was still going over a year later, held twice weekly.113 Certainly some teachers showed a genuine care for parents. One school tried to help with ‘assisting unemployed parents’, organising a fundraiser for the benefit of the local unemployed fund.114 Another hosted a tea and concert for 250 mothers. The aim, according to the headteacher, was to foster links between home and school and ‘most important, to give them a really good time’.115 Plenty of memoirs and oral history testaments recall the physicality of school as a warm, safe place. Louis Heren attended the Highway School: ‘By Shadwell standards the heating was wonderful. I can never forget the warmth of the classrooms on a cold day, or sitting on the pipes in the corridors during the breaks.’116 Another memoirist described the poverty of her Bethnal Green home before remembering her school as ‘a place of order and warmth. Every classroom had a large fireplace where … a banked-up fire burned.’117 Many found other reasons to be grateful. Just as Carolyn Steedman has written of the welfare provisions in the schools of the 1950s, for example, as telling her ‘in a covert way, that I had a right to exist, was worth something’, one woman remembers benefiting from the distribution of milk before the war: ‘I often think it must have given me some nourishment, as I have reached 85 years old.’118

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At least some remember the small kindnesses of teachers: times when ‘teacher would leave his class and come down to the gates and fill my bag with bottles of milk so that the family would not go without’; or ‘the teacher sending me home with paper patterns of children’s feet, to ask my mother – because I always had shoes – if there were any that I’d grown out of’.119 Many memoirs give contrasting impressions, of course. The open-air school – so frequently the subject of celebratory claims by officials – was not appreciated by Reg Chamberlain, who suffered from rickets as a child and was unhappy at the open-air residential school that he attended: A lovely big country place but with huts and a sort of square, with all open sides that us boys had to sleep in. The master used to walk around with a big cane … They were very strict. All our thoughts were to escaping, how we could get out and get back home. I was dying to leave and go back home but you had to put on some weight in order that they would let you home. I was so nervous on the last morning when I was going to be weighed. And luckily for me I had put on one pound so they let me go.120

However, contemporary sources do suggest that school initiatives could make a difference. In the summer of 1926, the magazine Labour Woman’s children’s competition asked for drawings entitled ‘School after the holidays’. A 9-year-old from Wandsworth was one of the winners with a picture of a drill lesson that she had captioned ‘getting fit after the holidays’; that was what returning to school meant to her.121 Another indication that messages were absorbed, at least by some, can be seen in the prize-winning essay of a 14-year-old who was asked to write about her impressions of a health exhibition held at Bethnal Green town hall in 1928, which she visited with her class: A lady doctor, a very clever health advisor, came and gave us a lecture the day before we came to the exhibition, and she told us of the various ways in which to keep healthy. Some of the things were, to clean teeth after every meal, to put fresh clothes next to the skin before going to bed, wash arms and underneath them night and morning, to comb hair before going to bed. She did really impress on us that these things were to keep one healthy, and I think she has



Fighting poverty 143 done excellently by telling us, because a great number of us have carried out what she said.

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One of the main features of the exhibition was the demonstration of an ultraviolet light, promoted as an alternative to sunlight. A 13-year-old was impressed: I think we are very fortunate to have such a wonderful invention which gives artificial sunlight to children who cannot get sufficient of the real sunshine. After being sun-rayed the children are as tanned as if they had been to the seaside. This does them a lot of good. I shall keep my windows open as much as possible in order to get the real violet rays from the actual sun.

Perhaps the winners realised that – to get a prize – they needed to parrot certain messages, but their essays nevertheless suggest that some children, at least, might be affected by what they saw and heard.122 Contemporary sources also suggest parental appreciation. When a small boy fractured his wrist in the playground of a Bethnal Green school in 1935, for example, he returned to school the following day ‘because mother thought he was better at school than about the streets’.123 A few years earlier, a Fulham school reported on the large number of children under school age who were being admitted ‘owing to increasing poverty … [meaning] parents are anxious for the children to be in better surroundings’.124 While hygiene and medical issues sometimes caused tension between parents and teachers, this was not universally the case. ‘I was delighted to find how enthusiastic the parents were and how ready to listen to advice’, wrote one headteacher following an open day.125 Others reported that demand exceeded supply when small items such as toothbrushes and combs were made available for families to purchase, or that bathing schemes were popular among parents and children alike.126 Returning from a school trip in 1923 a teacher reported that his pupils had been delighted at the accommodation, with its plentiful supply of hot water: ‘Should anyone wish to give evidence of the demand for baths in working-class homes, we can supply it!’127 The welfare arranged through the school might even, on occasion, be co-opted for the whole family. In 1936 the National Eye Service warned that spectacles should be

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used solely by the individual for whom they were prescribed: ‘It is by no means unknown for all the members of a family to share the same pair of glasses, the child wearing them at school, the mother using them for her sewing, and the father borrowing them for his evening paper.’128 Indeed, for all the documented friction around issues of cleanliness, parental reaction to a diagnosis of ‘uncleanliness’ might be embarrassment rather than hostility. One woman, born in 1916 and schooled in the East End, remembers getting ‘a three’ following a school inspection (‘one’ meant a child was clean, ‘two’ was a suspected case, ‘three’ was confirmed): ‘A sudden crash from the kitchen as Mum dropped what she was doing. “Three!” she shrieked, dashing up the passage and slamming the door … “You can’t have a three, you can’t,” she cried in distress. “Your dad’ll kill me.”’129 For such parents, the school might therefore be an ally. In 1938, when an East End infant school was provided with towelling by the LCC to encourage daily washing, parents volunteered to help teachers cut it to size and lent bowls to compensate for the shortage of basins.130 Sometimes parents were actively consulted: in 1934 it was only after a meeting attended by around one hundred parents that a school in a better-off district of Lewisham decided to join the new milk marketing scheme. The benefits of cheap milk for these ‘generally well-fed children’ versus the cost to lesson time as milk was distributed, drunk and tidied away were discussed; it was decided to join the scheme but ‘parents also agreed to come in and help in the distribution’.131 Many inspection reports of schools in poorer neighbourhoods noted the role of the headteacher – and particularly the ­headmistress – as someone to whom mothers could turn for advice, such as the head of a Camberwell school who was described as ‘the focus of much admirable social work, the mothers seek her help and advice in all kinds of problems, personal, domestic and educational’.132 It was a role that could take up considerable time: ‘enormous amount of correspondence with parents on questions dealing with the medical and welfare side of the child’s life’, another headteacher noted.133 It was this demand on the headteacher’s time that informed a request for more generous staffing by a committee of East End headmistresses in 1927. ‘A large part of the

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headteacher’s time is devoted to giving parents friendly advice on the most varied problems’, they argued, ‘and visits from parents in these areas cannot be confined to regular times as a rigid ruling as to time discourages the parent from seeking such advice. In cases where the headteacher is confined to a classroom [due to lack of staff] this valuable social work becomes impossible.’134 Again, evidence survives to suggest that at least some parents appreciated the effort. One father was moved to write to his son’s headmaster in a letter that reveals both his appreciation of the school’s care and also his hope that they could work together: Dear Sir, I am writing thanking you very much indeed for the way you was good enough to look after my son George. I am pleased to say he seems a bit better, but has a very bad cold … Dear Sir as regards his milk please do not think we do not try with him I take 1 pint of milk a day. I get tired of trying so perhaps you would see he has it at school. I will give him his penny. Once again thanking you very much.135

Such letters are extremely rare, but other logbook records hint at the regard in which a headteacher might be held. Following the abuse of a little girl ‘by a strange man’ in Hammersmith one weekend in 1920, for example, it was to the child’s headteacher that her mother turned on the Monday morning, and it was the headteacher who then filed the police report.136 Similar incidents appear in other logbooks, with the headteacher often the first to be informed. This, of course, might say more about the reputation of the police in some areas. F.H. Spencer, LCC Chief Inspector, commented that The hold which some headmasters and many headmistresses have over the parents, and especially the mothers, in some poor neighbourhoods is remarkable. This not infrequently applies to ‘evil’ as well as good parents. In one criminal region in N.W. London only a few years ago the schoolmistresses and the district nurses were far more secure in their goings and comings than the police.137

Clearly some headteachers worked hard to build trusting relationships with parents, and were likely more sensitive to their pupils’ conditions than those who came into less frequent contact with children and their families.138 In 1926, the pupils of a school in a crowded area of St Pancras, for example, were led by a headmaster

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who had been in post since 1910, having served as head of a neighbouring school for nineteen years before that. Inspectors commented that it had given him ‘a possibly unique knowledge of the home lives of his boys, and [he] rightly attaches very great importance to social work among them’.139 Indeed, teachers might give short shrift to officials who came from outside to pass judgement. In 1936, a researcher investigating different academic standards between English and American children was granted permission by the LCC to visit various schools to gather data. One headteacher wrote to the Education Officer requesting that her school be excluded: ‘My inclination is to withdraw from any test which is not preceded by a definite endeavour to learn about the social ­surroundings – school, home, friends – of the children concerned, learnt, moreover, from talking to the children themselves.’140 Teachers might also offer advice to local officials if they thought that practice could be improved. In 1921, the teachers of a Bethnal Green school protested to the medical officer about the generic notices handed to parents if their child failed an inspection, which did not distinguish between, say, a minor cases of nits or more serious levels of uncleanliness. The notices were causing ‘a good deal of trouble with parents’, they suggested, arguing that different notices for the various degrees of uncleanliness would be a better solution.141 Elsewhere, another headteacher visited his school’s local dining centre and protested on behalf of his pupils that the dinners were greasy, difficult to digest and not very hot.142 Logbooks also record teachers’ frustration at others’ inconsideration. When a school’s medical officer cancelled a visit at short notice, the headteacher berated his thoughtlessness: ‘Parents make arrangements to be absent from work to attend and such cancelling is not fair.’143 One headteacher was furious when a school doctor arrived forty minutes late to see a poorly child, ‘told the mother to take the baby out of the room as she could not stand the noise of the crying’, and gave only a perfunctory examination. ‘As this is not the first case of the doctor’s unkind treatment of parents I wish to place on record my protest’, she wrote.144 Perhaps the most compelling evidence of one headteacher’s sympathetic attitude can be seen in the treatment of a child who was later sent to a school for the ‘mentally defective’. Asked by the

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Education Officer why she had not sent the girl for examination earlier, she defended her decision by linking the child’s ‘backwardness’ to poverty and refusing, unlike many of her contemporaries, to see it as fixed: ‘She was very slow, but not too bad. She was backward too, but we put all this down to the misfortunes of the family. We remember quite well that there were other children worse in the school. In fact now I could easily pick out a few. I should dislike the idea of certifying such children.’145 In 1919 the headteacher of Central Street Boys’ School, ‘situated in one of the poorest quarters in London’, noticed that late-coming was becoming more frequent among his pupils: ‘Spoke to whole school urging earlier bedtime, earlier rising and breakfast AT HOME’, he noted in his logbook. A few pages and eighteen months later he attached a copy of the school’s Christmas concert programme. It included his message to parents: I write for the whole school (teachers and boys) to wish you a very happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year. We hope that the New Year will bring better times and plenty of employment. For the staff and myself I can say that in most cases, your boys try well in work at school and in behaviour to make men of themselves. Please help us in our efforts by a word of encouragement to your boy and by seeing that he is regular and punctual and clean at school.146

It is a good example of the shared responsibility – with both children and parents – that many schools adopted when trying to improve pupils’ welfare. Not all parents responded positively, and some remained suspicious of a school’s encroachment on the health and welfare of their child. A striking example is the logbook entry of one headteacher, following a child cutting her chin in an accident. A teacher took her to the hospital to get stitches. Her mother, however, ‘who visited school today, objects to attendance at the hospital and says she will now go to her own doctor’.147 As always, attitudes were shaped by the personalities involved. Not all headteachers could summon the warmth of the Central Street headmaster’s message. When, in 1924, a Fulham schoolchild slipped in the playground and grazed her face, her headteacher logged the incident, noting that ‘as this child comes from a rather

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neglected home, she was given a small supply of basic ointment and a clean bandage to take home’.148 The entry is both kind and judgemental, the same ‘combination of pity and blame’ with which Susannah Wright has characterised a headteacher’s attitude in a Birmingham school before the First World War.149 Headteachers obviously differed in their balancing of the pity and the blame. Whatever balance they struck, schools were restricted by the conditions in which they operated; sometimes welfare provision was limited. However, there is no doubt that sometimes school could make a difference, even on an individual level. In September 1921, a school for ‘mentally defective’ children in Chelsea referred seven pupils to the NSPCC officer, all for neglect. One was 13-year-old Vera, ‘as the child says there is no food at home’. She stayed at the school until she was 16, the leaving age for ‘mentally defective’ children and, before she left, the logbook listed a group of children who had passed elementary lifesaving. Vera’s name was among them and, nearly one hundred years later, I read the headteacher’s entry and was glad that the school had been able to give this poorest of children something of which to be proud.150

Notes 1 TNA, ED21/34952, Inspection report, 22 Dec. 1933. 2 Quoted in A. Susan Williams, Patrick Ivin and Caroline Morse, The Children of London. Attendance and Welfare at School, 1870–1990 (London: Institute of Education, 2012), 66. 3 TNA, ED21/34710, Inspection report, 12 June 1935. 4 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SCA/LB/001, Logbook, 5 July 1933. 5 TNA, ED21/35065, Inspection report, 1 Sept. 1935. 6 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/243–44, LCC correspondence and minutes, 1927–31. 7 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MOW/LB/012, Logbook, 29 Aug., 18 Sept. 1924. 8 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV06/POW/LB/003, Logbook, 22 Oct. 1922; LCC/ EO/DIV01/BRN/LB/001, Logbook, 14 Nov. 1929. 9 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV09/BRO/LB/003, Logbook, 30 Oct. 1925. 10 TNA, ED21/35176, Inspection report, 25 June 1926.

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11 TNA, ED21/35332, Inspection report, 29 Oct. 1926; ED21/35150, Inspection report, 22 Dec. 1930. 12 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 22 March 1922. 13 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 21 May, 30 July 1919. 14 TNA, ED21/35124, Inspection report, 27 May 1932. 15 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/354, Representative managers’ meeting, 27 Feb. 1922. 16 London Teacher, 3 March 1922. Original emphasis. 17 James Vernon, ‘The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-Politics of the School Meal in Modern Britain’, American Historical Review 110:3 (2005), 724. 18 Peter Atkins, ‘School Milk in Britain, 1900–1934’, Journal of Policy History 19:4 (2007), 417–18. 19 See, for example, Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health, and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); John Welshman, ‘Physical Culture and Sport in Schools in England and Wales 1900–1940’, International Journal of the History of Sport 15:1 (1998); Fiona Skillen, ‘“A Sound System of Physical Training”: The Development of Girls’ Physical Education in Interwar Scotland’, History of Education 38:3 (2009). 20 John Welshman, ‘“Bringing Beauty and Brightness to the Back Streets”: Health Education and Public Health in England and Wales, 1890–1940’, Health Education Journal 56 (1997), 202. 21 Jane Pilcher, ‘Body Work. Childhood, Gender and School Health Education in England, 1870–1977’, Childhood 14:2 (2007), 220, 229. 22 LCC, Annual Report of the Council, 1920. Report of the School Medical Officer, 79. 23 LCC, Annual Report of the Council, 1924. Report of the School Medical Officer, 94. 24 Susannah Wright, ‘The Work of Teachers and Others In and Around a Birmingham Slum School 1891–1920’, History of Education 38:6 (2009), 737. 25 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/02/001, Headteachers’ meeting, 8 Sept. 1934. 26 Maclure, One Hundred Years, 102; LCC, Annual Report of the Council, 1937. Report of the School Medical Officer. 27 TNA, ED21/34764, Inspection report, 22 Dec. 1930. 28 TNA, ED21/34975, Inspection report, 7 March 1929. 29 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/BAT/LB/001, Inspection report, 18 Dec. 1922; LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/FPR/LB/004, Logbook, 6 June 1923. 30 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/341, Managers’ minutes, 7 Dec. 1938.

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31 Robert E. Chaddock, ‘Voluntary Social Services in London Schools’, Social Forces 11:3 (1933), 344–5. 32 TNA, ED21/34708, Inspection report, 21 July 1925. 33 THLHLA, 1/GUA/1/2/2, Logbook, March 1922. 34 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/009, Memorandum by Chief Inspector, 20 Feb. 1928. 35 ERO, T/Z 25/4271. 36 ERO, T/Z 25/4341. 37 John Welshman examines the close association of physical education with the School Medical Service. Welshman, ‘Physical Education and the School Medical Service in England and Wales, 1907–1939’, Social History of Medicine 9:1 (1996). 38 TNA, ED21/34629, Inspection report, 7 Sept. 1934. 39 Board of Education, Syllabus of Physical Training for Schools (London: HMSO, 1919, 1921), 3. 40 London Teacher, 6 May 1932. 41 TNA, ED21/35041, Inspection report, 30 Jan. 1934. 42 London Teacher, 7 June 1929. 43 TNA, ED21/35282, Inspection report, 8 Dec. 1931. 44 London Teacher, 23 April 1926. 45 London Teacher, 30 Oct. 1931. 46 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/02/003, Headteachers’ meeting, 7 July 1936. 47 On the open-air movement in Britain and elsewhere, see Nelleke Bakker, ‘Fresh Air and Good Food: Children and the Anti-Tuberculosis Campaign in the Netherlands c.1900–1940’, History of Education 39 (2010); Linda Bryder, ‘“Wonderlands of Buttercup, Clover and Daisies”: Tuberculosis and the Open-Air School Movement in Britain, 1907–39’, in Cooter, In the Name of the Child; Anne-Marie Châtelet, ‘A Breath of Fresh Air. Open-Air Schools in Europe’, in Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith (eds), Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space and the Material Culture of Children (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Cynthia Connolly, ‘Pale, Poor and “Pretubercular” Children: A History of Paediatric Antituberculosis Efforts in France, Germany and the United States, 1899–1929’, Nursing Inquiry 11 (2004); Rodney Lowe, ‘The Early Twentieth Century Open-Air Movement: Origins and Implications’, in Nicholas Parry and David McNair (eds), The Fitness of the Nation: Physical and Health Education in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester: History of Education Society, 1983); Richard A. Meckel, Classrooms and Clinics: Urban Schools and the Protection

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and Promotion of Child Health, 1870–1930 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 105–14. 48 Quoted in Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan 1860–1931 (London: Virago, 1990), 181. 49 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 19 June 1929. 50 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/BOW4/LB/001, Inspection report, 10 Feb. 1927. 51 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 31 March 1920. 52 LMA, LCC/PH/SHS/01/025, LCC documents, 1932; LCC/PH/SHS/ 01/029, Doctor’s letter, 10 July 1936. 53 Bernard Harris, The Health of the Schoolchild: A History of the School Medical Service in England and Wales (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), 127–30; Charles Webster, ‘The Health of the School Child during the Depression’, in Parry and McNair Fitness, 78–9. 54 Webster, ‘Health of the School Child’, 77. 55 Bryder, ‘Wonderlands’, 90. 56 TNA, ED21/35160, Inspection report, 20 Nov. 1935. 57 Willis, Whatever Happened, 100; see also Magee, Clouds of Glory, 41. 58 Scannell, Mother Knew Best, 75; People’s Autobiography of Hackney, The Island, 35. 59 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STGAB/LB/005, Inspection report, 27 July 1934. 60 TNA, ED21/35009, Inspection report, 5 May 1930; ED21/34880, Inspection report, 18 Sept. 1925. 61 ERO, T/Z 25/4288. 62 TNA, ED21/34820, Inspection report, 10 June 1932. 63 TNA, ED21/35115, Inspection report, 4 Jan. 1933. 64 TNA, ED21/35016, Inspection report, 22 Sept. 1933. 65 London Teacher, 4 Sept. 1931. 66 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/MOR/LB/003, Logbook, 24 Jan. 1938. 67 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/331, Managers’ minutes, 28 Nov. 1938, 27 March and 26 June 1939. 68 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/OLG/LB/007, 14, 19 April 1926. 69 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/SIR/LB/006, Logbook, 21 Feb. 1929. 70 TNA, ED21/34600, Inspection report, 25 March 1929. 71 TNA, ED21/35171, Inspection report, 28 Feb. 1930. 72 Maclure, One Hundred Years, 128. 73 LMA, LCC/PH/SHS/01/026, Medical Officer’s letter, 19 Oct. 1933. 74 TNA, ED21/34694, Inspection report, 27 July 1931.

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75 TNA, ED21/35361, Inspection report, 6 June 1933; ED21/34853, Inspection report, 22 June 1933. 76 TNA, ED21/35121, Inspection report, 21 July 1932. 77 TNA, ED21/34845, Inspection report, 6 Nov. 1933. 78 TNA, ED21/34518, Inspection report, 31 Jan. 1927; ED21/34952, Inspection report, 14 Nov. 1924. 79 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/341, Inspection report, 11 Jan. 1938. 80 TNA, ED21/34739, Inspection report, 1 April 1934. 81 TNA, ED21/34646, Inspection report, 12 July 1933. 82 TNA, ED21/34724, Inspection report, 6 Jan. 1935. 83 TNA, ED21/35194, Inspection report, 22 April 1929. 84 TNA, ED21/34974, Inspection report, 9 April 1930. 85 TNA, ED21/35122, Inspection report, 26 Jan. 1925. 86 TNA, ED21/34660, Inspection report, 6 June 1928. 87 TNA, ED21/34538, Inspection report, 17 July 1931; LMA, LCC/EO/ DIV05/STH/LB/001, Logbook, 26 Nov. 1935. 88 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/HAG/LB/005, Logbook, 18 June 1925. 89 LCC, Annual Report of the Council, 1932. Report of the School Medical Officer, 29. 90 People’s Autobiography of Hackney, The Island, 26. 91 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/KSW/LB/008, Logbook, 4 Feb. 1921. 92 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/048, Inspection report, 29 July 1938. 93 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/BRN/LB/001–2, Logbook, 6 Oct. 1930, 7 April 1932. 94 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/02/013, Headteacher’s letter, 20 Jan. 1939. 95 LCC, Annual Report of the Council, 1925. Report of the School Medical Officer, 142. 96 TNA, ED21/35160, Inspection report, 20 Nov. 1935. 97 Peckham People’s History, Times of Our Lives, 113. 98 LCC, Annual Report of the Council, 1937. Report of the School Medical Officer, 23. 99 Bailey, Children of the Green, 1. 100 LCC Education Committee minutes, 17 Nov. 1920. 101 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAN1/LB/011, Logbook, 23 Aug., 1 Sept. 1921. 102 LCC, Annual Report of the Council. Report of the School Medical Officer, 1921–38. 103 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/CHE/LB/002, Logbook, 3 Oct. 1924. 104 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/TOL/LB/001, Logbook, Dec. 1930–Jan. 1931. 105 LCC, Annual Report of the Council. Report of the School Medical Officer, 1920–27.

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106 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 15 Feb. 1922. 107 London Teacher, 30 Sept. 1921. 108 TNA, ED21/35139, Inspection report, 1 Dec. 1933; ED21/35116, Inspection report, 22 Nov. 1935. 109 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/VAU2/LB/003, Logbook, 30 June 1932; LCC/ EO/DIV05/RUT/LB/001, Logbook, 18 July 1921. 110 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/ROC/LB/005, Logbook, 30 May 1929. 111 Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop Journal 5 (1978), esp. 38–43; Dyhouse, ‘Good Wives’, esp. 28–9; F. Prochaska, ‘A Mother’s Country: Mothers’ Meetings and Family Welfare in Britain, 1850–1950’, History 74 (1989); Tim Fisher, ‘Fatherhood and the British Fathercraft Movement, 1919–39’, Gender and History 17:2 (2005). 112 TNA, ED21/34654, Inspection report, 2 April 1928. 113 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/ROT/LB/006, Logbook, 30 Sept. 1931; TNA, ED21/34862, Inspection report, 7 Dec. 1932. 114 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/LAW/LB/003, Logbook, 9, 19 Dec. 1921. 115 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAN1/LB/009, Logbook, 10 Feb. 1931. 116 Louis Heren, Growing Up Poor in London (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973), 55. 117 ERO, T/Z 25/4268. 118 Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman. A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986), 122; ERO, T/Z 25/4287. 119 ERO, T/Z 25/4339; Ena Abrahams, ‘I Had This Other Life …’, in Jewish Women in London Group, Generations of Memories. Voices of Jewish Women (London: Women’s Press, 1989), 85. 120 Quoted in Humphries and Gordon, Out of Sight, 61–2. 121 The Labour Woman, Oct. 1926. 122 THLHLA, L/BGM/E/3/8, Bethnal Green Public Health Department records, 1928. 123 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/334, Managers’ minutes, 13 March 1935. 124 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/LFD/LB/003, Logbook, 9 Jan. 1923. 125 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/HAG/LB/010, Logbook, 12 March 1930. 126 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/03/006, Headmistresses’ meeting, 31 March 1925; LCC/EO/DIV08/PRI/LB/004, Logbook, 3 June 1919. 127 School Journey Record (1925), 30. 128 London Teacher, 4 Dec. 1936. 129 Bailey, Children of the Green, 1–3. 130 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAN1/LB/009, Logbook, 15 Nov. 1938. 131 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/BRO/LB/007, Logbook, 5 Oct. 1934 132 TNA, ED21/34552, Inspection report, 20 April 1935.

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133 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV06/CAT/LB/003, Logbook, 17 Feb. 1927. 134 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/03/006, Headmistresses’ meeting, 30 Aug. 1927. 135 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/FAI/LB/001, Loose letter, n.d. 136 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/WIL/LB/013, Logbook, 2 Feb. 1920. 137 F.H. Spencer, Education for the People (London: Routledge, 1941), 222. 138 Copelman suggests similar in her study of women teachers. Copelman, London’s Women Teachers, 159–60. 139 TNA, ED21/35176, Inspection report, 25 June 1926. 140 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/024, Correspondence, Jan-Feb. 1936. 141 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MOW/MISC/002, Staff conference minutes, 18 Oct. 1921. 142 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/VIC/LB/008, Logbook, 22 Sept. 1921. 143 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/CAP/LB/002, Logbook, 14 Oct. 1919. 144 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HIT/LB/009, Logbook, 30 Sept. 1931. 145 LMA, LCC/EO/SS/01/5, Headteacher to Education Officer, Oct. 1936. 146 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/CEN/LB/004, Logbook, 3 June 1919; Concert programme, Dec. 1920. 147 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SYD2/LB/006, Logbook, 27 March 1934. 148 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/KSW/LB/011, Logbook, 6 June 1924. 149 Wright, ‘The Work of Teachers’, 738. 150 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/BRN/LB/001, Logbook, 22 Sept. 1921, 23 July 1924. Name has been changed.

5

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Brightening lives

In 1930, LCC inspectors attended a performance of John Milton’s 1634 masque Comus, at a Hackney school where there ‘is much overcrowding, poverty and anxiety, and unemployment or casual labour is common’. The choice of drama ‘had elements of risk’, they wrote, ‘But the success was complete. Every one of the young performers spoke her lines and did her part with clearness and graciousness of speech, with comeliness of manner and movement (further emphasised by the charm of the dressing), and with evident appreciation of the appeal of beauty in poetry and music.’1 If such initiatives were unusual, they had particular currency in interwar London, where educationalists worried not only about crowded homes and malnourished bodies, but the drabness of children’s intellectual lives; their ‘apathy and indifference to the things of the mind’.2 Urban life was assumed to be particularly stultifying, resulting in children who were ‘perhaps a little too sober in demeanour for such young people’.3 It was a particular kind of deprivation, thought the teachers of another Hackney school, who told inspectors that the nearby streets contained not even ‘a bright shop into which a child or a woman can stare with wonder or envy’.4 Most inspectors saw children’s homes as incapable of mitigating this cultural and intellectual poverty, even if they resisted blaming  poorer parents for deprived conditions more generally. ‘Refining influences are generally absent; books are a rarity’, was a typical comment. The same inspector blamed both poverty and the drabness of the environs: pupils were not likely to find much mental enrichment ‘in such a poor and uninspiring district’.5 Some suggested that children might even suffer an emotional poverty,

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for which schools would ideally make amends. Teachers provide ‘a bright and interesting environment which gives the children the opportunities, largely denied them at home, for natural childish activity and happiness’, wrote another inspector.6 A focus on satisfying children’s mental and emotional needs sat alongside pedagogical change. Writing about ‘The Changing School’ in 1925, the LCC inspector P.B. Ballard suggested that ‘the profession has been astir with movements … towards the same goal  – the goal of freedom for the scholars’. His book included chapters on such topics as ‘freedom’, ‘the unconscious’, ‘imagination’, ‘individual work’, ‘the passing of the object lesson’ and ‘the advent of nature study’.7 The turn towards progressive pedagogies has been the subject of much attention by historians, most recently by Laura Tisdall, who argues that although child-centred pedagogies were championed by inspectors and training colleges in the interwar period, they were ‘only ever half-implemented’ in the classroom, particularly before 1945.8 However, if not all schools embraced the new pedagogies promoted by educationalists, this chapter considers the way in which lessons in music, drama and art provided other opportunities to encourage creativity, while fostering an association with nature was seen as crucial to alleviating the bleakness of the urban environment. Dozens of inspectors referred to ‘happiness’ as a successful feature of a school: a senior girls’ school where children were ‘allowed to develop naturally and happily’; a non-provided school in which pupils undertook their work ‘with evident happiness’; an infants’ school which was a hive of ‘happy activity’.9 The report for a Catholic infants’ school was under two sides long, yet the word ‘happy’ (or a derivative) appeared no less than five times: This is a happy school … [Despite some passivity,] in the music period … the babies were in a happier condition … they obviously enjoyed listening to the older children; they were also able to take part in certain of the very jolly songs and games they knew … Some very good reading was heard, and the children were going happily at their own pace … There was a very happy atmosphere in both [physical training] classes … [Overall] the Head has been successful in maintaining a happy tone.10

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This was partly about effective teaching – ‘every day should have some bright lesson to which the girls especially look forward’11 – but was also an end in itself. One senior girls’ school achieved only mediocre attainment, but the inspectors nevertheless praised the ‘purposive activity’ and the ‘happy and serene environment’. ‘There is no doubt’, they concluded, ‘that education of this kind is of much greater value to the community than any formal teaching, however good.’12 Such comments were frequently made of infant schools, where a loose mix of Montessorian and Froebelian methods could be found (most London infant teachers were ‘wisely eclectic’, according to P.B. Ballard).13 But references did not come exclusively from infant departments, as the quoted examples show. It was a Hackney junior school that named its eight classes ‘Little Folk, the Land of Good Beginnings, the Pilgrims, Pleasant Place, The Treasure Seekers, The Busy Bees, The Friendly Company and Round the Corner’. The titles ‘represent a sincere effort to make the school a gay or joyous place’, approved an inspector.14 Of another junior school at St  Pancras, inspectors described the transformation of the school hall into ‘Fairyland’ for Christmas. Tellingly, they added that ‘when these decorations have fulfilled their function in the school, they are taken away by the children to help brighten their own homes’.15 The majority of references come from reports of the late 1920s onwards and increase throughout the 1930s, reflecting changing pedagogical practice. As Ballard suggested in 1930: ‘The two most notable movements in modern education – the movement towards freedom, and the movement towards individual work … have already brought … more cheerfulness, more happiness, and more friendliness.’16 Earlier references are not uncommon, however. Even in 1922, inspectors of a junior school in Shepherd’s Bush were struck by its ‘exceptionally bright and happy’ tone.17 Several logbook references to ‘happiness’ in the 1920s also predate the official drive, such as a trip to Greenwich Park in 1923, where ‘a very happy day’ was spent.18 Christmas was a particular focus and one headmaster appealed to his school’s managers in December 1922 for help in making Christmas ‘happier and brighter’.19 That month, the London Teacher commented on the fancy dress parties organised in several schools, involving ‘a great

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deal of labour and some worry … But … they are great events in the lives of the children. The colour, the music, the dancing and the general joyousness thrust into the background the grey streets and often too dingy homes’.20 Not all teachers were able or inclined to prioritise a happy classroom. One was explicitly told that he should be doing more to ‘cultivate the art of happiness among his little boys. There is a tendency to worry them … [but] he would get them just as well by more cheerful means.’21 But more often inspectors were positive, and they – at least – seemed to feel that children responded. The school motto, ‘“Everybody happy, everybody good, everybody doing what everybody should”, is more than a pious aspiration’, concluded the report of one school.22 It is harder to know if pupils shared this conviction. The fact that, in 1925, the stammering class of an East End school was required to recite that ‘Every day and in every way I am getting better and happier’ is clearly no indication that they believed it.23 Some limited interaction with the concept is suggested when a new playhouse was bought for an infant school: when the children voted on a name (from an unknown shortlist presumably chosen by teachers), they decided on ‘Happiness House’.24 There is also some evidence that parents valued the emotional environment of different schools. In 1929, when a dispute arose in Bethnal Green over a school’s closure and the reallocation of its pupils, eighty-seven parents signed an unsuccessful petition in opposition, arguing that ‘the school was the most convenient for their children and by far the happiest school’.25 If ‘happiness’ was a key educational aim, then one way of fostering it was believed to be through an association with the natural world. Interwar rhetoric eulogised rural England. The sentiments captured by Stanley Baldwin’s famous address of 1924, beginning ‘England is the country and the country is England’ were echoed by many others.26 Both historians and cultural geographers have long explored the complex relationship between rural and urban, but within a rich historiography the relationship between urban schoolchildren and the interwar countryside is largely absent.27 But in the 1920s and 1930s, educationalists saw schools as being in the vanguard of this movement. George Newman for example,



Brightening lives 159

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the Chief Medical Officer to the Board of Education, was an advocate of open-air pursuits, applauding in 1935 the recent ‘growth of open-air activities’ and the ‘open-air cult’ which was ‘so striking a feature of the manners and customs of today’.28 Nurturing a love of nature was judged particularly important in London, with its unambiguously urban environment. Of St Patrick’s Catholic School, inspectors explained in 1926 that This school is close to the river being separated from it only by Wapping High Street – a narrow dark artery between tall warehouses which block the view of the river and the shipping. There are no shops in the High Street and the only life is connected with the transport of goods to and from the warehouses. Between these warehouses are narrow openings which lead to ‘stairs’ to the river, but they are too dangerous for children to be encouraged to visit them.29

It was not the only school to get such a depressing assessment. Inspectors described schools situated near industrial works which were ‘unpleasantly affected by smoke and coal dust’, suffered ‘a constant shower of fine grit [which] falls on the playground and penetrates into the classrooms’, or for whom the constant rumble of traffic meant that ‘there are many times in any lesson when the sound of the speaker’s voice is completely submerged’.30 Reformers such as Margaret McMillan wanted the ‘school of tomorrow’ to be ‘a garden city of children’ where the monstrous ‘heavy walls, the terrible gates, the hard playground, the sunless and huge classrooms … the awful and grim corridors’ would be ‘swept away’ and children freed from the darkness of the ‘prison house’.31 When a new LCC school opened at Eltham in 1938 the London Teacher praised the ‘sunlight, air and space, beauty of colour and design, and freedom for growing bodies and busy enquiring minds’.32 But spacious schools needed larger sites; as Andrew Saint has observed, few of the primary schools built to these ideals in the first half of the twentieth century were situated in cities.33 The elementary schools had been ‘built to last a century’, the Board of Education commented in 1936, and were ‘too solid for adaptation without excessive cost’.34 ‘We congratulate the London Education  Committee upon every forward movement’, remarked the London Teacher in 1920, ‘But a beautiful building on a model

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LCC estate at Bellingham will not help those who work in an oldfashioned Bermondsey “three-decker”.’35 Many interwar inspection reports described buildings that were gloomy, cramped and depressing. One inspector abandoned an assessment altogether, writing of one class that ‘the children often sit three at a desk … in a miserably dark room. To judge fairly of any teacher’s work in these circumstances would be impossible.’36 Others highlighted serious safety concerns. Of a school in Bethnal Green, inspectors reported in 1924 of cracks or bulges in several walls, shifting beams, damp due to leaking windows and trouble with vermin. The school possessed no hall and the corridors and cloakrooms were unheated, draughty and dark. It closed in 1928.37 Renovation was undertaken where possible, and from the early years of the century the LCC aspired to better lighting, heating and ventilation, the provision of drinking water and staffrooms, and the removal of galleries and stepping in classrooms.38 But of two thousand schools blacklisted in 1925, 1,200 were still in use in 1935, and one hundred even into the 1950s.39 When the 1944 Education Act was passed, over three hundred London schools were still lit by gas.40 In 1923, an enquirer wrote to the Council to ask what steps were being taken to combat the urban environment. ‘The LCC has encouraged nature study in many ways in its schools’, replied the Assistant Education Officer, describing the encouragement of ‘a flourishing Nature Study Union’, which organised lectures, excursions and exhibitions and had about two thousand members – mostly teachers – by the 1930s. He mentioned the botany scheme, by which botanical specimens were provided for use in lessons; hundreds of boxes were sent to participating schools fortnightly. And he boasted of the School Gardening Association, through which teachers could hire plots of land from the Council to cultivate with their pupils. ‘I think you will realise from all this’, he finished, ‘that there is in London a real endeavour to acquaint the children with the beauties of nature.’41 Commentators argued that such an acquaintance was essential for emotional wellbeing. Displays of flowers and plants in classrooms, for example, were rated for their aesthetic value as much as their educational role and, as always, were assumed

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to be ameliorative: ‘The display of bulbs and spring flowers … brighten[s] both school and scholars’; ‘There can be little doubt about the humanising influence of this kind of work.’42 One inspector anticipated that benefits would extend beyond the school gates, recommending to a headteacher that more plants should be used in lessons: ‘the district needs it’.43 Amid such expectations, many schools tried hard to promote the natural world to their pupils. In 1930, the London Teacher claimed that there were upwards of 120 school gardens in London, and nearly 750 departments enrolled in the botany scheme.44 What constituted a ‘garden’ obviously varied – one had been ‘wrested from a rubbish dump’; another had ‘been made on the roof, all the soil being carried up by the boys a few pounds at a time’ – but their value was typically sentimentalised.45 One inspector noted the ‘little garden in the boys’ playground, which is tended with devotion, containing, as it does, the only vegetation in sight of the school’.46 Alongside the formal botany scheme, the exchange of botanical specimens also encouraged a form of patronage, sometimes of younger children by older ones, but also of urban children by rural. Nature study posed particular difficulties in the East End, wrote one teacher, but ‘[we are] in the happy position of having been “adopted” by two high schools, who generously send baskets of flowers and nature study material at regular intervals’.47 In some classrooms, rural objects did, therefore, become regular – and perhaps popular – subjects of discussion; the headteacher of an East End school noted that ‘children much interested in school hyacinths in bloom’.48 Nature study lessons were ‘looked forward to with obvious delight’ by the infants of Popham Road, Islington, according to an inspector who praised the school for overcoming ‘the limitations of an unnatural environment’.49 Items of interest from the natural world included fauna. One school had its own rabbit; another a dove; a third, having appointed a teacher with knowledge of beekeeping, purchased a hive and added ‘lessons on the life of the bee’ to its syllabus.50 An infants’ school in East Dulwich boasted several aquaria with frogs’ spawn, sticklebacks, newts, and snails; while a visitor to Maidstone Street School in Hackney might ‘think for a moment that a branch of the South Kensington Natural History Museum has been installed in

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the wide corridors’, lined as they were with specimens of birds.51 If such extensive displays were unusual, the recognition of RSPCA week was an annual event in many school calendars. In 1933, a school in Poplar marked it by inviting all children to bring their pets. Fifty-three animals duly attended school, comprising dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, a parrot, a hedgehog and a tortoise.52 One dreads to think. As always, much depended on individual teachers; inspectors who praised schools for their teaching of nature study often acknowledged an ‘enthusiast’ on the staff. Walter Johnson was a teacher at Bolingbroke Road School in Battersea and the author of several books on nature study and rural life. In 1910 he had published a guide to the nature found in Battersea Park and he followed this with guides to the ‘nature-world’ of London in general: he surely shared his love with his pupils.53 Other schools took advantage of new ways of learning. Over the course of 1932, the boys of a Bethnal Green school were shown several films to illustrate their lessons. The eclectic mix included films on the otter, the ferret, the jellyfish, the death’s head moth, and – with indigenous peoples also labelled as part of the natural landscape – ‘savage life in Africa’, and ‘the Eskimo’. ‘There can be no doubt that it [use of film] has a distinct value educationally and makes a strong appeal to the children’, wrote their headmaster.54 Indeed, the keen appetite for rural programming surprised inspectors, who noted that countryside talks were among the most popular of the BBC wireless broadcasts chosen by London schools, after British history, travel talks and regional geography but ahead of music, literature, world history and biology, and despite the fact that ‘these talks were intended primarily for rural schools’.55 Evidence of the countryside in everyday classroom life could be seen in more intangible ways too. At least some schools named their houses after different flowers. Rural images might adorn classroom walls. When bucolic pastoral scenes were distributed to several East End schools, one headteacher observed ‘admiring groups of children in front of them every day since’.56 Countryside imagery also infiltrated singing lessons. In 1920, the boys of St Dunstan’s Road School in Fulham learnt songs including those with such obvious rural connotations as The Tree in the Wood, Where the Bee Sucks,

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Wood Pigeon and The Hunting Song, as well as There’s A Land A Dear Land, which glorified the green island kingdom that was England.57 Of course, belonging to Daffodil House, observing a painting, or singing such songs was no guarantee that children adopted such sentiments – or were even intended to. The pupils of St Dunstan’s Road also learnt I’m Seventeen Come Sunday, in which a maiden is seduced by her lover (‘she rolled in his arms till morning’) and deserted the following day. Presumably St Dunstan’s were less keen on children thinking too hard about this particular story. If the practice of bringing specimens into the classroom was encouraged, educationalists argued that taking children to nature would be more effective still. As the Geographical Teacher urged in 1925: ‘Nature Study is emphatically an out-of-doors pursuit, not the pulling of flowers to pieces inside four walls, nor examining mouldy old specimens of stuffed birds in dusty cases, nor even the more enlivening observation of the development of a tadpole in a derelict jam-jar.’58 Many schools managed at least the occasional fieldtrip; some took their children on several. Victoria Park was a common destination for East End schools: one class went there in 1920 to observe different kinds of trees; another in 1933 ‘to enjoy May-time trees and flowers’.59 Kew Gardens was also popular. In May 1929, an entire school – 228 children and eight mistresses – spent the day there.60 Three years earlier a party of thirty-four girls had visited, their teacher recording ‘five hours spent in the gardens in autumn sunshine’. They had seen ‘spiders and their webs, blue and red dragonflies, bees, storks, crane, fish, ducks, blackbirds, water lilies, bananas growing fruits, acorn and beech nut, berberis and rowan, oak, beech, horse chestnut, fir, cedar, willow and poplar’.61 London Zoo was another common destination. One school took eighty infants there in 1927 where they had ‘a most enjoyable afternoon, every child was taken to see all the best known animals, every child had a ride on an animal’s back and saw the chimpanzees’ tea party. At 4.30pm they all had tea consisting of two buns, a shortbread biscuit and a cup of milk.’ It was the first trip the school had ever made, wrote the headteacher: ‘we shall certainly repeat the experiment’.62 Some schools were more adventurous, with excursions

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to Box Hill or Epping Forest – though at least one outing had to be cancelled ‘due to heavy rain and fact that boots and shoes of the girls [were] in bad state of repair’.63 In 1935, a teacher took seventy children to Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire: ‘It was good to take such a large party of out the filth of the “fire” into the countryside.’64 These years also saw the increasing popularity of the ‘school journey’, a two-week-long educational fieldtrip.65 Begun by enthusiastic individual teachers in the late nineteenth century, the School Journey Association was established in 1911 to assist their organisation. By 1936 the LCC was subsidising 378 journeys a year.66 In 1930, an LCC inspector explicitly defined the trip’s purpose as an attempt to ‘make up’ for the lack of nature in a London childhood. She pleaded for destinations to be chosen ‘which would give to the child an opportunity of solitary leisure, a programme elastic enough to allow the children to find some quiet nook, where dimly, perhaps even unconsciously, they could feel something of the calm, unruffled rhythm of Nature’s pulse’.67 One teacher was more prosaic, writing in the guidebook prepared for pupils: ‘We are leaving the streets and noise of London for this haven for a fortnight so as to help boys to learn to look into the wonders and beauties of nature and to discover and observe the strange and interesting life of the seashore.’68 Other guidebooks encouraged children to engage actively with nature, with competitions held for the best collections of plants, shells or fossils. Sometimes the tone was light-hearted: one teacher offered a shilling for a seahorse and half a crown for a mermaid.69 Yet the underlying aim was always serious, reminding children to appreciate what they saw. One opened with the promise that ‘You are going to a wonderful country; you have never seen anything like it before. Be thankful for it; do not spoil it one little bit.’70 Contemporary evidence suggests that many teachers, at least, felt that something was being achieved. One headteacher proudly described her school in the journal of the School Nature Study Union: This school is in District E14. There are bricks to the right of us, bricks to the left of us, and mixed odours from soap works, cake factory, and oil tanks everywhere. The nearest park is three stations away and



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there is not even a shop that sells flowers within ten minutes’ walk. I, therefore, felt that the joy of Nature lovers would not enter into the lives of my children unless school brought it … Enthusiasm is roused by talks in the hall to the whole school after prayers, on specimens brought by my colleagues and myself. Scripture time is taken to feed the hungry with good things by literally obeying our Lord’s command to consider the lilies of the field.71

She certainly felt that that such activities could foster an enduring commitment to the natural world, citing the example of three ex-pupils, now in service, who had recently written to her either enclosing specimens or writing about the insect life they had seen: ‘They evidently had not forgotten their interest in Nature or the school.’ She also quoted the approval of a mother: ‘Nature drawing is a fine thing. It do keep our Vera quiet wet nights.’72 Inevitably, some children were less impressed. In a letter home in 1940, one London evacuee complained of the attention his teacher was giving to their Cornish surroundings: ‘School starts today with blooming nature walks’, he wrote.73 It seems reasonable to assume that at least some of his counterparts in the 1920s and 1930s felt similarly. One teacher, having taken her pupils to Dorset, remarked that ‘Chesil Beach was not so much a natural wonder as a place to slide down on one’s trousers.’74 Another admitted that travelling with London children ‘hurts sometimes. They often have no eyes to see the trees … even flowers along the banks win no comment.’75 Later accounts recorded in memoir and autobiography can also be critical. ‘Every time I see a sticky bud it makes me think of school. They used to stick some in a jam jar and you’d got to paint it. I didn’t like that at all’, remembered one ex-schoolgirl.76 As an adult, Rose Gamble recalled tales of rural life that remained distant and irrelevant: Bit by bit, from songs and poems, stories and pictures in books, I began to build up a feeling about the country, but I couldn’t find out where it was. Some things I did know. It would have red toadstools with white spots and sitting up rabbits, and everyone walked about with a cow on a piece of string.

She did remember one instance of a more hands-on activity but remained sceptical of its value: ‘there was a memorable occasion

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when nature study was introduced by a student who showed us how to grow a single broad bean on a piece of blotting paper’.77 In contrast, an ex-teacher remembered school activities more fondly. She recalled the specimens kept in the school, ‘larvae of caddis flies and dragonflies and minnows and so on … when the dragonfly was coming out of its chrysalis, it was a beautiful sunny day and she [headteacher] called all the children into assembly to watch … they all saw the dragonfly emerge, climb up the stem, come out and fly round that hall. Those children were absolutely thrilled.’78 Other contemporary evidence suggests that many children – not yet cynical adults – embraced certain activities with enthusiasm. Flower-growing competitions were popular, for example, for which children planted seeds at home or in a communal garden and presented the results for prizes. The competition among the infants of Globe Road School in Bethnal Green regularly attracted 200 entrants in the mid-1920s; in 1927, a record 260 plants were returned.79 At nearby Turin Street School, 150 infants bought nasturtium seeds for a penny a packet in May 1925: over half eventually came back as adult plants.80 Sometimes the initiative came from pupils. At Teesdale Street, another East End school, senior girls formed a club for the provision of flowers and plants for the whole school.81 And it was of yet another that an inspector wrote in 1933 of the ‘tubs of bulbs growing to perfection … although the playground is open every evening until dusk the daffodils and other flowers are neither stolen nor broken’.82 School journeys were also popular. Unusually, the guidebook of one school’s trip in 1938 contains a couple of pupil contributions. One is a letter thanking the teachers: ‘I am having a very happy time … I hope you enjoy teaching us as I enjoy listening … I like the beach best of all, and weeding in the lawn.’ It is no surprise that children relished the excitement of a fortnight out of school, but a second comment suggests that at least one classmate also appreciated the different vista to the usual grey of London: ‘We saw something we had never seen before, around the sun was a rainbow.’83 There were, of course, many schools in which initiatives were absent. For some, the cost of activities such as school journeys remained prohibitive even when subsidised. Inspectors might regret the lack of botany boxes, aquaria or a vivarium. Globe Road

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infants – which promoted gardening so successfully – nevertheless was poorly positioned for natural light and depended on gas, which ‘causes dirt and is probably not unrelated to the difficulty experienced in keeping plants and animals’.84 Sometimes inspectors blamed teachers. At one Fulham school, ‘in no class are books kept by the boys for notes and illustrations; and there were no nature rambles last year … nor was any use made of the lantern’.85 They were particularly disapproving of schools which failed to take advantage of resources on their doorstep: a school in which ‘though elm trees grew close by … their name was unknown to the boys’; or another which, though having ‘one of the best situations of any in London for nature study’ – next to Waterlow Park, with Hampstead Heath beyond – still pursued ‘old-fashioned object lessons’.86 Elsewhere, lessons might have little sense of continuity or progression. The scheme of work for the older girls of a Poplar school began with an apparently cohesive series of classes on nature in different regions such as the Arctic, a desert, the tropics and in the mountains, followed by topics ranging from ‘The potato’ and ‘Shellfish seen in Poplar shops’ to ‘Where fruits come from’ and ‘The walrus’.87 This might be due to the different priorities of different headteachers. In fact, nature study might be displaced by other topics even during school journeys. In 1920, the School Journey Record published a list of all journeys taken that year and gave basic details of each, including the subjects studied. Nature study was commonly cited, along with geography and history, but teachers also took the opportunity for lessons on architecture, sketching, ecology, mapreading, arithmetic, literature and sports.88 Some neglected nature study entirely. ‘So much material for architecture, history and geography presented itself that our time for nature study was limited’, wrote the headteacher of an Islington school.89 For another group, ‘the study of trees and flowers was chiefly incidental’.90 If an association with the natural world was believed to be one way to brighten children’s lives, then an engagement with culture was another, and creativity and the arts therefore played an important role in the school curriculum – at least in theory. As Chief Inspector F.H. Spencer argued: ‘What our schools must do is to give this thirst

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for beauty free play, and to help the pupils year by year to become more and more conscious of beauty, more and more capable of producing it, more and more contemptuous of the ugliness and dirt and confinement enforced upon millions by mere greed or unreflective utilitarianism.’91 When, in 1927, the Board of Education published illustrative suggestions of prints with which to decorate elementary schools, it suggested that choices should be taken from three categories: the first ‘in which the appeal is direct and easily appreciated’, including seascapes, landscapes and animals; the second, in which ‘while the appeal is still direct … the artist has given a special and personal interpretation’, including landscapes and historical figures; the third, in which artists such as Velázquez, Whistler and Rembrandt should be included, whose pictures would be ‘definitely harder for the child to appreciate’, perhaps even ‘beyond the child’s understanding, because it is worthwhile that a child should grow up in daily contact with some of the pictures which he will hear about all his life if he hears about pictures at all’.92 This was partly about teaching the history of art. At least one inspector was pleased when children showed ‘a remarkable knowledge’ of well-known masterpieces and could discuss them ‘with great intelligence’.93 A handful of logbooks mention supplementing lessons with visits to the Tate. But an acquaintance with great art was also intended to go beyond instructional purposes. As another Board of Education pamphlet confirmed, The case for providing pictures in schools rests ultimately on their importance in connection with aesthetic training. Aesthetic training cannot be carried on unless children live in contact with beautiful things [and] contact with works of art is necessary because it is not enough to train the child’s intellect and develop his moral character; the emotional side of his nature must be developed also.94

In schools that attempted to make their surroundings more attractive, inspectors echoed the same message: of a very poor school in Greenwich, one admired staff who were doing ‘their utmost to bring beauty into the lives of the children and to raise the standard of taste; the pictures in the school are well chosen, there are flowers and nice curtains, and the atmosphere is a bright and happy one’.95 Another

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was convinced that such efforts mattered: at a Bethnal Green school where displays included reproductions of work by Botticelli and Giotto he commented that ‘it was interesting to find that the children had observed and liked these finer examples of art’.96 It is striking that the suggestions provided by the Board of Education in 1927 included a list of twenty-eight specific paintings, only four or five of which could fairly be described as colourful or ‘bright’. Most were dominated by browns, or sombre blues and greens. They might nonetheless have an effect on some individuals. One woman, writing in her sixties, remembered that ‘All around the hall … we had pictures by famous painters. Lovely pictures like the Madonna and the Laughing Cavalier and pictures by Gainsborough, in fact all the best.’97 And other – c­ ontemporary – evidence suggests that children noticed. In 1930 a charitable endowment of one guinea was won by a pupil of Wordsworth Road School for writing ‘the most intelligent and appreciative essay on the art collection in the possession of the Borough of Stoke Newington’.98 Music might fulfil the same function as art, and best practice was again touted as a combination of imparting knowledge with provoking an emotional response. Trips to the concert hall were not unknown, if rare, but the spread of the gramophone and the wireless – the BBC’s first school broadcast in April 1924 was a music  lesson – meant that satisfying music appreciation lessons were no longer dependent on having a proficient pianist on the staff.99 By the end of 1938, 359 London schools had wireless installations, although take-up remained limited in some areas due to a lack of electricity supply points or the cost of equipment.100 Even so, it was not to everyone’s taste. ‘Once a week we had Musical Appreciation in the School Hall’, remembered one unimpressed ­ex-schoolboy. ‘Beethoven was one of the teacher’s favourites but to us lads his music was torture.’101 But the emphasis in music – certainly when filtered through inspection reports – was on participation. Inspectors stressed the emotional aspect of singing, criticising schools in which a teacher’s desire ‘to obtain technical accuracy … prevent[ed] singing from being a joyous occupation’ and praising those for whom singing was ‘a welcome period of real self-expression’.102 Repertoires

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varied – one school even taught its pupils Gregorian chants – but inspectors generally advised that ‘the songs selected for singing should be, as a rule, songs the children want to sing’.103 One approved of a Greenwich school which taught ‘the kind of songs they might sing if they went on a country walk’.104 Some schools went further and by the late 1920s the London Teacher could claim that ‘a Gilbert and Sullivan opera is now becoming as much a part of the educational experience of a London elementary school as a performance of a Shakespearean play’.105 At least one schoolboy would remember these performances in his old age.106 As always, alternative examples could be found. One woman remembered her teacher’s insistence that she joined the choir in advance of a competition. ‘She realised I couldn’t sing … but she said my lovely smile would appeal to the judges and so I was placed in the centre of the front row and I learned to mime.’107 But some schools were strikingly ambitious. When Charles Smith, a teacher at Glengall Road School in Poplar, published accounts of his music and drama lessons, a newspaper reviewer was impressed: ‘The story is an extraordinary one: an unknown elementary schoolmaster, who loves music, has unbounded confidence in the capacities of boys and girls. He gives them the best, sets them straight at learning and ultimately performing works like Tannhauser, Faust and Die Zauberflote, and they respond as if to the manner born!’108 Smith was unusual but not unique. Another headmaster, whose school was situated ‘in a poor and crowded part of Whitechapel’ also had his children performing operas such as The Magic Flute and Orpheus: his ‘aim in such work has been to create in the minds of the boys an appreciation for music in itself and some understanding of its place as part of the world’s culture, which is a heritage which all should enjoy’.109 Musical instruction extended to instrumental tuition too. Not all schools had the money or inclination to support this. ‘There was no such thing as a school orchestra or percussion bands in those days’, remembered one ex-teacher.110 Yet, dozens of elementary schools did offer violin classes, held at lunchtime or after school. When the annual conference of the National Union of School Orchestras was held in London in 1924, 3,500 violinists from local schools were assembled for a mass concert. The conductor was the headteacher of an elementary school in Lewisham.111

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Many schools offering violin tuition were located in better residential areas, such as Fulham Palace Road School, whose 321 pupils came from ‘good average working-class homes’: in May 1927, 51 of them were learning the violin.112 A handful boasted other instrumental achievements: a brass band, or an orchestra of violins supplemented by ‘two cornets and a clarinet’.113 In a few exceptional cases, schools were permitted to use their piano and/or school time for private piano lessons; at least two had approached the Council for permission ‘at the request of the parents’.114 But budding violinists could be found in the poorest areas of London. Bell Street School, situated in a very deprived area off the Edgware Road, was praised by inspectors for its ‘successful violin class [that] plays at school assembly’. They were particularly pleased given the poverty of the area: ‘the school has had to give practically all of the culture and refinement that the boys know’.115 Bonner Street School in Bethnal Green also introduced violin lessons, for pupils for whom ‘the bad housing conditions, insufficiency of sleep and irregular meals are an even greater obstacles to progress than lack of intelligence’.116 More than one inspection report mentioned ‘flourishing’ violin orchestras in the same breath as the existence of boot clubs, a staple of schools in poor areas.117 This was particularly impressive given that schools usually required a small charge from parents. In 1928, the headteacher of Central Street School, situated in an overcrowded area of Finsbury, recorded that a violin class had been formed; sixteen girls were paying weekly instalments of two shillings for the purchase of the instrument and an additional sixpence for each weekly lesson. Six months later, the number of children enrolled in the class had risen to 35, from a total school roll of 243.118 Further evidence of parental support can be seen in the 150-strong audience attending a concert of violinists of Hither Green School, situated in an area of Lewisham that was ‘not an inspiring one in which to live’.119 No doubt, for the vast majority of children any opportunities for music-making fell away when they left school. Violin playing is not mentioned in any of the autobiographies or memoirs I have come across. Nevertheless, the London Teacher’s report in 1929 of a local school’s concert at Hackney Central Hall is notable for the generational expertise it drew upon. Performing a programme of

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Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, ‘the vocalists were past and present pupils … and the orchestra of 25 performers … was largely composed of old pupils and parents’.120 For an exceptional minority, music might change their future. Very occasionally elementary schoolchildren were successful in securing scholarships to music colleges. They were usually from schools based in more prosperous parts of the capital, or able to draw on parental expertise: in 1927, for example, an ex-pupil of a Paddington school was appointed organist of St Paul’s Cathedral; his father had been the organist at his local church.121 But this was not always the case. In 1929, an inspector visited Barlby Road School in Kensington. A few years earlier a colleague had described it as ‘socially … one of the worst schools in London’; by the late 1920s things were improving a little but the inspector noted that most children still came from homes ‘of the poorest and often of a degraded type’. Music teaching, however, was praised as excellent: ‘An especially high standard is reached in the group singing of songs, and in the performance of the junior school percussion band, which was brilliantly conducted by a girl who has won a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music.’122 A final way in which schooling was hoped to enhance children’s lives was through the gift of ‘the permanent possession of a store, small but precious, of great passages of literature’.123 When one headteacher recorded a special recital of various Wordsworth poems, read by staff to pupils, he noted: ‘Object: to arouse and stimulate interest in reading, and appreciation of what is beautiful in Nature and literature.’124 Most schools stuck to traditional subject matter. Robert Brown­ ing, Kipling and Keats were regularly taught alongside Wordsworth while Dickens was a common choice for prose. At the London Schools Drama Festival in 1938, one group performed a scene from Nicholas Nickleby: the adjudicators were pleased by ‘the evident enjoyment of the boys … Squeers warmed to his part as the play proceeded and was thoroughly detestable at the end.’125 Several schools chose children’s literature to read such as Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan. A few were more unconventional. In 1930, one girls’ department taught a range of female poets, includ-

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ing the Chartist Eliza Cook, to the chagrin of inspectors who would have preferred a focus on ‘the great poets’.126 Nor were they keen on another school, in which girls ‘had learned a fair amount of modern poetry’ but ‘never heard of Chaucer, Spenser or Milton’.127 They were more impressed with a school situated ‘in a poor and crowded part of Whitechapel’, in which the boys ‘read and recited, with evident pleasure, translations from great authors such as Euripides and Calderon’.128 Above all, interwar schooling was dominated by Shakespeare, encouraged by the LCC which subsidised trips to Shakespearean performances in all but the leanest of financial years. In 1920–21 one hundred performances of eleven different plays were seen by nearly 129,000 children.129 Shakespearean scenes were also common choices for children to act out themselves, whether to classmates or larger audiences. The pupils of an Islington school, for example, situated in yet another ‘poor and very congested area’, gave two evening performances of Julius Caesar in December 1936.130 Pupils were enthusiastic, believed inspectors. The boys ‘are thoroughly well acquainted with the characters and plot of Hamlet’, wrote one of a school in a ‘difficult’ area of Kensington.131 Others reported on children who ‘know and like their Shakespeare’, or of the ‘intelligence and enjoyment with which [pupils] read and discussed Julius Caesar’.132 Certainly, it seems to have been assumed that most children would have a basic grounding in Shakespeare. When a headmaster published an employment guide for schoolleavers in 1926, he peppered the text with Shakespearean references, suggesting, for example, that attention should be paid to personal appearance when meeting employers. ‘Consider the famous advice of Polonius … “For the apparel oft proclaims the man”’, he advised. ‘Take out your Shakespeare. Read the whole of this passage and digest its sound advice, which is clothed in exquisite language.’133 A more disturbing sign of influence was another headteacher’s belief that anti-Semitism among children was encouraged by the popularity of The Merchant of Venice as a classroom text.134 A few scattered sources from children themselves support the inspectors’ assessments. In 1926, a London-wide competition asked pupils to write up to fifty words in response to the question: ‘Supposing Shakespeare suddenly woke up and said to you with a

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laugh, “I wonder why you like my plays, or perhaps you don’t”, what would you say?’ An 11-year-old Bermondsey schoolgirl was one of the prize winners, receiving tickets to a matinee at Drury Lane. ‘I like your plays with their loveable and funny characters, because I understand them’, she had written. ‘I wander with Rosalind and Orlando in the Forest of Arden and gambol with Puck among the fairies. I sigh with Viola, and laugh with Sir Toby. Thank you for such plays.’ Her headteacher had signed to confirm that it was the child’s unaided work.135 In fact, if one might worry that inspectors’ belief in children’s enthusiasm was sometimes exaggerated, there were also instances in which they under-estimated children’s reactions. In 1938, RADA students performed a run of Twelfth Night especially for schoolchildren. The Chief Inspector thought it a mediocre offering with undistinguished acting and a uninspiring set. But the verdict of a Hampstead schoolgirl, writing to the Education Officer to express thanks for the trip, was quite different, reporting that she and her classmates ‘enjoyed the play very much, and all thought that the characters in the play were acted very well … We performed some of the scenes at school, so it was interesting to compare the actors in the play with our own. The stage itself was lovely, and so was the lighting too.’136 Memoirs also suggest that literature lessons made an impression. English lessons were ‘pure pleasure’, remembered one man. ‘We read Wordsworth, Tennyson, Longfellow, Browning, and committed a surprising amount to memory, much of which I still remember. We learnt several Shakespearean songs, and read extracts from his works. We studied all of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and later saw it performed at Whitechapel Theatre.’137 A contemporary loved ‘The Lady of Shalott’: ‘I would get very agitated, and nibble my nails from sheer excitement when I chanted the part.’138 For Chaim Lewis – who would become a writer and poet – his teacher was nothing short of inspirational: This stocky, avuncular little man … traded with words: he blew the wind of rhythm into them as he caressed them to mean more than they said and made them sing as I had never heard them sing before … through him I discovered the daffodils of Herrick and Wordsworth, the wry eloquence of Shylock, the whimsy of Lamb and the stirring rhythmic tales of the Ballads.139

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If one aim of English lessons was to acquaint children with classic literature, then another aspiration was to encourage a habit of reading that would continue beyond schooldays and into adulthood; to brighten their lives over decades. Some schools possessed their own libraries; by the early 1920s the Council’s own library scheme included well over two million books which were swapped between schools.140 Popular children’s authors such as G.A. Henty, Angela Brazil and R.M. Ballantyne were prominent on requisition lists.141 Of a very poor school in north London, inspectors noted good use of the library, although the boys’ taste tended towards ‘adventure stories of the more lurid type … perhaps a little more guidance might be given … care being taken, however, not to stifle their interest’.142 At its best, the scheme was credited with the fact that ‘most of the pupils have formed the habit of reading for pleasure’.143 But it was more common for inspectors to highlight the need for more resources. This could be a criticism made of schools even in better neighbourhoods: at a school in Balham, inspectors described pupils whose homes were ‘steady and respectable’ and who owned books of their own, ‘varying in number from 8 to 25; they all knew exactly how many books they had, and were eager to describe and discuss the contents’. Yet the school’s facilities were poor in comparison. The ‘library’ (the inspectors added the inverted commas) was an empty classroom, unattractively decorated, possessing only a small collection.144 Alternatively, schools might encourage children to use the local library if they were fortunate enough to have facilities nearby, though two London boroughs, Paddington and St Marylebone, had no public library at the beginning of the period.145 Under an East End scheme ‘to promote greater co-operation between librarians and teachers’ begun in December 1920, classes of children about to leave school were sent to lectures on ‘the uses and resources of public libraries’. Over 7,500 pupils had attended by October 1922 and libraries were reporting an increased demand for tickets.146 Some schools undoubtedly failed to get pupils reading. ‘It is again noteworthy no boy in the top five classes made a book his choice for a prize’, wrote a headmaster in 1936.147 Sometimes the

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teaching was uninspired; inspectors criticised one school which repeated Grimm’s Fairy Tales as a class reader across three different year groups.148 ‘Poems were pulverised and shoved down my throat’, remembered one old schoolboy.149 But there were many successes. At one school, in a poor area of Deptford, inspectors noted the ‘remarkably large’ number of books (53 on average) borrowed and read by pupils.150 And some children did relish the offer of books as prizes. Nearly seventy years after her schooldays in Islington in the 1920s, one woman still possessed four books that she had won at school, ‘a bit soiled and dilapidated owing to the fact they have been housed in sheds and air-raid shelters during the Second World War, but I still treasure them’.151 It is clear that a range of activities was enjoyed by many – though most definitely not all – pupils in interwar London, which were thought to mitigate the effects of a drab urban environment. Reporting on an East End school in 1938, one inspector remarked that Without the help of the school many [children] … would not have seen the sea, or hills, or rivers, and would know nothing of life except the life of the slums. It is satisfactory to record, therefore, that this is one of the few schools in London in which every child goes for a school journey, and most of the children go several times. They go to a lovely country house near Canterbury, where there are gardens and lawns and many acres of fields in which they can play. Visits are made to the sea, and altogether the children have a splendid holiday.152

Some of these children would be among the 800,000 to be evacuated eighteen months later, in September 1939, when, amid the anxiety, many commentators expressed pleasure that urban children were at least able to enjoy the countryside for the first time. If the scale of movement in 1939 was unprecedented, however, many London evacuees were not as wholly unfamiliar with the countryside as many believed. It was hoped that school initiatives would also impact a wider community. At one Lewisham school, ‘Activities of various kinds, such as May Day and Midsummer Revels, Dramatic productions, dinner-hour concerts, and formerly a company of Guides and



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Brownies, play an important part in the school organisation and have in the past filled a gap in the life of the Estate which for long lacked any social amenities.’153 One inspector praised a school for modelling aesthetic ideals to parents, who equally with the children, can scarcely fail to be influenced by the excellent way in which the attractiveness of the building, which is kept scrupulously clean, has been enhanced by the lay-out of the school garden, now well stocked with shrubs and flowers, by the presence in the hall and classrooms of an abundance of freshly-cut flowers, and by the display of well-chosen pictures.154

Like inspectors, teachers might also view the child as a way of spreading certain values more widely within the neighbourhood. In 1929, children at a Camberwell school were recruited to tidy a local memorial ground. Their headmaster hoped ‘that the boys will thereby begin to get concerned in local affairs and through them the parents learn to preserve what is intended for their personal happiness’.155 Thus schools might be educators of parents as well as children. One teacher made a telling comment when he spoke of a child’s return home following a school journey to the countryside: ‘The guidebook comes out: outings are discussed … We have won a great victory! We have allies where perhaps before we had rather arbitrary critics. We may be making the Saturday family outings into educational visits, and the annual holiday a home school journey. We have transferred our work to the child’s everyday life.’156 As has been clear in previous chapters, such comments demonstrated a desire for partnership while almost always resting on an assumption of the superiority of the school environment over that of the home. Some thought the task insurmountable. When his school was offered free tickets to see Twelfth Night, one headteacher regretfully turned them down, explaining that the long journey not only impacted the school day but that ‘parents in the East End – and I speak with 28 years’ experience as Head here – do not like upsetting the regular dinner time’.157 However, evidence suggests that both children and families might be appreciative. At a Shoreditch school, inspectors cited the good attendance of pupils as evidence of success, thinking it ‘not surprising, as the school is probably the brightest spot in their

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lives’.158 References to parents also pepper the accounts of teachers and inspectors: the ‘grateful crowd of joyful parents’ waiting to meet their children after their return from a school trip to Brighton; or the parents who are ‘persuaded to join in the singing’ during musical concerts on open days.159 Among all the various initiatives pursued by schools in this period, however, it is the examples of struggling parents putting aside pennies to pay for violin lessons – surely with little expectation that these would be of any lasting occupational value, or perhaps any lasting value at all – that remain perhaps the most striking. There is, of course, no reason why parents would not have appreciated the opportunities their children received. One ex-schoolgirl remembered her family struggling in the 1930s, but they nevertheless managed an annual holiday to the Isle of Wight. ‘Take a deep breath of this lovely fresh air, it’s got to last you all the winter in London’, her dad would tell her.160 He valued the country air as much as any teacher; many other working-class London families simply had no ability to get to it. There were clearly some exceptional teachers in interwar London; for those children lucky enough to be taught by them, school experiences might remain vivid for the rest of their lives. This applied not just to those very few children who would end up as poets, musicians or similar. Many teachers aspired to make a lasting impression in more ordinary ways. One headteacher issued a set of hardbacked exercise books to his classes in 1925, ‘in which is to be printed or written the particular pieces of poetry or good prose learnt … The book is intended to be the personal possession of the writer. He will carry it from class to class and enter fresh pieces of literary merit. He will take it with him on leaving school.’161 A similar motivation inspired a headmaster who addressed his pupils as they departed on a school journey to the East Sussex coast in 1933. He wished them a happy trip and hoped that the experience would stay with them long after their schooldays were over. ‘You will stand on the Downs and see wonderful views almost like “aeroplane photographs”’, he told them. ‘Try to photograph some glorious view in your mind so that it will be a valuable possession that can be seen any time you shut your eyes and wish to see a beautiful memory picture.’162



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Notes 1 TNA, ED21/34755, Inspection report, 15 Sept. 1930. 2 TNA, ED21/34638, Inspection report, 26 Feb. 1923. 3 TNA, ED21/35121, Inspection report, 21 July 1932. 4 TNA, ED21/34730, Inspection report, 17 April 1934. 5 TNA, ED21/35087, Inspection reports, 1 May 1930, 3 Nov. 1927. 6 TNA, ED21/34708, Inspection report, 21 July 1925. 7 P.B. Ballard, The Changing School (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925), quotation at v–vi. 8 Tisdall, Progressive Education? She builds on a considerable body of work stimulated by R.J.W. Selleck’s work in the 1970s. Selleck, English Primary Education and the Progressives, 1914–1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). 9 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/074, Inspection report, 18 July 1936; TNA, ED21/34583, Inspection report, 13 May 1930; ED21/34521, Inspection report, 4 Jan. 1935. 10 TNA, ED21/34992, Inspection report, 5 Jan. 1935. 11 TNA, ED21/35200, Inspection report, 13 April 1923. 12 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/331, Inspection report, 6 June 1937. 13 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/147, P.B. Ballard, ‘Report on 25 Years of LCC Education’, 1930. 14 TNA, ED21/34757, Inspection report, 23 Oct. 1933. 15 TNA, ED21/35182, Inspection report, 1 Feb. 1935. 16 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/147, P.B. Ballard, ‘Report on 25 years of LCC education’, 1930. 17 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/VIC/LB/005, Inspection report, 16 Nov. 1922. 18 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SCA/LB/005, Logbook, 6 July 1923. 19 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/115, Managers’ minutes, 12 Dec. 1922. 20 London Teacher, 20 Jan. 1922. 21 TNA, ED21/34885, 28 July 1926. 22 TNA, ED21/34742, 28 March 1933. 23 TNA, ED21/35317, Report on Stammering Class, 21 July 1925. 24 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/BUC/LB/001, Logbook, 28 June 1935. 25 TNA, ED21/34541, Assistant Education Officer to Board of Educa­ tion, 18 May 1929. 26 Stanley Baldwin, On England (London: P. Allan, 1926), 6. 27 An exception is the examination of the open-air school movement, discussed in Chapter 4, although the impetus here comes from historians of education rather than scholars of the countryside or national

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identity. Recent work has, however, stressed the importance of the countryside to youth groups such as the Scouts and Guides. Sian Edwards, Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside: Creating Good Citizens, 1930–1960 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Siân Roberts, ‘Cultivating an “Earthly Paradise”: Nature, Informal Education, and the Contested Politics of Youth Citizenship, 1910s–1940s’, History of Education 49:4 (2020). My own work anticipates some of the ideas discussed more fully in this chapter. Hester Barron, ‘Changing Conceptions of the “Poor Child”: The Children’s Country Holiday Fund, 1918–1939, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 9:1 (2016); Barron, ‘“Little Prisoners of City Streets”: London Elementary Schools and the School Journey Movement, 1918–1939’, History of Education 42:2 (2013). 28 Quoted in Webster, ‘Health of the School Child’, 74. 29 TNA, ED21/35332, Inspection report, 29 Oct. 1926. 30 TNA, ED21/35117, Inspection report, 16 April 1929; ED21/35193, Inspection report, 22 Nov. 1926; LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/WAT/ LB/001, Inspection report, 4 Jan. 1935. 31 Quoted in Burke and Grosvenor, School, 74. 32 London Teacher, 25 Feb. 1938. 33 Andrew Saint, ‘Battersea: Education in a London Parish since 1750’, History of Education 39:6 (2010), 690. 34 Burke and Grosvenor, School, 91. 35 London Teacher, 15 Oct. 1920. 36 TNA, ED21/34841, Inspection report, 19 Dec. 1924. 37 TNA, ED21/35275, Inspection report, n.d., c.July 1924. 38 Maclure, One Hundred Years, 83. 39 Webster, ‘Health of the School Child’, 76. 40 Maclure, One Hundred Years, 148. 41 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/011, Letter from Assistant Education Officer, 5 Jan. 1923; School Nature Study 103: 26 (April 1931), 29. 42 TNA, ED21/34835, Inspection report, 8 Jan. 1935; ED21/34975, Inspection report, 19 June 1923. 43 TNA, ED21/34860, Inspection report, 11 Nov. 1925. 44 London Teacher, 23 May 1930. 45 TNA, ED21/34596, 10 Aug. 1934; ED21/34629, 7 Sept. 1934. 46 TNA, ED21/34596, Inspection report, 10 Aug. 1934; LMA, LCC/EO/ DIV05/BOW1/LB/002, Inspection report, 6 April 1932. 47 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/BOW1/LB/002, Inspection report, 6 April 1932. 48 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MOW/LB/012, Logbook, Feb. 1923.

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49 TNA, ED21/34860, Inspection report, 4 Dec. 1930. 50 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/GLE1/LB/005, Logbook, 25 Jan. 1938; TNA, ED21/34521, Inspection report, 4 Jan. 1935; LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/ RAN/LB/002, Logbook, July 1926. 51 School Nature Study 79:20 (April 1925), 45; TNA, ED21/35193, Inspection report, 19 Sept. 1934. 52 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/WOO/LB/002, Logbook, 10 May 1933. 53 Walter Johnson, Battersea Park: As A Centre for Nature Study (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910); The Nature-World of London. Trees and Plants (London: Sheldon Press, 1924); Talks with Shepherds (London: Routledge, 1926); The Nature-World of London: Animal Life in London (London: Sheldon Press, 1930). 54 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STH/LB/001, Logbook, 29 Nov. 1932. 55 LCC, Broadcast Lessons in London Elementary Schools: Report of a Survey made by the Council’s Inspectors during the Spring and Summer Terms of 1936 (London: LCC, 1937), 10. 56 School Nature Study 73:18 (Oct. 1923), 62. 57 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/CAP/LB/002, Logbook, 5 Oct. 1920. 58 Geographical Teacher, 13:1 (1925), 62. 59 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/GLO/LB/008, Logbook, 2 June 1920; LCC/ EO/DIV05/POR/LB/003, Logbook, 18 May 1933. 60 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/KNA/LB/006, Logbook, 30 May 1929. 61 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/TUR/LB/004, Logbook, 9 Sept. 1926. 62 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/HAG/LB/009, Logbook, 17 Oct. 1927. 63 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/KNA/LB/006, Logbook, 2 July 1929, 20 June 1930; LCC/EO/DIV05/STPAU1/LB/006, Logbook, 24 July 1922. 64 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/BRE/LB/001, Logbook, 28 Oct. 1935. 65 W.E. Marsden, ‘The School Journey Movement to 1940’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 30:2 (1998); Barron, ‘Little Prisoners’. 66 Marsden, ‘School Journey Movement’, 84. 67 School Journey Record (1927), 21. 68 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/CAP/LB/003, Newspaper cutting, Aug. 1936. 69 LMA, LCC/CH/E/ASH/6/6, School Journey Guidebook, 1935. 70 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/11/039, School Journey Guidebook, 1930. 71 School Nature Study 73:18 (Oct. 1923), 75. 72 School Nature Study 73:18 (Oct. 1923), 76. 73 Imperial War Museum, Documents.4915, Private papers of E. Bradfield. Letter home, n.d., c.Nov. 1940. 74 School Journey Record (1928), 21. 75 School Nature Study 80:20 (July 1925), 69.

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76 People’s Autobiography of Hackney, The Island, 35. 77 Gamble, Chelsea Child, 55, 146. 78 People’s Autobiography of Hackney, Working Lives, 28. 79 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/GLO/LB/008, Logbook, 14 July 1927. 80 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/TUR/LB/008, Logbook, 4 May, 16 July 1926. 81 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/TEE/LB/004, Inspection report, 25 July 1923. 82 TNA, ED21/34516, Inspection report, 24 April 1933. 83 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/11/029, School journey sketchbook, 1938. 84 TNA, ED21/34521, Inspection report, 4 Jan. 1935. 85 TNA, ED21/34667, Inspection report, 16 April 1924. 86 TNA, ED21/34885, Inspection report, 28 July 1926; ED21/34850, Inspection report, 22 June 1927. 87 School Nature Study 81:20 (Oct. 1925). 88 School Journey Record (1919), supplement, 8–20. 89 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/1/37, Headteacher’s report, April 1920. 90 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/ADD/LB/001, Inspection report, 19 July 1920. 91 Spencer, Education, 148. 92 Board of Education, Report of a Committee on the Selection of Pictures for Public Elementary Schools (London: HMSO, 1927), 27–8. 93 TNA, ED21/34750, Inspection report, 16 Jan. 1932. 94 Quoted in Ian Grosvenor, ‘“To Act on the Minds of the Children”. Paintings into Schools and English Education’, in Braster et al., Opening the Black Box, 46. 95 TNA, ED21/34710, Inspection report, 12 June 1935. 96 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/WIL/LB/006, Inspection report, 7 March 1927. 97 Knight, Millfields Memories, 21. 98 London Teacher, 31 Oct. 1930. 99 On the development of school music broadcasts in this period see Gordon Cox, Living Music in Schools 1923–1999 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2002), 31–50. 100 Gibbon and Bell, History, 274; LCC, Broadcast Lessons, 5–7. 101 Peckham People’s History, Times of Our Lives, 112. 102 TNA, ED21/34776, Inspection report, 18 Sept. 1933; ED21/35320, Inspection report, 25 June 1934. 103 TNA, ED21/34853, Inspection report, June 1933; ED21/35266, Inspection report, 4 Jan. 1935. 104 TNA, ED21/34710, Inspection report, 12 June 1935. 105 London Teacher, 27 April 1928. 106 BLSA, Fred Dent. 107 Scannell, Mother Knew Best, 79.

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108 Manchester Guardian, 20 Sept. 1921. See Charles T. Smith, The Music of Life (London: P.S. King & Son, 1919) and The School of Life: A Theatre of Education (London: Grant Richards Ltd, 1921). 109 TNA, ED21/35343, Inspection report, 7 Feb. 1931. 110 People’s Autobiography of Hackney, Working Lives, 30. 111 London Teacher, 4 July 1924. 112 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/FPR/LB/002, Logbook, 25 May 1927. 113 TNA, ED21/35144, Inspection report, 14 May 1934; LMA, LCC/EO/ DIV07/LYN/LB/003, 19 June 1922. 114 London Teacher, 6 June 1924; LCC Education Committee Minutes, 21 May 1924. 115 TNA, ED21/35116, Inspection report, 22 Nov. 1935. 116 TNA, ED21/34516, Inspection report, 16 Nov. 1927. 117 TNA, ED21/35288, Inspection report, 22 Nov. 1933; LMA, LCC/ EO/DIV08/WAL/LB/003, Inspection report, 17 July 1931. 118 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/CEN/LB/005, Logbook, 20 Oct. 1927, 17 April 1928. 119 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HIT/LB/003, Logbook, 26 March 1929; LCC/ EO/DIV07/HIT/LB/003, Inspection report, 8 April 1936. 120 London Teacher, 24 May 1929. 121 London Teacher, 1 July 1927. 122 TNA, ED21/34899, Inspection reports, 8 May 1923, 15 April 1929. 123 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/015, LCC report on senior elementary schools, 9 June 1939. 124 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/IVY/LB/003, Logbook, 20 June 1934. 125 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/BRO/LB/002, Adjudicators’ reports, 2 Feb. 1938. 126 TNA, ED21/34834, Inspection report, 24 Oct. 1930. 127 TNA, ED21/34846, Inspection report, 5 Sept. 1930. 128 TNA, ED21/35343, Inspection report, 7 Feb. 1931. 129 London Teacher, 16 Sept. 1921. 130 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/GIF/LB/001, Logbook, 16 Dec. 1936. 131 TNA, ED21/34904, Inspection report, 24 July 1924. 132 TNA, ED21/34560, Inspection report, 25 April 1935; ED21/34798, Inspection report, 7 Sept. 1927. 133 Nugent, Vocations, 19. 134 E.J. Kenny, ‘Religious Education in the Elementary School’, The Bible and Modern Religious Thought V:10 (1934), 43. 135 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/064, Correspondence, 1926. 136 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/065, Chief Inspector’s report, 23 Jan. 1938, Letter from prefect, 14 Jan. 1938.

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137 ERO, T/Z 25/4268. 138 ERO, T/Z 25/4343. 139 Chaim Lewis, A Soho Address (London: Victor Gollancz, 1965), 18. 140 London Teacher, 9 Nov. 1923. 141 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 17 Nov. 1920. 142 TNA, ED21/35116. Inspection report, 22 Nov. 1935. 143 TNA, ED21/35070, Inspection report, 28 July 1930. 144 TNA, ED21/35362, Inspection report, 22 April 1931. 145 London Teacher, 30 April 1920. 146 THLHLA, L/PMB/F/2/1, Report on lectures to school leavers, 10 Oct. 1922. 147 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/BAT/LB/002, Logbook, 2 July 1936. 148 TNA, ED21/34521, Inspection report, 10 April 1924. 149 Kops, World is a Wedding, 35. 150 TNA, ED21/34638, Inspection report, 26 Feb. 1923. 151 ERO, T/Z 25/2953. 152 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STSAV/LB/001, Inspection report, 25 May 1938. 153 TNA, ED21/34987, Inspection report, 17 July 1929. 154 TNA, ED21/34776, Inspection report, 18 Sept. 1933. 155 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SCA/LB/001, Logbook, 1 July 1929. 156 School Journey Record (1926), 18. 157 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/065, Letter from headteacher, 20 Jan. 1938. 158 TNA, ED21/35202, Inspection report, 27 March 1931. 159 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/BOU/LB/002, Logbook, 29 June 1923; TNA, ED21/34542, Inspection report, 10 March 1928. 160 ERO, T/Z 25/3425. 161 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/CRE/LB/005, Logbook, 20 Nov. 1925. 162 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/11/039, School journey notebook, 1933.

6

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Making citizens

In early 1919, a few weeks after millions of women and men had exercised their new right to vote for the first time, the representative managers of LCC elementary schools gathered for a meeting. One of their number, a headmaster at a north London private school, declared that the elementary schools ‘were not merely places to train children to become good clerks, engineers, chimney-sweeps or tailors, but it was the business of teachers to see that whatever else  they did they must put the children in the way of becoming good citizens’.1 The language of citizenship pervaded education during the interwar period, as both local and national officials adjusted to a period of mass democracy. In 1933 – by which time younger women, too, had been given the vote – the same managers were still emphasising the importance of creating ‘a true sense of the value of civic consciousness and duty to the State’.2 They were no doubt supportive of a pamphlet published by London’s Chief Inspector that year on ‘The Teaching of Citizenship’: ‘Whatever else the children now in school may or may not become’, wrote F.H. Spencer, ‘it is certain that most of them will be citizens, with the political duties and rights that the status of citizen implies.’3 The expectation of citizenship extended to all children, including those who might have been excluded in the past. An LCC official, writing in 1921 about schools for the ‘mentally deficient’, noted that the vast majority of pupils would leave ‘to work as ordinary citizens, become fathers and mothers and voters’.4 Girls’ futures were explicitly referenced in a headteacher’s aspiration to make pupils ‘better mothers and better citizens’.5 And of another school,

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about half of whose pupils were of Eastern European Jewish origin, inspectors urged a special effort to ‘make English citizens of children, a large number of whom are foreigners in respect of their home language and their social and cultural traditions’.6 Numerous such comments are scattered across the inspection reports of the interwar years, especially in the 1930s, when the rise of extremism in Europe focused officials’ attention. And the fact that a copy of Spencer’s pamphlet remains tucked into one old school logbook demonstrates that a commitment to engaging with citizenship training went beyond inspectors’ words.7 There has been a considerable amount of scholarly interest on citizenship education, discussions about which predated the arrival of compulsory schooling in the 1870s and would still attract attention in the twenty-first century. The idea of citizenship itself is historically contingent: Brad Beaven and John Griffiths have charted its shift from a primary association with civic spirit and engagement in the late nineteenth century, to the increasing dominance of notions of duty and discipline in the early twentieth, and the taming of its more aggressively imperialistic strand after the First World War.8 As well as temporal shifts, Tom Hulme has drawn attention to its geographical boundaries; Rob Freathy to the competition between its religious and secular advocates.9 Jenny Keating has specifically examined the interwar LCC, whose councillors and educationalists frequently discussed questions of citizenship and how (or if) ‘civics’ should be taught.10 Closely tied to ideas of citizenship was the classroom dissemination of ideas of patriotism, empire and nation. In this, too, historians have long been interested, generally agreeing that an imperialistic curriculum, to a greater or lesser degree, was advocated by educationalists, but vigorously disagreeing about how extensively this translated into classroom practice or – even harder to judge – inculcated an imperial mentality among children.11 The way that history was taught has probably attracted more attention here than any other subject. Several historians have examined school textbooks from the late Victorian period onwards, arguing that, even by the 1930s, they often reflected the prescriptive factladen history famously pilloried in Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That, ‘encouraging talk of kings and battles to echo around

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the classroom’.12 Stephen Heathorn focused his analysis of the 1880–1914 period on the cheaper and more ubiquitous school readers (textbooks were more generally used in secondary schools) through which pupils ‘were not only learning the alphabet of the English language, they were also learning the language of their presumed identity’.13 Peter Yeandle continued this work into the interwar period, also eschewing textbooks for readers, and arguing that a consistent aim was ‘not to promote patriotism per se, but “enlightened patriotism” – that is, the desire to serve one’s own country with pride, not pomp, and with full awareness of why the nation was great, rather than with blind and unthinking adulation’.14 Patrick Brindle anticipated some of these conclusions in his doctoral thesis, suggesting that the interwar discourse of compliant citizenship, nationalism and imperialism lacked much of the jingoism and chauvinism of earlier years. But Brindle was unusual in his attempt to then explore reception through the testimonies of former teachers and pupils. He found much evidence to suggest that a progressivist turn was not matched by changes in classroom practice.15 The memories of ex-teachers and pupils were also a key source for David Cannadine, Jenny Keating and Nicola Sheldon’s examination of history teaching, though these were richest for the post-1945 period, and their conclusions for the interwar era were necessarily more reliant on written documents. They nevertheless concur with Brindle that the objectives of educationalists were not met, suggesting that ‘history as taught in interwar state schools was widely regarded as being dull and unexciting; and it did not make pupils proud to be English or British’.16 This chapter examines the way that London schoolchildren were taught about citizenship, patriotism and empire, whether through formal lessons or more incidental activities, and beyond the contents of textbooks or readers. It finds that experiences were varied, but that they could sometimes make a lasting difference. But it also argues that the dominant scholarly focus on patriotism and empire can be a distraction. Lessons in subjects such as history, for example, may not have made pupils proud to be English or British; but sometimes that was not their intention.

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One of the biggest debates over citizenship education revolved around whether to teach it directly through timetabled lessons on ‘civics’ or indirectly through subjects such as history and geography. External groups lobbied for the former, the most influential being the Association for Education in Citizenship, founded in 1934 ‘to advance the study of and training in citizenship’.17 As one of its supporters wrote, it was ‘more important that people should know who collects their refuse than who cut off Anne Boleyn’s head’.18 The teaching of dedicated lessons in civics was not government policy. In 1933, the Board of Education’s Suggestions commented that direct instruction was not the best way to lay a foundation in ‘intelligent citizenship’: ‘Any attempt to deal elaborately with such matters as the parts of the British constitution, the local government of the country or the administration of justice, is wearisome, and must be largely unintelligible to children.’19 Twenty years later, the Norwood Report used similar arguments, agreeing that ‘nothing but harm can result, in our opinion, from attempts to interest pupils prematurely in matters which imply the experience of an adult’.20 It was 2002 before citizenship became a statutory part of the English school curriculum. In the interwar period, the LCC was similarly hesitant to advocate direct teaching, but the dissemination of citizenship ideals was clearly present in its schools. In 1918, a questionnaire sent to London senior departments garnered around seventy replies. Only eighteen – not an insignificant minority – had a ‘definite scheme of instruction’, but every other bar two claimed to teach civic ideals more incidentally. The Council concluded that it was almost universally the case ‘that an effort is made to inculcate in the children some idea that they have a responsibility towards the society in which they live’.21 Another inquiry in the mid-1920s confirmed that the teaching of ‘civics’ as a separate subject was neither widespread nor desirable but that there was probably no school in which the teaching of History is not concerned with national heroes and national achievements, in which the teaching of Geography takes no account of the relation between geography conditions and the development of our people and dominions, in which the note of patriotism is never sounded in the literature



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studied or the songs sung. And it is certain that local and national problems (eg budgets) may and sometimes do enter into the teaching of Arithmetic.22

London schools were particularly well placed for practical lessons that touched on civic duty. The House of Commons was a frequent destination for day trips, with parties often accompanied around the House by their local MP. Returning to the classroom, one teacher rearranged the seating to imitate ‘such places as Speaker’s Chair, Government benches, Opposition benches, the gangway, the red line, the Press Gallery, Ladies’ and Strangers Gallery’. He  felt that his pupils valued the experience: ‘The Question: “What  struck  you  most in your visit?” brought many interesting individual observations.’23 The enthusiasm of teachers was not, of course, universal, and nor were school trips. One boys’ school in the East End explicitly incorporated a course of ‘Citizenship’ studies into its history syllabus; inspectors were therefore particularly disappointed that children had never been taken to Westminster.24 For schools that lacked the will or finances for day trips, there were other ways of introducing the pageantry and rituals of government. The mayor of Bethnal Green visited several schools in her area in the mid-1930s; dressed in her robes and chain, she visited Hague Street in 1934 and gave its pupils ‘an address on citizenship and their task of fitting themselves for their future lives’.25 Moments might also be found between lessons to initiate informal discussions. A teacher at a Peckham school, for example, devoted ‘a brief space during both morning and afternoon sessions … to the discussion of current topics of importance such as are gleaned from newspapers’.26 The increasing use of wireless broadcasts provided a different means of attracting children’s interest. In 1926, BBC school programmes included lectures on such topics as ‘The child as citizen: his rights and duties’, ‘Coming of age: the vote’, and ‘Why we pay taxes, and how’.27 The school’s organisation itself might offer further opportunities to introduce citizenship training. The house and prefect system was described as ‘steadily gaining ground’ in an LCC report of 1925; it also noted that they were ‘a valuable aid in producing a civic sense

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as well as a rational discipline by fostering the notion of personal duty and of collective obligation’.28 By 1939, most senior schools possessed both houses and prefects, allowing pupils to learn ‘in a rudimentary way some of the principles of self-government’.29 One  school chose a more archaic model, basing its system of school government on the old English system of reeves, with each class reeve being responsible for certain duties: ‘[Thus] the children have a very useful insight into a simple and direct method of control.’30 The election of prefects also allowed children to practise democracy, conducted in at least some schools ‘in a manner resembling as closely as possible the method used at a general election’.31 One school set out polling booths and employed children as poll clerks: ‘Each boy had to register his vote, and a Returning Officer declared the winner, and the successful candidates returned thanks.’32 The use of infant departments as polling stations on real-life election days provided another chance for scholars to witness the mechanics of democracy. One headteacher took children into the polling booths to give ‘a lesson on voting’, the frequency of general elections in the early 1920s allowing him to do this regularly.33 By 1931, the London Teacher was reporting the mock election as ‘a popular form of activity in many schools’.34 Privileges – such as the election of the May Queen – might also be allotted by ballot; on one such occasion ‘where the children were too young to write the names, the children recorded their votes by whispering to the teacher’.35 For schools that did not teach civics directly, indirect messaging most often came in history lessons. There was very little central guidance on history teaching. The 1922 Code recommended only that History … should include, in the lower classes, the lives of great men and women and the lessons to be learnt therefrom, and in the higher classes a knowledge of the great persons and events of English History and of the growth of the British Empire. The teaching need not be limited to English or British History, and lessons on citizenship may be given with advantage in the higher classes.36

Textbooks or readers might provide the skeleton for a scheme of work, and both were used in London’s elementary schools. Indeed,

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inspectors felt that at least one school was over-reliant on them, finding written work ‘composed of strings of phrases from the textbooks which on questioning appeared to convey little or no meaning to the children’.37 Others were criticised for using textbooks that might be not only old, tattered or in short supply but ‘antiquated and unreliable’.38 But it was more common to find complaints about the lack of textbooks or similar resources. ‘The children are … longing for books’, wrote one frustrated headteacher, but ‘I have already spent above my allowance’.39 Teachers therefore had considerable freedom to plan their curriculum. If many fell back on the tropes and ideas that they had themselves received a generation earlier, others were clearly invested in the subject. History graduates were more likely to be found in secondary schools but they were not absent from elementary ones, not even the poorest. Those responsible for history teaching in London elementary schools included a handful of men and women who held university diplomas in history or even honours degrees.40 Some were active researchers: in 1933, a teacher at Knapp Road School in Bow was granted permission by the LCC to use his own school in his study of ‘Fundamental concepts in the teaching of history’.41 Such teachers may have influenced the content of textbooks: the author of one popular series, A First History of England, noted in the preface of the volume dealing with the years 1820–1901 that it was a period she had not intended to cover as she considered the ‘complicated history’ of the last century to be unsuitable for younger pupils. She had been persuaded to write the volume ‘at the request of various headmasters and headmistresses’.42 However, despite the latitude given to teachers, an overwhelming majority of Brindle’s oral history respondents reported a curriculum that concentrated predominantly upon a standard canon of stories and biographies in English history from 55 BC to 1901; so much so that ‘it is possible to argue that there existed a de facto national curriculum for History’.43 If inspection reports throw up a number of exceptions – at a school in Islington, ‘Hammurabi and Akhnaton [were] more than names’44 – most confirm that history  usually  started with either Roman Britain or the Norman invasion. ‘Modern’ history – broadly conceived as

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nineteenth- or even twentieth-century history – was commonly taught, though not a given. If the chronological range was predictable, so too was an emphasis on patriotism. ‘History is plainly a subject in which frequent opportunities will occur for developing patriotism and devotion to the Motherland’, stated an LCC report in 1925.45 It was an aim that became particularly pronounced when schools catered for large numbers of Jewish children, as apparent in the comment of an inspector ‘that the teaching of History is of particular importance in a school such as this where many of the homes are lacking in the traditions acquired by long residence in this country’. He recommended increasing the amount of time devoted to the subject.46 At least some schools took the task seriously. In 1919, a group of pupils were taken to pay tribute to Edith Cavell as her remains were taken through Liverpool Street station. ‘The boys are at present receiving a course of lessons in citizenship’, wrote the headmaster. ‘The various forms of true and false patriotism having been recently dealt with, occasion was taken of this sad event to make a lasting impression and to awaken admiration for and to illustrate the seriousness of national duty.’47 In 1923, another headteacher recorded his scheme of work for the lower classes: ‘Great deeds and the men who did them from Alfred the Great to Lord Roberts’.48 More generally, and at the other end of the period, it was the belief of the research organisation Mass Observation that ‘some astonishingly patriotic history is still taught in elementary schools’. Its investigators quoted a girl who told them in 1940: ‘My teacher says we’ve never lost a battle. She says that’s what we learn history for, to show we’ve never lost a battle.’49 Outside of history lessons, a school’s choice of house names reveals the heroes commonly celebrated, with houses assigned historical figures more than any other category. Some schools chose from a suite of military or imperial men – Drake, Raleigh, Wolfe, Nelson, Gordon; famous explorers – Shackleton, Livingstone, Scott; or eminent inventors, engineers or craftsmen – Telford, Arkwright, Faraday, Wedgwood, Stevenson. Girls’ schools chose women: a Nightingale house was usually a given, with other options being those such as Edith Cavell, Grace Darling, Boadicea or Queen Victoria. Several schools chose literary greats: one chose children’s

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writers – Barrie, Carroll, Milne, Stevenson. Others chose from – for boys – Dickens, Tennyson, Kipling, Milton, Defoe, Keats, Bunyan or – for girls – Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Jane Austen. Either might have a Shakespeare house; at least two girls’ schools named their houses after the bard’s female characters. Choices were invariably British; the only exceptions I came across were Beethoven, St  Francis and Joan of Arc, or the decision of a couple of girls’ schools to name their houses after female saints.50 No doubt for many pupils – perhaps most – these names meant little beyond a token allegiance, but there was an attempt in some schools to go beyond this. Houses ‘are here much more than mere names’, wrote one inspector approvingly.51 One girls’ department named houses after Emmeline Pethick Lawrence (to stand for ‘Freedom’), Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (‘Service’), Elizabeth Fry (‘Love’) and Josephine Butler (‘Brotherhood’). Talks were organised to help children understand what their figureheads represented; Pethick Lawrence herself spoke to the girls on ‘freedom’.52 Certainly the fact that some memoirists, decades after their schooldays, can still recall their house names suggests some kind of lasting attachment. Houses were named after navigators’, recalled one ex-schoolboy. ‘Mine was Frobisher … I can remember looking up Frobisher in the public library … I was jealous of the boys in Drake because he had been a much more successful navigator. Frobisher had not got very far, while Drake had defeated the Armada and sailed round the world.’53 If none of these names surprise, then teachers were also increasingly turning to social history. Yeandle points to the celebration of ‘ordinary’ people as well as the extraordinary in elementary school readers, which ‘incorporated stories of nurses, servants, writers, inventors and unnamed sailors and soldiers’.54 Definitions of ‘social history’ were not sophisticated, nor always clear – ‘normally based upon the substitution of inventors and social reformers for monarchs and martial heroes’, suggests Brindle – but were in step with the increased engagement with the ‘history of everyday life’  that Laura Carter has documented in the popular culture of these years: ‘a mild and liberal social history with conservative streaks’.55 An emphasis on social history also added something to history lessons beyond mere patriotism. As Carter has also argued, scholars

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have tended to overemphasise the importance of history as a means of teaching national or international identity; she suggests that local and social history, less politicised and more accessible, was preferred by teachers.56 As one headmaster put it: ‘It is to history we turn to help us in our present task of living.’57 Inspectors, too, promoted history lessons that ‘throw some light on the world of today as the child knows it’.58 ‘Transport, ships or houses throughout the centuries are fruitful subjects. A place can even be found for studying toys’, was the advice of one.59 If inspection reports sometimes criticised curricula for too narrow a focus on political topics (‘The Reform Bill and the Factory Acts are not for ten-year-olds’),60 it was more common for them to praise teachers for introducing social, industrial or economic history. ‘The history of occupations, industries, inventions and “everyday things” means much more to these boys than a laboured study of institutions and political affairs’, wrote another inspector approvingly.61 There was, of course, a balance to be struck. When an inspector praised a school for its ‘interesting and unusual’ syllabus, embracing ‘topics ranging from milk and agriculture to the working of a modern electrically-controlled clock’, he also worried that the cost would be a chronological awareness.62 Indeed, a weak grasp of chronology was one of the inspectorate’s most frequent complaints, quoting children who ‘gave the Birth of Christ as occurring in the eleventh century’, or who ‘did not know that Julius Caesar lived before Christopher Columbus’.63 But there was no unified approach. ‘Before attempting social and economic history the boys should have an adequate sense of the sequence of events’, warned one, while another felt that a precise knowledge of years and names was ‘unimportant provided they acquire a keenness for books that will ultimately give them dates and facts in abundance’.64 The London Teacher despaired and wondered how headteachers could be expected to navigate the contradictory advice, faced with ‘about a dozen different suggestions as to what should be the first consideration … Local history … biography … the social life of the common people … practical civics … source book history … constitutional history … the concentric method … the League of Nations view of history, etc, etc, etc.’65 In 1918, elementary teachers were among the attendees at a conference on history teaching organised

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by the LCC. One wrote to the Education Officer afterwards, to regret that ‘the result of the conference was, I fear, confusion in the minds of the audience … Something new is wanted, but what, was not clearly shown.’ He added that ‘apart from yourself … probably not one of the speakers had very much knowledge of what history is taught in our elementary schools. How then could they fittingly address headteachers and others on that very subject?’66 This particular headteacher was himself a history graduate; no record exists of his school’s history syllabus but it was probably safe in his hands. But others floundered and several inspection reports criticised the incoherence of a school’s curriculum: ‘the main intention of the history teaching is not at all clear’.67 Indeed, a Board of Education survey of 1927, involving forty-one London elementary schools, made several criticisms of their history teaching, including that factual knowledge was deficient, syllabuses overloaded and resources inadequate. It suggested that the oral lesson was still too predominant: ‘It is probably safe to say that the majority of children in London elementary schools spent at least 75% of their time during the history periods as passive listeners, and in some schools it is difficult to ascertain what else they do.’68 ‘The teaching heard both in History and Geography was very poor, lacking in plan, vague and uninteresting’, was an inspector’s take on a school the following year. ‘Most of the boys preferred their private conversation to listening to the teacher.’69 Surely in such lessons there could be little consistent attempt to imbue patriotism, or indeed much else. However, when an investigation of 1913 surveyed thousands of schoolchildren, most of whom came from London elementary schools – admittedly shortly before the period covered by Cannadine and his team’s oral history interviews, from which they concluded that history was remembered as dull – it found that history was one of the more popular school subjects. This was particularly the case for boys for whom ‘massacres, battles, strategies and pillaging are the chief charms … One boy is frank enough to state that he likes History because “it tells me how to make debased coinage”; whilst another finds interest in knowing “how kings die”.’ It did record some children who felt differently, for example that ‘We all cannot go like Drake and rob Spain, but we all can

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do our duty to our country.’70 But more pious lessons were not always the intention; perhaps the teacher who gave his boys massacres, battles, strategies and pillaging was responding to what captured his pupils’ interests, rather than any greater political motive. History lessons could serve other purposes, more akin to the cultural stimulation discussed in the previous chapter. A loose note, dated 1925, reveals one headteacher’s approach: ‘In lower classes especially, store children’s minds with stories of all kinds.’71 In a Finsbury school, situated in deprived surroundings, inspectors praised both history and geography lessons for providing a ‘means of escape’, and for ‘widening the outlook and for stimulating the imagination of pupils, some of whom appear to have grown old before their time’.72 The decentring of patriotism can also be seen when foreign children were present. At one school in the West End, in which children hailed from several different countries, a headteacher’s aim was described as twofold: both ‘to make good English a natural form of expression for these foreign children and so to give them a share in English culture’ but also ‘to give scope for the development of their own characteristic gifts’.73 The same celebration of different cultures was present when a party of twenty boys, only five of whom had English parents, went on a school journey in 1934. An inspector thought it had done ‘much to put them in touch with English ways’, but not at the expense of their own heritage: ‘On the way home the boys marched to the singing both of school songs and of one or two Italian Fascist tunes, including Giovanezza.’74 For schools which did possess textbooks, the Highroads of History series was the most popular in senior elementary schools, according to the Education Officer in 1918.75 One of its volumes opened with a chapter on the national flag: No Briton can help being proud of the Union Jack. It flies over the greatest empire the world has ever known; and wherever it flies, there are to be found at least justice and fair dealing for every man. Nearly one quarter of the whole earth is ruled by the Power which it represents, and nearly one quarter of the population of the earth finds protection beneath its folds.76

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The British Empire was central to the sense of the world that was imparted within the schoolroom, from descriptions in textbooks to visuals on the walls. Several school halls displayed the Union flag; at one school, the class with the best attendance each week was allowed it in their classroom.77 Aside from the red-coloured maps of empire commonly recalled by memoirists, many schools also displayed the iconic advertising posters produced by the Empire Marketing Board between 1926 and 1933.78 One London headteacher recorded the hanging of maps ‘showing Empire Air-routes’ and ‘Empire shopping’.79 It is impossible to know how actively such displays were employed, but the Board received many appreciative letters from teachers across the 27,000 British schools that participated. ‘Your posters have created a new “Idea of Empire” in the minds of these poor little slum children’, wrote one.80 Pride in the British Empire was bolstered by rituals associated with the monarchy, with special lessons given on occasions such as royal births or deaths. In 1922, the children of Tottenham Road School sent their wellwishes to Princess Mary when she married. The thank-you note received from Buckingham Palace was framed and hung in the hall.81 One ex-schoolgirl’s memories of her headteacher were inseparable from royalty: ‘Her desk was … plastered with newspaper cuttings and photographs [of royalty] … After prayers we had a bulletin on the health and activities of the Royal Family.’82 And royal events of the 1930s provided imperial setpieces: in 1935, 70,000 London schoolchildren saw the Jubilee procession; another 40,000 watched the Coronation parade two years later (feats of planning that would prove useful in September 1939).83 One 15-year-old wrote to the Education Officer, thanking him for the opportunity to see the king and queen, who ‘in blue and silver looked more lovely than any of her pictures portray … I never before felt more glad that I was English and more proud of my King and Country.’84 This particular girl was a secondary school pupil, but many of her elementary counterparts must have felt similarly. The most significant imperial occasion of the interwar period was the British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley in 1924, visited by 190,000 elementary schoolchildren during school hours and many thousands more independently.85 One East End school took 120 girls over two days. ‘Visited Palace of Industry, Canada, Australia,

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New Zealand, Government Pavilion, Hong Kong, India, Railways and three quarters of an hour in amusement park’, wrote the headteacher, adding ‘No one lost.’86 The popularity of the amusement park was a reminder that the exhibition might entertain rather than inform, but at least some children were swept up by the dazzle of empire. When The Labour Woman ran a national children’s essay competition that year entitled ‘The day we spent at the British Empire Exhibition’, its editors reflected on the contributions. Some children had ‘kept their heads’, they suggested, but others ‘were greatly impressed by the size of the Empire, and indeed it had filled them with what we fear to be a dangerous kind of Imperial swellheadedness’.87 It is testament to the power of the exhibition that these were children whose mothers were politically engaged enough to buy that particular journal. ‘Reading the memoirs of those who attended’, Jonathan Rose has argued, ‘one cannot help but conclude that these [imperial festivals] were by far the most persuasive vehicles of imperialist propaganda. School lessons only instilled the haziest consciousness of colonialism, but once the discussion turns to Wembley, it jumps into sharp and memorable focus.’88 A more regular celebration took place every year on Empire Day, observed by the vast majority of British schools in the interwar period.89 The morning typically included a headteacher’s address, flag-waving, songs and a pageant, perhaps to parents; a half-holiday was given after lunch. Many schools chose to emphasise the active role that children, as future citizens, were expected to play. The writing lessons given at one school on Empire Day in 1923, for example, required pupils of the top class to write out that ‘Everyone should work: for themselves, for their family, for their country’; those of the second that ‘Every bit of work well done is helping’; the third that ‘Lazy people are of little use to their country’, and the fourth simply that ‘We can work hard.’90 In their addresses, headteachers spoke of the duties and responsibilities of British Imperial citizens, telling children about ‘the building of the Empire and the part each one must play if its glory is to remain’, or ‘the duty of each individual to become fit to be a member [of the Empire]’.91 In the years immediately after the war, masters who had seen service were sometimes invited to speak; in one case the boys were addressed by a teacher ‘from the point of

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view of the man who had to stay at home and carry on’.92 The role of the ordinary citizen was foregrounded, as when one headteacher instanced ‘the many examples of great men of the past down to today’s hospital helpers’.93 In another school in 1919, Empire Day ended with ‘cheers for the king, soldiers, mothers and teachers’.94 Recollections of Empire Day are often included in memoirs. One ex-schoolgirl remembered learning about the imperial provenance of wheat, butter, pineapples, bananas and sugar. Arriving home, her tea comprised two slices of bread with margarine: ‘It really didn’t seem much of a meal for a proud citizen of the most Important Capital of the Greatest Country of the Mightiest Empire in the Whole World!’95 It is unclear whether such cynicism was felt in childhood. Memoirists often recall excitement and pride – ‘I used to feel as though I would burst!’96 The day is frequently remembered as ‘a highlight of the year’, ‘A Very Important Day’, a ‘great day’, and recalled by several as invariably sunny.97 Childhood pleasure, of course, was heightened by the half-day holiday. When a Bethnal Green school celebrated Empire Day in 1925, the rendition of God Save the King was followed by ‘Cheers for the London County Council, for kindly granting a half day this afternoon’.98 The treat status even of the morning’s events is suggested by one logbook entry, noting that two pupils would not be participating as a punishment for bad behaviour.99 Other memoirs suggest that children might absorb a sense of imperial greatness, whether or not it was later rejected. One suggested: ‘I think we all enjoyed Empire day. It may sound oldfashioned now, but then it gave us a sense of belonging, and thus of security, very precious to a child’, while another commented that the impression left by Empire Day was ‘to establish that I was a freeborn Englishman and the world was my oyster’.100 There were certainly some children who – as children – were uncomfortable with its connotations, particularly when this was encouraged by parents. Harold Rosen, for example, was lectured by his mother ‘about what she thought Empire really meant’. She sent him to school on Empire Day in his usual old jersey, scuffed shoes and without a flag, ‘which was all very well but … it was one thing to be dazzled by her inside knowledge but quite another to be selected as the representative of her principles, defying the

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British Empire all by myself’. His teacher assumed his flag’s absence was due to poverty and lent him a ha’penny to purchase one. The 8-year-old Rosen did so, but felt miserable all day and ripped it up before he got home.101 It seems unlikely that this was the experience of the majority. Some level of parental support is implied by the clean white dresses or red, blue and white hair ribbons so often referenced by exschoolgirls, or the fact that few children – Rosen excepted – arrived without the flags which parents were expected to provide. The headteacher of Vauxhall Street infants, for example, whose school accommodated just over five hundred children, reported that only four of her pupils arrived without flags on Empire Day in 1931.102 Beaven and Griffiths have noted the ‘starkly different conclusions’ that historians have come to regarding the impact of Empire Day. They speculate that this may be because evidence drawn from scattered autobiographical material fails to represent the ‘key localised contexts and agencies that may have influenced the dissemination of the imperial message’. They examine the diverse ways in which English localities approached the event, supporting their wider argument that the degree to which schools immersed pupils in imperial propaganda depended upon the local context.103 Showing that variation was more finely grained still, Beaven also suggests that differences might exist between individual schools, as so much depended on the tone set by the headteacher.104 Obviously teachers differed in their personal stance towards imperial pageantry. A variety of views can be deduced from responses to the decision by the newly elected Labour Council to change the name of Empire Day to ‘Commonwealth Day’ in 1934 (it was not renamed nationally until 1958). Dozens of teachers ignored the instruction and continued to refer to ‘Empire Day’ in the semi-private space of their logbook that year. Others paid grumpy lip-service, writing that ‘Empire Day’ was celebrated ‘by the instruction of the LCC as Commonwealth Day’, or that ‘this being “Commonwealth” Day (Empire Day) …’105 By 1935 most had accepted the change, but several continued to use the term ‘Empire Day’ into the late 1930s, usually with ‘Commonwealth’ in brackets.106 Most schools conformed though; presumably some were happy to do so. It is certainly the case that many London schools adopted

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a gentler tone. If one themed its pageant as a ‘procession of Colonies etc. to do homage to England’; others chose ‘a tableau demonstrating the Brotherhood of Nations’, or performed ‘a little fantasie representing the overthrow of war and the coming of peace’.107 Some offered no elaborate pageant at all. Empire Day at one East End school in 1928 was marked by ‘appropriate lessons’, but the communal activity was limited to a half-hour talk by the headteacher, the singing of ‘England’ and two verses of the national anthem.108 A school in Camberwell in 1931 offered a ‘simple ceremony’ in which the headmaster emphasised ‘that this day was not a “flag wagging or boasting ceremony” but … a day when we should each attempt to settle our minds to renewed efforts to make the whole world a happier place’.109 In Finsbury, a few years later and likely apprehensive of future conflict, a headteacher conducted Empire Day ‘on a very quiet scale’ based around the central idea of ‘Freedom. Today’s thoughts: (i) want to keep this freedom (ii) want to be worthy of it (iii) How?’110 Even within the same school, a change of headteacher could mean a significant change in approach. When a new headmaster took over Beaufort House Boys’ School in February 1934, for example, Empire Day was marked three months later with marches, flags, speeches and songs. Disapproving of the quieter approach taken by his predecessor, he recorded that ‘Empire Day was – for the first time for many years – appropriately celebrated.’111 Some claimed that the popular response to the First World War had provided proof that schooling could influence attitudes. In the London Teacher, the common assumption that an aggressive nationalism taught to German children carried significant blame for the war was contrasted against ‘the grim determination of the British soldier to fight on, to die fighting … that spirit, so splendidly exhibited by our men, was fostered in every school of the nation.’112 Similar sentiments were repeated locally. In 1921, when a Sydenham headmaster retired, a speech by the chairman of managers included the accolade that boys from the school had signed up to fight in the early stages of the war in greater numbers than (she claimed) any other elementary school in London, showing ‘the kind of teaching they had received’.113 Certainly some teachers

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must have tried to imbue pupils with patriotic fervour, such as the headmaster who, in 1920, suggested school memorials should list the names only of volunteers, not those who had been conscripted; or another who tried to prevent the appointment to his staff of a wartime conscientious objector: ‘I have the utmost contempt for such people.’114 The way children were taught about the war also offered the opportunity to emphasise patriotism in other ways. The popular textbook Highroads of History pulled no punches in describing a conflict initiated by Germany’s ‘covetous eyes’ for the British Empire and an Austria ‘bent on war’. Although the British government had ‘strove with might and main’ to avoid it, they had been honour-bound to support Belgium, while ‘common prudence would not let us remain supine while the Germans … established themselves on the shores of the English Channel’. The textbook did, at least, conclude that ‘the misery and waste of the long struggle’ led to the establishment of the League of Nations ‘which should eradicate the great curse of war from the life of civilised mankind’.115 The experience of the war was also used by those pushing a different political line, who argued that ‘The war to end war must be waged by the schoolmaster far more than by the soldier’, and that ‘the German army consisted of men who as children were used to the idea of war and trained to admire it, while the English army was the product of a more peaceful childhood’.116 As the Board of Education pamphlet on The Teaching of History suggested in 1923, the experience of the war meant that ‘every civilised community will recognise with increasing clearness that its own social order and unity and the harmonious progress of the whole world demand a general and more thorough study of History, both national and international’.117 Teachers differed over their attitude to the war just as they differed over approaches to civics, history teaching or empire, and presumably also affected by their own wartime experiences. School logbooks for 1919 are peppered with references to teachers returning from service abroad. Twenty thousand elementary school teachers served in the war, of whom nearly two thousand were killed; old war injuries were still causing staff absences well into the 1930s.118 Commemorating Armistice Day in the early

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1920s, one headmaster stopped morning lessons early to give children extra play ‘to celebrate the Victory’ while another sent two parties of pupils to visit the Cenotaph, ‘to help lay a foundation of patriotism and love of great deeds of Englishmen in their hearts’. Both were very different to the headmaster of a Limehouse school who presided over a sombre collection of activities and cancelled all play that day.119 Attitudes changed over the two decades too, as the popular memory of the war shifted from patriotic celebration to the more circumspect feelings of the 1930s, driven in part by a changing cultural context.120 In 1934, the Labour Council announced that, alongside the renaming of Empire Day, Armistice Day was henceforth to be known as ‘Armistice and Peace Day’.121 That year one headteacher ditched the ‘Armistice’ part altogether, noting that the ‘peace day’ had included a reading of the roll of honour and renditions of ‘Jerusalem’, the national anthem, Kipling’s ‘Recessional’ and ‘O God Our Help’, alongside an address by the headmaster on ‘the futility of war’.122 Children’s responses were also affected by generation. In 1919, a minute’s silence on 11 November was, one head observed, ‘as long as the children could endure it. Many of them were much affected.’123 Some pupils would carry their trauma with them in the years that followed and teachers were still citing the experience of air raids to explain disruptive behaviour, ‘nervousness’ or ‘mental deficiency’ as late as the mid-1920s.124 But, by 1927, a headteacher noted that ‘All children now in the [infants] school have been born since the War ended. They promised however that they would do all in their power to promote peace.’125 And by 1937, when a teacher in a London suburb wrote an account for Mass Observation, his description of the scene as his school listened to the broadcast from the Cenotaph was very different: ‘Two or three talkers and misbehavers are turfed out … There is a good deal of fidgeting, playing with hands, looking sideways and behind.’126 Across the two decades, a discussion of the League of Nations or prayers for its work were usually included. Schools were actively courted by the League of Nations Union (LNU). ‘There is no body of persons with more power or opportunity to help than the teachers’, remarked Robert Cecil, one of its founders.127 Helen

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McCarthy comments that ‘if there was one place in interwar Britain where the fact of the League’s existence was hard to miss, it was the classroom’, while Jenny Keating suggests that it was particularly influential in London’s schools, where various members of the LCC were supportive and involved – at least until the mid-1930s, when its increasing impotence in international relations saw its influence wane.128 LNU values were cast as citizenship and one teacher felt that LNU speakers should be encouraged: ‘By allowing our children to be taught by such people, and by bringing them into personal contact with them … we are giving them the best possible training in citizenship.’129 By 1933, Chief Inspector F.H. Spencer could comment that ‘The League of Nations has a part of one kind or another in the life of most schools’, but, as always, some were more enthusiastic than others.130 One adopted ‘Lord Robert Cecil’ as the name for one of its houses; another, led by ‘one of the most enthusiastic LNU workers in London’, provided optional instruction in Esperanto after school hours.131 In 1932, a Camberwell school marked League of Nations week with a full programme of ‘hymns, prayers, lessons on the League, the display of maps and posters in the hall and addresses by LNU speakers to both girls and parents (almost one hundred parents attended), and a pageant of song, dance and play on Friday’.132 On the other hand, the teacher writing for Mass Observation described his headteacher’s lip-service during the Armistice Day address: ‘The head now reads out without pause a message from the League of Nations Union … The reading lasts about five minutes, or rather less, but as it is couched in language rather difficult for juniors most of it passes over their heads. Before the end I notice that there is hardly a child listening.’ He added that as an aside that the head ‘has no sympathy with the League’.133 At least one memoirist, schooled in the East End in the 1930s, was unimpressed even when intentions were good. He recalled the visiting LNU lecturers who addressed pupils, remembering one for the ‘enormous vein in the centre of his forehead. I don’t know what he was talking about, but the vein would rise fit to burst when he got excited about his lecture. This was more interesting than the drivel he was emitting.’134

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In 1923, the Royal Commonwealth Society ran its annual competition for scholars across the British Empire. The prize-winning entries (the only ones to be archived) were usually dominated by grammar, secondary and private school pupils. That year, however, two London schoolgirls from an elementary school in Rotherhithe took the top prizes for their descriptions of the Prince of Wales’s recently completed world tour. Their essays, running to twenty-five and eighteen pages of foolscap, gave fantastically detailed accounts of his journey from Portsmouth to Canada via India, with numerous stop-offs along the way. That their two scripts were different in many places suggests that this was no mere copying-out exercise; that they nevertheless also contained several identical phrases suggests that much of their writing was informed by their class lessons. ‘Comradeship’, the winning essay announced, ‘is the key to all wellbeing and happiness in the democratic life of the empire today – comradeship between the British nation and other nations, comradeship between all walks of life within each nation’s ranks. Never surely in any Empire was there such mutual love and loyalty between prince and people as was shown on the famous world tour.’135 Of course, sentiments such as these might be reinforced outside the classroom too. Hugh Cunningham neglects the school altogether when he suggests that it would have been ‘very difficult for any child growing up in the early twentieth century not to have been infected by the ubiquity of empire’, noting the ‘slide shows, films, toy soldiers, cigarette cards and almost any kind of merchandise [which] came emblazoned with imperial motifs’.136 But if the girls’ essays are testament to the success of imperial messaging in one particular school – and to two particular pupils – it is clear that the teaching of concepts such as citizenship, patriotism and empire varied enormously across different London classrooms, affected by the degree of enthusiasm among a school’s staff (especially the headteacher), and the effectiveness of their teaching. Individual children also responded in diverse ways. It is harder still to generalise about any long-term effect. As the Board of Education itself acknowledged in 1932, when commenting on the steady increase in educational activities promoting international cooperation across the nation’s schools, ‘Whether

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an international pageant, in which all the 120 infants of a school took part and the League of Nations was represented by a child of three, would have an enduring effect is a matter for psychologists to determine.’137 Many memoirs explicitly acknowledge that growing up affected their view of their childhood. One memoirist recalled her old headteacher: ‘I wonder now if she was a communist … She was terribly fond of the brother theme’.138 A contemporary had the opposite experience, remembering his headmaster spending ‘a lot of his time pointing out the weaknesses of Utopian ideals. Looking back, I realise that he must have meant socialism.’139 Political messaging could easily be lost at the time, especially to smaller children. Indeed, in 1935 a group of school managers dismissed a complaint that a teacher had instructed children to tell their parents which candidate to vote for, not least because ‘the children are too young either to convey accurately any incident of this kind, or exert any influence with parents’.140 In any case, love of country, monarchy and empire or, indeed, the championing of the League of Nations and international cooperation, rarely dominated a child’s education and instead competed with more day-to-day concerns. A striking example is the examination set by one school in 1930. Pupils were asked to choose between two questions. The first asked children to potentially reflect on history, Britain’s role in the world, and internationalism: ‘“Peace hath her victories, no less renowned than war.” Write a composition with this heading, giving some examples of the victories of Peace.’ The second captured the mundanities of everyday life: ‘Describe a crossword puzzle and how to solve it.’141 One reason why more dedicated lessons on, for example, citizenship were never introduced was that it was not necessarily seen as a priority. In 1925, an LCC report commented that ‘Employers … sometimes complain, with or without reason, that boys cannot do long tots, or compound practice, or cannot spell. They do not complain that children know too little about De Montfort’s Parliament or the achievements of Sir George Grey.’142 Children might have agreed: during an inspection of a senior girls’ department in 1934, inspectors quoted a child ‘from a very poor home’ who thought history a waste of time ‘because it deals with people who are dead and gone and does not … help to earn a living’. Their advice to the

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school to combat such apathy was to work harder to ‘bring the past into relation with the present’.143 This was not always about imbuing a love of country, then, but spoke to a simpler aspiration to bring children up to know the world around them. Mark Benney’s memoir, written as a young man, paints a generally damning picture of his schooldays. But one of the very few things he appreciated were the occasional school excursions to the Tower or the Houses of Parliament, or mock elections ‘which encouraged us to inquire into the political situation of the day’. He neither took a new look at citizenship, nation or empire as a consequence, nor implied that such motives were intended. For him, their value lay in the fact that ‘Such novelties infused life into the dead body of study, started fresh trains of interests, linked up the school with the world outside its walls.’144

Notes 1 The Schoolmaster, 1 March 1919. 2 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/356, Representative managers’ report, 1933. 3 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/IVY/LB/006, Memo by F.H. Spencer, ‘The Teaching of Citizenship’, 1933. 4 LMA, LCC/EO/SS/01/07, LCC memo, 14 Jan. 1921. Original ­emphasis. 5 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/341, Inspection report, 11 Jan. 1938. 6 TNA, ED21/35138, Inspection report, 10 Dec. 1929. 7 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/IVY/LB/006, Logbook, 1929–39. 8 Brad Beaven and John Griffiths, ‘Creating the Exemplary Citizen: The Changing Notion of Citizenship in Britain 1870–1939’, Contemporary British History 22:2 (2008). 9 Tom Hulme, ‘Putting the City Back into Citizenship: Civics Education and Local Government in Britain, 1918–45’, Twentieth Century British History 26:1 (2015); Rob Freathy, ‘The Triumph of Religious Education for Citizenship in English Schools, 1935–1949’, History of Education 37:2 (2008). 10 Jenny Keating, ‘Approaches to Citizenship Teaching in the First Half of the Twentieth Century – The Experience of the London County Council’, History of Education 40:6 (2011), 777. 11 See particularly Jim English, ‘Empire Day in Britain, 1904–1958’, Historical Journal 49:1 (2006); Beaven, Visions of Empire; Brad

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Beaven and John Griffiths, ‘The City and Imperial Propaganda: A Comparative Study of Empire Day in England, Australia, and New Zealand, c.1903–1914’, Journal of Urban History 42:2 (2015); Rose, Intellectual Life, 321–64; Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 116–24. 12 W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London: Methuen & Co., 1935); John Gardiner, The Victorians: An Age in Retrospect (London: Hambledon and London, 2002), 109; see also Valerie E. Chancellor, History for Their Masters. Opinion in the English History Textbook 1800–1914 (Bath: Adams & Dart, 1970). 13 Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country and Race: Constructing Gender, Class and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 20. 14 Peter Yeandle, Citizenship, Nation, Empire: The Politics of History Teaching in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 123. 15 Patrick Brindle, ‘Past Histories: History and the Elementary School Classroom in Early Twentieth Century England’ (unpublished PhD, Cambridge, 1998), 38. 16 Cannadine et al., Right Kind of History, 95. 17 Derek Heater, A History of Education for Citizenship (London: Routledge, 2004), 95; Gordon Batho, ‘The History of the Teaching of Civics and Citizenship in English Schools’, The Curriculum Journal 1:1 (1990), 95. 18 Hulme, ‘Putting the City Back’, 27. 19 Board of Education, Suggestions for the Consideration of Teachers and Others Concerned in the Work of Public Elementary Schools (London: HMSO, 1923), 95. Also quoted in Keating, ‘Approaches to Citizenship Teaching’, 767. 20 Quoted in Heater, History of Education for Citizenship, 94. 21 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/003, Education Officer’s report, 20 April 1918. Keating discusses this survey and the LCC’s position more generally. Keating, ‘Approaches to Citizenship’, 769. 22 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/003, Report of Committee on Civics, 29 July 1925. 23 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/APP/LB/002, Logbook, 25 Nov. 1925. 24 TNA, ED21/35084, Inspection report, 1 Dec. 1925. 25 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/HAG/LB/002, Logbook, 27 April 1934. 26 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/FRI/LB/001, Logbook, 5 April 1921. 27 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/083, BBC syllabus, 1926.

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28 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/003, Report of Committee on Civics, 29 July 1925. 29 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/015, LCC report on senior elementary schools, 9 June 1939. 30 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STH/LB/002, Inspection report, 15 May 1933. 31 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HIT/LB/003, Logbook, 16 April 1926, 30 April 1931. 32 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/003, Newspaper cutting, 25 Sept. 1933. 33 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAL/LB/004, Logbook, 15 Nov. 1922. 34 London Teacher, 19 June 1931. 35 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/GLE1/LB/005, Logbook, 28 April 1933. 36 Quoted in Brooks, ‘No Mistakes’, 177. 37 TNA, ED21/35317, Inspection report, 27 June 1922. 38 TNA, ED21/35202, Inspection report, 27 March 1931. 39 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STE/LB/002, Logbook, 15 May 1933. 40 See, for example, Inspection reports in TNA, ED21/34564, ED21/ 34652, ED21/34739, ED21/34742, ED21/34743, ED21/34776; LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/007. 41 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/023, LCC documents, Jan. 1933. 42 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/008, LCC memo, n.d., probably 1918. 43 Brindle, ‘Past Histories’, 181. 44 TNA, ED21/34847, Inspection report, 14 Sept. 1932. 45 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/003, Report of Committee on Civics, 29 July 1925. 46 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/WOD/LB/004, Inspection report, 22 Dec. 1926. See also Benjamin J. Lammers, ‘“The Citizens of the Future”: Educating the Children of the Jewish East End, c.1885–1939’, Twentieth Century British History 19:4 (2008). 47 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/CEN/LB/004, Logbook, 15 May 1919. Original emphasis. 48 THLHLA, 1/GUA/1/2/2, Logbook, March 1923. 49 MOA, FR299, ‘Children and the War’, June 1940, 16. 50 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01–09, Logbooks, various. 51 TNA, ED21/34982, Inspection report, 9 July 1930. 52 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/FLO/LB/001, Logbook, 13 June 1928. 53 Heren, Growing Up, 57. 54 Yeandle, Citizenship, 124. 55 Brindle, ‘Past Histories’, 230; Carter, ‘The Quennells’, 129. 56 Laura Carter, Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918–1979 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 55–86.

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57 Payten Gunton, New Senior School, 54. 58 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/WAT/LB/003, Inspection report, 26 Feb. 1939. 59 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/046, Inspection report, 10 July 1938. 60 TNA, ED21/35118, Inspection report, 22 Dec. 1935. 61 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/331, Inspection report, 4 July 1936. 62 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/048, Inspection report, 29 July 1938. 63 TNA, ED21/34868, Inspection report, 16 Nov. 1927; ED21/34834, Inspection report, 24 Oct. 1930. 64 TNA, ED21/34718, Inspection report, n.d.; ED21/34870, Inspection report, 20 Sept. 1927. 65 London Teacher, 14 Oct. 1927. 66 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/007, Headteacher’s letter, 3 June 1918. 67 TNA, ED21/34914, Inspection report, 22 Dec. 1926. 68 Board of Education, General Report on the Teaching of History in London Elementary Schools, 1927 (London: HMSO, 1927), 12. 69 TNA, ED21/35314, Inspection report, 7 May 1928. 70 E.O. Lewis, ‘Popular and Unpopular School Subjects’, The Journal of Experimental Pedagogy and Training College Record 2:2 (1913), 94, 98. 71 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/EVE/LB/002, Headteacher’s note, 2 April 1925. 72 TNA, ED21/34646, Inspection report, 12 July 1933. 73 TNA, ED21/35138, Inspection report, 10 Dec. 1929. 74 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/47, Inspection report, July 1934. 75 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/007, Memo by Education Officer, 1 June 1918. 76 Highroads of History, Book Va (From 1603 to Present Time) (London: Nelson, 1920), 7. 77 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/115, Managers’ minutes, 20 Oct. 1925. 78 On EMB posters see also Grosvenor, ‘To Act on the Minds of the Children’, 47. 79 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/COE/LB/003, Logbook, 20 Oct. 1927, 25 Jan. 1932. 80 Stephen Constantine, Buy and Build. The Advertising Posters of the Empire Marketing Board (London: HMSO, 1986), 11, 17. 81 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/TOT/LB/002, Logbook, 27 Feb., 2 March 1922. 82 Gamble, Chelsea Child, 52–3. 83 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/081, LCC planning documents, 1935; LCC/ EO/GEN/01/169, LCC documents, 1937. 84 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/081, Letter to Education Officer, 15 May 1935. 85 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 28 Jan. 1925.

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86 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/TEE/LB/004, Logbook, July 1924. 87 Labour Woman, July 1924. 88 Rose, Intellectual Life, 349. 89 See English, ‘Empire Day’. 90 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV06/CAT/LB/002, Logbook, 22 May 1925. 91 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STH/LB/001, Logbook, 24 May 1933; LCC/EO/DIV03/HUN/LB/002, Logbook, 23 May 1919. Original­ emphasis. 92 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/HAN/LB/001, Logbook, 23 May 1919. 93 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/TUR/LB/003, Logbook, 24 May 1922. 94 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/HWY/LB/002, Logbook, 23 May 1919. 95 Dorothy Burnham, Through Dooms of Love (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), 38. 96 ERO, T/Z 25/2020. 97 Peckham People’s History, Times of Our Lives, 117; ERO, T/Z 25/4244; Brenda Hargreaves, ‘A Streatham Childhood in the Thirties’, in Dorothy Rockett and Brenda Hargreaves, Two Streatham Childhoods (London: Streatham Society, 1980), 13; Gamble, Chelsea Child, 58; ERO, T/Z 25/4248; ERO, T/Z 25/4281. 98 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MOW/LB/012, Logbook, 22 May 1925. 99 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/EVE/LB/006, Logbook, 24 May 1933. 100 Dorothy Rockett, ‘A Streatham Childhood in the Twenties’, in Rockett and Hargreaves, Two Streatham Childhoods, 3; Heren, Growing Up, 58. 101 Rosen, Are You Still Circumcised?, 14–15. 102 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/VAU2/LB/003, Logbook, 22 May 1931; LCC, Education Service Particulars for the Year 1928–29 (London: LCC, 1929), 109. 103 Beaven and Griffiths, ‘The City and Imperial Propaganda’, 379. Also Beaven, Visions of Empire, 151. 104 Beaven, Visions of Empire, 170–4. 105 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/PET/LB/001, Logbook, 24 May 1934; LCC/ EO/DIV07/VIC/LB/001, Logbook, 24 May 1934. 106 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01–09, Logbooks, various. 107 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV09/BRO/LB/001, Logbook, 1 May 1924; LCC/ EO/DIV05/WEL/LB/001, Logbook, 24 May 1939; LCC/EO/DIV05/ HAG/LB/009, Logbook, 23 May 1919. 108 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/SEN/LB/004, Logbook, 24 May 1928. 109 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SCA/LB/001, Logbook, 22 May 1931. 110 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/BAT/LB/002, Logbook, 24 May 1938. 111 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/BEA/LB/003, Logbook, 24 May 1934.

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112 London Teacher, 15 Nov. 1918; See also Ken Osborne, ‘“One Great Epic Unfolding”: H.G. Wells and the Interwar Debate on the Teaching of History’, Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’Histoire de l’Éducation 26:2 (2014), esp. 3–6. 113 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HAS/LB/003, Newspaper cutting, 29 July 1921. 114 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/03/003, Headmasters’ meeting, 5 July 1920; LCC/EO/STA/02/007, Headteacher’s letter, 16 March 1920. 115 Highroads of History, Book VI: Modern Britain (1688–1918) (London: Nelson, 1920), 302–10. 116 John Langdon-Davies, Militarism in Education. A Contribution to Educational Reconstruction (London: Headley Bros, 1919), 18. 117 Board of Education, Report on the Teaching of History (London: HMSO, 1923, 1929), 9. 118 Manchester Guardian, 9 Feb. 1919; LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01–09, Logbooks, various. 119 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/HAG/LB/009, Logbook, 11 Nov. 1921; LCC/ EO/DIV07/HLB/LB/005, Logbook, 17 Nov. 1920; LCC/EO/DIV05/ DAL/LB/004, Logbook, 11 Nov. 1920. 120 Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day, 1919–1946 (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 92–8; Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2005), 51–9. 121 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/097, LCC Gazette, 8 Oct. 1934. 122 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/GIF/LB/001, Logbook, 12 Nov. 1934. 123 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/BRN/LB/001, Logbook, 11 Nov. 1919. 124 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/CRA1/LB/003, 24 March 1920; LCC/EO/ DIV01/LFD/LB/003, 21 June 1923; TNA, ED21/35317, Inspection report, 21 July 1925; ED21/ 34818, Inspection report, 15 Sept. 1926; London Teacher, 5 June 1925. 125 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/WOD/LB/006, Logbook, 11 Nov. 1927. 126 MOA, DS385, Day survey, 11 Nov. 1937. 127 London Teacher, 12 Nov. 1920. 128 Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 104; Keating, ‘Approaches to Citizenship Teaching’, 775–6. 129 London Teacher, 19 June 1931. 130 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/003, LCC document, 24 Oct. 1933. 131 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/PRI/LB/007, Logbook, 3 Sept. 1934; London Teacher, 18 Sept. 1925, 11 Jan. 1929. 132 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/OLI/LB/001, Logbook, 11–16 July 1932. 133 MOA, DS385, Day survey, 11 Nov. 1937. 134 ERO, T/Z 25/3318.

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135 ARCS, GBR/0115/RCS/ARCS/20/1/2, Essay competition, 1923. 136 Hugh Cunningham, The Invention of Childhood (London: BBC Digital, 2006), 182. 137 Board of Education, The League of Nations and the Schools. Report on the Instruction of the Young in the Aims and Achievements of the League of Nations (London: HMSO, 1932), 13. 138 Bailey, Children of the Green, 9. 139 Wolveridge, Ain’t it Grand, 55. 140 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/332, Managers’ minutes, 18 Nov. 1935, 20 Jan. 1936. 141 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STE/LB/003, Examination questions, March 1930. 142 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/003, Report of Committee on Civics, 29 July 1925. 143 TNA, ED21/34895, Inspection report, 7 Sept. 1934. 144 Benney, Low Company, 133.

7

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Teaching morals

‘When one sees a game of Rugby football being played on a ­concrete playground with so much mutual consideration that there is little danger, one realises that the school has somehow got the essentials right.’1 So commented an inspector of a Bethnal Green school in 1933, in a nod both to a school’s role in ‘character training’ and to the classed assumptions within which behaviour was modelled. This kind of social training, seen as a key function of the elementary schools, has been well documented for the period before the First World War, extending also to youth organisations such as the Scouts and Guides. During this time, writes Nathan Roberts, ‘character building’ became ‘the agent and guarantor of national and imperial vitality … a pressing national requirement’.2 Historians have placed less emphasis on character training for the years after 1918. Susannah Wright’s discussion of both morality and citizenship between 1897 and 1944, for example, shows how a focus on morality was more prominent in the earlier years and citizenship in the latter, reflecting ‘a shift in dominant educational priorities and wider public discourse’.3 The change in focus was partly because – as Peter Brett has argued – the post-war period and the coming of mass democracy led to a greater emphasis on the kinds of civic education discussed in Chapter 6. One pressure group, for example, established as the Moral Instruction League in 1897, changed its name to the Moral Education League in 1909, the Civic and Moral Education League in 1916 and finally the Civic Education League in 1918, representing ‘more than minor semantic shifts’.4 But the change in the historiographical focus is also because histories of interwar citizenship

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education tend to engage primarily with lobbying organisations such as this, as well as the numerous books and pamphlets that were authored by educationalists and inspectors.5 Valuable as these are, they did not necessarily reflect practice. In her study of citizenship teaching in the LCC in these years, for example, Jenny Keating demonstrates that the focus was on the direct teaching of civics or its indirect teaching through subjects like history, despite elements of moral education and the influence of religion, but acknowledges that her research can only document ‘the major thrust of the debate’.6 In fact, this chapter shows that an education that included ‘character-training’, defined in various ways, remained integral to the classroom of the interwar years and that this continued emphasis on social training had a role in the framing of citizenship that was as important as the civic education discussed in Chapter 6. It also considers the reactions of parents, who might not have used the phrase ‘character training’ or have thought in terms of citizenship, but who could be just as engaged as the school – perhaps even more so – in expecting certain standards of behaviour from their children. ‘Character training’ was a crucial function of interwar schools and many of them – according to inspectors – were very successful at it. Their reports praised those who offered a ‘training in decent social behaviour’, picking out evidence such as children’s ‘alert and manly bearing’, ‘a general level of speech and courtesy much above the characteristic of the neighbourhood’ or the ‘improvement in appearance, dress and behaviour as the girls progress’.7 One ex-pupil remembered her headteacher placing ‘much emphasis on “character”. We were told the need for the prevention of cruelty to animals, the disgrace of litter, respect for public property, beginning with borrowed library books, and much more.’8 Logbooks occasionally record specific examples of classroom practice: one headteacher dedicated a specific time each day to address pupils on ‘good manners, personal hygiene, general intelligence on everyday affairs, good behaviour in general, etc.’9 Another gave a series of ‘moral lessons’ on ‘thoughtfulness, obedience, gratitude, kind treatment of birds, insects, flowers and all living creatures, unselfishness, truth’.10 Needlework, in particular, was frequently

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referred to ‘as a civilising factor in home life’, as a skill that awakened self-respect, was conducive to thrift, and encouraged girls to attend to their personal appearance.11 Character training was one reason given by those – such as the all-male London Schoolmasters’ Association – who opposed the appointment of female headteachers to boys’ or mixed schools; 54 LCC junior schools, excluding girls’ and infants’, were led by a female head in 1928.12 Some preferred a fully male staff, without which, one headmaster explained, boys ‘miss that manliness of manner which only a man can give and if character training is to be the first and chief aim of our efforts, it is essential we should have men only for the training of boys’.13 Also contentious with regard to boys’ training were the cadet corps established at some schools. Brad Beaven has noted that the experience of the First World War made some turn against the ‘creeping militarisation of the school curriculum’ of the early twentieth century, while – as Stephen Heathorn and David Greenspoon have pointed out – Labour control of the Council from 1934 onwards further restricted activities, with a ban on school visits to military displays, for example.14 In the early 1920s, the headteacher at a Hampstead school encouraged his cadet corps to attend school wearing their cadet uniform on certain days, and activities included drilling with rifles and parades at playtime. When two local councillors complained, the headmaster agreed to keep activities out of school hours, as required by the LCC, but defended the practice, which, he argued, ‘has led to the formation of an excellent spirit of discipline, order and obedience’. He added, for good measure, that the complainants were ‘Labour Party extremists who are pledged to carry out their instructions from Moscow’.15 Less controversially, another virtue promoted was charitable giving, especially by better-off schools towards their poorer counterparts. ‘The boys are interested in social work’, commented the inspector of a school in Notting Hill, where children generally came ‘from homes which help, rather than hinder’, and who raised funds to provide a Christmas entertainment for an East End school and a local boot club.16 The Friern School in Dulwich engaged in a number of such activities, usually in aid of local schools except in 1937, when the four sacks of toys collected were sent to a school

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in South Wales: ‘One of the “distressed areas”’, the headteacher explained in the logbook.17 But poorer children were also expected to learn the value of giving. In 1923, the pupils of a Bethnal Green school donated goods to a local hospital including forty-one apples, six oranges, twelve lemons and one and a half cabbages.18 Ten years later, children at a school in Kennington, situated in a ‘poor and sordid area’, still managed to raise several shillings towards the Lambeth Spectacles Fund.19 One comment in a logbook stands out for its rarity, when the staff of a school in Notting Hill which laboured ‘under serious social disabilities’, decided that ‘owing to the increased poverty amongst the children, it was not advisable to attempt to make further collections from them [for Save the Children]’.20 Connected to charitable giving was the promotion of thrift. Many schools offered their pupils the chance to subscribe to saving schemes. In 1930, an inspector of a school near St Pancras noted that a new penny savings bank, inaugurated to ‘combat the prevailing habit of living hand to mouth’, had already attracted 122 members, and reasonable numbers of subscribers and the saving of decent sums were reported by other poor schools in deprived areas of the capital.21 One school kept a savings chart in the hall, with ‘boys versus girls’ offering an added incentive.22 Initiated in schools as a means of supporting the war effort, the purchase of savings certificates continued to be framed as a national duty in peacetime. In 1920, an article in the London Teacher addressed itself directly to children, exhorting them to ‘help yourselves and your country by buying Savings Certificates … if you are loyal citizens, you will respond to the call readily and cheerfully’. (It also suggested that calculating interest and so on would serve as useful arithmetic practice).23 By late 1938 there were 2,471 savings schemes in London schools, and the teachers’ newspaper was still linking their value explicitly to citizenship, suggesting that from the practice of thrift came ‘a habit of mind, a power of self-discipline and a gift of forethought and discrimination … [It] is not a preparation for death but a preparation for life and is necessary to the complete emancipation of democracy.’24 More generally, moral learning was encouraged by school mottoes such as ‘There is always time for courtesy’ or ‘There’s

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nothing so kingly as kindness. There’s nothing so loyal as truth.’25 One school rewarded with prizes those ‘who try hard, who are kind and try to help others, who come early and attend well, who keep themselves clean and tidy and are polite to everyone’.26 Some schools asked pupils to vote for the ‘the most honourable and trustworthy girl’, or ‘the most popular, the most helpful, and the kindest lad’.27 When one girl was chosen by her schoolmates to be the May Queen in 1926, as ‘the one that the children loved and trusted most … It changed my life. I tried to be a better person and set a good example.’28 The house system was credited with promoting ‘thrift, cleanliness and other social habits’; for ‘developing a spirit of work and responsibility’; or improving ‘the politeness and demeanour of the pupils’.29 The prefect system, meanwhile, was valued for the practice of leadership, with prefects trained to be ‘self-reliant and to take their place in the world at the end of their school career’.30 That place would not, of course, be the same as for their public school counterparts, and their role and responsibilities might be limited in practice. One woman remembered being thrilled to wear the prefect badge on her chest: ‘I was to see to Miss Wilkie’s needs, open the high windows with a screw-like key every morning, collect the registers and give out the stationery.’31 (One south London schoolboy failed to manage even this: elected as prefect in September 1920, he lasted three months before he was demoted. ‘Better suited as ink monitor’, commented his teacher.)32 For some children, moral lessons might be prioritised over academic ones. An inspector at a poor school in Lambeth concluded that ‘the main problem is how to save the children from besetting evils rather than how to instruct them in traditional school subjects’.33 Teaching might therefore extend to non-academic issues altogether. Catherine House ‘mentally deficient’ school catered for children from a wide area which meant that pupils were more likely to stay at school for their midday meal. This offered an opportunity to teach appropriate table manners, and the pupils ‘sit at small tables and are developing a sense of social requirements’.34 Teachers elsewhere might find different ways to impart the same lessons; one group of infants ‘practice[d] eating daintily by feasting on stewed blackberries’.35

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School journeys were a chance for more intensive training, with clear rules: ‘At meal times: Help your neighbour, not yourself, first. Keep the tablecloth clean. Speak quietly. Silence must be kept when required.’36 Given the unusual opportunities of the trip, inspectors were particularly critical if children and teachers failed to maintain proper standards. One was dismayed to find an absence of utensils: ‘children were eating with lettuce leaves in one hand (dipping them in the salt cellars) and bread and butter in the other. As table manners are an essential part of the school journey education this should not be allowed.’37 Another was shocked that teachers did not eat with the boys and that ‘there was consequently little attempt to improve the table manners of the pupils … it should be plainly understood that a school journey is not a kind of rough holiday but a training in proper living’.38 Appropriate moral training also meant attention to the body. The importance of hygiene lessons and sports in schools have been discussed in Chapter 4, but both were valued beyond their health benefits. By the middle of the 1930–31 season, for example, the first eleven of a school in Camberwell had played and lost nine games, scoring ten goals and conceding 123. The headmaster was proud nevertheless: his boys had ‘stuck to their guns’ and kept up a ‘plucky fight’.39 Meanwhile, cleanliness was often elided with ‘tidiness’, to be valued for the sense of self-respect it gave. One school boasted ‘an unusual profusion of mirrors in which the boy can “see himself as others see him”’.40 Morality was a particular concern with regard to sexuality. Sex education – often referred to as ‘sex hygiene’ – was very limited; ‘there was quite a lot of nature study in our school. It was supposed to help’, recalled one ex-teacher.41 The Board of Education offered no central steer, and a 1929 survey revealed that around 30 ­per cent of schools provided some kind of instruction, but mainly as advice given to individual pupils.42 The LCC had conducted its own inquiry in 1914, gathering views from elementary school headteachers. It found a consensus against teaching ‘sex hygiene’ as a class subject in favour of a quiet word to individuals when necessary.43 Further consultation took place in 1924 and came to similar conclusions: it was a question ‘which bristles with difficulties’, commented one group of headmistresses, suggesting that it would be

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‘undesirable and even dangerous to treat Sex Hygiene as a definite subject of instruction’.44 It is true that for some headteachers, the decision to offer sex education was also framed in moral terms. Giving evidence in 1914, Theodora Bonwick, headteacher of a Hackney school (she would move to a school in Islington in the 1920s), female suffrage campaigner and advocate of sex education in schools, argued that class lessons should be given across LCC schools – as they were in her own – to protect children ‘from the danger of their minds being poisoned by ignorant or impurely-minded persons’.45 The LCC chose to avoid prescription and asked headteachers to use their discretion with individual pupils, which, as Hera Cook has noted of schools across Britain, meant in practice that an identified need for sex education was almost always associated with delinquency.46 Female sexuality, unsurprisingly, caused the greatest concern.47 One school treated its most troublesome boys and girls differently, segregating the girls from their classmates but not the boys. The headteacher explained: Among the boys the influence of a bad environment may often lead to forms of wrongdoing which, though bad in themselves, are not inimical to mental activity … With the girls, however, the influence of a bad environment … has manifested itself in a way that makes the presence of a small number of girls in the school a real menace to the others coming from good homes. The influence is also most inimical to mental activity, despite the fact that the girls have, in a sense, developed early.48

Occasionally, male teachers could find themselves chastised. ‘I spoke to Mr B (supply) re. his manner of dealing with older girls’, recorded one headteacher. ‘It tends to encourage forwardness.’49 Correspondence between headteachers and the Education Officer in 1936 over the diagnosis of ‘mentally deficient’ children is noticeable for the importance of sexual maturity as an incriminating trait in girls. One child was struggling at school but was recommended by her headteacher for examination ‘only when I noticed the sex appeal was becoming more prominent’; for another it was ‘one or two incidents with men [that] happened when she was between twelve and thirteen years which definitely showed her unfitness

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for an ordinary school’.50 For some girls, the consequences were irreparable. In 1929, a Fulham schoolgirl ran away ‘to Portsmouth with a sailor’. When she was found and returned to London her headteacher pushed for a medical examination ‘for the morale of the school’. In fact, wrote the head in her logbook later, ‘Dr cannot give “clear” bill.’ The girl was not allowed to return and a domestic placement hastily arranged.51 A training in character therefore incorporated the way children behaved, acted, and looked. It also addressed the way they communicated. As one inspector put it, ‘teachers can test the value of their work by constantly asking themselves how far they are helping children, unflavoured by circumstances, to become clear-spoken, clear-thinking, clear-reading and, when necessary, clear-writing citizens of their world’.52 ‘Speech training’ preoccupied educationalists and inspectors in this period. This should ‘not mean that we shall all speak “standard English”. God forbid!’ wrote Chief Inspector F.H. Spencer. ‘We shall not be too particular about accent, even though to possess the Cockney accent is to suffer in many walks of life a grave economic disability.’ Rather, he continued, ‘the present defects in speech of our children are, first, that they dislike speaking aloud, and, second, that when they do they clip their words and speak into the linings of their waistcoats so that no one can hear them’.53 This was somewhat disingenuous. Many inspectors were constantly critical of the accent – not just the style – with which children spoke, and regularly disparaged Cockney traits such as the inability to pronounce ‘with’ correctly or the fact that the final ‘g’ in ‘ing’ was ‘especially defective’.54 Whatever the Chief Inspector’s beliefs, many of his staff prioritised accuracy in speech, even at a cost. While appreciating a school’s initiative in getting its pupils to make ‘short speeches after a debating society manner’, one inspector felt that it would be better ‘if the teacher broke in more frequently and corrected mistakes there and then, even at the risk of spoiling at first some of the boys’ confidence’.55 Nor was the Cockneyism of the streets the only threat: the LCC Chief Examiner felt that the cinema’s influence had led to several Americanisms appearing in exam scripts, along with a ‘rather unpleasant form of journalese’.56

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Teachers might take good speech just as seriously. In 1919, one headmaster heard every boy read, recording that the chief faults were undue haste, the ‘monotonous dropping of the voice at commas, and the dropping of the aspirate’.57 Most strikingly, in 1939 one school declined to submit pupils to the Shakespeare Reading Society competition, because the previous year’s ­adjudication ‘seemed to consider dramatic effect apart from good speech, and in some cases, in spite of bad speech. Our aim is good speech, and so we feel that another competition like last year’s is no help to us.’58 Pupils might remember the emphasis placed on speech training for the rest of their lives. In his autobiography, Bryan Magee remembered a headteacher for whom ‘the way we spoke … was the bugbear of her life’.59 Success varied. For all the inspection reports that praised improvements in speech, just as many were critical of teachers who were prepared to ‘accept crudities’, ignored ‘the most obvious cases of the mutilation of aspirates and the distortion of vowels’, or who were ‘too easily satisfied with inaccurate and indistinct utterance’.60 There was even the occasional reproach to individual teachers whose own speech, the inspectors felt, was not up to standard.61 But any class prejudices were most pronounced in the case of schools they felt were actually over-performing. One report of a school based in an extremely poor part of East London praised the clarity of speech attained but warned of ‘the slight affectation which is noticeable here and there and is due to the pupils’ over-anxiety to speak well’.62 Another spoke of such considerable improvement that ‘in one class, at least, a visitor might think himself in a good secondary school’, but also cautioned against ‘the danger of ultra-refinement’.63 Above all, lessons on morality were fixed within a Christian framework. ‘Religion must colour the whole of life – there must be no separation into sacred and secular’, wrote E.J. Kenny, the headteacher of Cavendish Road School in Balham. ‘The child must be made to feel that religion is not confined to what happened in Palestine hundreds of years ago, but is concerned with the everyday incidents of our lives: for them, with such things as cleanliness, tidiness, running errands and so forth.’64

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Religious education was not compulsory in English state schools until 1944 but religious belief remained significant to every child’s experience of school; Rob Freathy has argued that religion became even more central from the mid-1930s when Christian values were emphasised as a counter to extremist ideologies.65 A Christian influence was greatest in the non-provided schools, which were maintained by the churches and closely linked to their local place of worship. Members of a religious order were commonly employed in Catholic schools and, although the Board of Education did not permit Anglican clergymen to teach, there were other ways for them to get involved, perhaps helping out on welfare matters, addressing pupils on special occasions, or supervising boys’ games when no male member of staff was available. The character of one Church of England school, inspectors believed, was ‘largely due to the personal influence of the Vicar … for the atmosphere which he creates pervades the whole school’.66 Non-provided schools were subject to annual diocesan inspections, which, predictably, testify to a range of effectiveness in religious teaching. Inspectors praised one Church of England school, in which ‘real, living religious lessons’ and ‘a good level of attention and reverence’ were observed’, or a Catholic one where prayers were said ‘accurately and with devotion’ and Bible stories repeated ‘with obvious interest’.67 Other schools were criticised for mechanical teaching – ‘it is not sufficient that the children should be able merely to repeat the words [of a catechism] … the meaning of the words used should be known’ – or downright lack of knowledge, as when pupils ‘strangely confused the Transfiguration and Ascension’.68 But the Church’s ambitions were not limited to the classroom; a greater aim was to create lifelong adherents. At one Anglican school in Finsbury, therefore, the headmistress ‘encouraged the girls to take a pride in the church and to attend the services regularly’.69 The same was true of another in Hammersmith, where ‘real efforts are made to link up Church and School’.70 Church attendance was seen as essential by Catholic schools: one ex-pupil recalled his headmaster caning children for missing church; another that skipping Mass meant being ‘hauled over the coals’.71 Tensions could sometimes flare between the LCC and the nonprovided schools, perhaps over teacher appointments or school

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reorganisations; the Council almost always got its way. The old Board schools of the late nineteenth century had often been stereotyped as lacking sufficient religious fervour and, twenty years later, the Education Officer was still regretting ‘that groundless rumours are occasionally circulated about the LCC “Godless schools”’.72 Tensions might simmer between individual schools and the local church, as was the case in 1927 at Mowlem Street School in Bethnal Green, when the headmaster received a complaint from the local vicar over the treatment of certain boys. ‘I strongly object to your interference in the conduct of this school’, he angrily replied.73 The council schools were strictly non-denominational and the LCC shied away from all possible controversy. When in 1938, for example, a teacher studying for a degree in education sought the Council’s permission to question pupils on their religious beliefs, the request was refused. ‘We do not wish religious questions raised in school’, wrote an official (adding – rather gratuitously – in ­brackets, ‘He looks Jewish’).74 Logbook comments reveal the nervousness of headteachers: one spoke to a staff member about ‘her pupils’ habit of crossing themselves’, and advised against it.75 Of course, many council teachers possessed a strong personal faith. Logbooks record the occasional absences of staff to attend church events: in 1920, an LCC headmaster represented his diocese at the National Assembly of the Church of England.76 The religious motives of many settlement workers are well documented and teachers might similarly be driven by religious belief to work among the poor: the East End headteacher and social worker Clara Grant had originally intended to be a missionary.77 Notwithstanding the objection of the headmaster of Mowlem Street, many vicars were warmly invited to join the life of nearby council schools. One south London vicar addressed his local school on prize day: ‘He wished to drive home two thoughts – manners and duty. He thought boys and girls were not so polite as they formerly were and he then referred to Captain Fryatt and Nurse Cavell, who had done their duty … There would be no sin if everyone did their duty. Sin was the result of idleness.’78 A clergyman’s touch was thought particularly useful in welfare matters and when an Islington schoolboy was found guilty of criminal action in 1920 his headmaster wrote to the vicar asking if he might reach out to him.79



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Sometimes the initiative came from the church. In 1936, a Southwark vicar wrote to his local headmaster, asking him to exploit a provision of that year’s Education Act, which allowed children with parental consent to receive special religious instruction from clergy. He explained: The children in our parishes are our responsibility for a much longer period than they are yours. They belong to you for certain hours of the week till they are fourteen. They are our responsibility till they leave the parish or die … Orange Street School is in my parish. I am a manager and a member of both Care and After-Care Committees. The boys who come to my church I know – but I and my brother clergy want to know also those who belong to our Church by Baptism but who do not come.80

The headmaster agreed after consultation with the Education Officer, who advised that the instruction should not exceed one morning a week and must not interfere with attendance at the Handicraft Centre. Not every child absorbed religious sensibilities. Rose Gamble remembered the daily assembly: ‘We whined through the hymn … and then gasped through the Lord’s Prayer … A resounding smack punctuated the prayer every so often as a teacher crept along the lines and slapped the back of a boy’s head who was caught peeping through his fingers.’81 One contemporary recalled being given a beautifully bound and illustrated Bible as a prize for religious knowledge, ‘which I afterwards flogged to brother Jack for half a crown to buy fireworks with’.82 The East End teacher Clara Grant worried that, if anything, the number of Bible lessons given in council schools might turn children off.83 An inspector was similarly anxious that efforts would backfire when he accompanied a school journey party to a local church service: Many of the boys were without books, until I, after the service had begun, collected some from various parts of the church. The singing was extremely bad – discordant and very slow. The Vicar was often unintelligible – his enunciation being so slovenly: by straining all my faculties I did get the gist of the sermon, fortunately short, but I am sure the boys did not. Some of them do not as a rule go to a

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place of worship, and cannot but have been repelled by their experience of this service.84

But some teachers were able to project a warm and humanising religious belief. One inspector was particularly taken with pupils’ apparent devotion: ‘At prayers every morning a boy from the top class reads the Bible lesson to the assembled school, and this practice has so much interested the pupils that nearly every boy in the top class can read from the Bible with feeling and understanding.’85 Children should look forward to scripture lessons, wrote the headmaster E.J. Kenny, and ‘when it is given in an interesting and reverent manner they do look forward to it’. He advised that teachers ‘begin with the New Testament, not with the Old. Let the children get their idea of God from the teaching of our Lord: later they can be taught that men did not think of God in the way we do.’86 Another teacher felt similarly, explaining her decision to omit sections of the LCC’s suggested syllabus. She felt ‘rather strongly’, she wrote, that stories such as that of Jacob and Esau, or Abraham and Isaac ‘are quite immoral and wrong to teach children. I have also eliminated all stories of plagues and pestilences, and famines being sent by the Almighty as a punishment for wrong doing.’87 For such teachers, lessons were intended to give children a basis of religious learning that they could then revisit in later life. ‘We recited the Lord’s Prayer every day, but I never had the remotest idea what “Hallowed be thy name” meant, or “Thy Kingdom come”’, remembered Bryan Magee.88 But to some that mattered less than the fact of the reciting: when F.H. Spencer advocated learning parts of the Bible by heart, he suggested that to do so meant that children would have it ‘store[d] forever’. ‘It is not necessary or even desirable that children should comprehend all that they learn by rote’, he explained. ‘Understanding comes later.’89 In their assumptions about character and morality, schools were once again explicitly setting themselves in opposition to the home environment. Of a school in ‘a congested area … [with] much acute  poverty’, for example, inspectors explained that ‘much time has to be given to eradicating bad habits and in inculcating courtesy, gentleness and personal cleanliness’.90 The contrast was particularly

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evident when discussing speech: inspectors expressed horror at the ‘slovenly English which they [children] hear in the streets and in their very own homes’.91 Of a school in Kensal Green inspectors were particularly damning: ‘in probably no district in London is the native speech of the children more limited in range of vocabulary and more debased in its utterance than in the streets from which this school draws its pupils’.92 Others referred to the ‘bilingualism’ of pupils, lamenting the fact that good habits taught in school were up against ‘the ever-present fear of derision in the street environment which intimidates even the good intentioned from the paths of pure English’.93 Sometimes educationalists suggested a more pernicious influence: when describing local neighbourhoods, inspectors might make comments about gambling or drunkenness, or the presence of a ‘criminal element’.94 When a child arrives at school ‘looking pale and tired’, one inspector remarked, ‘the cause is generally a late night “at the dogs”’.95 At a meeting of headmistresses in Poplar, 1930, a belief was general that children were being used for gambling in the area, taking slips to the bookmaker.96 ‘Much that is done in the classroom during the working day may be undone during the evenings and weekends when the child is at large’, wrote the LCC’s educational psychologist, Cyril Burt.97 Further proof seemed to come in ‘the deterioration in personal habits, in speech, and in resource and self-reliance, noticeable after the Christmas and Easter vacations’, which one official suggested was ‘an ordinary condition of things’ in the majority of infant schools and reinforced a sense that ‘progress’ could easily be reversed.98 According to F.H. Spencer, London schoolchildren were ‘pleasant, well-mannered little men and women’, but ‘it was sad sometimes to find cases in which, six or twelve months after leaving school, children had reverted to a condition almost of primitive savagery’.99 A language of combat was used to emphasise the ‘constant warfare waged … against the illiteracy and barbarisms of poor social environment’, or the ‘fight put up against the vulgarity and commonness of the enveloping neighbourhood’.100 It was one reason why school journeys were felt to be so valuable. ‘Removed from the exigencies of home surroundings, fretting babies, ­household cares

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and ordinary school discipline, the sullen, bad-tempered girl sheds this side of her character and discloses a healthy, normal, happy temperament’, wrote one observer.101 A headteacher was just as enthusiastic: ‘The effect on a common life was most marked on the boys of the more ill-bred type. Beginning with no manners at all, and a strictly business-like attention to the necessities of themselves, by the end of the fortnight, they had nearly attained the level of their more fortunate companions, in quieter ways and voices, and more consideration for others.’102 A teacher’s feeling of duty might go beyond the school gates. One headmaster reminded his staff ‘to use any opportunity that serves to try to improve the conduct of our boys in the streets’.103 Another ‘visited every class re the button game craze – spoke about dangers of sitting on kerbs and on cold stones’.104 It might extend out of term time, too, and at least one headteacher dismissed his pupils for their summer holidays with advice on ‘how to use the holiday’, reminding them about ‘paper in parks, broken bottles, etc., and talked to them about their behaviour in the streets’.105 Others were less sure about the limits of their responsibility, as when two teachers reported being ‘ill with worry’ that a pupil was pregnant, having overheard playground chatter. They had, however, delayed taking their concerns to the headmistress for several days ‘because the conversation was overheard in the dinner hour when teachers are off duty’.106 On occasion, anxieties around morality focused on individual parents. In 1919, a headteacher of an East End school met with the local vicar to discuss a child whose ‘mother lets her front room to a woman whose behaviour needs enquiring into’.107 More generally, it was hoped that improving the conduct and manners of children would have an influence on the wider community. ‘The school exerts a spiritual influence in the parish’ was one of several similar comments, and numerous inspection reports praised schools as ‘a real power for good in a most difficult neighbourhood’ or as ‘performing a most valuable social function’ among parents who might be ‘more difficult to deal with than the children’.108 Of a Birmingham school in the period 1891–1920, Susannah Wright has commented that inspections ‘served to highlight the positive achievements of staff – noticeably, not of pupils – against

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the odds’.109 She might have added that parents were similarly overlooked, and the same was true of London, where inspectors consistently disregarded a child’s family when crediting a school for the good character of its pupils. ‘The better feeding and clothing of recent years are, doubtless, due to general social and economic conditions’, wrote an inspector of a Finsbury school, ‘but the improvement in cleanliness and behaviour is largely the result of educative work done in, and in connection with, the school’.110 There are many examples, although particularly egregious is the assumption of another inspector that among a poor and crowded neighbourhood in Lambeth, there was ‘likely to be little refinement or intellectual life. That they [children] are happy, eager, responsive, careful in speech and nice in manner must, therefore, be set to the credit of the headmistress and an able staff.’111 When credit was given to parental influence, this, too, was attributed to the school: ‘The clean and tidy appearance of the children evidences the interest of the parents and their willingness to respond to the influence which the school exerts.’112 At another school, a colleague believed that ‘it is largely due to the time spent in educating the parents as well as the children that a very good tone has been obtained in recent years’.113 In fact, the premium placed on cleanliness by traditions of working-class respectability makes it unlikely that many parents were as unconcerned as such reports suggest, or that they played no role in their child’s development. Persuasive evidence comes not from London but from the Lancashire town of Bolton, where schoolchildren’s essays were kept by the social research organisation Mass Observation. In 1937 a class of elementary schoolgirls were asked to write about ‘What I learn at home that I don’t learn at school’. Some answers suggested a conflict between the aims of home and school, specifically over language, which was seen by one particular mother as a distraction from the types of lessons she thought her daughter’s teachers should be imparting: ‘My mother is always shouting and saying, don’t talk swanky when we have relatives here, never mind what they learn you at school. You are up at school to work, learning to spell, read, write and do sums, not to waste your time learning swanky talk’, wrote the child in her essay. But some of the children also testified to the importance of parents as their primary influence in instilling exactly the kind of lessons that

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inspectors would have been delighted with. ‘At home I am taught my manners and not to use vulgar words’, wrote the daughter of an unemployed cotton worker. ‘I have to be ladylike and polite, when I am asked a question I have to look at the person who asks the question and answer properly.’114 I have been unable to find such rich contemporary evidence for London schools in the same period, but it is surely the case that many working-class children and parents in the capital acted similarly. Certainly, it is common to find references in memoirs of London childhood to the influence of (particularly) mothers on inculcating good speech, manners and cleanliness. One woman writing about her childhood in London’s docklands remembered that ‘My mother was very fussy indeed about correct English and saying please and thank you, and I never heard a swear word in my home.’115 A contemporary who grew up in Stepney remembered the special effort her mother made when she started school: ‘It was the first time my mother pinned a square of white rag to the front of my dress, which was to be used as a handkerchief.’116 Other fragments of evidence suggest that moral conduct and religious training mattered to parents, and that the behaviour taught at school was valued. One headteacher reported complaints from a mother following the closure of the school for the local elections: ‘another whole day the children are going to be kept away from school by the LCC so that they may run the streets and be a nuisance to the public in general’, the mother objected. The child was only four, noted the headmistress.117 Complaints were also the subject of another headteacher’s logbook entry in 1933, when a dispute blew up in a Lewisham school around a parent’s upset that her daughter had not received her scripture certificate. The girl had come top in the scripture exam, the headteacher acknowledged, but ‘her work had been so systematically bad during the year and her age was about one year above the average for the class so she was disqualified’. The headteacher had had other confrontations with the mother who, she said, ‘in other ways … does not help towards the easy running of the school’. But the mother eventually got her way; a few weeks later it was noted without comment that the child had received her scripture certificate. For this parent, perhaps fighting at the behest of her daughter, the validation of a certificate mattered.118

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Indeed, children and their families might sometimes outdo the school, leaving teachers chasing to catch up. ‘1 November 1919 – All Saints’ Day’, wrote one headmaster in his logbook. It was a Saturday, but ‘so many boys attend service that I decided to attend too’.119 A particularly interesting example – and a reminder of the varied nature of children’s circumstances – could be seen in the case of a troublesome child at a school in Dulwich. She ‘exercises a very pernicious influence’, commented her headteacher, but in this case her steady home life was actually seen as a disadvantage: ‘It is most unfortunate that her good treatment at home acts against her being put into an industrial [residential] school, where her influence would be limited.’120 For children who transgressed in various ways, punishment was supposed to be a last resort. LCC rules instructed headteachers to make ‘every endeavour … to reduce all forms of punishment … to the minimum compatible with the welfare of children and the school, and that corporal punishment shall not be inflicted (save for grave moral offences) until other methods have been tried and failed, and then only under prescribed conditions’.121 ‘The rules of the Council in this matter [of corporal punishment] are explicit and allow of no divergence’, insisted the Education Officer.122 But of course, the phrase ‘grave moral offences’ was open to interpretation. One headmaster recorded in his logbook that he had given the right to inflict corporal punishment to one of his teachers, Mr E, ‘in accordance with the Council’s rules’. It seems that he and Mr E disagreed over the severity of offences, however, and he had ‘to ask Mr E to be less extravagant in its use later in the day’.123 Another headteacher called a special meeting to remind his staff of the regulations: ‘My main theme was the interpretation of “grave moral offences”, pointing out that the cane was not to be used for trivial offences and instructing the staff to interpret the quotation generously and in the spirit it means.’124 In his discussion of corporal punishment in this period, Jacob Middleton has drawn attention to the lifelong trauma suffered by some children for the way they were disciplined at school.125 It is certainly not uncommon to come across recollections of sadistic teachers who beat children brutally and ‘knew how to use a cane in

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the most terrible way’.126 The worst treatment was usually reserved for older boys, but even girls and younger children might remember ‘a continuous flow of light and perfunctory assault’.127 One ex-schoolboy recalled ‘an occasion when as many as three masters were needed to pin a berserk pupil down over a table so as to enable a fourth to administer a flogging’.128 The memoirist recalled his admiration for the child, but the scene must have been horrific. Logbook evidence supports such recollections. In another instance, a boy required hospital treatment when ‘an endeavour to place the lad across the desk to punish him resulted in knocking his mouth against a ledge and to cutting his lip’.129 Sometimes the violence was unashamed. In the early 1930s the managers of a Lambeth school grew concerned at the number of corporal punishments, which were drawing complaints from parents and which they saw ‘as excessive and without justification’. They spoke to the headmaster who agreed, seemingly with pride, that ‘as a disciplinarian he was distinctly above the average’. No further action was taken against him or his staff, although the children he mistreated perhaps got some kind of justice when he was later sacked for financial irregularities.130 As in this instance, managers were required to investigate when large number of punishments were recorded. They might caution teachers if they felt it necessary. Occasionally teachers were required to apologise, but reasons could usually be found to excuse their actions. When a father complained that his 8-yearold son had been left with a seven-inch weal after being caned for ‘talking and showing marbles to his neighbour’, the headmaster’s investigation  concluded that the punishment was ‘excessive but not illegal’  and action was limited to withdrawing permission to use the cane from the relevant master and reminding him of the regulations.131 The LCC itself took action against a handful of teachers every year. Between 1919 and 1921, for example, five teachers had their service terminated, two were transferred to other schools, one was demoted and two ‘severely censured’. Frustratingly for the historian, the minutes rarely gave the details of the misconduct, but the only two transgressions specifically recorded both concerned corporal punishment. Of another head, whose disciplinary record was

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considered by the education committee in 1925, it was concluded that he was ‘not suitable’ to lead a mixed school and instead he was transferred to a boys-only department, where more violent disciplinary methods were judged to be more appropriate.132 Children might find alternative ways to assert agency. As Philip Gardner has noted, the history of the interwar classroom is ‘divided between the picture of apparent order and calm suggested by the official document, and the image of endemic conflict in some childhood recollections’.133 Some experienced it as a state of simmering warfare. One ex-schoolboy understood his and his classmates’ role to be ‘all out to harass the man in front. He, in turn, working on the principle that attack is the best form of defence, perpetually harassed us’.134 Not all teachers were effective disciplinarians, as inspectors did not hesitate to point out if they found classroom control lacking. ‘The teacher, like the Rabbi, [was] your life-long enemy. Your one aim in life was to catch him napping’, remembered the same memoirist.135 Another recalled specific ways in which revenge could be taken: ‘We waited till school was over, nipped round to the bike shed and let his tyres down.’136 What is striking in memoirs, however, is the number of men or women who excuse their old schoolteachers when discipline was perceived to be ‘fair’. ‘The headmaster was a real tartar but he was fair’, is a typical comment.137 Middleton suggests the same: using evidence from memoir he concludes that most children seem not to have objected to corporal punishment in principle, but to how it might be administered in practice; Rose finds similar autobiographical evidence for the Edwardian period.138 The dislike of an arbitrary power, rather than the fact of corporal punishment itself is also apparent in a parent’s complaint to the Education Officer. ‘My child … was caned today … Could you kindly let me know if the teacher was acting within his powers as I was under the impression that it was only a headteacher who is allowed to administer punishment?’139 Parental objections might also centre around encroachment on to their own role as they perceived it. At least one working-class parent felt a keen distinction between the educational function of the school, which she valued, and the disciplinary function of the home, protesting that ‘my child is not there to be wacked she is

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there to learn and to be taught. I can do all the wacking my child wants.’140 Harry Hendrick has warned, more universally, not to ‘underestimate the role played by the general hostility of adults, regardless of class, to children, and the shared sympathies among adults concerning disciplinary problems’. Parental objections to corporal punishment in schools were thus not ‘objections to violence towards children per se, rather they were to teachers acting in loco parentis’.141 However, by the interwar years levels of corporal punishment were falling. Certainly, inspectors judged its infrequent use to be a sign of a success, and some schools were praised for an absence of corporal punishment over several months, sometimes even years. By 1937, when a group of elementary school managers debated a motion to abolish corporal punishment for juniors, views were expressed both ways and the motion eventually lost, but at least one member ‘did not feel … there was need to worry about the matter since, in her opinion, corporal punishment is dying out’.142 Gardner’s oral history interviews with former teachers revealed both a generational and gender gap in attitudes in this period, with younger teachers, particularly women, more likely to dislike the use of the cane. Few teachers were keen to remove it altogether, ‘in classrooms that remained overcrowded and poorly equipped and within pedagogies dominated by the ever-present fear of losing control’, but he argues that while some teachers were ‘pathologically attracted’ to its use, ‘most were not. The majority used it rarely, and some not at all.’143 As Gardner acknowledges, the most sadistic of child-beaters were unlikely to come forward to be interviewed. But contemporary evidence confirms that at least some teachers advocated different options. ‘Let children know that you think well of them, that you expect good from them, and you will get it’, wrote one headmaster.144 In his guide to vocations for school-leavers, another headmaster told readers what they might expect if they took up school teaching, noting that discipline was necessary, but only as a response to the normal – and welcome – nature of the schoolchild: ‘High character, unbounded enthusiasm and infinite patience are required. You will probably be dealing with forty or fifty young live wires, and you will need the gift of discipline.’145

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It is impossible to know what pupils thought of these particular headmasters, and nor were different methods necessarily less traumatising. For one man, memories of a ‘fiendish punishment’ were still vivid fifty years later. He had pulled the train’s communication cord on a school trip and ‘next day during morning prayers I was to spend the whole time with my head in the wastepaper basket – with the rest of the rubbish’.146 A different system operated at Ellerslie Road School in Hammersmith, led by G.G. Lewis, one of the pioneers of prefect organisation (and also of the school journey movement); he delegated power to his prefects, who ran a ‘prefects’ court’ – although the headmaster remained the judge and sentenced offenders. ‘Prefects courts administer such severe lectures that the culprits who come before them generally go away in tears’, wrote one journalist approvingly.147 But logbook records support the suggestion that some headteachers genuinely adhered to a more lenient code. One headteacher noted the transfer of a girl from another school. The child had previously been caught stealing but both her old and new headteachers felt the change would ‘give her a chance to do better’.148 Another headteacher was similarly generous when three pupils were found guilty of ‘petty pilfering’. He noted ‘the boys seeming to be thoroughly repentant and giving assurance of honesty in the future a “clean slate” to be granted’.149 A particularly sympathetic response came from the headteacher of a ‘mentally deficient’ school, who was approached by the police for information regarding an expupil, also caught stealing. She defended him immediately: ‘The boy in question was always in school a most nervous, down-trodden, under-fed neglected little boy, obedient and of good general behaviour, and the headteacher is quite of the opinion that the boy if an actual offender was acting under orders.’ Her character testimony might have made a difference; in court a couple of days later the boy was bound over for a year.150 Before a school doctor examined children for signs of ‘mental deficiency’, teachers were required to fill out a form providing details of scholastic attainments, home environment and behaviour. It also asked a series of questions about character, with implications for diagnosis: ‘Is he obedient? Affectionate or otherwise? Spiteful?

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Destructive? Unduly timid? Aggressive? Bad-tempered? Easily led?’151 For in assessing the value of sending a child to a school for the ‘mentally defective’, the LCC education committee explained, academic ability was only one consideration; also important was the fact that the presence of such children in ordinary schools might ‘prove a hindrance to the education of those not so afflicted, and if they were not under instruction, they would become a menace to the order of the home and the neighbourhood’.152 ‘Mentally deficient’ children might be seen as a particular threat, but working-class children were frequency characterised as objects for reform more generally. Lobbying the education committee for better staffing of senior schools in 1934, a group of headteachers emphasised the importance of the senior school as the final stage of education for the majority of children and – perhaps unintentionally echoing the phrase used to justify corporal ­punishment – vital for the prevention of ‘grave moral deterioration’.153 The result was that a schooling in moral character, incorporating the way that children looked and spoke, as well as acted, continued to be as central to the purpose of education as it had been in earlier decades. As Kate Rousmaniere, Kara Dehli and Ning De ConinckSmith have argued, the formation of conduct and beliefs has been a fundamental part of state schooling in the modern era, and they refer to ‘moral regulation’ as normative practices which ‘have as their object the production of self  disciplined individuals who adhere to explicit and implicit rules of conduct and norms of conscience as if they were their own’.154 The emphasis on character training was partly due to the classed assumptions of the inspectorate in particular. The greatest accolades that inspectors could give were to compare children to their public school counterparts. Reporting on a school journey party, one inspector was impressed: ‘Every girl had white stockings and straw hats and the general appearance of this “crocodile” was indistinguishable from that of several “high” class private schools.’155 His comment betrays much about the class-bound models to which the inspectors believed the elementary schools should aspire. At least one teacher implied approval, suggesting that his workingclass boys adapted well: ‘Their reading of boarding school stories stood them in good stead, especially in the bedrooms.’156

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But ex-pupils might also recognise the value of the moral training that they had received. ‘I left school at the age of 14 having had a basic and useful education’, wrote one man, simply. ‘I was taught right from wrong and to be honest and truthful, something which I have tried to keep to all my life.’157 His comment confirms the importance of such lessons within the school curriculum, but also suggests that this was not simply an imposition of his teachers but was a shared value more widely. In 1925, the headmaster of Kenmont Gardens School in Paddington instituted a new annual prize. It was to be awarded to a pupil aged 13 or over who, in the opinion of the staff and older scholars ‘by his loyalty to the school, his sincerity and honour, his integrity and beauty of character generally, is deemed the most worthy in the school, and who in the future would, in all probability, develop into an exemplary citizen of whom the school would be proud’.158 One imagines that the chosen boy’s parents might have been proud too.

Notes 1 TNA, ED21/34524, Inspection report, 25 Oct. 1933. 2 Nathan Roberts, ‘Character in the Mind: Citizenship, Education and Psychology in Britain, 1880–1914’, History of Education 33:2 (2004), 179. 3 Susannah Wright, Morality and Citizenship in English Schools: Secular Approaches, 1897–1944 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 6. 4 Peter Brett, ‘Citizenship Education in England in the Shadow of the Great War’, Citizenship Teaching and Learning 8:1 (2013), 61–2. 5 An exception is Tom Hulme, who has argued that a study of the material school environment reveals the importance of health in discourses of citizenship. Hulme, ‘“A Nation Depends on its Children”: School Buildings and Citizenship in England and Wales, 1900–1939’, Journal of British Studies 54:2 (2015). 6 Keating, ‘Approaches to Citizenship Teaching’, 763 (Keating’s ­emphasis). 7 TNA, ED21/34694, Inspection report, 27 July 1931; ED21/34547, Inspection report, 20 Dec. 1923; ED21/34518, Inspection report, 31 Jan. 1927; ED21/34544, Inspection report, 20 June 1933. 8 ERO, T/Z 25/4268.

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9 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV06/CAT/LB/003, Logbook, 13 April 1926. 10 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/CAP/LB/007, Logbook, 11, 18, 25 July 1933. 11 TNA, ED21/34846, Inspection report, 5 Sept. 1930. 12 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 28 March 1928. 13 LMA, LCC/EO/STA/02/052, Headteacher’s letter, 16 Nov. 1923. 14 Beaven, Visions of Empire, 135–6, 141–2; Stephen Heathorn and David Greenspoon, ‘Organising Youth for Partisan Politics in Britain, 1918–c.1932’, The Historian 68:1 (2006), 115. 15 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/082, Correspondence, Dec. 1922–Feb. 1923. 16 TNA, ED21/34900, Inspection report, 18 Nov. 1926. 17 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/FRI/LB/005, Logbook, 1930–37; quotation 10 Dec. 1937. 18 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MOW/LB/012, Logbook, 2–3 Oct. 1923. 19 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/CHU/LB/004. 27 Sept. 1933 TNA, ED21/34947, Inspection report, 10 Dec. 1931 20 TNA, ED21/34907, Inspection report, 27 Feb. 1932; LMA, LCC/EO/ DIV01/SIR/MISC/002, Logbook, 29 Sept. 1920. 21 TNA, ED21/35150, Inspection report, 22 Dec. 1930. 22 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAN1/LB/009, Inspection report, 9 Sept. 1927. 23 London Teacher, 12 March 1920. 24 London Teacher, 28 Oct. 1938. 25 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/EVE/LB/006, 31 Jan. 1930; TNA, ED21/34750, Inspection report, 16 Jan. 1932. 26 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HLB/LB/005, Prize scheme details, n.d. 27 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STPAU1/LB/007, Logbook, 12 June 1930; LCC/EO/DIV03/ROM/LB/001, Logbook, 14 Oct. 1920. 28 ERO, T/Z 25/1847. 29 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/CEN/LB/004, 12 Feb. 1932; TNA, ED21/ 34853, Inspection report, 22 June 1933; LCC Education Committee Minutes, 7 Nov. 1923. 30 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/FPR/LB/004, Logbook, 27 Sept. 1923. 31 Scannell, Mother Knew Best, 78. 32 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/FRI/LB/001, Logbook, Sept. 1920. 33 TNA, ED21/34952, Inspection report, 22 Dec. 1933. 34 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV06/CAT/LB/003, 20 Jan. 1929. 35 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/TRP/LB/004, Logbook, 31 Aug. 1925. 36 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/11/039, School journey notebook, 1931. 37 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/1/37, Inspection report, June 1920. 38 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/43, Inspection report, 8 Sept. 1927. 39 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SCA/LB/001, Logbook, 25 Feb. 1931.

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40 TNA, ED21/35193, Inspection report, 19 Sept. 1934. 41 People’s Autobiography of Hackney, Working Lives, 29. Hera Cook has argued that sex education was another source of friction between school and parents, though the topic matter makes that hard to evidence here. Cook, ‘Emotion, Bodies, Sexuality, and Sex Education in Edwardian England’, Historical Journal 55:2 (2012). For broader discussions of sex education in British schools see also Cook, ‘Getting “Foolishly Hot and Bothered”? Parents and Teachers and Sex Education in the 1940s’, Sex Education 12:5 (2012); Angela Davis, ‘“Oh No, Nothing, We Didn’t Learn Anything”: Sex Education and Preparation of Girls for Motherhood, c.1930–1970’, History of Education 37:5 (2008); Lesley A. Hall, ‘Birds, Bees and General Embarrassment: Sex Education in Britain, from Social Purity to Section 28’, in Richard Aldrich (ed.), Public or Private Education? Lessons from History (London: Woburn Press, 2004); Jane Pilcher, ‘School Sex Education: Policy and Practice in England 1870 to 2000’, Sex Education 5:2 (2005). 42 Quoted in Pilcher, ‘School Sex Education’, 156. 43 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/022, Education Committee report, 20 May 1914. 44 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/03/006, Headmistresses’ meeting, 7 April 1924; LCC Education Committee Minutes, 19 Nov. 1924; LMA, LCC/EO/ PS/02/028, LCC report, Oct. 1924. 45 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/022, Education Committee report, 20 May 1914. 46 Cook, ‘Getting “Foolishly Hot and Bothered”’, 558. 47 On anxieties over girls’ sexuality see Cox, Bad Girls, 37–50. 48 TNA, ED21/34975, Inspection report, 19 June 1923. 49 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/HUG1/LB/004, Logbook, 18 May 1920. 50 LMA, LCC/EO/SS/01/5, Headteachers to Education Officer, Oct. 1936. 51 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/EVE/LB/006, Logbook, 3–26 Sept. 1929. 52 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/MID/LB/001, Inspection report, 30 July 1936. 53 Spencer, Education, 150. 54 TNA, ED21/34651, Inspection report, 18 March 1926; ED21/34548, Inspection report, 3 Sept. 1925. 55 TNA, ED21/35006, Inspection report, 7 Sept. 1934. 56 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/03/022, Report by the Chief Examiner (London, 1924), 10. 57 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/ATL/LB/002, Logbook, 22 Sept. 1919. 58 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/066, Headteacher to Education Officer, 13 March 1939. 59 Magee, Clouds of Glory, 50.

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60 TNA, ED21/34856, Inspection report, 25 May 1927; ED21/35105, Inspection report, 3 Jan. 1930; ED21/35103, Inspection report, 8 June 1925. 61 TNA, ED21/34588, Inspection report, 20 June 1933. 62 TNA, ED21/35206, Inspection report, 3 May 1932. 63 TNA, ED21/34856, Inspection report, 24 Jan. 1930. 64 Kenny, ‘Religious Education’, 41. 65 Freathy, ‘The Triumph of Religious Education’, 301. 66 TNA, ED21/35105, Inspection report, 3 Jan. 1930. 67 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/08/013–14, Diocesan inspection reports, 1931, 1937; LCC/EO/DIV05/JSN/LB/001, Religious inspection report, 5 Feb. 1936. 68 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STGAB/LB/002, Diocesan inspection report, 31 Oct. 1919, original emphasis; LCC/EO/DIV01/STST/LB/002, Dio­ cesan inspection report, 15 April 1924. 69 TNA, ED21/34654, Inspection report, 2 April 1928. 70 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/STJO1/LB/001, Diocesan inspection report, 31 March 1936. 71 Wolveridge, Ain’t it Grand, 55; BLSA, Tom Britton. 72 TNA, ED 106/23, Letter from Education Officer, 5 March 1941. 73 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MOW/LB/003, Logbook, 30 May 1927. 74 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/025, LCC documents, 6 April 1938. 75 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/SIR/LB/005, Logbook, 19 Dec. 1923. 76 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/PLA/LB/001, Logbook, 16 Nov. 1920. 77 Kevin J. Brehony, ‘English Revisionist Froebelians and the Schooling of the Urban Poor’, in Mary Hilton and Pam Hirsch (eds), Practical Visionaries. Women, Education and Social Progress, 1790–1930 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), 189. 78 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/HAS/LB/003, Newspaper cutting, 1 Aug. 1919. 79 LMA, LCC/EO/WEL/02/007, Care committee minutes, 18 June 1920. 80 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/019, Vicar’s letter, 14 Dec. 1936. 81 Gamble, Chelsea Child, 52. 82 Peckham People’s History, Times of Our Lives, 111. 83 Clara E. Grant, Farthing Bundles (London: Fern Street Settlement, 1931), 156. 84 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/37, Inspection report, June 1920. 85 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAN1/LB/003, Inspection report, 20 May 1936. 86 Kenny, ‘Religious Education’, 42–3. 87 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/017, Headteacher’s report, 5 June 1935. 88 Magee, Clouds of Glory, 176.

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89 Spencer, Education, 259–60. 90 TNA, ED21/35168, Inspection report, 9 Feb. 1926. 91 TNA, ED21/34724, Inspection report, 6 Jan. 1935. 92 TNA, ED21/34895, Inspection report, 7 Sept. 1934. 93 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/03/022, Report by the Chief Examiner (London, 1924), 9. 94 For example, TNA, ED21/34835, Inspection report, 20 Sept. 1935. 95 TNA, ED21/34730, Inspection report, 17 April 1934. 96 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/03/006, Headmistresses’ meeting, 23 Sept. 1930. 97 Cyril Burt, The Backward Child (London: University of London Press, 1937), 118. 98 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/149, LCC report, ‘Observations, 1919–25’. 99 London Teacher, 12 Jan. 1934. 100 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/03/022, Report by the Chief Examiner (London, 1924), 7; LCC/EO/DIV08/WAL/LB/003, Inspection report, 17 July 1931. 101 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/1/47, LCC report, Nov. 1934. 102 LMA, EO/PS/1/37, Headteacher’s report, April 1920. 103 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SCA/LB/001, Logbook, 5 and 7 Dec. 1938. 104 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/SEN/LB/004, Logbook, 16 June 1932. 105 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/SEN/LB/002, Logbook, 22 July 1925. 106 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/LWD/LB/001, Logbook, July–Aug. 1938. 107 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/JAN/LB/001, Logbook, 25 March 1919. 108 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STSAV/LB/002, Diocesan inspection report, 1926; TNA, ED21/35150, Inspection report, 30 Sept. 1926; ED21/ 35107, Inspection report, 20 May 1935; LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/SIR/ LB/002, 12 May 1932. 109 Wright, ‘The Work of Teachers’, 741. 110 TNA, ED21/34648, Inspection report, 14 June 1932. 111 TNA, ED21/34974, Inspection report, 18 May 1926. 112 TNA, ED21/34787, Inspection report, 30 July 1935. 113 TNA, ED21/35085, Inspection report, 20 July 1933. 114 MOA, TC Children and Education 1937–52, 59/6/C. 115 ERO, T/Z 25/1722. 116 ERO, T/Z 25/4271. 117 London Teacher, 17 June 1932. 118 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/BRO/LB/007, Logbook, 7 July, 18 Sept. 1933. 119 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/CUB/LB/001, Logbook, 1 Nov. 1919. 120 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/FRI/LB/002, Logbook, 8 Nov. 1921. 121 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/074, LCC Education Committee minutes, 17 April 1934.

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122 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/076, Letter from Education Officer, 28 Nov. 1938. 123 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/MON/LB/004, Logbook, 24 April 1923. 124 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/BEN/LB/009, Logbook, 21 Sept. 1938. 125 Jacob Middleton, ‘The Experience of Corporal Punishment in Schools, 1890–1940’, History of Education 37:2 (2008), 271–2. 126 BLSA, J.G. Bloom. 127 Magee, Clouds of Glory, 47. 128 Lewis, Soho Address, 12. 129 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/CHU/LB/004, Logbook, 19 Sept. 1923. 130 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/117, Managers’ minutes, 22 Sept. 1930, 31 Aug. 1931, 22 March, 17 June 1932. 131 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SCA/LB/001, Logbook, 20, 24 Feb. 1931. 132 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 1919–21; 28 Jan. 1925. 133 Gardner, ‘Giant at the Front’, 163. 134 Willy Goldman, East End My Cradle (London: Faber & Faber, 1940), 27–8. 135 Goldman, East End, 27. 136 Peckham People’s History, Times of Our Lives, 110. 137 People’s Autobiography of Hackney, The Island, 49. See also, for example, Peckham People’s History, Times of Our Lives, 115; BLSA, Jim Caste; Willmott, Growing Up, 117. 138 Middleton, ‘Experience of Corporal Punishment’, 275; Rose, ‘Willingly to School’, 130–1. 139 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/074, Parent’s letter, 12 July 1935. 140 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/KEN2/LB/002, Parent’s letter, n.d., 1930s. 141 Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society, 75. 142 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/073, Managers’ minutes, 28 June 1937. 143 Gardner, ‘Giant at the Front’, 162. 144 Kenny, ‘Religious Education’, 40. 145 Nugent, Vocations, 85. 146 Peckham People’s History, Times of Our Lives, 112. 147 TNA, ED21/34779, Newspaper cutting, 5 March 1921. 148 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/POP/LB/007, Logbook, 28 Aug. 1921. 149 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAN1/LB/002, Logbook, 22 Feb. 1922. 150 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/JAN/LB/002, Logbook, 22–24 Feb. 1927. 151 LMA, LCC/EO/SS/01/03, LCC documents, n.d., c.1920s. 152 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 14 July 1920. 153 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/02/002, Headteachers’ meeting, 9 Sept. 1934. 154 Rousmaniere et al., ‘Moral Regulation and Schooling’, 3. 155 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/43, 3 July 1927.



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156 LMA, EO/PS/1/37, Headteacher’s report, April 1920. 157 ERO, T/Z 25/3459. 158 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/KEN/LB/003, Logbook, July 1925.

8

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A sense of place

In 1919, a teacher in Battersea, south London, quizzed his pupils – average age 11½ – on their knowledge of the capital. Despite their coming from ‘prosperous artisan homes’, he found that of forty-five boys only twenty-two appeared to have seen the Houses of Parliament, though the towers are visible from my classroom window; only eleven (three doubtful) had been inside Westminster Abbey; three boys had no recollection of seeing St Paul’s, nine only had been inside. The Tower had been visited by twelve, though only seven seem to have been inside. I asked the boys to describe in writing what the Strand was: twenty-six had no idea, ten wrote it down as a street, others variously described it as a busy place, a lot of offices, a district, etc.1

The limited horizons of children brought up in the capital city of empire was a frequent lament among educationalists, and the general importance of a geographical awareness was increasingly promoted in the years after the First World War. As the educationalist and geographer W.H. Barker suggested in 1927: Never before was it so necessary that our future citizens should view the world as a whole, that they should see that various lands and peoples have different contributions to make, and that all must act and react on each other with ever-increasing force … To no people is a sound knowledge of geography more important than to the British with their far-flung Empire and world-wide interests.2

Historians of education have been particularly interested in the presentation of empire in the classroom, as discussed in Chapter 6. But a child’s understanding of place was not just about Britain’s

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global positioning. Recent work has also stressed the importance of local identities, particularly in forming conceptions of citizenship; ‘Putting the city back into citizenship’, Tom Hulme describes it. His Manchester case study found that ‘in the interwar period at least, citizenship was still very much local and urban based’.3 Jenny Keating’s London study also emphasised that a celebration of the local as well as the empire was promoted by advocates of citizenship education.4 This chapter examines the way that children learnt about the world around them, whether local, national or international. Manchester was a northern city known for its civic consciousness; London had a very different status as the capital city of empire. But in London, too, local civic pride was important and, indeed, could provide the basis on which a deeper sense of imperial and global positioning could be built. However, the development of a sense of place might also have nothing to do with empire or citizenship at all. London schools did not exist in a bubble. They were geographically situated in a crowded capital city whose residents and businesses encompassed a host of varied interests. Schools were one way in which children were able to situate themselves in their local environment and economy. The LCC envisaged the ideal school as embedded in the local community, the hub of a wider network of services. Following the Physical Training and Recreation Act, 1937, which empowered local authorities to develop facilities for physical training and recreation and to establish centres for social activities, the LCC suggested that ‘as a general rule in establishing a community centre, which will be available for both juveniles and adults, the Council will endeavour to place it in as close proximity as possible to a school so that there may be a free interchange of accommodation’.5 The Council’s plans were disrupted by the war, but many schools had already been providing services to their district. The Jews’ Free School had long been the centre of the kind of community of which the LCC dreamed more widely: Day in and day out the building is a hive of educational and communal activity. It houses the Old Boys’ Club (senior and junior),

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the Old Girls’ Guild, Jewish Memorial Council Hebrew Classes, the Jewish Lads’ Brigade, the Sabbath Classes of the Jewish Religious Education Board; and (under the Jewish Health Organisation) the Child Guidance Clinic.6

The Jews’ Free School was unusual, of course, in catering to a discrete constituency with a clearly defined identity.7 But other schools also offered facilities to a wider community, for example letting out rooms or playgrounds to clubs such as the Scouts or Guides, political or trade union groups, charity entertainments or Sunday schools; about 230 schools opened their playgrounds on Saturdays in 1921.8 Requests were accepted or refused at the discretion of school managers, and the primary consideration was usually the interests of the children at the school: a request to let a playground on Saturdays to the Evening Institute for netball was agreed by a group of Camberwell managers subject to the non-exclusion of elementary schoolchildren, but a month later the same committee refused a request to let a playground to adults, feeling that the principle of reserving use for children should be preserved.9 Some schools were associated with their locality in other ways. Local businesses often supported schools in their districts, contributing to school funds or sponsoring sporting competitions. The Gainsborough Film Studio offered more bespoke support, helping out a neighbouring school with scenery for dramatic work.10 School magazines might feature advertisements from local shopkeepers, or, more unusually, be bound up alongside other community endeavours such as the parish magazine.11 One school serving  the LCC estate at Roehampton was allocated a portion of the t­enant-produced Roehampton Estate Gazette. The London Teacher thought it an ‘ideal arrangement’: ‘The linking up of the community interests of the schools and the inhabitants of the district in which the school is situated is obviously of advantage to all.’12 Ex-pupils might go on to play important roles in the local community, as the headteacher of Columbia Road School testified, noting that ‘the Mayor of Finsbury, a “Columbia” old boy, recently visited the school in state. In fact, this school and its name have a definite connection with the life of the neighbourhood.’13 Teachers might be similarly plugged into local politics. The mayoralties of

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more than one London borough were held by serving teachers, who were granted a few days leave of absence across the year so they could fulfil their duties.14 Such connections were not frictionless. More negative reactions came when schools posed direct economic competition: in the early 1920s, the LCC received regular complaints from traders against the sale of plimsolls at cost price in schools.15 Sometimes the school’s educational messages were undermined by divergent interests, and the London Teacher noted that the numerous sweet sellers who pitched up outside elementary schools during the midday break were making the work of school doctors and dentists more difficult.16 There are many examples of complaints by headteachers or managers regarding damage done by outside organisations: ‘certain articles … broken by Boy Scouts’; ‘scratches on lid of piano which had been stood on at a political meeting’; or ‘the filthy condition of the infants department after letting to the Fulham Co-operative Society’.17 Logbooks record dozens of disapproving references to the evening institutes in particular which left litter, spilt ink, or caused more wilful damage. One headmaster was appalled to find his school ‘in a very dirty state. The staircase had been used as a urinal by the Evening Institute boys. Ink had been overturned in several rooms and pens thrown at the ceiling.’18 Tenancies could be withdrawn in response, but other irritations were harder to eradicate, such as the catcalls made by local factory employees towards boys arriving at a manual training centre, or the ‘bad language and low songs by workmen outside windows of classrooms’.19 Some annoyances were less deliberate, as when one headteacher complained of ‘the clanking noise made by hammering iron in the dumping yard [next door], also the noise and shaking of the school premises when unloading the lorries, which is nervewracking to the teachers if not to the children’.20 One ex-schoolgirl remembered of her Hackney childhood that We used to get men come round the streets with a barrel organ, dressed as women, in lesson time. If the classroom windows were open, we’d listen to them rather than the teacher and get told off. If they came at dinner time, they’d get all the kids lined up on the

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kerb. The bell used to go and nobody would move. So we’d get told off for that, too.21

Frustration worked both ways of course. Following complaints, school managers in Camberwell asked headteachers to be aware of ‘the annoyance caused to pedestrians by children swinging their wet bathing costumes and towels in the street when returning from the swimming baths’.22 Some of the fiercest community hostility to the elementary schools was nakedly class-based: the proposed erection of a new elementary school in Lewisham in the 1930s raised furious (though futile) objections from local residents, who complained that ‘the surrounding space is occupied by middle-class property, the amenities of which will be adversely affected’.23 A few years earlier in Brixton, even a proposed new central school had drawn objection from those who worried that ‘to “dump” a huge b ­ uilding  … in good residential quarters … must, in the very nature of things, turn the district into a slum area’.24 The LCC was generally unsympathetic. In 1921 a Council official reported having received numerous letters from Londoners complaining that parks and open spaces were being spoilt by schoolchildren, with trees damaged and shrubs destroyed. ‘I think that these complaints about the children of London chiefly emanate from querulous old gentlemen or querulous old ladies. My sympathies are all with the children’, he declared.25 But if it dismissed these particular complaints, the LCC still had to juggle the needs of its respective constituents, and its ­self-consciously progressive agenda required the prioritisation of certain commitments over others. The construction of new schools did not  come only at the expense of better-off Londoners, for example, and in 1925 notice was served on around two hundred LCC tenant families at King’s Cross following the decision to erect a new school. ‘There are already twelve schools within a radius of a mile of this site, so why cannot they leave school building alone for the present till the housing shortage becomes less acute?’ asked one threatened resident. An LCC official explained that the new school was necessary ‘owing to a decision that no classroom of a senior school should have more than forty children’.26

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Schools had a different opportunity to connect children to the locality through formal lessons. In subjects such as history and geography, a stress on the local environment was often emphasised. ‘At all stages the importance of the geography of the homeland and of London in particular should be kept in mind’, advised one inspector of geography lessons, while another explicitly suggested that local history – as opposed to national – needed greater attention.27 Where children’s capabilities were deemed limited, as in a school for ‘mentally deficient’ children, an inspector validated the choice to teach no geography bar ‘a little geography of the neighbourhood’.28 The Board of Education’s 1927 survey on history teaching found that eighteen of the forty-one London schools it surveyed made a dedicated effort to deal with local history, and more touched on the subject in a less definite way.29 For several schools, the emphasis on the local meant focusing on the immediate neighbourhood. When Ivydale Road School celebrated ‘Camberwell Day’, in August 1928, the programme included an address by the headteacher on Camberwell, a speech by the local mayor on the work of Camberwell Borough Council, a recital of the song ‘London River’ and a reading of Wordsworth’s poem ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’.30 The pupils of a neighbouring school were praised by inspectors for their ‘very interesting and original notebooks made on the historical, geographical, and literary associations of Camberwell’.31 Schools elsewhere also recorded lessons on their specific areas. One used a nearby tributary of the Thames to study river action and discussed the Domesday description of the local district.32 Several chose to emphasise their place in the neighbourhood by naming their school houses after local notables, such as ‘famous men associated in History with Chelsea’.33 Others could celebrate the name of their school itself, such as the Raleigh School in Stepney, whose name had been chosen to reflect ‘the strong maritime traditions of the district and a certain association of Sir Walter Raleigh with the locality’, or the Hugh Myddelton School in Finsbury, situated ‘within two minutes of the New River Head, where he [Myddelton] inaugurated London’s first real water supply in 1613’.34 A focus on local history might be supplemented by visits to nearby places of interest. In 1919, a Lewisham school took a class of girls to visit the

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parish church and almshouses, ‘as the girls are studying the history of Lewisham’.35 A report in the London Teacher on south London schools in 1923 confirmed that local history was receiving more attention generally, but noticeably so in Greenwich, ‘which enjoys the advantage of rich historical associations’.36 Not too much further away, of course, were the various national sights of London and many schools took advantage of these too. In 1921, a class of children from Poplar enjoyed a packed itinerary, with a walk from Westminster to Charing Cross ‘by way of the Victoria Embankment, Boadicea Monument, Westminster Bridge, the New County Hall, St Thomas’ Hospital, the Houses of Parliament, Richard I’s statue, Westminster Abbey, St Margaret’s Church, Whitehall, the Cenotaph, the Horse Guards, the Admiralty Arch, St James’s Park, Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s Column’.37 Such landmarks might make an impression even when not seen at first hand. One Londoner later remembered being presented with a prize following the class examinations: ‘It was a book titled The Sights of London, introducing me to such wonders as the Mansion House, Guildhall, the Monument and Hampton Court Palace. Of course, I already knew the Tower of London and Buckingham Palace, so often mentioned at school as being the most important buildings in the universe.’38 The number of school trips increased over the interwar period. In 1926, the LCC noted that nearly 29,000 school parties (with an estimated average of thirty people per party) had used the tramways in the previous year during school hours, an increase of almost 10,000 compared to three years previously.39 Officially, school trips were meant to be educational – ‘an educational visit must never degenerate into a “school treat”’, wrote the Chief Inspector40 – and thought to be particularly important given the assumption that children had such limited cultural capital. ‘Children in poor districts rarely or never get more than a mile from their homes’, lamented one inspector, while a headteacher noted the success of a visit to Westminster Abbey stating: ‘only one child had previously seen the River Thames’.41 Inspection reports therefore urged several schools to make greater use of their proximity to places of interest – in the case of one poor school in Lambeth, noting that ‘apart from meeting in a fine

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building, the only advantage possessed by the boys of this school is their proximity to the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the Tate Gallery and Lambeth Palace’.42 Another suggested that educational visits should be more frequent, ‘seeing that little or no travelling is ever done by most of the pupils in the school’.43 As so often, it was hoped that children’s school experiences might carry over into their home lives, and one school was praised for the fact that children were given ‘a list of cheap excursions’ at the end of term, to give them and their parents inspiration for their own trips.44 The inspectors’ pleas are a reminder that a significant minority of schools were not taking such opportunities. In 1936, 73 replies from headteachers to an LCC survey revealed that while 44 of their schools made educational visits, 29 did not, though all were heads of junior schools; the number of senior schools taking trips would  have been higher.45 Yet trips were common enough – or assumed to be common enough – that a scholarship exam in 1923 included the instruction to ‘Describe a day’s outing from your home to some place of interest on the other side of the Thames’. Afterwards, an examiner noted that places such as the Tower of London, Tate Gallery, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s were commonly written about, and were doubtless the outcome of educational visits and a tribute to their ability ‘to enrich the mind, kindle the imagination, stimulate observation and accuracy, and open up the vista of a wealth of history and interest in the treasures within easy reach of the poorest’. Another examiner acknowledged that ‘sometimes one encountered a script where the boy had never been to any place of interest on the other side of the Thames … and was forced to rely solely upon his powers of imagination’.46 Lack of such cultural knowledge was presumably yet another way in which the poorer child was disadvantaged in scholarship examinations. The emphasis on a local neighbourhood was partly about good pedagogy. ‘Every living thing explores its habitat; on foot or otherwise, children should do the same’, suggested an LCC report, while individual inspectors praised schools for geography lessons to which ‘children respond readily because the subject matter is real and has vital connections with their daily lives and interests’.47 A London emphasis also offered an opportunity to reinforce lessons about democracy. As well as the House of Commons, school parties

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could visit County Hall, where, as one teacher wrote, ‘the vast work of the LCC and its educational centre and importance were appreciated by the party. I consider such visits help in the making of good citizens.’48 Bryan Magee recalled (‘surprisingly’) knowing about both the Shoreditch Borough Council and the London County Council as a child ‘because they impinged so much on our lives; and I think we probably had something about them explained to us at school’.49 Those who missed out on a school trip might have read the LCC’s commemorative children’s pamphlet instead, published to mark its jubilee in 1939. In it the child reader was asked to imagine taking a walk through London, during which they would spot newly built houses, schools, hospitals, museums, parks and playing fields. ‘In a way the Council is like the father of a great family’, the commentary read: It looks after children; it teaches them when they are young; it trains them to earn a living. It helps them in times of sickness and trouble. It helps the blind and the poor. By its open-air baths and playingfields it makes it possible for Londoners to keep well and healthy. It watches against infection. Its doctors and nurses help in this; so do its new housing estates. It guards purchases. It protects everyone from fire. If people were left to do all these things by themselves it would not be easy for them. When a great elected body like the LCC does these things it can do them more efficiently and more economically than any individual could do them for himself.50

Admittedly, the impact of such initiatives were not always down to the school, but could be rooted in the values children learnt at home. Following a visit to a local council meeting in Lambeth, one boy wrote afterwards in an essay: ‘My visit was more interesting for me than some of the other boys, as my dad has always talked to me about the Borough Council, and has taken part in several elections … and I think when old enough I shall do my best to become a member of the Lambeth Borough Council and so do what good I can for the Borough in which I was born.’51 Finally, the local focus was also important because it encouraged a celebration of London as the centre of a wider empire. In the words of one inspector, ‘London forms a wonderful focus of ­interests – her river, her boats, her docks, her markets, and her

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people provide dozens of topics out of which may grow the study of the farther world.’52 Lessons on London could therefore be a way to introduce children to a much bigger and interconnected world. For the Medburn School near St Pancras, for example, which undertook such activities as displaying ‘trade labels from fruit boxes … in such a manner that even the dullest pupil can learn something about the countries from which these goods are imported’, geography lessons were an opportunity to stress ‘the ever increasing dependence on one another of the nations of the earth’.53 Imagining London as the centre of a global trade network was one way of emphasising this interconnectedness, as when one school linked geography lessons ‘with the needs of the home country; lessons on the temperate grasslands of the Southern hemisphere, for instance, are immediately followed by lessons on the wool industry of Yorkshire, and care is always taken “to bring foreign goods home”’.54 Inspectors were impressed with one geography teacher who ‘begins with products familiar to girls who early take part in shopping for their parents, and from a study of the source and distribution of these products she develops among her pupils an elementary notion of what Geography means’.55 Teaching London as the centre of a transport network further enabled a global outlook. In keeping with Britain’s imperial position, it was the shipping network which schools most often emphasised, and one headmistress spoke explicitly in such terms. Her school on the Isle of Dogs was ‘situated in an isolated area of the Metropolis’ but she was grateful for the fact that the river and docks could be seen from its classroom windows, opening up a vista on a much bigger world: ‘The forest of masts and funnels indicate its busy life, and remind one how it is linked with all parts of the Empire by its arriving and departing vessels.’56 A 1936 survey showed that visits to London’s dockyards were paid by over two hundred school parties every year.57 If there were a variety of ways in which children might become acquainted with their neighbourhood and city, an understanding of their national homeland was important too. According to Barker:

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What journeys may be made, what holidays may be taken, by means of the magic carpet of geography! … The Weald, the London Basin, East Anglia, Fenland, these and many more are easily recognisable regions of England. Can we but give to children the secret of their personality, the reality of their regional entity, England herself will become real, a country to be travelled until her children know and understand her.58

Inspectors were not always complimentary. One was shocked at a class of junior girls who ‘did not know where the highlands of England were, even though they were looking at a map which indicated them clearly’.59 But others remarked on pupils who could successfully complete an outline map of the British Isles or who ‘had acquired quite a respectable fund of information’.60 One exschoolboy remembered the rote learning that remained with him years later: Our teacher would draw on the blackboard an outline of the British mainland and first of all we’d have to fill in the rivers … Then with the broad side of the chalk the teacher would mark in the hill masses as we called them out … Then at the very end she would … mark a dot in the middle of the map and we’d all say ‘And the Wrekin’. Many years later I got my first glimpse of the Wrekin … I was looking out of the [train] window to the west and I saw a hill and I thought ‘That must be the Wrekin!’ and I got quite excited.61

But, as Rex Walford argues in his history of geography lessons in British schools, the teaching of the subject had long been about more than rote memorisation, and many teachers aspired to foster more than just textbook knowledge.62 In 1933, H.C. Barnard suggested in his best-selling geography manual that perhaps the most important objective of fieldtrips was to engender an affection for the nation: ‘There is no better way of learning to love England than by getting to know her.’63 School journeys in particular were therefore valued for offering children spectacularly different landscapes to the urban environment of London. One headteacher chose Abergavenny as his school’s destination, justifying the unusually distant choice by the fact that the district ‘both as regards scenery and occupations, offers a greater contrast to the London district than is afforded

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by any nearer resort’.64 The account of another journey to South Wales published in 1928 included pupils’ comments taken from the school magazine. Awed by the dark and damp of the coalmines and the roaring furnaces of the steelworks, children discovered a very different – and less appealing – world compared to their processed London environment. One declared that such visits ‘make us realise all that can lie behind the smooth and shining surface of a mustard tin’.65 Another school took fifty boys on a (long) day trip to Stoke-on-Trent. They visited the colliery, descending the mine shaft, and ‘at the end when everyone had removed as much as possible of the grime’, were entertained to coffee and cakes. ‘Returned to Euston at 9 pm after a very fine day. No casualties’, recorded the headmaster.66 The school journey was not only about encountering new environments, but also sought to foster an acquaintance with different people. The motto of the School Journey Association was that ‘Travel is the slayer of prejudice’, and many teachers felt that an understanding of the local population was just as important, if not more so, than physical contact with the land itself. As G.G. Lewis, one of the pioneers of the school journey movement, told the Association in 1926, one of the benefits of a school journey was that children entered a different community: ‘With luck, they may talk to a lord, a bishop, a dean, a great musician, an author, a general, or an admiral … They will encounter fishermen, farm labourers, lighthouse keepers, village schoolboys, farmers’ wives, and be all the richer for the widened experience.’67 A teacher who accompanied a school journey to Bideford later admitted to nerves before departure as ‘forty, fifty or sixty children invading a small town … may easily become unpopular’. In fact he was pleased to observe that soon every child was ‘passing the time of day’ with the locals, ‘and although the visitors did not at first gather half what was said to them, they understood the smiles and they certainly knew that they were enveloped in a “cheerio” atmosphere’.68 There was a strong class element to such contact. Lewis suggested that the ideal journey provided not only town and country with a better understanding of each other, but also bridged other divides. He referred to a journey made during the war, when his pupils had been invited by Lord Burnham to use his land as an open-air

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classroom, and toured his stately home. Those children, he argued, ‘are not going to shout for the heads of all aristocrats. The school journey is a good insurance against unrest and Bolshevism.’69 He was also keen to stress that contact was mutually beneficial. ‘The Dean or Canon who in his mind has muttered “Godless board school” changes his opinion when he finds our children asking keen questions on church architecture.’70 One wonders what the London children thought, particularly when they visited the impressive buildings of their more privileged counterparts. The impressions of twenty boys from Paddington who visited Harrow School during their school journey in 1920 can only be imagined.71 Other teachers were anxious to give children an insight into life outside the capital if only because it fostered an appreciation for what they already had. One Lewisham teacher wrote of ‘the young Londoner who takes taps and drains for granted and never gives a thought to the significance of his gas and electricity supplies, his trams and his buses or his nearby shops and school … a fortnight in a different environment … will do much to help the studies of other regions where such conveniences do not exist’.72 When, in 1924, a rare school journey took place from the provinces to the capital, London families seemed keen to show off their city. Forty boys came from Worcester to stay in the homes of pupils at G.G. Lewis’s Hammersmith school. An official programme of sightseeing was organised each day, but many hosts were keen to give their visitors a good impression of London, treating them ‘like favourite nephews up from the country’ and taking them to see other sights in the evening, such as ‘the flashing lights of Piccadilly’.73 There was therefore no straightforward adoption of the official mantra that valued the rural and denigrated the urban. In 1929, the London Teacher published the comments of an 11-year-old from Fulham, reported by his teacher. ‘Some of the children in London think it would be nice to go to school in the country as they would not have to do hard work’, he had written. ‘But look at the difference when grown up. The ignorant countryman, the brainy Londoner. It is not the countryman’s fault, most likely he did not have a learned man to teach him. Probably he had the Vicar’s wife to teach him.’74 It was an anecdote published to entertain, but it also reinforced an assumption of the superiority of London schools.

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A rare caveat about school journeys comes from an ex-teacher who accompanied children for the fortnight. She appreciated that ‘it was the only holiday they had’ but also remembered the unusual challenges of country life: ‘we had them all down with temperatures and ever so poorly because the sun streamed in through all  the windows. We had to make calico hats for all the girls to protect their heads.’75 Sometimes, therefore, the experience of a school journey might engender a deeper appreciation of London. The guidebook prepared for a group of Clapham children who visited Bognor Regis in 1937 contained the usual detailed information gathered by teachers about the locations visited. Its final page dealt with the journey home and instructed children to follow the map, counting off the different places that the train passed through. ‘Can you name the towns?’ it asked. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to live in – London! At last?!’76 In some schools, lessons on the local and national environment took priority. In 1933, even Empire Day was celebrated by an East End school with dances and songs based on the four home nations, rather than emphasising Britain’s colonial reach.77 But it was hoped that an understanding of the homeland would also sit within a broader knowledge of the wider world. W.H. Barker advised on this, too: It is reasonable to expect scholars [by age eleven] … to show on the globe or map the large regions of great and least population density, the location and character of the dominant activities in the principal countries of the world, the distance in miles between, say, London and New York, Buenos Aires, Calcutta and Sydney, the zones of the world’s forests and grasslands and the uses to which they are put.78

These were ambitious aims, perhaps, but the list of questions on a 1923 geography exam paper, taken by 13-year-old elementary school pupils hopeful for a late scholarship place, suggests that such knowledge was expected. Pupils were given a choice of q ­ uestions, including being asked to describe the climate in India and the Prairies  of North America; write a few sentences about each of tinned fruits, silk, rubber, wheat and furs and where in the world they came from; or give a description of life either in the Black Country or Belfast. Precise geographical knowledge was required by

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any candidate who answered the question requiring them to name, on a blank outline map, New Zealand, Ceylon and Madagascar, Marseilles, Calcutta and Durban; to insert the Panama Canal, the Andes and the rivers Rhine, Congo and Mississippi; and to mark a possible steamer route from Liverpool to a Japanese port.79 Many schools followed a broadly concentric syllabus based around studies of Britain, Europe, the empire and the world. One popular series of textbooks, co-authored by the headmaster of a London elementary school and entitled Uncle Peter’s Travels, followed Peter’s visits to different countries through letters home to his nephew. The four books explored ‘The Temperate Lands’, ‘The Hot Lands and the Cold Lands’, ‘The World’ and ‘The British Isles’.80 Of course, and as seen in previous chapters, a school’s textbook or curriculum did not necessarily reflect classroom p ­ ractice. The inspectors of Sydenham Hill Road School in 1930 praised the headmaster’s approach to geography – he ‘takes a real interest in this subject and has drawn up a useful syllabus’ – but found that the actual teaching was not so coherent: the methods employed in the classes are too varied and do not form a whole. In one class the teaching takes the shape of general information about the country studied; in another, it is regional; in another, it emphasises the scientific side of the subject. In one class, geography note-books are kept; in another, there are none. Here a sketch-map was drawn on the board and there a wall-map was put up or atlases used. The school globe was out of repair.81

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, many children did not possess the geographical knowledge called for by either Barker or the scholarship examination. ‘In most schools’, wrote one inspector, ‘countries like China, Persia and Brazil have no geographical existence.’82 Pointing out the continents of South America and Africa was beyond some of the girls at an Islington school, while a headmaster in Notting Hill got ‘the shock of my life’ when he tested his pupils on basic facts about mountains, rivers and places. ‘I want every class next term to have work set on maps’, he resolved.83 One inspection team despaired when even the teachers used ‘maps and atlases … unintelligently; frequent references to north and south as “top” and “bottom” of the map were noticed in more than one class’.84

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A lack of resources might not help. Barker suggested that, as a minimum, every school should possess two globes (physical and political) and several different wall maps.85 In some schools, resources were used to good effect, as at a school where a large map, ‘always open to the inspection of the pupils’, was used to indicate ‘the voyages of early navigators, the flights of modern aviators, or the trade routes by which articles in daily use are brought home to the inhabitants of Shoreditch’.86 But many schools fell short. At least one was still using pre-war editions of atlases into the late 1920s.87 An article in the Geographical Teacher in 1921 tried to help by providing instructions for a home-made globe, explaining how to cover an ordinary football bladder with paper ‘whose shape has been drawn according to the “cosine rule” for varying latitudes’, and then, after machining ‘the gores together to about 80  degrees latitude North and South … on the surface draw in pencil a few lines of latitude; the seams will be meridians, and lightly sketch in the land masses’.88 It is unclear how many teachers would have possessed the requisite ‘little practical skill’ the article claimed was  all  that was required, but enthusiastic teachers could obviously make a  difference, and inspectors praised a Kensington teacher for his many ‘great pains in making and collecting charts, maps, ­diagrams, models etc.’89 If teachers were willing, geography lessons might also benefit from the increased use of film in schools, which could give children a more direct connection to the places studied. Over the course of the autumn term 1930, for example, the boys of a Hammersmith school listened to one BBC lecture a week on an eclectic list of topics, from ‘Life on the Tundra’, to ‘Life of a Trader in the South Sea Islands’ and ‘Salmon Fishing, British Columbia’, all supplemented by short films.90 Some schools organised visits to specialised film showings, with travelogues particularly popular. Lowell Thomas’s film Through Romantic India was seen by as many as 50,000 children; when 150 Lewisham boys were taken soon after it opened in 1923 their teacher felt ‘sure our boys will derive much benefit’.91 Other London pupils watched such films as The Cradle of the World, documenting a journey through British East Africa; Cape to Cairo, which toured 6,000 miles of the African continent; or Robert J. Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North, which followed the daily life of an Inuit family.92 An LCC report of 1925

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suggested that ‘most of the cinema visits authorised by the Council such as the pictures of Scott’s expedition and of the Everest exploration, have been calculated to inspire the children with proper admiration for the heroism of their own countrymen’.93 London children had further opportunity to hear about life in other countries through international visitors. In 1920, London schools hosted nearly two hundred visits by men and women from overseas. A third of guests came from Empire countries, but the rest hailed from Europe, the USA, Japan, China, Palestine and Egypt. Some were high profile – the visitors’ book of a Stepney school in 1937 bears the signature of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia – but most were teachers or educational officials.94 Many of these visits were probably fleeting, with little, if any, interaction with children or staff. One headteacher questioned their purpose even for the visitors, noting that a large party from the British Commonwealth Education Conference had been that morning: ‘Query – do such folk receive any benefit from these visits?’95 But some visitors came for longer, for teaching practice or observation lasting two or three weeks. One headteacher reported back to the Board of Education on three Indian students who had attended his school for teaching practice. He noted that ‘the children displayed no undue excitement and were keenly interested in first-hand knowledge of Indian life and literature. Several parents expressed their appreciation of the privilege extended to their children in the practical demonstration of the principles of the League of Nations.’96 Longer visits were facilitated by the League of Empire exchange teaching scheme, which enabled the interchange of staff between Britain and the white dominions. By 1931, nearly two thousand British teachers had swapped places for a year with a dominion counterpart, with London teachers disproportionately represented among them.97 It could cause headaches for headteachers who had to arrange supply teaching, but the benefits were also acknowledged, with either dominion teachers or returning British teachers expected to provide first-hand retellings of their experiences: the dominion exchange teacher who addressed the school on ‘Natives’ Life in South Africa’, or a teacher from Australia tasked with ‘taking Class I for most lessons but her services are being utilised in other

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classes – so that her visit to the school may be of real educational value’.98 At least one ex-pupil was appreciative of his teacher’s tales: ‘He must have travelled a lot in his time and would hold forth on all sorts of things that were not in the Geography book. Deserts and jungles, the Amazon and the Nile; we would sit there spellbound, lapping it all up.’99 Only a very small minority of elementary schoolchildren had the opportunity to travel themselves. The destinations of school journeys were almost always based in Britain (and usually south-east England) for financial reasons, but a handful of schools attempted more ambitious trips. In 1927, the children of Goodrich Road in Dulwich visited Paris, while several years later a small party from Addison Gardens in Hammersmith went to Scandinavia.100 Both schools were situated in relatively prosperous areas, but the inspection report of Credon Road, situated in a poor neighbourhood in Peckham, noted that this school had twice taken parties of children to holiday in Belgium.101 For more children, a physical interaction with people from foreign lands could be gained without the cost of travel. Some schools exploited links with ex-pupils or staff to establish connections with schools overseas. The headmaster of a Finsbury school recorded that his boys had been corresponding for over a year with their counterparts in Sydney, where an old pupil was now working.102 In 1933, the girls of a Stepney school exchanged letters with pupils in Cairo, following the employment of an ex-mistress there.103 Other letters were exchanged between Camberwell and Auckland, Fulham and Ontario, or Lewisham and the USA, while at least two Islington schools engaged in an ‘exchange of flags’ ceremony with schools in Islington, New South Wales.104 Such contacts were usually limited to English-speaking countries; only a small handful of elementary schools requested and received special permission to teach French.105 Other initiatives were more ambitious. In 1934, the LCC agreed to an experiment linking up two London schools with two ships, having been approached by the chairman of a shipping company: An office on board the ship would keep in constant communication with the school, informing the teacher of the movements of the ship,

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the cargoes it takes on and disembarks and various other intimate pieces of information of value to the children. The teacher and children would thus establish a close personal relationship with the ship and whenever the ship returns to London visits would be made to it and possibly some of the ship’s officers would visit the school.106

The two schools initially chosen – Childeric Road Junior Boys’ and The Millbank Senior School – reported favourably on the initiative: when Childeric Road received a letter from the captain of its paired ship SS Deptford, explaining that it had shipped 40–50 tons of coal at Cardiff, it ‘set us going on coal getting, mining and transport for a week’.107 In 1935 the scheme was extended to 100 schools.108 Cranbrook Road in the East End adopted the San Alberto: in 1937 the captain’s wife visited, bringing with her an octopus caught by the ship’s crew: ‘The boys were very excited.’109 A group of Wandsworth pupils wrote letters to ‘their’ ship’s crew, answered by the captain when he visited; ‘he also bought them a Buddha from China, a silk ­handkerchief … and bottles of seeds illustrating the cargo he carries from China to London. The following year he visited again, this time bringing a model of a Japanese house.110 A sense of a wider world was further evident through the presence of foreign children in the classroom. Not all children in London schools were white English. Jim Wolveridge, who attended a Catholic school in the East End, remembered that the English were outnumbered by ‘a pretty cosmopolitan crowd of kids’: Germans, Greeks, Italians, Jamaicans, Lithuanians, Poles, and a girl who was Portuguese-African.111 Multinational classrooms were not uncommon in parts of the capital, with many schools reporting ‘a distinct foreign element’.112 The biggest minority was Jewish, particularly in the East End: in 1921, over sixty thousand Russian and Polish immigrants lived in the four boroughs of Stepney, Bethnal Green, Hackney and Stoke Newington.113 Despite their high numbers, the recentness of their arrival was noted in school statistics: of the 196 girls in the senior classes of Stepney Jewish School in 1925, for example, only 36 had parents who had both been born in England.114

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Fear over the number of foreign children in schools had long been stoked by anti-immigrant groups. In 1902, in a parliamentary debate on immigration, the MP William Evans-Gordon warned of ‘schools crowded with foreign children’.115 Several historians have examined the stereotypical racial depictions that dominated school textbooks from the later nineteenth century onwards, lionising the British and diminishing the peoples of empire.116 By the interwar period other influences were also promoting prejudice. One inspector in 1927 was dismayed that ‘a question about the Chinese showed that, no doubt owing to cinema and similar influences, only the less satisfactory qualities of that nation were familiar to the children’.117 But within official educational circles, such children were often contrasted favourably (if stereotypically) with their English peers. Of Upper Marylebone Street School in 1929, inspectors suggested that the ‘gay and animated’ temperament of the foreign children was a good influence on the ‘less articulate English girls’.118 Jewish children in particular were feted as intellectually superior, with anecdotal evidence supported by a psychological investigation of 1930.119 ‘Many of the schools attended by Jewish children are in poor neighbourhoods’, suggested an LCC report of 1925. ‘But the Jewish children do not, with rare exceptions, show the usual characteristics of the slum child; they are well-grown, well-fed, wellclothed, and intelligent children, and, age for age, are in intellectual advance of Christian children of the same social class.’120 In his research on Jewish children of the East End, Benjamin Lammers has argued that, despite the often hostile discourses of early twentieth century, the LCC’s policies towards Jewish pupils were ‘open and accommodating, particularly when compared to responses to immigration later in the century’.121 In addition to the Jews’ Free School and Stepney Jewish School, which were wholly  Jewish, other elementary schools which catered for a majority of Jewish children were designated by the LCC as ‘Jewish schools’, giving them leeway to vary holiday arrangements to cover Jewish festivals, for example.122 However, the LCC was less accommodating when Jewish children were in a minority, even if that minority was a substantial one. Hoping to avoid mass absences on the Day of Atonement in 1923, the head of a school in Bethnal Green asked the LCC to

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authorise a temporary change to the school day so that his seventyodd Jewish children could leave early. ‘Not granted’, he recorded in the logbook, ‘It being, apparently, the idea of the LCC that such absences were of no importance.’123 Ena Abrahams, born in 1924, attended schools in the East End before moving to a school in Hackney, which had a ‘fair-sized Jewish element’. She, too, felt that the size of the Jewish component made a difference: The school just didn’t want to know about differences in cultural background … You took part in all the rituals of the time, the communal rituals like Empire Day, and Christmas. I think parents didn’t want to make you any different, so they allowed you, whatever their thoughts to take part in the Christmas festivities, and all the rest. They wouldn’t have done so in a school in the East End of London, because there were more of you together and you could say, ‘Well, we don’t want this.’124

But even when schools had a smaller Jewish population, concessions might still be made by individual teachers (some of whom, of course, might be Jewish themselves; headteachers sometimes noted the absence of individual members of staff due to Jewish holidays). W. Victor Sefton, for example, growing up in the 1920s, remembered being allowed to stay silent during Christian prayers, and ‘was given a few maths problems to do while the class was studying the New Testament’.125 His was not an isolated memory; one headmaster’s logbook records his decision to divide the Jewish and Christian children for one lesson a week so that the Jewish children could focus on the Old Testament and the Christian children on the New.126 Headteachers might also fight against structural bias, such as the LCC rule that scholarships could only be given to British subjects. In 1928, a Whitechapel headmaster successfully appealed for an exception to be made in the case of a child who had come to England from Russia as a baby, and whose illiterate widowed mother had not sought (expensive) naturalisation. He was ‘a brilliant pupil’, attested the headmaster, who was ‘very anxious that the boy should not be deprived of the award’.127 Prejudice still existed, of course. One ex-headmaster remembered admitting a Jewish lad, ‘to the disgust of the staff … [who], like most of the surrounding inhabitants, envisaged themselves as a

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garrison holding the “island” against Jewish besiegers’.128 A Jewish ex-schoolboy also remembered the varied attitudes of different teachers, from a master who called the register ‘beginning with Aronowitz and terminating in Zelikovsky … so casually the names might have testified to a lineage sprung from the Normans’, to another who ‘got the class sniggering with … “Old tin potsky” and “Old tin cansky”’.129 Prejudice towards Black, Indian or Chinese children was also common. Inspectors described one school in a poor district of Limehouse, for example, as including ‘some Chinese and one negro family’ as well as ‘several half-castes’.130 A 1939 school report for a troublesome 14-year-old noted that the boy is a ‘very poor mixer – boy is a “half caste” (mulatto) and lethargic but at times very stubborn’.131 Memoirs and autobiographies generally suggest that the most explicit racism was more usually encountered in the playground. One ex-schoolgirl educated in Islington in the 1920s remembered the only child of colour she had ever seen: ‘most of the children took the micky … looking upon him as some kind of freak’.132 Memories of anti-Semitism vary between nostalgic recollections of friendship and unity – ‘We mixed as though there were no barriers’; matter-of-fact accounts – ‘to be quite frank about it, you were called a Jew boy. Or a Jew bastard even’; to bitter tales of hurt and upset – ‘“Dirty git! You killed our Lord!” Through my tears I cried, “I never killed no one!”’ When prejudice was directly encountered from teachers, however, it could be more painful. For the boy accused of killing our Lord, worse than the playground taunting was the fact that it turned into fight and he got ‘rapped on the bum by a master for making a lot of noise’.133 If analyses of geography textbooks and suchlike can inform our understanding of the messages offered to schoolchildren, then the day-to-day activities of the classroom are much harder to access. Occasional finds in school logbooks include the fact that, in March 1930, the pupils of Stepney Jewish School sat their end of year English exam, which asked them to ‘write a few lines about the sea, supposed to be written by: a) a sailor b) a fish c) a big liner and d) a pebble on the shore’.134 Or that, a few years earlier, and south of the river, a school for ‘mentally deficient’ children set a ‘reading activ-

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ity’ on Empire Day, 1925. For the lowest class it was just one word: ‘London’. More advanced classes received ‘We live in a fine city named London, with many houses and schools’ and ‘London is a big city, nice to live in.’135 Such small tasks – probably set without much thought by the teacher – might seem innocuous examples, but speak to bigger themes: the assumption that all would be familiar with the sea, and the centrality of it – in a Jewish school – to an English identity; or the celebration of London and the benefits of living there. However, the grounding of schools in their local community meant that, even if some children missed the classroom messaging, the school experience was always going to be bound up in the world around them. As one man remembered, it was going to school that was ‘always an adventure, great steamships in the docks, large factories, goods trains coming and going, ships’ hooters and factory whistles blowing, hundreds of people going to or trying to get work. To me as an infant, I thought the whole world was just docklands.’136 And for others, their schooldays contributed to an awakening of a curiosity about a world beyond the capital. In 1925, an inspection of Portobello Road School in Kensington suggested that ‘the home surroundings of the children present many difficulties, not the least being the narrowness of their experience of the simplest features of the country’. A couple of years earlier, the headmaster had proudly recorded the appointment of ex-pupil Harold Spencer Jones to the position of Astronomer Royal at the Cape of Good Hope.137 One child, at least, had looked up at the stars.

Notes 1 The Schoolmaster, 1 Feb. 1919. 2 W.H. Barker, Geography in Education and Citizenship (London: University of London Press, 1927), 188–9. 3 Hulme, ‘Putting the City Back’, 26. 4 Keating, ‘Approaches to Citizenship Teaching’, 773–4. 5 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/338, Managers’ minutes, 24 May 1938. 6 London Teacher, 25 Feb. 1938. 7 For its history, see Gerry Black, JFS: The History of the Jews’ Free School, London, since 1732 (London: Tymsder, 1998). 8 London Teacher, 9 Dec. 1921.

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9 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/045, Managers’ minutes, 21 Oct., 18 Nov. 1927. 10 TNA, ED21/35207. Inspection report, 9 May 1935. 11 London Teacher, 7 July 1922, 12 Oct. 1923. 12 London Teacher, 24 Nov. 1922. 13 TNA, ED21/34518, Inspection report, 3 March 1930. 14 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 26 Feb., 10 Dec. 1919. 15 London Teacher, 25 June 1920, 11 Dec. 1925; LCC Education Committee Minutes, 22 Feb., 21 July 1922. 16 London Teacher, 3 June 1932. 17 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/115, Managers’ minutes, 16 Dec. 1924; LCC/ EO/DIV05/TEE/LB/007, Logbook, 30 Nov. 1923; LCC/EO/DIV01/ EVE/LB/009, Logbook, 14 March 1932. 18 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/STJOH2/LB/003, Logbook, 28 Feb. 1923. 19 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/BAL/LB/001, Logbook, 14 May 1925; LCC/ EO/DIV04/STJOH2/LB/003, Logbook, 20 Oct. 1924. 20 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/JSN/LB/001, Logbook, 7 Sept. 1935. 21 People’s Autobiography of Hackney, The Island, 35. 22 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/07/046, Managers’ minutes, 6 July 1934. 23 TNA, ED21/35002, Inspection report, n.d., c.1934. 24 TNA, ED21/34951, Letter from The National Citizens Union, Brixton and District Branch, 13 July 1926. 25 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/03/003, Headteachers’ meeting, 27 June 1921. 26 TNA, ED21/34882, Daily Chronicle, 27 Feb. 1925. 27 TNA, ED21/34786, Inspection report, 15 Feb. 1933; ED21/34616, Inspection report, 13 April 1933. 28 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/TOL/LB/001, Inspection report, 18 Sept. 1923. 29 Board of Education, Report on the Teaching of History in London, 7. 30 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/IVY/LB/002, Logbook, 31 Aug. 1928. 31 TNA, ED21/34594, Inspection report, 13 Dec. 1932. 32 TNA, ED21/35041, Inspection report, 30 Jan. 1934. 33 TNA, ED21/34612, Inspection report, 4 July 1929. 34 London Teacher, 12 May 1933, 25 Feb. 1938. 35 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV06/SAN/LB/004, Logbook, 26 Feb. 1919. 36 London Teacher, 9 Nov. 1923. 37 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/KNA/LB/005, Logbook, 27 Sept. 1921. 38 Barnet Litvinoff, A Very British Subject: Telling Tales (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1996), 17. 39 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 5 May 1926. 40 London Teacher, 14 Jan. 1927. 41 TNA, ED21/34902, Inspection report, 12 Dec. 1925; LMA, LCC/EO/ DIV04/NOR/LB/004, Logbook, 14 Sept. 1926.

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42 TNA, ED21/34976, Inspection report, 18 May 1932. 43 TNA, ED21/35320, Inspection report, 25 June 1934. 44 TNA, ED21/34897, Inspection report, 4 May 1927. 45 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/02/003, Headteachers’ meeting, 7 July 1936. 46 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/03/022, Report by the Chief Examiner (London, 1924), 6–7, 9, 40. 47 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/071, Inspector’s report on enquiry into visits to industrial firms, March 1936; LCC/EO/DIV05/POR/LB/003, Inspe­ ction report, 30 Oct. 1936. Teresa Ploszajska has argued that English inspectors had been increasingly stressing the value of a school’s locality as a resource for geography lessons since the introduction of compulsory schooling. Ploszajsa, ‘Down to Earth’, 759. 48 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/FPR/LB/004, Logbook, 4 July 1923. 49 Magee, Clouds of Glory, 201. 50 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/124, Commemorative souvenir booklet. Manchester City Council published similar promotional literature. See Hulme, ‘Putting the City Back’, 43–4. 51 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/PRI/LB/004, Newspaper cutting, 1 July 1921. 52 TNA, ED21/34952, Inspection report, 14 Nov. 1924. 53 TNA, ED21/35185, Inspection report, 14 July 1933. 54 TNA, ED21/34859, Inspection report, 25 April 1935. 55 TNA, ED21/34859, Inspection report, 24 Dec. 1935. 56 London Teacher, 9 Dec. 1927. 57 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/071, Inspector’s report on enquiry into visits to industrial firms, March 1936. 58 Barker, Geography, 96–8. 59 TNA, ED21/34565, Inspection report, 21 Sept. 1928. 60 TNA, ED21/34518, Inspection report, 3 March 1930; LMA,  LCC/ EO/DIV05/DAL/LB/005, Inspection report, 19 May 1924. 61 BLSA, A.J. Gardner. 62 Rex Walford, Geography in British Schools, 1850–2000: Making a World of Difference (London: Woburn Press, 2001). 63 Quoted in Ploszajska, ‘Down to Earth?’, 769. 64 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/QMR/LB/001, Inspection report, 3 Dec. 1925. 65 Geography 14:6 (1928), 522. 66 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/NOR/LB/011, Logbook, 25 June 1934. 67 School Journey Record (1926), 29–30. 68 School Journey Record (1927), 24–5. 69 School Journey Record (1920), 35–6. 70 Bill Marsden, ‘A British Historical Perspective on Geographical Fieldwork from the 1820s to the 1970s’, in Rod Gerber and Goh Kim

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Chuan (eds), Fieldwork in Geography: Reflections, Perspectives and Actions (London: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 25. 71 School Journey Record (1920), 68. 72 School Journey Record (1930), 32. 73 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/01/42, Cutting from Teacher’s World, 16 July 1924. 74 London Teacher, 22 Feb. 1929. 75 People’s Autobiography of Hackney, Working Lives, 24. 76 LMA, P95/TRI1/204, School Journey Guidebook, 1937. 77 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/THO1/LB/003, Logbook, 24 May 1933. 78 Barker, Geography, 89. 79 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/03/022, Report by the Chief Examiner (London, 1924), 35. 80 London Teacher, 19 June 1931. 81 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/SYD2/LB/003, Inspection report, 3 Sept. 1930. 82 TNA, ED21/34869, Inspection report, 25 Sept. 1923. 83 TNA, ED21/34834, Inspection report, 24 Oct. 1930; LMA, LCC/EO/ DIV01/POR/LB/001, Headteacher’s note, Oct. 1924. 84 TNA, ED21/35358, Inspection report, 25 June 1929. 85 Barker, Geography, 140–1. 86 TNA, ED21/35193, Inspection report, 19 Sept. 1934. 87 TNA, ED21/34593, Inspection report, 15 April 1926. 88 J. Jones, ‘A Teaching Suggestion: A Home-Made Globe’, Geographical Teacher 11:2 (1921), 58. 89 TNA, ED21/34904, Inspection report, 24 July 1924. 90 ‘How BBC Lectures and Films are Utilised’, Geography 15:8 (1930), 672. 91 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 20 Oct. 1926; LMA, LCC/EO/ DIV07/HAS/LB/003, Logbook, 8 June 1923. 92 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/STCH/LB/002, Logbook, 18 Feb. 1924; LCC/ EO/DIV05/ATL/LB/009, Logbook, 28 Nov. 1929; LCC/EO/DIV05/ MOW/LB/003, Logbook, 5 Dec. 1929. 93 LMA, LCC/EO/PS/02/003. Report of Committee on Civics, 29 July 1925. 94 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/OCE/LB/001, Logbook, 20 April 1937. 95 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/OLD/LB/002, Logbook, 21 July 1931. 96 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/FLO/LB/002, Inspection report, 2 July 1935. 97 Jody Crutchley, ‘Teacher Mobility and Transnational “British World” Space: The League of Empire’s “Interchange of Home and Dominion Teachers”, 1907–31’, History of Education 44:6 (2015), 733, 744. 98 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/DUN/LB/003, Logbook, 5 April 1934; LCC/ EO/DIV05/LAW/LB/003, Logbook, 30 Jan. 1922.

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99 Peckham People’s History, Times of Our Lives, 111. 100 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 15 Dec. 1926; LMA, LCC/EO/ DIV01/ADD/LB/002, Logbook, Aug. 1936. 101 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/CRE/LB/006, Inspection report, 5 April 1938. 102 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/CEN/LB/004, Newspaper cutting, n.d. 103 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/HEC/LB/001, Logbook, 24 Jan. 1933. 104 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV07/IVY/LB/002, Logbook, 28 June 1926; LCC/EO/DIV01/QMR/LB/002, Logbook, 12 Oct. 1936; TNA, ED21/35044, Inspection report, 12 March 1936; LMA, LCC/EO/ DIV03/ROT/LB/003, Logbook, 4 Dec. 1935; LCC/EO/DIV03/GRA/ LB/003, Logbook, 4 Dec. 1936. 105 London Teacher, 15 Nov. 1918. 106 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/128, Letter to Divisional Inspector, 1 Feb. 1934. 107 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/128, Headmaster’s letter, 24 Oct. 1934. 108 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/01/128, The Times, 7 Nov. 1935. 109 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/CRA1/LB/004, Logbook, 14 April 1937. 110 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/PRI/LB/007, Logbook, 16 April 1937, 7 July 1938. 111 Wolveridge, Ain’t it Grand, 53–4. 112 TNA, ED21/34967, Inspection report, Dec. 1926. 113 Sally Alexander, ‘Memory-Talk. London Childhoods’, in Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (eds), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (Ashland, OH: Fordham University Press, 2010), 239. 114 TNA, ED21/35281, Inspection report, 25 April 1925. 115 Quoted in Grosvenor, ‘No Place’, 243. 116 Avril M.C. Maddrell, ‘Empire, Emigration and School Geography: Changing Discourses of Imperial Citizenship, 1880–1925’, Journal of Historical Geography 22:4 (1996), 380; Kathryn Castle, ‘The Imperial Indian. India in British History Textbooks for Schools 1890–1914’, and T. Lilly, ‘The Black African in Southern Africa: Images in British School Geography Books’, both in J.A. Mangan (ed.), The Imperial Curriculum. Racial Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience (London: Routledge, 1993). 117 TNA, ED21/34662, Inspection report, 11 April 1927. 118 TNA, ED21/35138, Inspection report, 10 Dec. 1929. 119 W.H. Winch, ‘Christian and Jewish Children in East End Elementary Schools: Some Comparative Mental Characteristics in Relation to Race and Social Class’, British Journal of Psychology 20:3 (1930). 120 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 1 April 1925. 121 Lammers, ‘Citizens of the Future’, 393–418.

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122 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 21 May 1919. 123 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/DAN1/LB/002, Logbook, 18 Sept. 1923. 124 Abrahams, ‘I Had This Other Life’, 86–7. 125 W. Victor Sefton, ‘Growing Up Jewish in London 1920–1950. A Perspective from 1973’, in Dov Noy and Issachar Ben-Ami (eds), Studies in the Cultural Life of the Jews in England (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975), 322. 126 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/LOW/LB/003, Logbook, 3 Feb. 1925. 127 LCC Education Committee Minutes, 12 Dec. 1928, 30 Jan. 1929. 128 Quoted in F.G. Bettany, Stewart Headlam: A Biography (London: John Murray, 1926), 194. 129 Litvinoff, A Very British Subject, 32–3. 130 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/GIL/LB/001, Inspection report, 30 June 1930. 131 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV04/BRU/LB/002, Child’s report, 14 March 1939. 132 Knight, Millfields Memories, 22–3. 133 Lammers, ‘The Birth of the East Ender’, 337; BLSA, J.G. Bloom; Kops, World is a Wedding, 35–6. 134 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/STE/LB/003, Examination questions, March 1930. 135 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV06/CAT/LB/003, Logbook, 22 May 1925. 136 ERO, T/Z 25/4294. 137 TNA, ED21/34901, Inspection report, 20 April 1925; LMA, LCC/ EO/DIV01/POR/LB/001, Logbook, 21 Sept. 1923.

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Conclusion

Trying to guess at the long-term effects of lessons in this or that particular subject asks a lot of teachers long ago. Which reader of this book can remember every – or perhaps any – detail of classes sat through aged 5, 10 or 14? I can recall very little even of history lessons, let alone algebra, the periodic table or the geography of Japan. Meanwhile, the more unusual events of schooldays might stand out for unintended reasons. When I was 8, my class visited a sewage works. We were given a stern talk about the dangerous machinery beforehand and for weeks after I had nightmares about falling in and being sucked away. I’ve thought about it every time I’ve happened to pass a sewage works since. It may have been similar for a group of girls who visited an East London cocoa works in 1920. The sources say nothing about nightmares, but the children likely remembered the half a pound of chocolate that they were allowed to take home much more vividly than the ins and outs of chocolate manufacture.1 However, I’m not sure that forgetting – or selective remembering – automatically invalidates the experience. School still mattered. In the twenty-first century, the frequency with which website security questions ask for the name of a first school is testament to its importance: no one could forget that. Musing over these thoughts, I was struck by an investigation of forty-one London senior schools in 1926, in which pupils were tested on their knowledge of history. For marks out of twelve, they were asked to write the names of three persons or events for each century covering the period 1000–1400 (‘if you can put exact dates in brackets against each name’), and then, for a grade of A–D, to write a short account of one person or event for each century. The

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same test was repeated for the periods 1300–1700 and 1500–1900. The inspectors were ambivalent about the results, recording an average mark of 6/12, showing ‘that the average elementary school child in London has acquired some sense of time sequence’, but finding it ‘disquieting in the extreme’ that over a quarter of children received a D for the longer, written section.2 Yet ‘how many adults would have obtained the fifty per cent which was the average reached by these children of thirteen?’ one headmaster commented.3 Nearly a century later, I wondered how colleagues in my university history department would fare. I didn’t test them, to save their blushes. Richard Street Boys’ School in Islington, described in an inspection report that year as serving one of the poorest districts in north London, was one of the schools tested. Its pupils did well, securing an average of over 9/12 for each of the three periods, with twenty A− or B−scored answers compared to seventeen Cs or Ds. A few years later, when inspectors visited the school, their report specially commended the history syllabus, suggesting it would lead ‘to an understanding of the causes of the changes which have gradually come about in industrial and social conditions in our own country, and to prepare school leavers to take an interest in their future duties as citizens of a great empire’.4 As discussed, much historical attention has been devoted to the analysis of textbooks, readers or official pronouncements to examine the messages that children received at school or, more often in recent years, the scouring of oral history and memoir to try and glean the lasting effects of these. As adults, I doubt that many of Richard Street’s pupils would have continued to score 9/12, or that they could have outlined ‘their future duties’. But, at the age of 13, they were clearly engaged, interested and well-taught. And what stands out is the pride with which the headmaster copied the results into his logbook, including his promise that he would let ‘the boys know the results’; he anticipated their pride too.5 It was this sense of confidence, coupled with an opening up of horizons, that the best London schools sought to give their pupils. ‘Lessons on literature, art, music etc. should be inspirational’, agreed a group of Islington headmistresses, meeting in 1929.6 The sentiment was not universal. ‘Not all teachers are competent, not all

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schools are good, not all local authorities are progressive and not all children are capable of learning’, wrote H.A.L. Fisher. ‘There are few generalisations about elementary schools which are true over all the field.’7 Again and again, comments made in previous chapters about the experience of one school can be contradicted by the activities (or lack of activities) in another. How children experienced their education depended on their headteacher, class teachers, the school building and its resources, even before their own varied personalities and home circumstances are taken into account. In writing this book I struggled constantly to quantify various activities and different types of lessons and often found it impossible. Yet, for philosopher Bryan Magee, who attended elementary school in Hoxton in the late 1930s, it was the physical uniformity of London’s schools that stayed with him. Writing his memoir, he recalled schools that seemed ‘so securely built that they look as if they will go on for ever’: Huge buildings in three unusually high storeys, built with unmovable municipal stolidity, they all have the same internally windowed classrooms, the same parquet-floored corridors and assembly halls, the same asphalt playgrounds with pitches for games marked out in white, the same external colour schemes on their facades. In one of them you could be anywhere in Edwardian London.8

Indeed, it is striking how many memoirs of schooldays recall the physicality of school, much more so than the details of lessons: ‘the solid oak desks … the parquet floors’; ‘gigantic slabs of windows taller than our house’; ‘huge classrooms – in the corner of each a great black coal oven’ and the ‘lovely squeaky noise’ of chalk on slate.9 In the twenty-first century, the imposing facades of the old Board schools, with their red bricks, large windows and gable ends, are still easily identifiable on London’s streets, even if many have now been converted into flats or offices. Their architecture made it easy for commentators to characterise them as alien to the working-class communities around them and thus representative of a different set of values. An oft-quoted passage comes from a Sherlock Holmes short story, in which Holmes and Watson look down on London from a train viaduct:



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Holmes: Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea. Watson: The Board schools. Holmes: Lighthouses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of little bright seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future.10

The civilising rhetoric used to describe state education, born out of anxieties stemming from the industrialisation and urbanisation of Victorian Britain, remained inherent to the rationale of interwar schooling: as an inspector wrote in 1933, of a school situated in a deprived part of Finsbury, it was ‘a little centre of civilising influence in the locality’.11 The working-class families from which pupils came might be described as neglectful and apathetic at worst, uncultured and uninspiring at best. Schools were seen as a remedy, allowing the imposition of values of morality, behaviour and citizenship – all assumed to be otherwise lacking, to a greater or lesser degree – among working-class children. ‘In some quarters of London’, suggested the LCC inspector P.B. Ballard, it was ‘part of the teacher’s work to turn uncouth boys and girls, grimy and inarticulate, into decent members of society, with some small measure of grace of speech and charm of manner’.12 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that so many studies – building on the idea of education as a form of social control – have foregrounded agency, conceptualised as an act of working-class resistance, subversion or opposition to the imposed middle-class values of the education system. There is no doubt that this was sometimes the case in London’s interwar schools, particularly regarding questions of discipline. But many of those same studies focus on an earlier period, particularly late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, when compulsory schooling was ‘a new and unwelcome phenomenon in many working-class neighbourhoods’, with schools as a proxy for the state and the School Board Man in particular as representative of its tyranny.13 By the 1920s and 1930s, schools were operating in a different social context. The authority of working-class mothers and fathers, whose attempts to assert authority had previously rested on the fact of their parenthood and their ‘everyday knowledge’ of their children,14 was now bolstered by participatory democracy and the

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recent memory of mass wartime mobilisation. Alongside  – and in London perhaps more than anywhere else in the country – the ­politics of aspiration, consumption and technological change altered the relationship of schools and their communities. Schools were part of the urban environment, and often less visually separate from the local community than the stereotype suggests. In one of the poorest parts of Marylebone, where many pupils came ‘from squalid and overcrowded homes’, for example, inspectors regretted that ‘it is, therefore, the more unfortunate that the school building is also markedly inconvenient and depressing’.15 Sometimes the school itself could be the less distinguished partner. Burnt Ash Hill School, for example, was situated in a prosperous area of Lewisham. In 1935 its inspector was critical of the youngest class, containing a number of under-age pupils crammed into a small room. ‘There does not appear to be any reason why these children, who come, for the most part from good homes situated amid delightful surroundings, should be admitted into this congested classroom at three years of age’, he concluded.16 But despite continued financial stringency, schools in these years were also better equipped to raise aspirations, rather than contain them. An expanded welfare remit and progressive ideas about the benefits of education meant that they could reflect a sense of possibility, even if practice was often restricted by economic realities. Generational change is important here: compulsory schooling was no longer new. The grandparents of children in the 1920s had been to elementary school, as might even the great-grandparents of children born in the mid-1930s. Hierarchies of power had become more engrained by the interwar years, compared to those early years of compulsory elementary education, but, just as families had become more used to interacting with schools, so schools had become more adept at dealing with parents, with the passing of years allowing for the development of both an institutional memory and individual experience. And so there was much in their school lives that children appreciated, as did their parents. Schools courted parents and, in the best schools – and many of the more mediocre ones too – parents and teachers saw themselves in a partnership. Some of this was about the shared desire of both teachers and parents to improve the health

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and wellbeing of children that both parties talked of as ‘theirs’, but it was also because of an appreciation that education could improve children’s lives in the long-term. A few exceptional children aside, the ability of schools to act as agents of social mobility, even in a limited way, would have to wait until after the Second World War. But they could still prepare pupils for the future. The same group of headteachers who called for art and music lessons to be inspirational also requested ‘more [school] sewing machines … for neighbourhoods where needle-trades predominate’.17 It meant that these years saw a shift in attitudes towards education, the further flourishing of which Peter Mandler has charted across the second half of the twentieth century, when demand ‘from the bottom up … drove widening participation’.18 It was not just policy that shaped education in Britain, either before or after the Second World War: it was people’s involvement in it. Rather than seeing schools as a state imposition on working-class communities, then, this book argues that they were much more likely to be grounded in their local communities, with the daily movement back and forth of teachers, parents, workers, and – not least – pupils. This might be particularly the case in London – where the noise of traffic or industry was rarely absent outside classroom windows. One headteacher reminded his staff that the subjects chosen for writing exercises should be those well known to the children. ‘Suitable subjects for London boys are: hoardings, trams, buses, barges, the Thames, postmen, policemen, cinema, etc.’19 Just to read his words is to hear the bustle outside. And so, in contrast to the imagery offered by Sherlock Holmes, I prefer the words of a woman writing in the late 1990s about her schooldays in East London over sixty years earlier. Rather than seeing formal educational institutions as impositions which sought to shape and to mould – and were potentially resisted – here, the child is at the centre and the hierarchies implicit in Conan Doyle’s text are inverted: I must tell you that our playground was on the [school] roof. This was true, we chased up the stairways to be on top. There were railings all around and we could gaze down and see rows of houses, Church steeples, factory chimneys, the gas works, and even where I lived, wondering what was there for dinner.20

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We live in a political climate that is more similar to the interwar period than we might like: an uncertain international situation, anxieties over extremism from both left and right, and economic retrenchment and austerity. And today, as then, schools play a vital role in the mediation of expectations, aspirations and values. Many of the issues discussed in this book have parallels with today’s society and perhaps something to teach us: the trickiness of forging a common culture and values; the background of austerity and the juggling of resources; concerns over urban pollution; the role of the school in protecting children; and the partnerships forged with parents. Certainly, as I researched this book I was struck, again and again, by the opinions, contexts and experiences of the 1920s and 1930s that remain part of our world nearly one hundred years later: the inspectors who counted the number of children being given free milk or meals as a indicator of deprivation; worries over the subjugation of ‘general culture … to the narrower demands of written examinations’; debates over the history curriculum in particular and discussions about ‘national identity’; anxiety over young people ‘who, having attained the age of 14, are neither in school nor in employment’.21 Working on the book as I marked undergraduate essays, I worried about a London Teacher article that questioned the reliability of examiners marking scholarship papers: different examiners gave different marks to the same paper; sometimes the same examiner gave a different mark when re-marking the paper, it claimed.22 Many teachers of the twenty-first century would surely be able to identify with the despair of a 1922 counterpart that ‘the stock-room is practically empty, in spite of most rigid economy during the past year’, or a note entered in another logbook that year: ‘Headmistress absent from school owing to nervous exhaustion.’23 When I submitted the proposal for this book to Manchester University Press in the summer of 2019, it was suggested by one of the anonymous readers that I should be cautious in making contemporary parallels, as it would immediately date the book. My own feeling at the time was that these issues were unlikely to go away soon. Then events overtook us; most of the book was written in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, marking the moment as a reference point for decades to come.

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The toll that the pandemic and associated school stoppages took on today’s children is incalculable. There have been no shortage of commentators offering creative and imaginative suggestions as to how we might start to repair the damage. ‘Build back better’ was one of the slogans of 2020. At the time of writing it seems reasonable to assume that the current government will not enact many, if  any, of these measures, and that a change of government is unlikely any time soon. If you are reading this in years to come and laugh at me for being wrong, then rejoice; I will be laughing too. But perhaps the interwar period offers hope to those demoralised by our current political climate. Amid the harshness of the interwar years, London schools had their expected share of teachers who were weary, unenthusiastic or downright sadistic. But examples can be found among the very poorest schools of children who were taught to swim, acted in Shakespeare plays, or learnt the violin. Waterloo Road School in Southwark catered for ‘some of the poorest children in South London’, drawing its pupils ‘entirely from an area of poverty and slum-dwellings’. Yet its 1935 inspection report was testament to what such a school could still achieve: There are many flourishing activities. Educational visits are made. A homework class is conducted very successfully during the winter. Broadcast lessons are taken. A gramophone, bought by subscription, is used for assemblies, appreciation of music and dancing. Handwork is a specially noteworthy feature. The school choir has competed for the last five years at the London Schools Musical Festival, and has gained the Cup once and Honours Certificates on all occasions. School journeys have been regularly taken. Junior and senior parties are given at Christmas. An annual visit is paid to Hampton Court and Bushy Park. The children take part in the Lambeth Sports as well as having a sports day of their own. Football and Netball teams play regularly through the seasons. Swimming is a very successful feature.24

It might act as a reminder that no school should ever be written off; with the political will, better resources and motivated teachers, schools can make a difference. It is a conclusion that offers, perhaps, another take on the Sherlock Holmes quotation: rather than ‘Beacons of the future’, they become ‘Beacons of hope’.

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Notes   1 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/CUB/LB/004, Logbook, 12 May 1920.   2 Board of Education, Report on the Teaching of History in London, 5–6.   3 J.A. White, ‘The Board of Education Report on the Teaching of History in London’, History 12:48 (1927), 323, n.1.   4 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/RIC/LB/002, Board of Education letter, 21 Dec. 1926; TNA, ED21/34861, Inspection report, 19 Dec. 1933.   5 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV03/RIC/LB/002, Logbook, 28 Feb. 1927. Original emphasis.   6 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/03/005, Headmistresses’ meeting, 2 Dec. 1929.   7 H.A.L. Fisher, ‘The Elementary Schools’, in National Union of Teachers, The Schools at Work, 8.   8 Magee, Clouds of Glory, 39.   9 Heren, Growing Up, 55; Gamble, Chelsea Child, 52; ERO. T/Z 25/4324; BLSA, Vic Giles. 10 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’, in Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories (London: J. Murray, 1928), 515. Quoted in Burke and Grosvenor, School, 26; Copelman, London’s Women Teachers, 57; Saint, ‘Battersea’, 682. 11 TNA, ED21/34646, Inspection report, 12 July 1933. 12 Williams et al., Children of London, 77. 13 Sascha Auerbach, ‘“A Right Sort of Man”: Gender, Class Identity and Social Reform in Late-Victorian Britain’, Journal of Policy History 22:1 (2010), 84. 14 Pooley, ‘Parenthood, Citizenship and the State’, 35. 15 TNA, ED21/35119, Inspection report, 20 March 1928. 16 TNA, ED21/34995, Inspection report, 8 Feb. 1935. 17 LMA, LCC/EO/GEN/03/005, Headmistresses’ meeting, 2 Dec. 1929. 18 Mandler, Crisis, 7. 19 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV01/EVE/LB/002, Headteacher’s note, 18 Nov. 1929. 20 ERO, T/Z 25/4334. 21 Grant, Farthing Bundles, 147; LCC Education Committee Minutes, 14 March 1923 22 London Teacher, 13 Dec. 1935 23 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV05/WOL/LB/001, Logbook, 1 May 1922; LCC/ EO/DIV08/KEN2/LB/004, Logbook, 21 Sept. 1922. 24 LMA, LCC/EO/DIV08/WAT/LB/001, Inspection report, 4 Jan. 1935.

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Index

admissions see school admissions Alexander, Sally 8–9 Anderson, Benedict 33 anti-Semitism 173, 224, 263–5 approved schools (named industrial or reformatory schools before 1933) 10, 85n, 117, 138, 140, 231 arithmetic see maths Armistice Day 73, 76, 202–4 art on classroom walls 162, 168–9, 177, 197 as a school subject 73, 109, 156, 167–9, 273 Association for Education in Citizenship 188 Atkins, Peter 128 attendance see school attendance Auerbach, Sascha 18 Baldwin, Stanley 158 Ballard, P.B. 9, 156–7, 275 Barker, W.H. 244, 253, 257–9 BBC 162, 169, 189 Beaven, Brad 186, 200, 216 behaviour see ‘character training’ Billig, Michael 34, 55 Birmingham 4, 129, 148, 228 Blair, Sir Robert 69

Board of Education 14–15, 19, 60, 75, 94–5, 98, 105, 109, 111–13, 132–3, 159, 168–9, 188, 195, 202, 205, 219, 223, 249 Board schools 48, 224, 256, 274–5 Bolton 229 Bonwick, Theodora 220 boot clubs see welfare provision Booth, Charles 9 Boy Scouts 214, 246–7 Bradford 13 Brett, Peter 214 Brindle, Patrick 187, 191, 193 British Empire see Empire Brockliss, Laurence 7 Bryder, Linda 133 Burt, Cyril 227 cadet corps 216 Cannadine, David 15–16, 187, 195 care committees 43, 100–1, 105, 130–1, 225 Carter, Laura 14, 193 Catholic schools see non-provided schools; religion Cavell, Edith 192, 224 Cecil, Lord Robert 203–4 central schools 13, 75, 93, 95–8, 248

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Index 299

‘character training’ 51, 132, 168, 214–37 behaviour and manners 214–19, 226–30, 235–7, 275 charity 216–17 personal appearance 216, 218–19, 226, 229–30 thrift 216–18 children agency 7, 20, 67, 98, 138, 199–200, 233 aspirations 97, 100, 114–16, 118, 252, 266 of different nationalities/ ethnicities 196, 262–5 see also Jewish pupils opinions of school 5, 15, 21–2, 37–8, 41–2, 67, 75, 80, 106, 111–12, 116–17, 142–3, 158, 161–2, 165–6, 169, 172–4, 176–8, 193, 195–6, 198–9, 203, 206, 229–32, 256–7, 262, 265 opinions of teachers 42, 45–7, 65, 242, 233, 265 see also ex-pupils Children’s Country Holiday Fund 43, 130 cinema 4, 135, 221, 260, 263, 277 citizenship 3–4, 23, 49, 51, 55, 60, 128–9, 185–90, 192, 198–9, 204–7, 214–15, 217, 221, 237, 244–5, 252, 273, 275 see also civics Civic Education League 214 Civics, lessons in 186, 188–90, 215, 251–2 compulsory education, introduction of 12, 62, 275–6 Coninck-Smith, Ning de 236 consumerism 4, 276

cookery see domestic subjects Cook, Hera 220 Copelman, Dina 7, 64 corporal punishment 5, 8, 40, 44–5, 47, 70, 140, 142, 231–4 countryside 43, 52, 142, 158, 162–6, 170, 176–8, 255–7 COVID-19 pandemic 22, 278–9 Cox, Pamela 4 craftwork 109–11, 117, 225, 279 see also domestic subjects Crowley, Ralph 60–1 Cunningham, Hugh 205 Cunningham, Peter 64, 74 curriculum 10, 19–20, 93–4, 216, 258 see also school subjects Cutler, William 61 day continuation schools 13, 91–2 Dehli, Kara 236 delinquency 18, 40–1, 48, 54, 220, 224, 227, 235 democracy and citizenship 185, 214, 217, 251–2 extension of franchise 3, 23, 69, 185, 275 lessons on 189–90, 251–2 Dent, H.C. 14–15, 19 discipline 16, 35, 42, 216, 228, 231–5, 275 see also corporal punishment domestic service see employment domestic subjects 8, 106, 108–14, 215–16, 277 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 274–5, 277 drama 36, 50, 52–3, 155–6, 170, 172–4, 176, 246 Dyhouse, Carol 92

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300

Index

Education Act (1918) 3, 5, 13, 109, 91 Education Act (1936) 225 Education Act (1944) 5, 91–2, 160 Edwards, Elizabeth 64 emotions and child development/wellbeing 3–4, 67, 156–8, 160, 168–70, 235–6 history of 5, 33 Empire British Empire Exhibition (1924) 197–8 Empire Day 36, 79, 141, 198–201, 203, 257, 264–6 Empire Marketing Board 197 League of Empire exchange scheme 260–1 teaching of 186–7, 190, 192, 196–201, 205–7, 244–5, 252–3, 258, 263 employment advice given by school 54, 91, 100–5, 115, 173 children’s aspirations 97, 100, 114–16, 118, 252, 266 domestic service 23, 51, 104–5 and local industry 8, 23, 91, 101, 103, 105–7, 109, 206, 277 vocational training 102, 104–10 English lessons 14, 20, 167, 172–6, 178, 188, 273 see also libraries; Shakespeare Esperanto 204 Essex Record Office 21 evacuation (wartime) 18, 76, 129, 133, 165, 176 Evans-Gordon, William 263 evening institutes 51, 101, 104, 118, 246–7

ex-pupils 11, 38–9, 42, 45–6, 49–55, 77–8, 94, 99, 101–3, 105, 109, 118, 165, 172, 246, 261, 266 Old Scholars Clubs 50–1, 245–6 extra-curricular activities 43–4, 47, 53, 176–7, 279 see also school sports; school trips fieldtrips see school trips film, use of in schools 108, 135, 162, 259 see also cinema First World War 3, 9, 23, 38–9, 49, 53–4, 107, 198, 201–4, 216–17, 244–5, 276 see also Armistice Day Fisher, H.A.L. 274 Flaherty, Robert J. 259 Foucault, Michel 6 Fowler, David 4 France 6, 19, 261 Freathy, Rob 186, 223 French lessons 117, 261 Froebel, Friedrich 157 Gainsborough Film Studio 246 Garbett, Cyril 8 gardening see nature study Gardner, Philip 5, 14, 42–3, 62, 64, 74 general strike (1926) 65–7, 75 see also miners’ lockout (1926) geography lessons 20, 167, 188, 195–6, 249–62 Gilbert and Sullivan 52, 170 Girl Guides 176–7, 214, 246 Glamorgan 13 Gleason, Mona 7 gramophone, use of in schools 45, 71, 132, 169, 279 Grant, Clara 224–5

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Greenspoon, David 216 Griffiths, John 186, 200 Grosvenor, Ian 5 Guides see Girl Guides Gunton, T. Payten 53, 107–8

Stepney Jewish School 40–2, 262–6 see also anti-Semitism Johnson, Walter 162 Jones, Harold Spencer 266

Hadow Report 12 handicrafts see craftwork; domestic subjects happiness 156–8, 228 health education 128–9, 131, 136, 142–3 see also welfare provision Heathorn, Stephen 187, 216 Hendrick, Harry 4, 92, 234 Historical Association 14 history lessons 17, 167, 186–8, 190–6, 202, 215, 249–50, 272–3, 278 Holmes, Sherlock 274–5, 277 Home and School Council 61–2 homework 94–5, 117 homework classes 54, 98–9, 279 honours boards 37, 78 hop-picking 127 house system see school houses housewifery see domestic subjects Hulme, Tom 186, 237, 245 Humphries, Stephen 7 Hurt, J.S. 62 Hussey, Stephen 65 hygiene lessons see health education

Katz, Michael, 62 Keating, Jenny 186–7, 204, 215, 245

industrial schools see approved schools inspectorate composition of 15–16 reports as a source 15–17 Jewish pupils 9, 186, 192, 262–6 Jews’ Free School 245–6

Labour Exchange 100–1 Labour Party control of LCC 9–10, 200, 203, 216 Laite, Julia 14 Lamberti, Marjorie 6 Lammers, Benjamin 263 Langhamer, Claire 92 Lawrence, Emmeline Pethick 193 Lawrence, Jon 2 League of Nations 194, 202–4, 206 Lewis, G.G. 235, 255–6 libraries 117, 175–6, 215 Lindsay, Kenneth 93 logbooks, as a source 17–19, 29n, 54 London children’s knowledge of 244, 250–1 demography 10–11, 39, 76–7 pride in 245, 250, 256–7, 266 and school lessons 249–54 urban environment of 155–6, 159, 164–7, 176, 178, 245–7, 266, 277 variety in social conditions 9, 11–12, 34, 93 see also poverty London County Council (LCC) Labour control of 9, 200, 203, 216 progressivism 12–13, 92–3, 133, 245, 248, 252

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London Day Training College 64 London Schoolmasters’ Association 216 London Teachers’ Association 8, 12–13, 26n, 128 Lowe, Evelyn 51 Magee, Bryan 222, 226, 252, 274 managers see school managers Manchester 13, 245 Mandler, Peter 2–3, 92, 277 manners see ‘character training’ Mass Observation 36, 46, 79, 192, 203–4, 229–30 maths 105–6, 116, 118, 167, 189, 217 May Day celebrations 67, 69–70, 72, 176 McCarthy, Helen 203–4 McMillan, Margaret 132, 159 Meacham, Standish 62 ‘mentally deficient’ schools 10, 40, 47, 71, 79–81, 85n, 96–7, 102, 110, 116, 140, 146–8, 185, 218, 220–1, 235–6, 249, 265–6 Middlesbrough 21 Middleton, Jacob 5, 231, 233 Milton, John 155 miners’ lockout (1926) 2 monarchy 205–6 Coronation (1937) 197 Jubilee (1935) 68–9, 197 Montessori, Maria 157 Moral Instruction League 214 morality see ‘character training’ Morris, Henry 53 Morrison, Herbert 21 Munich crisis (1938) 18, 76 music 49, 156, 169–72, 178, 273, 279 Gilbert and Sullivan 52, 170

singing 15, 156, 162–3, 169–70, 172, 189, 196, 279 violin lessons 44, 47, 170–2, 178, 279 National Federation of Women Teachers 113 National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children 140, 148 National Union of Teachers 26n32, 64–5, 110 nature study 108, 156, 158–67, 219 gardening 43, 71, 109, 160–1, 166–7, 177 Nature Study Union 160, 164 needlework see domestic subjects Newman, George 158–9 non-provided schools 9, 223 Norwood Report 15, 188 old scholars see ex-pupils open days 53, 60, 71–3, 137, 141, 143, 178 Orr, John Boyd 133 parents appreciation of/involvement in school life 8, 36, 38, 42, 46, 48, 53, 60–3, 71–7, 80–2, 91–2, 95, 98–9, 101, 110, 114, 143–5, 147, 158, 165, 171–2, 178, 198, 200, 204, 230, 237, 260, 276–7 aspirations for children 92–3, 95, 99, 104–5 disparagement of 63–4, 73, 78–9, 93–4, 96–7, 101–2, 130, 136–8, 147–8, 177, 228–9 education of 73, 113, 131, 139–41, 177, 228–9, 251

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as educators of their children 98, 172, 178, 215, 229–30, 252 ex-pupils themselves 11, 50, 77, 276 teachers’ concern for 79–80, 141, 146 tensions with school/teachers 7–8, 19, 23, 40–1, 47, 61–3, 68–71, 79, 81–2, 85n, 96–7, 104–5, 112, 137–40, 146–7, 199–200, 229–30, 232–4 patriotism 128, 186–8, 190, 192–3, 195–203, 205–7 pedagogy see progressive pedagogies physical disability 9–10 physical education 17, 40, 129, 131–2, 134–6, 142, 156, 167, 245 swimming 38, 43, 47, 49–50, 70, 132, 135, 248, 279 see also school sports Physical Training and Recreation Act (1937) 245 Pilcher, Jane 128 playground culture 5, 20 playgrounds 134, 246, 277 police 47–8, 66–8, 140, 145, 235 Pollitt, Marjorie 66 Pooley, Siân 92 Portelli, Alessandro 21 poverty 3, 8–12, 18, 63, 72, 94, 96, 99, 116, 126–9, 134–7, 140–1, 143, 147–8, 155, 171, 197, 217, 226, 275–6, 278–9 prefects see school prefects prize day 81, 115, 224 prizes 17, 37–8, 45, 52, 73, 113, 142–3, 166, 174–6, 205, 218, 225, 237, 250

progressive pedagogies 4, 13, 156–7, 187, 251 public schools 11, 15, 34–6, 51, 218, 236, 256 racism 262–3 see also anti-Semitism reformatory schools see approved schools religion 215, 222–6, 231 involvement of vicar in school life 75, 223–5, 228 see also non-provided schools; religious education religious education 66, 165, 223–6, 230, 264 reorganisation of schools 10, 12, 35, 37, 74, 76, 109 resources, lack of 39, 110, 116, 134–5, 166, 169, 175, 191, 195, 259, 278 Rice, Margery Spring 26n34 Roberts, Nathan 214 Rose, Jonathan 5, 62, 198, 233 Rosen, Harold 21, 45, 69–70, 199–200 Rosenwein, Barbara 34 Ross, Ellen 62 Rousmaniere, Kate 236 Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals 162 Saint, Andrew 159 scholarships 8–9, 37, 49, 52, 78, 93–9, 116–17, 172, 251, 257, 264 school admissions 34 school attendance 10–11, 13, 60, 75, 177, 197, 275 reasons for absences 40, 96–8, 127 school attendance officers 61–2

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school buildings 6, 15, 39, 41, 67, 110, 116, 134, 141, 159–60, 167, 177, 274, 276 school houses 34, 36, 162, 189–90, 192–3, 204, 218, 249 School Journey Association 164, 255 school magazines 36, 41–3, 72, 246, 255 school managers 2, 17, 37, 39, 44, 52, 75, 130–1, 135, 157, 185, 201, 206, 232, 234, 246–8 school mottoes 37, 115, 158, 217–18 school prefects 36, 41–2, 189–90, 218, 235 school sports 37–8, 42–4, 52, 67, 72, 132, 135, 167, 214, 219, 246, 279 see also physical education school subjects see art; civics; craftwork; domestic subjects; drama; English lessons; Esperanto; French lessons; geography lessons; health education; history lessons; maths; music; nature study; physical education; religious education; science lessons; shorthand; speech training school trips 12, 36, 43–4, 72–3, 75, 103, 107, 143, 157, 163–9, 173, 174, 176–8, 189, 197–8, 219, 225, 227–8, 236–7, 249–57, 259–62, 272, 279 school uniform 34–7, 40–2, 48, 69, 216 science lessons 106–8, 113, 131 Science Museum 107 Scouts see Boy Scouts

secondary schools 13, 36, 40, 46, 65, 78, 92–7, 100, 115 Second World War 4, 14, 22, 176, 277 see also evacuation Selassie, Haile 260 sex education 219–20 sexuality 219–21 Shakespeare, William 14, 50, 170, 173–4, 177, 193, 222, 279 Sharp, Evelyn 114 Sheldon, Nicola 7, 61, 187 shorthand 104, 118 Sillitoe, Helen 113 Simon, Sir John 66 singing see music social mobility 92, 94, 96, 114, 277 see also scholarships speech training 80–1, 137, 158, 221–2, 227, 229–30 Spencer, F.H. 145, 167, 185–6, 204, 221, 226–7 sport see school sports Steedman, Carolyn 141 Sunday schools 246 swimming see physical education Tawney, R.H. 6 teachers as authors 14, 162, 258 critical of officials/systems 7, 111, 113–14, 146, 264 and gender 216, 220 influence of 14, 19–20, 33, 38, 42–8, 52–4, 75, 77, 96, 102–4, 108, 117–18, 135–6, 144–5, 162, 167, 170, 174, 178, 191, 200–5, 259, 261, 265, 274, 279

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and parents 7–8, 19, 61–3, 68–82, 94, 96–7, 99–101, 137–41, 143–8, 177, 228, 230–1, 276 pay and pensions 11, 43, 64–5, 76 and politics 66, 206, 216, 246–7 and religious faith 224–6, 264 and school discipline 40, 44–5, 47, 68, 70, 140, 142, 223, 231–5 social background of 64–5, 78, 80, 94 tensions between 15, 19, 80 training, recruitment and deployment 4, 64–5, 76–7, 127, 157, 191, 216 and travel 260–1 and welfare 44, 129–32, 137–8, 140–8 Teachers’ Labour League 66 technology, use of in schools see film; gramophone; wireless textbooks authored by teachers 14, 258 availability of 17, 190–1 contents of 186–7, 191, 197, 202, 258, 263 Highroads of History 196, 202 as a source 14, 273 Thomas, Lowell 259 Tisdall, Laura 13, 156 Todd, Selina 92 Tudor Hart, Edith 8, 26n34 unemployment 3, 8, 72, 100, 126, 136, 141, 155 uniform see school uniform United States of America 1, 6, 61, 146, 221, 260–1

university education 3, 15–16, 49, 52, 65, 77, 93–4, 191 Vernon, James 128 village college movement 53 violin lessons see music vocational training see employment Waller, Willard 1 Weber, Eugen 6 Webster, Charles 133 welfare provision 50–1, 61, 128–48, 276 bathing schemes 81, 127, 129–31, 135, 143 boots, provision of 47, 54, 129–30, 171, 216, 142 ‘cleanliness’ and cleansing stations 80, 127, 130, 139–40, 144, 146 dental inspections/treatment 130, 137 meals and milk 128–30, 133–4, 139, 141–2, 144–6, 278 medical inspections/treatment 61, 128–30, 139, 146 open-air education 129, 132–3, 135, 142–3, 159 and parents 131, 136–41, 143–5, 147 sleep 127, 130, 134, 137, 141, 227 spectacles, provision of 44, 129, 138, 143–4, 217 wireless, use of in schools 162, 169, 189, 279 Wright, Susannah 129, 148, 228–9 Yeandle, Peter 187, 193