Chapter 2.
After the 1870 Education Act: the expansion of teacher training

By the end of the 1860s it was clear that voluntary effort was not providing an effective national educational system reaching every child. In 1870 only around 40% of children between the ages of 6 and 10 were on the school registers and a mere 20% of those aged between 10 and 12. Illiteracy was declining steadily but still around 30 per cent of women and 20 per cent of men were apparently unable to read or write. [fn 1] The social anxieties of the propertied about crime, riot, violence, disease, even revolution, persisted. James Kay-Shuttleworth, a dominating presence in educational policy-making (and a member of Whitelands Council 1862-76), commented in 1866:

A free Government cannot tolerate without extreme danger the want of education in the mass of the people. Even where the franchise is limited to the middle class, a state of ignorance in the people causes chronic discontent, arising from the misery of ill-regulated homes; turbulence in years of distress; sedition in years of political difficulty; embarrassment at all times in the relations of capital and labour; and a waste of natural resources by the increase of disease and mortality. [fn 2]

The Education Act of 1870 was a watershed in the development of a national education system. It did not provide a unified education system at elementary level nor free and compulsory schooling for every child. School attendance was finally made compulsory in 1880 but not free until 1891. The 1870 Act was a compromise, establishing a dual system of state and voluntary schools. Where voluntary provision of schools was deemed inadequate an elected School Board was set up and elementary schools, funded out of a compulsory local rate, were established. Despite its limitations the 1870 Act did stimulate a rapid expansion in public provision of elementary schools. Treasury Grants for Elementary Education stood at 2.9 million pounds in 1880, had risen to 4.4 million by the mid-1880s, 8.4 million by 1894 and 10.9 by 1901. By the 1890s there were more than 2,000 School Boards managing nearly 5,000 elementary schools. However, the new state elementary schools merely filled in the gaps where voluntary provision was failing and the 1870 Act generated considerable counter activity by the churches. There were around 9,800 voluntary schools in 1872, but over 14,000 within a decade and the figure remained more or less stable thirty years later. In 1901 both voluntary and board schools were educating around 2.4 million children. In other words, voluntary schools were not immediately displaced after 1870 by the new board schools.

Looking more closely at different religious groups providing elementary education, the following set of figures of voluntary day schools begins to explain the expansion of existing voluntary training colleges and the foundation of new ones after 1870: [fn 3]

Roman Catholic

Anglican

Wesleyan

	Schools	Avge Att (000s)		Schools	Avge Att (000s)		Schools	Avge Att (000s)
1870	350	66.1		6,382	844.3		--	--
1880	758	145.6		11,416	1471.6		569	121.4
1890	946	193.8		11,922	1682.1		551	131.9
1900	1045	255.0		11,777	1885.8		458	125.7

A remarkable growth in both Anglican and Catholic elementary schools is apparent in the decade after the 1870 Education Act. The National Society raised over £12 million in these ten years, almost as much as during its previous sixty years of existence. Church schools almost doubled in number. Some of these apparently-new schools were simply old parochial schools which were transferred to the National Society. Others were established to repel the threat of a new board school and its accompanying rate. Though Anglican energy faded after 1880, the National Society did not retreat before the incursions of the state. Roman Catholics were equally energised by the horror of a protestant state educating their adherents and, though lacking the resources of the established church, steadily increased their denominational provision. The number of Catholic elementary schools trebled and their pupils nearly quadrupled in the thirty years after the 1870 Act.

The Methodists, on the other hand, were cautiously in favour of the 1870 Act. The Wesleyan Education Committee recognised the limitations of the voluntary system: 'though well calculated to meet the wants of many portions of the population, it was certainly unable to reach the most needy and outcast portions of the dwellers in towns, or the more scantily-peopled portions of the rural districts' [WEC, 1870, 15]. The Methodists, as a body, stood apart from dissenting opposition to the 1870 Act. Seeing the new Board Schools as posing no threat to their own schools, in the longer term they failed to sustain their denominational position. However, if the number of Methodist schools declined, the number of pupils at Methodist schools was slightly higher in 1900 than it had been twenty years earlier.

More voluntary schools required more teachers trained in denominational principles. As we have seen in the previous chapter, there were significant costs involved. The state did not fund the initial establishment of a new voluntary college. Once a college was in operation the government only funded a proportion of the costs and some of that was not paid until individual students had completed a two-year probationary period in an inspected elementary school and thus obtained their 'parchment'. Despite the financial risks, the churches quickly responded to the need for an increased supply of trained teachers after the 1870 Act. The dissenting British and Foreign Schools Society had doubled the number of its student places by 1873. The colleges at Borough Road and Stockwell expanded and new women's colleges were opened at Swansea and Darlington. The Church of England similarly expanded its student places. New colleges under the auspices of the National Society were opened at Chichester and Oxford in 1872 and at Tottenham in 1874. Existing Anglican colleges expanded during the 1870s, as we will see in the case of Whitelands. The Wesleyan Methodists opened a second college, Southlands, at Battersea in 1872 and the Roman Catholics opened a third college, in Wandsworth, in 1874.

It is no coincidence that the majority of these new student places were at female colleges. Elementary school teaching was increasingly a female occupation. In London Board Schools, for instance, nearly 40% of pupil-teachers were male in the early 1870s. But that proportion fell steadily. It dropped below 25% in the early 1880s and by the beginning of the twentieth century was a mere 12%. The figures for students resident in teacher training colleges in these years tells the same story – a steady rise in female numbers and a steady fall in male numbers, attracted instead to the growing white-collar sector.

The expansion of Whitelands

The rapid growth of Church of England Schools in the immediate aftermath of the 1870 Act meant an increased demand for trained teachers from school managers. It also meant, at least in the short term, rising wages for trained teachers and an increased demand among pupil-teachers for a place at a training college. At Whitelands College applicants had always exceeded places during the 1860s but by the mid-1870s there were between two and three applicants for every place. The College grew. In 1873 it expanded to take in 12 more students. At the beginning of 1877 a hostel adjoining the college was opened capable of accommodating a further 7 students. And in 1878 it was allowed to increase its total numbers to 140, making it, with the Home and Colonial College on the Gray's Inn Road, the largest in the country. A further three places were added in 1883. If one reponse to increased demand is increased supply, another is an increase in price. At Whitelands the fees paid by students were increased in 1875 to £7 for first class students and £8 for second class; in the following year to £8 and £10 and in 1877 to £10 and £12.

Rising fees brought about no decline in numbers of applicants. As the College Principal later recalled: 'It is worthy of remark here that the only apparent result of raising the fee was that we had a better class of candidate and that the fee was more readily paid' [JPF/I]. What did he mean by 'better class'? The college could select students from the higher ranks of the entrance examinations -- many of them from the 'first class'. Picking up the brighter, or at least the more assiduous, pupil teachers contributed to Whitelands being placed regularly in the top three of female training colleges in terms of first and second-year exam results. This in turn reinforced the high prestige of the college and stimulated further well-qualified applicants. The college registers do not however reveal any marked change in the social class of the students. The social profile is similar to that of the 1850s. Fathers of students during the 1870s were predominantly shopkeepers and small businessmen, clerks and minor officials, schoolmasters, supervisory and skilled workers. A significant proportion of Whitelands students were orphans -- 18% of entrants in 1874, 29% in 1875, 11% in 1876, and 17% in 1877. And, though a minority, there were still a number of fathers who were subordinates in various kinds of elite institutions. Butler, coachman and gentleman's servant appear occasionally in the student registers -- and in 1878 no less a personage than the Groom of Chambers at the Duke of Bedford's Woburn estate. The Lord Mayor of London's state coachman sent his daughter in 1876. There were occasional servants at Oxford or Cambridge colleges. There were also several church-related occupations: a couple of parish clerks, a church organist, the registrar of a Burial Board and several of the lower grades of the clergy. Most, if not all, of the schoolmasters were presumably servants of the National Society. Whether or not these daughters of butlers, parish clerks, schoolmasters, and so on, were the benificiaries of social patronage, the majority of students at Whitelands in the 1870s and early 80s remained daughters of the labour aristocracy and the lower middle class.

Expansion in student numbers at Whitelands required the appointment of extra teaching staff. In the early 1870s the establishment had consisted of chaplain, male lecturer, lady superintendent and three governesses. In 1875 the posts of chaplain and male lecturer were amalgamated in the post of Principal; the rest of the staff consisted of lady superintendent, head governess and four governesses. This was a more effective deployment of resources and marked the steadily-increasing teaching profile of the female governess in place of the male lecturer. The number of governesses continued to increase to match rising student numbers: five by 1878 and six by the early 1880s, a number which was not to change for a decade.

Increased student numbers also meant increased pressure on accommodation. On its cramped King's Road site there was limited space for Whitelands to expand its buildings. Instead, in 1878 the lower commercial school was discontinued and the infants school moved in. The old infants school was then converted into new student dormitories. The dining hall was extended and new bathrooms were built in the old laundry. There was also some refurbishing and renewal of furniture and fittings in existing buildings.

The effect of the 1870 Education Act on Whitelands College was, then, steady expansion: more students, a larger teaching establishment, increased accomodation. Some significant changes in the ethos of the college began to occur from the late 1870s, involving John Ruskin's connection with Faunthorpe, the Whitelands principal, but this will be reserved for the next chapter.

Training Methodist teachers

The Methodists, in the forefront of the Sunday School movement, had been slow to develop denominational day schools. It was the threat posed by the Whig plans for a secular education system and the Church of England's counter-claims to monopoly in the educational field which provoked the establishment of the Wesleyan Education Committee in 1838. In its first annual report it stated: 'it is the duty of every section of the Church of Christ to educate their own children in their own way, in the best manner they are able' [WEC, 1839, 1-2]. While Wesleyan day schools were willing to educate 'as many others as are voluntarily placed under its care', their main concern was to provide education for their coreligionists and thus to cement denominational loyalty. Education in the Methodist day school was uncompromisingly protestant and should, the Wesleyan Education Committee stated, 'present a standing protest against the spreading influence of Popery' and against 'the loose and dangerous principles of the false liberalism and latitudinarianism of the age' [WEC, 1839, 2]. These were coded references to the suspected crypto-Catholicism of High Church Anglicans and the old-fashioned Deism of prominent Whig politicians at the end of the 1830s.

In the 1840s the Wesleyan Education Committee began to coordinate an effective denominational policy on education. It encouraged the creation of day schools and their numbers increased rapidly. At the end of the 1830s there were 101 Wesleyan day schools with just over 8,000 pupils; by 1843 there were 290 such schools with nearly 21,000 pupils. To provide trained teachers the Committee financed young men and a few young women to spend a year at David Stow's famous college in Glasgow. This was a short-term, and costly, expedient and the question of a Methodist training college in England was first broached in 1843. Finally, in October 1851 Westminster College opened its doors. It was located on Horseferry Road, in an area of slum housing, to divert students from 'the attractions of superior life' and to teach acceptance of 'the arduous and selfdenying duties of school teachers'.[fn 4]

A mixed college, training both men and women, Westminster was uncompromisingly Methodist in its ethos. Candidates for entry had to demonstrate some basic intellectual attainments, but denominational affiliation was a sine qua non:

Every teacher employed in the day or infant Schools, or trained for them, shall be of a decidedly religious character, and in connexion with the Wesleyan-Methodist Society. [WEC, 1845, x]

After a slow start (only ten students were present at the inaugural address) Westminster recruited well. By 1855 the number of resident students had increased to 97. Two adjoining houses were purchased, providing accommodation for a further 28 students in 1858. Still numbers grew and further accommodation was added in 1862, giving a total of 135 places. The impact of the Revised Code, here as elsewhere, was to reduce the number of applicants, especially male, for a number of years. By the late 1860s, however, the college was again overcrowded and was turning away qualified applicants while being unable to provide sufficient numbers of trained teachers for Methodist schools. As the Wesleyan Education Committee noted in 1870:

It is becoming evident to everyone acquainted with the working of our school system, that a point has been reached where the existing Training College has become unequal to the supply of the rapidly increasing educational wants of the Connexion. [WEC, 1870, 21]

Initially Southlands was very much an offshoot of Westminster College. Though it was originally mooted that the new College should be located in the North of England, where Methodism was traditionally strong, it was established at Battersea in order to remain close to Westminster. The two Colleges shared the same Governing Body. The first Headmaster and one of the governesses were transferred from Westminster, and the two Colleges shared a single music master. Southlands' first cohort of 105 students included twenty-one who had completed their first year at Westminster. Several times each year the students from both colleges were gathered together to hear a welcoming, valedictory or some other address from one of the two college principals.

Southlands of course retained Westminster's traditional emphasis on Methodist affiliation. James Rigg, Principal of Westminster, reminded the gathered students of the two colleges in February 1873 that they were Methodist students, training at a Methodist College to be Methodist teachers and had been recruited on the basis of their 'religious fitness':

Our rule has always been to select the students who, in our best and impartial judgement, were most likely to make good teachers and trainers. In this conclusion we are by no means guided solely, perhaps not even mainly, by the mere rank which the candidate holds in the Scholarship list. Moral qualities are, as we think, even more important than intellectual for a teacher's true success. Modesty and patience, simplicity of character and purpose, outweigh, in our estimation, mere quickness of apprehension and extent, or even accuracy, of knowledge. [WEC, 1872, 77-8]

No student records seem to have survived for this period, hence there is no detailed evidence of the family backgrounds of Southlands students. However, we can make some sound assumptions about their social profile. The students arriving at the college in the 1870s were, with very few exceptions, products of the pupil-teacher system and of Methodist elementary schools. Matthew Arnold commented in 1852 that Methodist elementary schools in his experience were provided 'for the sake of the children of tradesmen, of farmers, and of mechanics of the higher class, rather than for the sake of the children of the poor'. Kay-Shuttleworth made the same observation in a speech to the Wesleyan Education Committee in the 1860s, noting 'to how large an extent the Wesleyan communion consists of numbers of the humbler portion of the middle class, and of the superior part of the class supported by manual labour...' [fn 7] Thus it is safe to assume that, as in the case of Whitelands, the social origins of Southlands students were skilled working class, white collar workers, small farmers, schoolmasters and Methodist ministers, shopkeepers and small businessmen. This is very much the social profile of nineteenth-century Methodism as a body.

The regime at Southlands in the 1870s reflected the puritan ethos of Wesleyanism. The students rose at 6.45 a.m., breakfasted at 7.45 and then had prayers. Lessons were from 9.00 a.m. until noon, and then from 2 p.m. until 5 p.m. After an hour for tea there was private study from 6 p.m. until 8.30, supper and prayers. Lights went out at 10.20 p.m. This was in some ways less spartan than Whitelands in the 1850s. They rose later, went to bed later and seem to have had the blessing of considerably shorter prayers. Nevertheless some of the earliest students had painful recollections of the material regimen of College life. There was strict discipline about where students should be at every moment of the day. They were not allowed to return to their dormitories until evening. 'The Dining Hall, whither we repaired four times a day, was a bare unlovely room with no pictures, curtains, or anything wherein the eye could rest with pleasure'. The crockery was, this student remembered, a dingy brown earthenware and the cups and mugs had no handles:

The Authorities must surely have thought they were catering for the roughest boys in some penal institution, instead of guileless, well brought up young women. [fn 8]

With women the industrial and domestic work in a training school are necessary, not only for the practical information thus to be obtained, but for the habits thus early infixed of neatness, order, cleanliness, supervision of the house and insight into the requirements of the house; habits which are essential in the lives of those who are to be teachers. [CCE, 1874, 264]

This was a rare concession. In most respects, the regime at Southlands was austere and rigorous. As the Principal reminded the students at the end of the college's first year of existence, submission to authority was required at every level of the educational hierarchy:

You have had rules laid down for your observance, and those rules have been committed to your keeping in order that by means of them you might learn to govern yourselves. Do not forget, my young friends, that in your own schools you will want order, you will require obedience; and you will never know how to govern unless you have learned to obey. [WEC, 1872, 67]

There were two Roman Catholic colleges for the training of elementary school teachers at the time of the 1870 Education Act. A men's college had been set up at Hammersmith in 1850 and five years later two female colleges were established -- at St.Leonard's-on-Sea and at Mount Pleasant in Liverpool. The college at Hammersmith struggled to recruit. In 1860, for instance, it had 70 places but only 7 students in the first year and 22 in the second. And the situation deteriorated further. In 1865 more active steps were taken to increase recruitment. These, including direct payments to training-college students, were successful and by 1870 Hammersmith was about full. By contrast, the two female Catholic colleges initially recruited satisfactorily. However they were badly hit by the financial stringencies of the Revised Code after 1862 and they were forced to amalgamate at Liverpool. By 1870 the two Catholic training colleges were on a more stable footing. Their combined annual output of certificated teachers was, nevertheless, insufficient to supply the rising number of Catholics abandoning the economic catastrophe of post-famine Ireland for the slums of English cities. The establishment of a third Catholic training college was becoming urgent.

This was the subject of much discussion and considerable political wrangling inside the Catholic hierarchy. Finally, in December 1873, the nuns of the Order of the Sacred Heart took on the responsibility. With remarkable speed, accommodation was arranged in the dormitory of the orphanage at the convent at Roehampton and term began on February 21st 1874 with 21 hurriedly-recruited students. Properties suitable for adaption to a training college were looked at in Deptford, Blackheath and Clapham until one was found much closer to the Roehampton convent. 'The Orchards', a substantial but dilapidated three-floor house with several acres of gardens was close to the junction of West Hill and the Upper Richmond Road with Wandsworth High Street. Extensive renovation and rebuilding was required. Worse still the property had eleven separate owners and there were plans for two public roads to be driven through it. These problems were resolved, contracts signed and the college left Roehampton, moving into 'The Orchards' in June 1874. [fn 9]

The new college had the support of the powerful laymen who sat on the Catholic Poor-School Committee. The managing committee of the latter directly supervised the running of the college. Its members in the 1870s and 80s included Lord Henry Kerr and Lord Petre and its secretary for the first five years of the college's existence was Lord Howard of Glossop (1818-83), a younger son of the thirteenth Duke of Norfolk and a former Liberal M.P. The committee also included the two most important Catholic laymen of the period: the fifteenth Duke of Norfolk (1847-1917) and the first Marquess of Ripon (1827-1909). The former was from a stubbornly recusant family and a Tory of the old school, much involved in court circles. The latter, however, was a Liberal and a convert, received into the Church in September 1874. He was the son of Frederick John Robinson, Viscount Goderich, a prominent conservative politician and briefly prime minister in 1827-8. Born in 10 Downing Street, George Frederick Samuel Robinson had been a Christian socialist and the author of a radical democratic tract, The Duty of the Age (1852). He subsequently settled into a successful political career, first as a Liberal M.P. during the 1850s, then from 1859 as Earl Ripon sitting in several cabinets under Palmerston and Gladstone, and serving as Viceroy of India from 1880 to 85.

The member of the Poor-School Committee who was most directly involved in the day-to-day business of Wandsworth College was Thomas William Allies (1813-1903). Educated at Eton and Oxford, a Fellow of Wadham College 1833-41, he sacrificed a promising career in the Church of England when he followed Newman into the Roman Catholic Church. He was the first professor of history at the Catholic University in Dublin in the 1850s and author of an eight-volume history The Formation of Christendom (1865-9). For forty years Allies served as the secretary of the Poor-School Committee and played a central role in the establishment of Notre Dame College in Liverpool. 'Training colleges have been to a great extent my work', he wrote privately in 1883. From its opening until 1890 he was treasurer of Wandsworth College, kept in touch with the nuns of the Sacred Heart, supporting and encouraging, and occasionally addressed the students. [fn 10]

The political influence, intellectual weight and social status of men like the Marquess of Ripon, the Duke of Norfolk and Thomas William Allies gave Wandsworth Training College a certain gravitas. Each year at the end of their inspection of the college the HMIs had to present their reports before this committee prior to their publication. This can only have served to mute the anti-Catholic bias which was undoubtedly present among the Inspectorate. At different times the Duke of Norfolk and the Marquess of Ripon came to give speeches to the students and hand out prizes. In the end though, however valuable the moral and material support of prominent Catholic laymen, the college owed its existence to the nuns of the Order of the Sacred Heart. The Poor-School Committee had noted in 1874, when plans for the rebuilding of 'The Orchards' were brought before them:

Reflecting upon the expenditure which these improvements will involve, in addition to the large outlay of the original purchase, they could not do less than express their thanks to the Nuns of the Sacred Heart for the generosity with which they are incurring a great pecuniary responsibility in addition to the anxiety which a new and difficult work of teaching must necessarily impose on them. [CPC, 1874, 10]

Despite the weight of Catholic influence standing behind it, the Wandsworth Training College inherited the powerful and implacable enmity of Cardinal Manning to the Order of the Sacred Heart. He had been deviously obstructive in early discussions about the establishment of a third Catholic training college. In 1877 he refused to allow the quarterly examinations of all the pupil teachers in his diocese to take place at the new College. He provided no less than twelve reasons for this ruling, but Allies felt that under all the persiflage there was only one:

The twelve reasons, notwithstanding their compactness, mean simply that, however great his Eminence's affection was for the Sacred Heart, and his satisfaction that he was only separated from it by "the silver thread of the Thames", he did not mean in any way to encourage or support the training College at Wandsworth.

The declared position of this important personage moves me to say how much anxiety I do feel as to how the Training College can adequately meet some very trying difficulties which are being put upon it. It is not a small one that instead of receiving encouragement and genuine recommendation from the person who could most assist it among the Bishops, it has nothing to expect from him. [fn 11]

A more serious long-term problem for Wandsworth training College was reaching its target numbers of students. The annual report of the Catholic Poor-School Committee in 1877 noted how Catholic children were above the national average in the grades they achieved in the earlier years of schooling but fell away as they grew older:

Catholic schools, as a rule, are filled with the children of the poorest persons in the land. Their success in the lower Standards shows the intelligence of the children, and the zeal of the managers and teachers. Their failure in the upper Standards and special subjects is due to no indifference on the part of Catholics to the higher branches of instruction, but mainly to the great difficulty in persuading, or even under the present law in compelling, the poorest class of parents to keep their children at school after the age when they may begin to earn a little, and to the obstacles to any kind of study out of school which exist in the homes of the very poor. [CPC, 1877, 25]

For Catholics then the problem was not, as at some training colleges, about failing to recruit cultivated young women from the middle class. The problem was to recruit at all. Catholics were rarely found among the lower middle classes of Victorian England -- the shopkeepers, small businessmen, clerks -- who were the most important source of pupil-teachers for the colleges of other denominations. Matthew Arnold, who, as an HMI, knew the Catholic schools of London, told a confidential government inquiry in 1875:

They take, it is true, a poorer population than most of my other schools; they take their pupil teachers from this population, and their masters and mistresses from these pupil-teachers. Their masters and mistresses come, therefore, many of them, out of a lower and less civilised class than the masters and mistresses of my other schools. [fn 12]

Wandsworth students were generally low on the official published lists of grades on admission. Results at the end of the first and second years regularly placed the college at the lower end -- and sometimes at the very bottom -- of the government's league tables of training colleges. This also harmed recruitment. Allies commented on the problem:

it is a very hard condition indeed to be able to look forward for some years to getting only second or third class pupil teachers ... Lord Ripon, and I, and some others, know that when the list at Wandsworth comes out with lower classes than at Liverpool, there is good reason for it -- but the managers at schools throughout the country look merely at the list, and rate the Training College thereby. [fn 13]

One way of compensating for the shortcomings of the entering students and thus improving official examination results and raising the prestige of the college was by sheer hard work. The timetable at Wandsworth in the 1870s was gruelling. In 1876, for instance, there were classes each weekday from 9 a.m. until noon, from 1.30 until 4.00 p.m., from 4.30 until 5.30 and then from 6.00 to 7.30: eight hours of formal classes each day. Saturdays were hardly less strenuous. There were classes from 9 a.m. until noon and from 1.30 until 4.00 p.m. To discourage idleness among the students Saturday evenings from 4.30 until 7.30, every week, were spent writing examination papers. No less than 45 hours each week were spent in formal classes. In addition, at Wandsworth, as elsewhere, the students had to be involved in domestic labour of all kinds. Each student made her own bed, cleaned her boots and kept her own clothes in repair as well as spending one hour each morning, before breakfast, sweeping and dusting all the rooms and corridors. There was one and a half hours of drill each day. All students were also involved at various times in working in the kitchens, refectory, laundry and dairy. There were performances of plays by the students and the regular organization of entertainments for each other and for the children in the Practising School. Added to this was the strong Roman Catholic emphasis on religious devotion with regular prayers, masses, confessions and communions, celebrations of Saint Days and so on. Rest was in short supply. Under the eyes of the same nuns and the dominating presence of Mabel Digby and Henrietta Kerr, Wandsworth students experienced the same austere life as pupils at the convent school at Roehampton -- cold water and chilblains, mortification of the flesh, an all-powerful self-discipline, much silence and little in the way of privacy. [fn 14]

The unremitting pressure of this kind of regime on teaching staff at female training colleges was intense. At Wandsworth they were nuns and, though some of them were experienced schoolteachers, they were all new to training college work. Not only were they involved in hour after hour of teaching a wide variety of subjects but some of them were following courses at the College of Science and Art at South Kensington. At times tutors were only a few steps in front of their students. They also had other duties in the convent -- one tutor was also the organist, another in charge of the choir and a third was responsible for the linen rooms. In 1877 Thomas Allies expressed his anxieties about the pressures placed on the Wandsworth staff and the risk to their physical health:

I may say that when I looked over last year Mr Tinsley's comparative statement of the work of the Teachers at the various female Colleges, I could find none that had as much to do as those at Wandsworth ... you should have more horses to draw a heavy carriage along a course full of ruts. [fn 15]

Gradually the work-load was lightened for staff and students alike. More staff were allocated to College teaching. There were 6 tutors in 1875 and '76; 7 from 1877 to '79 and 8 by 1880. There was also a marked reduction in the timetable. The HMI report of 1879-80 specifically commented about Wandsworth: 'The hours of work are long'. Again in 1882 an HMI report suggested the need for an increase in recreation time for the students. By the mid-1880s the hours spent each week in class had fallen to 26 hours. The teaching day had been cut from 8 hours to 5.5 hours. Saturday classes had gone: there were still examination papers set for several hours in the morning, but the rest of day was free. There was now far more recreation time for the students during each day and much more emphasis on private study.

'Specially trained, inferior teachers'

H.G.Wells, himself at one stage a pupil-teacher aspiring to a place in a teacher-training college, was sharply critical of the kind of teachers and the kind of elementary schools that emerged after the 1870 Act.

The Education Act of 1870 was not an Act for a common universal education, it was an Act to educate the lower classes on lower class lines, with specially trained, inferior teachers who had no university quality. [fn 16]

Pupil-teachers were not adequately prepared for entry to the training colleges. The academic level of even the successful products of this system -- those who passed the entrance examinations at the end of their long travail -- was a perennial source of complaint by College staff and their governing bodies. In 1870 the Annual Report of Whitelands College grumbled about 'the gradual but continued falling off of the attainments of the Pupil Teachers who apply for admission' [p.4]. A year later the point was reiterated. Despite having passed the entrance exams in the higher range of marks, students entered the College 'unable to read with any clearness or efficiency, and without the power of putting into simple language the little knowledge which they possess'[p.4]. Whitelands students were mostly ranked in the upper reaches of the Queen's scholarship list. Wandsworth students, on the other hand, were mostly ranked at the lower end. Here the problems of equipping students to achieve certification in two short years at college were often particularly acute.

These were not merely the perennial grumbles of overworked college staff. The Inspectorate recognized that there was a real and worsening problem. A typical HMI complaint in 1877 stated that many of those entering the training colleges (male and female) had little understanding of geometry and algebra, that their history was restricted to a memorised list of names and dates and that their writing was poor: 'Diffuse language and obscurity of thought are the rule'. The main problem, he went on to acknowledge, was the sheer pressure of work on the pupil-teachers:

When we consider that they may be, and generally are, obliged to be present six hours daily in school, no part of which can be devoted to their own studies, that their private instruction is given under disadvantageous circumstances of time and place, to suit their own or their teacher's convenience, that their home circumstances often are opposed to opportunities of private study, ought we to say that much more can be reasonably expected? [CCE, 1877, 687]

On arrival at the teacher training college in the 1870s, ill-prepared students confronted a bewilderingly-complex curriculum. Female students had to study arithmetic, grammar and composition, literary criticism, geography and history, domestic economy, sewing (practical and theoretical), music, drawing, religious knowledge and a special subject -- a language or a science. On top of all this they studied school management, learning methods, child development and had to do school practices, including giving a model lesson before an HMI. Under the Gragrindian regime of the Revised Code the emphasis was on passing examinations. As HMI reports noted year after year, rote learning and cynical calculation were the path to success in the training college. The text-book, a specially-prepared compendium of 'facts', became a catechism to be memorised and regurgitated on command. Here for instance is an HMI commenting on History examination papers:

There is general agreement that bare facts, and especially lists of dates, sovereigns, battles, etc., are very fairly committed to memory, but that there is an entire absence of any lifelike picture of the manners and customs of former ages, and of the actions of bygone worthies as compared with and illustrated by present times. [CCE, 1877, 684]

If this was not sufficient to undermine any intellectual self-confidence among the students, the regime of the training college reinforced their sense of social and intellectual inferiority. The cold spartan material environment signalled that the training college, as at least one student at Southlands in the 1870s realised, had some kinship to the prison, the workhouse and the orphanage. And, as in these sister institutions, daily life was a constant repetition of the lowliness and subordination of the 'inmates'. Roland Barthes has argued that the language of power is primarily a language of repetition:

all official institutions of language are repeating machines: schools, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology. [fn 17]

The authoritarian disciplines of daily life, the lack of privacy or autonomy, the planned uniformity of every element of the student's life – and there seem to have been no significant differences between the colleges of different religious denominations -- gave material force to the message. The obsessive anxiety of the authorities about student dress, where a ribbon of red silk could become an act of wild insubordination, was symptomatic. Here again the message was to do with social hierarchy and female inferiority. In Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy presents a vivid image of student-teachers at the end of another day in 'the species of nunnery known as the Training-School at Melchester' in the 1870s:

Half-an-hour later they all lay in their cubicles, their tender feminine faces upturned to the flaring gas-jets which at intervals stretched down the long dormitories, every face bearing the legend "The Weaker" upon it, as the penalty of the sex wherein they were moulded, which by no possible exertion of their willing hearts and abilities could be made strong while the inexorable laws of nature remain what they are.

All her bounding manner was gone; her curves of motion had become subdued lines ... she had altogether the air of a woman clipped and pruned by severe discipline, an under-brightness shining through from the depths which that discipline had not yet been able to reach. [fn 18]

To be grateful, to be obedient and submissive to the will of others, to accept her inferior situation as a just and unalterable fact, was what the state expected of the properly-trained teacher after she had left college. Their status as teachers in elementary schools provided little in the way of professional authority or social respect. Matthew Arnold was alert to the consequent demoralisation. He was impressed by the authority of the well-educated German and Swiss teacher who was a public servant, who 'enjoys much consideration as discharging an important function', and even had a voice in educational policy-making. None of this was the case in England, especially under the Revised Code:

With us he has an inferior training, has no sort of representation by which to make his ideas and experience reach the Education Department; while, as to status, there was no part of Mr Lowe's reforms on which he valued himself more, and which more recommended itself to many people, than that by which he made the schoolmaster know his place, and got rid of the danger and impropriety of seeming to give himself rank as a public official. [fn 19]

If state policy was directed towards maintaining the elementary-school teacher as a low-status subordinate, this was often reinforced in the voluntary schools. John Morley in 1873 complained about the 'inferior' standing of the Church schoolmaster: 'He is the mere creature of the clergyman, and he knows it, and so also do both the clergyman and the children in the school know it.' He pointed to advertisements for schoolmasters and schoolmistresses in the Anglican press. Some of them required other duties: serving as choirmaster, organist, parish clerk or even sexton.

Can you expect "learning and zeal" in the department of secular instruction from a class whose members are first and above all things required to fill minor church and domestic offices, down to superintending choir linen and digging the graves of the parish? [fn 20]

Submission to a rigid destiny was reality for the college governesses too. They were themselves, of course, as former pupil-teachers and training-college students, successful products of the whole system. A letter appended to the 1874 Report to the Committee of Council on Education usefully sketches in their role. Teaching, it was stressed, was only part of their duties. The college governness also had an important moral responsibility. Whether conscious of it or not, they often became models for their students:

They are watched, and will be imitated; they must be so upright and true in word and deed, so superior to all frivolity and pettiness, so strict in doing, as well as in requiring, what is just and straightforward, so careful to avoid the appearance of levity in manner or dress, that the students may see nothing in them but what they can thoroughly respect.

They should, in short, consider themselves bound by the same laws which would govern a private family of which they might be inmates as the daughters, the sisters or the friends of the lady of the house. [CCE, 1874, 266-7]

Under £40	£40-50	£50-75	£75-100	£100-150	Above £150
3	21	37	17	3	1

All of these received board and lodgings in addition, and yet at this time the average female teacher's salary in elementary schools was around £64 per annum and for these too accommodation and other extras were often provided. 'At the present time,' the HMI remarked, 'owing to the smallness of salary offered for a junior governness, it is sometimes difficult to secure the right person for the right place' [CCE, 1876, 470]. Subsequent reports to the Committee of Council returned to this issue. Three years later, for instance, some improvement in the salaries of governnesses was noted:

Under £40	£40-50	£50-75	£75-100	£100-150	Above £150
3	14	40	20	12	1

The improvement was slight. The salaries of college governesses in these years remained little better than those of mistresses in elementary schools, and sometimes worse. Insofar as governesses did provide an example to their students, it was an example of inevitable failure to achieve anything but a modest competence, no matter how perfect their moral stature or how successful their academic achievements. They certainly did not, in the 1870s, provide models of independent and successful intellectual women with some social standing.

Undereducated, overworked, disempowered and underresourced at every point in their career, the real burden of providing education for the working class in the aftermath of the 1870 Education Act was carried by those who taught in the schools and training colleges, not by the social order they represented. H.G.Wells was right. The whole weight of the system was to produce 'inferior teachers' whose role was 'to educate the lower classes on lower class lines'. And the female training college was a key component of that system. The miracle was that out of this regime there came governesses and schoolmistresses with a spark of initiative, independence and genuine commitment to teaching.

on to chapter 3

footnotes

1. See W.B.Stephens, Education, Literacy and Society, 1830-70: the geography of diversity in provincial England (Manchester 1987).

2. 'A Sketch of the History and Results of Popular Education in England ...'[1866] in James Kay-Shuttleworth, Thoughts and Suggestions on Certain Social Problems, contained chiefly in Addresses to Meetings of Workmen in Lancashire (1873), 150-1.

3. See Marjorie Cruikshank, Church and State in English Education. 1870 to the Present Day (1963), Appendix C, 190.

4. For a detailed desciption of the new college see The Illustrated London News, 8 Feb.1851.

5. See Matthew Arnold, Reports of Elementary Schools 1852-1882, ed. F.Sandford (1889).

6. Eva Williams, The History of Southlands College, 1872-1972 (1972) provides a thorough account of the development of the college.

7. M.Arnold, Reports, ; J.Kay-Shuttleworth, 'Popular Education and its Relation to the Religious Denominations' in Thoughts and Suggestions, 176.

8. M.E.Knight, 'Southlands in 1877', The Southlander, 1927, 18.

9. For an excellent account of the college see Eileen Foster, Training College of the Sacred Heart for Catholic Schoolmistresses, West Hill, Wandsworth, 1874-1904, undergraduate dissertation. Copy held in Society of the Sacred Heart Provincial Archives, Roehampton.

10. See M.H.Allies, Thomas William Allies (1907).

11. Quoted in Anne Pollen, Mother Mabel Digby. Fifth Superior General of the Society of the Sacred Heart, 1835-1911 (1920), 149.

12. See correspondence file in PRO ED9/14.

13. Quoted in Anne Pollen, op.cit., 149.

14. For a brilliant account of life in a Sacred Heart convent school in the United States a couple of generations later see Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957).

15. Quoted in Anne Pollen, op.cit., 150.

16. H.G.Wells, An Experiment in Autobiography (New York 1934), 68.

17. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York 1975), 40.

18 In 1891, a few years before beginning to write Jude, Hardy had been deeply affected by a visit to Whitelands College and it must have contributed to his picture of the Melchester Training College. See the end of the next chapter.

19. Matthew Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent [1868], edited by R.H.Super, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Vol.IV (Ann Arbor 1964), 22.

20. John Morley, The Struggle for National Education (1873) 37.