Walworth early 50s -- new evidence

Pat and I recently interviewed someone with a good memory of the school from 1948 to 1955, though her memories relate more to the school and teachers in general than to English and what went on in the lessons.

She was taught English by Arthur Harvey for her entire time at the school. She confirms what others have told us, that Harvey had his favourites -- of which she was one in that class -- though this didn’t lead to any unfairness in marking. Some of the favourites joined Harvey in the Quick Service Cafe after school but not our informant: she belonged to an alternative group that met in another cafe, on the other side of the Old Kent Road, around the biology teacher, Eric Palmer.

Palmer was a quite different kettle of fish and he and Harvey didn’t like each other. Alex McLeod was associated with his group. Palmer taught frankly about sex and is said to have favoured free love (though his relationships were entirely ‘appropriate’, as we say now). But his main educational concern was teaching pupils about life. He was devoted to open air activities on the lines of the 1930s German hiking and health movement. He was associated with the Woodcraft Folk, took his group camping at their site and called them each by their Woodcraft name -- he himself was Fox. By all accounts Palmer was a thoroughly good thing and pupils benefited by his teaching and personal attention. Our informant regards him as one of the teachers at Walworth who had a lifelong influence on her (Harvey was without doubt another).


Another set of impressions from the same source supports what we’ve been hearing often, that Miss O'Reilly, the school’s first real head, was an ‘authoritarian’ who ruled pupils and staff alike ‘with a rod of iron’. What puzzles us, however, is that she was certainly a progressive in her principles: she believed in a school giving a social education as well as an academic one, through the practice of friendly and respectful relations; she stressed constantly that all pupils were equally valuable; she enthusiastically embraced the concept of an experimental comprehensive school; she introduced form meetings and a school council, and an innovative social studies curriculum that involved individual project work (not a great success, it seems) and a great deal of choice. She made unconventional appointments like Harvey and Palmer, and also Sean O’Regan the art teacher.

What’s the explanation? we suspect that her principles were more liberal than her personality could tolerate and that there was a real conflict between the two. But what sort of evidence would help us find out?

Walworth/Mina Road writing topics: Harvey and Rosen

I've been wondering if there was such a contrast as I’ve thought between the English teaching of Arthur Harvey and Harold Rosen (and successors at Walworth/Mina Road School in the 1940s and 50s).

The impression I've had is that Harvey set titles for writing that were either wild imagings or literary/purple prosish. Examples of the first that we’ve collected are ‘My Wild White Cat’ and ‘The Red-Headed Man with a Glass Eye’ and of the second ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ or ‘Observing the weather through the front room window’. Rosen on the other hand would be after writing about your real life in family and street -- grandparents, uncles, weddings, an adult who frightened you.

But looking more carefully at the information people have told us or sent us I note that Harvey also set the following, which seem exactly Rosen’s sort of topic:

Conversation at the fish and chip shop
At the barber’s
Waiting outside the pub

The last in particular taps into the vivid local experience of kids living in Walworth, Bermondsey or Peckham.

Readers who were there, can you recall more subjects set by Walworth teachers in the period (1949-64) of Harvey, Rosen, John Dixon and their colleagues? Share them by a comment on here, if you can work out how to do it (a pain) or, much easier, by an email to walworthresearch@me.com or a comment on our website, http://remakingenglish.org/. Whichever, we’ll be grateful and you’ll be contributing to history!

A Hand-Reared Boy

Another lovely Corgi cover. This is the first of a trilogy of which I read the second first (click on the label Aldiss [down the side] for my posting about it and to see another fine cover). That one I hadn’t heard of but this I had -- in fact I had the impression it was once notorious so I was expecting it to be just hilariously filthy, since I believed that was its reputation.

It was hilarious, and ‘filthy’ isn’t a concept we use any more but if we did it would be -- but not just. I thought it was an excellent novel -- or perhaps in reality an autobiography. The taboo (in 1970) topic of masturbation was prominent, as was regular sex, and some of the book is indeed very funny, not least his absurd, sad, social-climbing mother, but the book is serious and sensitive. A middle-class boy, son of a bank manager in some dull Midlands city, goes to school and then to public school, and of course is preoccupied with sex -- first with the maid but most notably with the school’s new matron, Sister Traven. But the sex and the love are seen in the context of the boy’s whole character and psychology -- and his doubts about whether his parents love him. Alone at the end, it’s his dad he wants to be there.

The book ends straight after he’s left school and is working in London in the first months of the war. It’s good as a bildungsroman (formation novel) but no less as an account of an era, the atmosphere of 1939 caught memorably, as well as that of suburban semi life in the mid-thirties. It’s probably absurd to say that I found it so genuine that it read as autobiography -- but that’s what, at least in the boy’s inner states, I took it to be.

Concurrently I was reading an actual autobiography that covered the same period and was also set in the suburbs, and I found myself constantly mixing the two stories up.

In Paul Vaughan’s Something in Linoleum his family moves from inner London, along with 1.5m others in the 20s and 30s, to Outer London, in their case to the new suburb of New Malden (near Kingston and a walk away from me in Surbiton). A new school was opened to cope, Raynes Park County School, a grammar school whose head, John Garrett, was co-editor with his friend (and once lover?) W.H. Auden of The Poet’s Tongue, an anthology for schools that I remember from Bradford Grammar School. Vaughan went there in the first intake. Garrett, a homosexual with a camp Oxford voice and a contempt for suburban values, used his literary connections (Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, A.L. Rowse -- who wrote a poem about him) to put the school on the map. Prizes on Speech Day were given out not by your usual local dignitary but Lord David Cecil and TS Eliot. The school play was reviewed in the Daily Telegraph, the New Statesman and the Evening Standard. Intellectually, it seems he was rather mediocre and no writer, and in the classroom was ineffectual. In this respect he’s unlike the person he constantly reminded me of (though I never met him), Arthur Harvey, an early head of English at Walworth School.

The art master was Claude Rogers, a future member of the Euston Road School and well represented now in the Tate Collection. I particularly like the painting on the cover, The Painting Lesson, and wonder where one can see his portrait of John Garrett.

Louis MacNeice and English at Walworth

We’ve learned that Arthur Harvey, who was a remarkable head of English at Walworth School from 1949 to 1955 and a published poet, was a good friend of the poet Louis MacNeice. Indeed, at least one former Walworth pupil remembers going with Harvey to MacNeice’s house.

I’ve been reading MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939) in which he writes (stanza iii) lines that I think would have exactly represented the educational convictions that brought men like Arthur Harvey to schools like Walworth:

...It is so hard to imagine

A world where the many would have their chance without

A fall in the standard of intellectual living

And nothing left that the highbrow cared about.

Which fears must be suppressed. There is no reason for thinking

That, if you give a chance to people to think or live,

The arts of thought or life will suffer and become rougher

And not return more than you could ever give.