A question and a comment:
What are those pictures (prints?) on the wall of the ‘top class’?
And the comment: when I worked in the successor school in the 1960s -- Walworth County Secondary School, comprehensive -- you could see the boys as the central school scholars’ direct descendants: still smart, well dressed, happy and alert, except for that poor or neglected minority that would never have got into the central school and for the most part were in the ‘remedial’ classes, though these classes, too, had thoroughly wholesome-looking children. The introduction of mixed-ability classes in the second half of the ‘60s was a welcome and successful reform.
Sunday, 16 October 2011
Mina Road Boys Central School
These photographs were kindly sent to us by Darien Goodwin. The portrait is of his father, Eric, who was at Mina Road Boys Central School between 1917 and 1921. The class photographs are of the first form (Eric top row, far right) and the top class (bottom row, far left). According to the system in central schools, the first form boys were aged 12 and the top class 15 (called fifth year in my time and year 11 these days).
Schools like this were selective elementary schools and some, including Mina Road (it seems), were very successful. Although they had a vocational emphasis, academic subjects were taken seriously, including, according to Eric’s reports, the ‘English subjects’, Mathematics (Arithmetic, Geometry and Algebra), History, Geography, Science and French.
We know a bit about the school around this time from Herbert John Bennett’s I Was a Walworth Boy (London: Peckham Publishing Project, 1980). At least in his slightly earlier day (1913-16) the headmaster was Edward P. Paul who in the first assembly explained the school motto, Agi quod Agis, ‘What you do, do well’. ‘I do not think he was liked by the masters. There was certainly little affection from us boys’ (32).
A Mr Dawes is remembered with respect and affection: ‘[Dawes] had seemingly realised that the best prospects for us boys from working class families lay in our entry into the Civil Service, and he specialised in putting his boys through the Boy Clerks examination.’ The attraction was the promise of a pension to escape ‘the insecure world of poverty that surrounded me’. Dawes’s friendliness is remembered; he used to play football with the boys (33-34).
Perhaps someone can even today tell us who were the teachers in the photographs.
‘Mina Road School was not a large school. There were only six classes but in addition to the six classrooms [there were science, art and woodwork facilities]. Next door [he seems to be referring to the layout of the playgrounds] was a girls’ school and contact between the two was forbidden.’ There was a school production, though whether it was Shakespeare is not clear (32).
The building is the one that’s still there on the site of what is now Walworth Academy. I wonder when the tiered seating was taken out?
Mr Bennett had ‘no regrets… [It was] a good school with some wonderful teachers’ (9-10).
One can indeed imagine the well-turned out boys in the photos, in their jackets, waistcoats and ties, being receptive to a good education, especially when the size of the class reduced from about 41 at the start to 15 in the final year. They look quite ready for good clerical jobs. (If you were going into a trade, would there have been any point in staying for a fourth year?)
I suppose one can’t judge by such photographs but it doesn’t strike me as an unhappy school.
The National Archives at Kew, by the way, have inspection reports on this and the girls' school from the 1930s. Both are highly praised.
Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Andrew Salkey at Walworth/Mina Road
We’ve been given a lovely letter of sympathy and good wishes that was written by a pupil to Andrew Salkey, her English teacher, who was then in hospital with bronchial pneumonia. It’s dated 24th October 1957 and was evidently never delivered. We would love to contact the writer, Barbara Allen: does anyone have her address or email, please? (Send it, please, to walworthresearch@me.com.)
We’d like also to learn more about Mr Salkey as a teacher. He was later a notable novelist and poet who dealt with themes relating to the Caribbean where he had grown up.
We’d like also to learn more about Mr Salkey as a teacher. He was later a notable novelist and poet who dealt with themes relating to the Caribbean where he had grown up.
Monday, 10 October 2011
Country hikes from Walworth/Mina Road, 1950s
Harold Rosen, he tells, used to organised Sunday hikes in the country for Walworth pupils. Adults went too. Shown here (click to enlarge) are, left to right, Harold Rosen, Alex McLeod (also NZ), Gillian Murray (wife of Mike Murray, biology, another New Zealander), Mrs Rosen (Connie) and Pat Darby (PE; married Pip Piper).
Anyone who went on these jaunts (via the ‘Ramblers Special’ train), do get in touch: walworthresearch@me.com. Or add a comment here if you can work the system.
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
O'Reilly plaque at Mina Road/Walworth
I mentioned before about a ceremony on 31 August to unveil a plaque to commemorate the first head of Walworth (comprehensive) School. It took place at Walworth Academy, who have now published their own photos of the event.
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Romantics again
I posted earlier on ‘English teaching, Romantics and Moderns’ in the light of Ian Reid’s book on the influence of the Romantics on English teaching. Ian immediately responded, but (like most people) was unable to post his comment -- procedure too cumbrous. Our exchange is now quite old since I've been away for a while but with his permission I reproduce it here, lightly edited.
Ian, 4 September:
Anyway, my lost-in-space comment was mainly to say (1) that I don't disagree with your remarks except that I don't see them as "problems" for my line of argument, just strands in the fabric I've tried to exhibit; and (2) that modernism's lack of significant impact on English teaching shouldn't really be surprising, because it has relatively little resonance (compared to Romanticism) with the self-shaping "sentimental education" that for most teachers and students has continued (albeit with variations) to be the major focus of "English".
Me, 4 September
Good of you to respond, Ian -- thanks. (1) fair enough. (2) -- this is not a comment on the book or your response -- it seems to me to take some explaining why people with a literary education and a keen interest in literature, who 'kept up' assiduously with developments in writing -- Britton, Rosen, Dixon -- and who would have been well aware of modernism and would have read the key texts -- were so unaffected by that whole revolution that their belief in the 'sentimental education' you rightly refer to should have continued in such an untroubled way?
When I think of it though I don't remember Harold [Rosen]-- my PGCE tutor who I knew well -- even referring to, let alone getting excited by, any modernist text. The stuff he liked was Dickens and stirring tales of revolutionary struggle -- Arturo Barea on Spain, Sean O'Casey's autobiographies (lots of autobiographies, in fact -- including Gorki).
In his case, it may have been the right-wing politics of Eliot and Pound and Proust's difficulty (for a start) that put him off -- but why not Joyce and Kafka? Though I recall he did read a quite 'difficult' (in a modernist way) poem by Charles Causley with us, and was an admirer of Miroslav Holub -- who I suppose you'd say was in the modernist tradition. And Britton was keen on Wallace Stevens and Malcolm Lowry.
Perhaps they found certain modernist works ok but didn't buy the whole rejection of, for instance, realist narrative -- nor see any implications in it for English teaching -- so had no hesitation in promoting it in kids' writing in school. Nothing could be more anti-modernist, come to think of it, that Britton's position (quoting Lady Chatterley) that novels were essentially the same thing as gossip....
Rosen certainly bought into Wordsworth's view of the child and was fascinated by and accorded great value to children's experience -- but I'm sure would have been appalled by Wordsworth's manifesto on education in Book IX of The Excursion, as I was when I read it a few days ago, possibly for the first time -- can't trust my memory now. How did intelligent people in the 20th century not find that stuff simply silly and offensive? (I didn't feel that way at all about the Prelude, needless to say, when I re-read it recently.) You're very clear, though, that Dixon, at least in his Bretton Hall period, was a serious Wordsworthian. Must ask him about it when I see him next.
Is it just my problem that I'm a bit perplexed by those people's position on modernism? As you can tell, I'm just floundering in all this. Perhaps they were simply right to stick with the essentially Romantic approach to childhood and education -- and after all there was no modernist position on education in the way that the Romantics -- the movement that it arose in opposition to -- had a view on it -- as they had a view on the state.
Ian on 5th September ends with a very strong point:
Yes, but I suppose another way of understanding the conundrum about modernism is to recognise that (despite some well-known oppositional gestures and dismissive rhetoric) it often tended to intensify certain elements in Romanticism. Think e.g. of Virginia Woolf’s emphasis (and Joyce’s) on epiphanic moments, or Kafka’s on the existential anguish of guilt-ridden individuals, etc.
Much of modernism could thus be seen in Harold Bloom’s terms as a combat with its inescapably influential Romantic parent.
Ian, 4 September:
Anyway, my lost-in-space comment was mainly to say (1) that I don't disagree with your remarks except that I don't see them as "problems" for my line of argument, just strands in the fabric I've tried to exhibit; and (2) that modernism's lack of significant impact on English teaching shouldn't really be surprising, because it has relatively little resonance (compared to Romanticism) with the self-shaping "sentimental education" that for most teachers and students has continued (albeit with variations) to be the major focus of "English".
Me, 4 September
Good of you to respond, Ian -- thanks. (1) fair enough. (2) -- this is not a comment on the book or your response -- it seems to me to take some explaining why people with a literary education and a keen interest in literature, who 'kept up' assiduously with developments in writing -- Britton, Rosen, Dixon -- and who would have been well aware of modernism and would have read the key texts -- were so unaffected by that whole revolution that their belief in the 'sentimental education' you rightly refer to should have continued in such an untroubled way?
When I think of it though I don't remember Harold [Rosen]-- my PGCE tutor who I knew well -- even referring to, let alone getting excited by, any modernist text. The stuff he liked was Dickens and stirring tales of revolutionary struggle -- Arturo Barea on Spain, Sean O'Casey's autobiographies (lots of autobiographies, in fact -- including Gorki).
In his case, it may have been the right-wing politics of Eliot and Pound and Proust's difficulty (for a start) that put him off -- but why not Joyce and Kafka? Though I recall he did read a quite 'difficult' (in a modernist way) poem by Charles Causley with us, and was an admirer of Miroslav Holub -- who I suppose you'd say was in the modernist tradition. And Britton was keen on Wallace Stevens and Malcolm Lowry.
Perhaps they found certain modernist works ok but didn't buy the whole rejection of, for instance, realist narrative -- nor see any implications in it for English teaching -- so had no hesitation in promoting it in kids' writing in school. Nothing could be more anti-modernist, come to think of it, that Britton's position (quoting Lady Chatterley) that novels were essentially the same thing as gossip....
Rosen certainly bought into Wordsworth's view of the child and was fascinated by and accorded great value to children's experience -- but I'm sure would have been appalled by Wordsworth's manifesto on education in Book IX of The Excursion, as I was when I read it a few days ago, possibly for the first time -- can't trust my memory now. How did intelligent people in the 20th century not find that stuff simply silly and offensive? (I didn't feel that way at all about the Prelude, needless to say, when I re-read it recently.) You're very clear, though, that Dixon, at least in his Bretton Hall period, was a serious Wordsworthian. Must ask him about it when I see him next.
Is it just my problem that I'm a bit perplexed by those people's position on modernism? As you can tell, I'm just floundering in all this. Perhaps they were simply right to stick with the essentially Romantic approach to childhood and education -- and after all there was no modernist position on education in the way that the Romantics -- the movement that it arose in opposition to -- had a view on it -- as they had a view on the state.
Ian on 5th September ends with a very strong point:
Yes, but I suppose another way of understanding the conundrum about modernism is to recognise that (despite some well-known oppositional gestures and dismissive rhetoric) it often tended to intensify certain elements in Romanticism. Think e.g. of Virginia Woolf’s emphasis (and Joyce’s) on epiphanic moments, or Kafka’s on the existential anguish of guilt-ridden individuals, etc.
Much of modernism could thus be seen in Harold Bloom’s terms as a combat with its inescapably influential Romantic parent.
Sunday, 25 September 2011
Concern at CERN
Seems some particles may have been breaking Einstein’s golden rule and exceeding the speed of light. I read, though, that an Italian physicists reckons may not have been going faster than light after all, on their test track from Switzerland to Italy, but ‘taking a short cut’ through another dimension.
As always when confronted with explanations like this I ask, What is the hope of a humanities product like me, who has trouble with maths, ever being able to understand?
I suspect -- incidentally -- that one problem is that term ‘dimension’. To me it means length, breath or height, x, y or z on a 3D graph. If those are dimensions it’s impossible to imagine a fourth that belongs in the same set. Time doesn’t seem to me to be anything like the same sort of thing, and as for the idea of others that don’t even have names that we understand (like ‘time’) in a rough-and-ready, everyday way, I can’t even get to first base. So should they use a different name, or is there perhaps a definition of ‘dimension’ that I might be able to grasp? (And would it help?)
As always when confronted with explanations like this I ask, What is the hope of a humanities product like me, who has trouble with maths, ever being able to understand?
I suspect -- incidentally -- that one problem is that term ‘dimension’. To me it means length, breath or height, x, y or z on a 3D graph. If those are dimensions it’s impossible to imagine a fourth that belongs in the same set. Time doesn’t seem to me to be anything like the same sort of thing, and as for the idea of others that don’t even have names that we understand (like ‘time’) in a rough-and-ready, everyday way, I can’t even get to first base. So should they use a different name, or is there perhaps a definition of ‘dimension’ that I might be able to grasp? (And would it help?)
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