H.M.I.: Some Passages in the Life of One of H.M. Inspectors of Schools

by E. M. Sneyd-Kynnersley

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Circularitis: the symptoms of this distressing complaint are eruptions of Circulars, Memoranda, and Instructions addressed to the servants of the Department, or to School Boards, or other local authorities, and often producing great local irritation. It is said that the disease is almost wholly confined to Whitehall.

[18] Aid Grant: the Voluntary School Act, 1897, gave an ‘aid grant’ not exceeding 5s. per scholar, &c., to Voluntary schools. This enabled the managers to increase the teachers’ salaries, or to improve the buildings and furniture.

[19] Code: every year the Board issue a Code of regulations for Public Elementary Schools. This directs the course of instruction and fixes the annual Government grant.

CHAPTER XV
MANAGERS

“To say ‘ay’ and ‘no’ to these particulars is more than to answer in a Catechism.”—As You Like It.

What is a manager? Generally one that manages; particularly one who manages a school. Before 1903 every school was supposed to have at least three of these potentates: over the others towered the Correspondent; in some cases there was no one behind or below the Correspondent; and when the three necessary signatures had to be provided as a warranty for the accuracy of statistical returns, the Department advised recourse to a minister of religion, a J.P., or a banker. But Squire Broadlands used to call in his wife and his gardener. They put their names where they were told, and asked no questions.

“Managing” included the appointment of teachers, general supervision of the process of Education, upkeep of the fabric, and paying the bills. Incidentally this brought with it the raising of the necessary funds. There was the weight that pulled them down.

The Correspondent was usually the Rector; or, in Roman Catholic schools, the Priest. He carried on the endless letter-writing with My Lords; secured teachers; kept them in order; and, above all, kept H.M.I. in good temper, especially by votive offerings of lunch. In Board schools the Clerk, as a rule, did all this work, except the lunch. There H.M.I. was left to the uncovenanted mercies of the charitable.

At the present day all this is changed. The so-called managers have the shadow of power without the substance: they appoint teachers, who at once pass from their control: and they have to raise money for landlord’s repairs from ratepayers who are already overburdened with the expenses of their tenancy. But they have got rid of Form IX.

What was Form IX.? In the dark ages before the Act of 1902 this was the stumbling-stone of managers and a rock of offence to inspectors. At the end of the school year Form IX. arrived at the correspondent’s house, and thenceforth sleep was banished from his pillow. There were countless questions spread over nine pages of foolscap, and arranged sometimes in horizontal, sometimes in vertical columns. For the unwary there were more traps to the square inch than are contained in any other nine pages in the world. Two pages were devoted chiefly to signatures and general declarations. (Dolus latet in generalibus.) Two more were for the school accounts; five remained for the statistics of the school; the size of the rooms; the names, ages, salaries, qualifications, and past histories of all the teachers; the number of children on the rolls; the number in average attendance; the number at each age between 3 and 14; and so on.

It required many hours of labour from the head teachers before it reached the treasurer: a skilful financier was the treasurer who could complete his share in a day.

At the office in Whitehall there was an army of clerks, whose duty it was to examine Form IX. and to hunt for errors and omissions. I have heard them compared with the railway men at important junctions, who tap the carriage wheels with a hammer in search of flaws or fractures; and, according to popular rumour, receive as much as half-a-sovereign if they detect a fault. But it was alleged that in the case of the clerks the reward was as low as sixpence; this, I feel sure, was a libel on the liberality of the Department.

Their Lordships encouraged accuracy by a printed warning to the effect that any mistake might involve a delay of six weeks in the payment of the grant; and as the sum involved might be £1,000, or more, and as interest on an overdraft at the bank might be running on (with a possible Bank Rate of from five to ten per cent.) this was a serious consideration.

It is often said that the Clergy are bad men of business. If this means that they have a habit, which they share with widows, and other narrow-incomed persons, of investing in speculative undertakings of the wild-cat type, I have nothing to say to the contrary. But when we get beyond this, let one who has officially been a malleus monachorum for many years enter a protest. In the ordinary local affairs, and especially in the control of public meetings, they are as a rule superior to the average layman, simply because they have more experience. And for this reason they—and I emphatically include the clergy of the Church of Rome—were able to fill up Form IX. with an ease to which the unhallowed lawyer or land agent never attained. It was a solicitor who in two successive years presented me with a balance sheet showing a surplus on both sides of the account: it was an estate agent who—but let sleeping dogs lie.

When Form IX. was approximately finished, it was tentatively offered to the Inspector, and nearly all classes of managers were grateful for suggestions of improvement. The benevolent Inspector would run his eye down the pages, and would say, “Just put in ‘NO’ twelve times in these columns, and ‘YES’ thirty-six times down there;” and the thing was done. It mattered little what was thereby affirmed or denied, if the Inspector vouched it.

But this editing was often a serious addition to our labours; for it might involve a considerable amount of research and some delicate enquiries.

“Date of birth of the assistant mistress?” What a question to ask a lady! I used to soothe the patient by jestingly proposing impossible pre-historic dates, and so coming gently down to the irreducible minimum of the approximate truth. And the managers always liked to hear the old Bar story:

Counsel: Pray, how old are you, madam?
Witness: Well, if you must know, I was born in the year ’64.
Counsel (blandly): A.D. or B.C.?

Once a manager came to me during the inspection and asked to have Form IX. back for a minute. I produced it, and he explained: “Old Miss Grey, when she brings me the Form, always asks to have it back again, before you come, so that she may run her eye over it. Then I look at it, and I always find that she has left a blank for her ‘date of birth.’ She gets it back from me, fills in the date, and gives you the Form: then I get it back again to see how she is getting on, and very slow progress she makes.”

“‘Character of the late master?’ How very awkward: after the last report, you know, we really were obliged to make a change, and people do say he was not quite—he seemed at times a little—what can I put there?”

“‘Present address of the late mistress’—and she died last November. Eh?”

It was not always possible to go into these details: there might be a train to catch: and then, if anything went wrong, the manager would lay the blame on the broad back of the Inspector. “I had Form IX. returned to me last year,” said a south-country incumbent to me: “I think Pluckham, our Inspector—do you know Pluckham?—might have corrected it for me: I gave the fellow lunch, don’t you know.” I assured him that there was no reciprocal obligation in the matter of lunch.

These were comparatively simple questions. But the accounts were appalling; and they had to be audited. Till recent years this was not much of an ordeal, for an amateur auditor was easily satisfied. I myself was witness of an audit when a treasurer presented his accounts to a friendly banker for his certificate. The skilled accountant added up the figures, and pronounced the result very good. “Now,” he asked, “what have I to certify: ‘That I have compared this balance sheet with the accounts, and with the registers’? Where are the registers?” and he seized the vouchers, and ran through them: then he signed the certificate. The school was not in my district, and I was not bound to remark that a register of school attendance is not the same as a receipted account.

In the late ’nineties a professional auditor was required, and after some experience I concluded that compound addition and subtraction are no part of an auditor’s education. But the process inspired confidence in the public mind.

When ladies and other simple souls undertook the office of treasurer, there was a chance of trouble. Two instances occur to me.

The first was in the depths of Bœotia. My sub-inspector and I had to inspect a school supported by the Earl of X., and managed by the Dowager Countess. I had been warned that her Ladyship was a little trying, and I was prepared for the worst. On the appointed day we drove a few miles from the railway station, and caught a glimpse of the Hall as we passed the lodge gates. “That’s built in the Grotto style,” said my driver, and after much meditation on this order of architecture, I decided that he meant “Gothic.” You could hardly put an Earl into a grotto.

At the school door—the school also was Gothic, but I prefer the Vandals—I was invited into a sort of lobby, which should have been the girls’ cloakroom; and there was the Countess. She was stately, but gracious. The accounts were a little perplexing; what should I advise? I suggested some trivial alterations, and then noticed that on the Income side there was no record of “School-pence” paid by the children: if any had been received they must be entered. The Dowager scorned the idea: there were school-pence, but they had been received by the Mistress and had been kept by the mistress: I think she considered them Korban. In that case, I said, they must appear on both sides of the account; on the Expenditure side they must be added to “Mistress’s Salary.”

The Dowager was wroth: she clutched me by the arm, and went nigh to shake me, as Queen Elizabeth “shook the dying countess.” “My good sir,” she said with biting sarcasm, “Lord X. is willing to pay the ordinary expenses of the school, but he cannot be expected to meet these additional charges. Is he to put down in the accounts every trifling present that he has given the mistress during the year?”

I pointed out that if the children had paid the pence, and the mistress had received the pence, the Earl was safe: all that remained was to record the payment and receipt. Otherwise, I said very emphatically, the accounts would be returned by the Department, and payment of the grant would be delayed for weeks.

Her grasp relaxed. “I think I see,” she said slowly: and I escaped into the school and joined my colleague in the examination of the children. The Dowager finished her accounts by the light of my suggestions, and followed. My sub. was hearing the first class read, and at the same time was keeping an eye on the second class, to which the teacher was giving Dictation. I saw her Ladyship make her way between the wall and back row of desks, glancing over the girls’ shoulders, as they wrote: I saw her pause behind one girl, and with a suggestive finger indicate that a word was wrongly spelt: I saw my ever watchful colleague shoot out a long arm, clutch the girl’s paper, crumple it up in his pocket: I heard him continue in his cheerful tones, “Very nicely read, Mary Smith; go on, Jane Brown.”

The Countess withdrew: the Grotto Hall did not provide lunch: I would have given a good deal to hear her Ladyship’s account of the morning’s work.

“And other simple souls,” I said: for I had in my mind the strangely parallel conduct of my friend Mr. Shippon. Citoyen fermier Shippon was elected treasurer of the village school, and he found Form IX. a hard thing to tackle. So far his experience of public education had only taught him that it interfered with the supply of cheap labour on farms; notably in the scaring of crows, and the dropping of ’taters. When it came before him as an offshoot of the Civil Service in connexion with a code and a balance sheet, he was—in the expressive language of north-west England—“fairly moithered,”[20] and he came to me for help. I got a slate and collected the items: income from school-pence, subscriptions, and proceeds of a bazaar—£98 11s. 4d. Expenditure on salaries, books, coal, &c.—£36 8s. 8d. Balance in treasurer’s hand—£62 2s. 8d. If he would copy down those figures, he would be safe.

“Na, na, it conna be,” said Shippon with much emotion: “yo’ve rackoned in t’ skule pence, and t’ governess ’as took ’em all.”

“Yes,” I said, “but I have included them in her salary: it’s as broad as it is long.”

“It conna be,” he repeated very emphatically; “yo knaw nowt about it.”

When a man holds all the cards, he can keep his temper, and I laughed, and left him. But I added a warning that if he didn’t bring out a balance of £62 2s. 8d. he would get no grant; and after some weeks’ meditation he yielded.

Managers generally were far more agreeable than these two: we got to tolerate one another, and established an armed neutrality; then we made advances on either side, and in most cases we became friends. They became part of our little solar system in our annual revolution round the district, and as the years rolled on we got strangely to associate them with the season of the year in which their school inspection fell due. “I hope, Mr. Kynnersley, you don’t regard me as November,” said a rector’s wife to whom I had made this confession. I prevaricated, but the association of ideas was unavoidable. We never met in any other month.

There were places which I never saw except in winter: there were others which I connected with climbing roses in the village, and great bunches of wild flowers in white jugs inside the school. If I lunched with A., I had ducks and green peas: B. came in rhubarb-tart time (I hate rhubarb): C. fed me on game: D. gave me the first mince-pies of Advent. I knew the exact spot in E.’s garden where he would draw himself up to his full height and say, “November’s sky is chill and drear”: and I was prepared for F.’s annual defence of the rainy weather by his cheerful cry of “February fill-dyke, don’t you know?”

It was on the way to G. that I expected to see the first lamb of March, irresponsible as a daddy-long-legs: and the big meadows beyond H. seldom failed to show the first infant colt. In May the cuckoo—but that reminds me of a story told me by one of my most hospitable managers, good old Mr. S., now gone to his rest. He was exceedingly deaf, and one talked to him through tubes and trumpets, but he bore his affliction most cheerily. One May night at dinner—he himself told me the story—his neighbour, being a little embarrassed with the trumpet, lost her head, and shouted into the apparatus:

“Have you heard the cuckoo, Mr. S.?”

“Not for thirty years,” he replied with keen enjoyment, and with his most fatherly smile.

The rest was silence.

To the Inspector, possibly to the manager’s wife, lunch was a more serious question than Form IX. Soon after my appointment I consulted an eminent London doctor about some ailment, and was given a string of dietary rules, among which one remains in my memory: “For lunch you’ll have a piece of bread and butter and a glass of cold water.” That, I said firmly, was impossible; I was an inspector of schools, and part of my official duty was to lunch with the parson of the parish. If I were to confine myself to this convict fare, I should give grave offence; and, moreover, should weaken public confidence in my judgment. Who would accept the report of a man who lunched on bread and butter, when he could get fatted calf? He admitted the plea.

My superior officer of that time never lunched with the managers: he said he liked to lunch with his own family. I was only a lodger, and a hungry one; and when the clergy found that I would gladly accept their hospitable offers, I rose in their estimation. But as work increased, this mid-day meal became a burden; and as years increased, what Homer calls “the love of meat and drink” abated; then came the end of formal inspections,[21] and for the remaining time I lunched chiefly at railway stations. Yet while the luncheon season lasted, I had many pleasant hours, and made many valued friendships.

Many managers invited us out of pure brotherly kindness: some possibly because it was usual to “lunch” the inspector: a few perhaps with a faint hope that a good lunch might soothe the savage beast. “Ask him to lunch,” wrote one of them to a brother manager on a piece of paper, which was by chance laid on the table in front of my unexpectant eyes, and read before I knew what I was reading: “a little civility is never thrown away;” and I was feasted royally, while my sub., who was going to mark the examination papers, was sent empty away. I enjoyed that lunch.

There were some managers who craftily tried to charge the inspectors’ lunch to the school expenses. When this was detected, we ceased to lunch there. But it was not always easy to trace. I have heard of its being included under the head of “Repairs.” “You can’t tell what’s in a bill,” said a Liverpool man to me in this connexion; “did you ever hear about the Captain’s horse?” I never had.

A Liverpool Captain, returning from Calcutta, presented to the owners his account for out-of-pocket expenses. Times were bad, and the owners criticised it with unusual care. There was a charge of ten shillings for horse hire: what was this? Horses from the river to the office? How far? Why didn’t he walk? The Captain pleaded the climate, the custom of the country, saving of time. All in vain: the charge was disallowed.

After the next voyage the Captain reappeared with his usual account. The owners examined it minutely, and the senior partner congratulated the Captain on the improvement: that horse didn’t appear again.

“He’s there all right,” said the Captain frankly; “you don’t see him, but he’s there.”

A colleague told me he disliked lunching with managers because it was so unpleasant to give them a bad report after having eaten their salt. I had no such scruple, because I admitted no connection between the two things. It would be an affront to my hosts to suppose that they wished to corrupt me.

There were, of course, managers with whom one did not lunch. The hand of Douglas is his own and so is his mouth. But I never was reduced to such strong words as were attributed by tradition to one of my predecessors, whom a squire had rather commanded than invited to lunch at the Manor. “Tell him I would rather eat my lunch in a ditch under a hedge,” said H.M.I. Taken by itself without knowledge of antecedent justification this almost seems rude.

Lunch, I maintained, was extra-official: and much of our work was extra-official. After a few years in a district we became informal advisers to very many managers. We advised on sites; recommended architects; advised on the plans with the architects; recommended head teachers and assistants. Where did we stop? Was I not constantly appealed to at lunch to recommend a really nice cook, and a curate who wanted a title? I think I earned my lunches.

A remarkable instance occurs to me. In a country parish the Rector was lamenting the collapse of his school at that morning’s inspection. He attributed it to the stupidity of his parishioners: his last lot in the south had been full of genius. I assured him that this was a delusion: if you cut off the heads of 50 boys in Arcadia, and 50 in Bœotia, and weighed their brains—Arcadia v. Bœotia—you would not find an ounce of difference. What he wanted was not a new horse but a new driver.

“Could I find one?”

Certainly: there was a first rate man just leaving a school a few miles away; and I gave particulars. The man was appointed at once; the school passed out of my district, and I thought no more of it. But four years later I got a letter from the Rector, full of gratitude: my nominee had effected a reformation: he had raised the Government Grant from £77 to £132, rendering unnecessary the collection of a voluntary rate. He was “good all round, in fact invaluable.” In the thirtieth year after my recommendation, when the Rector had retired, and the master had, alas! broken down, I got from the former a complete history. Not only had the grant risen to £170, “it had never looked back”: the master’s influence out of school had been equally priceless: the parish was changed.

I think I earned that lunch.

The humorous feature of this branch of our work was that most of it was bitterly resented by the Department. They instructed us to assist managers with advice, but the selection of good teachers and the weeding out of bad ones sadly interfered with the policy of the National Teachers’ Union, and Whitehall trembles when it sees the weakest of the N. U. T.’s.

A word of farewell is due to the lady manager. There was a time when she was a prominent personage: she assisted at the inspection, and waited for hours that she might see the Inspector blundering over the “garments.” She called his attention to specially meritorious stitches, and deplored the blindness of My Lords in their selection of sewing tests: she deprecated mathematics, and urged the superior claims of housewifery. She gave private information on the characters of the pupil-teachers and the children, generally hinting that the pretty ones were undesirable. And she had the strongest views about their dress, views that the male inspector regarded with lack-lustre eye. It was not only at the inspection that she appeared: in many schools she was to be found without fail two or three days a week; possibly assisting in the needlework; possibly taking a general interest in the girls: always full of good works.

Alas! her class is extinct. I think the cold disapproval shown by the professional teacher has frozen her out. Or is it that the haughty children resent intrusion? Or that the comprehensive, critical glance, which even Standard I. would cast at her dress when she entered the room, made it impossible for her to continue her visits without “making a toilette” for every visit? These are mysteries hidden from the male eye.

With the passing of the Act of 1902 came the Passing of the manager, male and female. Now there is a committee; there is a correspondent; there is a caretaker; but the greatest of these is the caretaker.

And with the other change came the passing of Form IX. as an amateur work. Part of it is done by the teachers, part by the local authority; the managers are free from it, and the inspector sees it no more.

If I thought any manager of the many who befriended me would read what I write, I would bid him farewell; and for his consolation I would refer him to the opening sentences of Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his Dictionary:

“It is the fate of those who toil ... to be rather driven by the fear of evil than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward.”