The Division then consisted of the two Counties Palatine[44] and the Isle of Man. There was a staff of about forty-five inspectors and sub-inspectors, whose diurnal and annual revolutions I was supposed to oversee. At the time of this alteration I also exchanged the title of Chief Inspector for that of Divisional Inspector. The substitution of five syllables for one is always to be deprecated, but that was the limit of my injury.
What are the duties of a Senior, or Chief, or Divisional Inspector? (I have lived to see the three dynasties.)
It is difficult to sum them up concisely. The professional reader knows them already: the unprofessional reader would not be interested. Briefly I may say, that he has to see that the District Inspectors and their staff do their work, and maintain the requisite standard of education; he has to advise the staff in all cases of difficulty; he has to hold enquiries in cases of dispute between the District Inspector and the local authority. Also he has to attend conferences at the Office, and to advise the Board “before any important change is made.” Lastly, he had in alternate years to compile a Blue Book report on the state of education in the Division.
I may say at once that the two last duties gave me little or no trouble. When I resigned, there had been no conference for eighteen months, and no divisional reports have been required for five years. I cannot say that the conferences were profitable to the nation: in fact, so far as I remember, they were chiefly confined to questions of official organisation; but they gave one a convenient opportunity of meeting old colleagues at the expense of the Consolidated Fund. The Blue Book report—if I may quote Mr. Curdle[45]—“as an exquisite embodiment of the (Inspector’s) visions, and a realisation of human intellectuality, gilding with refulgent light our dreamy moments, and laying open a new and magic world before the mental eye, is gone, perfectly gone.” I cannot say whether the Board suspected that no one read the reports; or whether in its positively Russian dread of individual opinion, it disliked the appearance in print of such crude ideas as might survive a triple censorship. So long as I was not asked to compile the hateful thing, I was content.
The most important duty of the Divisional Chief has been forgotten. It was to preside over an annual conference of his suffragans, which began with discussion of educational topics of present interest, and ended with lunch. I shall always retain pleasant recollections of those spring meetings at Derby, when I sat at the hospitable board of my good old chief, Mr. Blandford, and his successors, and I did my best to carry on the tradition at Manchester. As for the “topics,” they served their turn. Then the “agenda paper” evolved the menu.
It is obvious that an official who discharged these duties efficiently would be very valuable; and the Royal Commission, which enquired into Civil Service organisation, proposed[46] to assist him by relieving him of his “small” district work; (SMALL, they said!). So far from following this suggestion, the Board have steadily increased the local work by enlarging the areas and diminishing the subordinate staff; so that in my last half year, when the district population had increased to 880,000, though I had a splendid staff in number and in efficiency, I found my time and energies entirely absorbed by local claims. Fortunately, the Division could boast an admirable body of District Inspectors, and appeals and enquiries were exceedingly rare. I gave myself up to Manchester and Salford.
Hitherto I had regarded Manchester as the place where one changed trains if one wanted to go from Chester to York. The London and North Western thoughtfully arranges an interval of an hour or more, and there is time to stroll into the town. There is a river more gloomy than the Styx, more foul than the Pegnitz of Nuremberg, or a back canal of Venice at low water. Beyond that is a cathedral, smoke-begrimed outside, filled with an impenetrable gloom inside. Beyond the cathedral I had never ventured, for it usually rains, and there is an oft recurrent fog. In this town I was to spend four years, if I survived.
When you have realised the rain and the fog, and the smoke, you begin to grasp the ceaseless uproar of traffic. There are electric trams screaming, and whirring, and clanging, and crashing. There are lorries, chiefly laden with mineral-water bottles, which make a specially irritating rattle, and jar. There are drays groaning under the weight of huge bales of calico. And everywhere there is stone pavement; granite setts, that multiply, and intensify the clanging and crashing and groaning. And this granite paving is not confined to the main thoroughfares, where the wear and tear of traffic might almost justify a poverty-stricken corporation in its selection; might at least reduce the charge of sleep-murder to culpable somnicide: it extends over the whole town. A few, a very few favoured spots have a short stretch of wooden pavement: everywhere else, even in the most remote side street of a back quarter, there is granite.
This does not strike a Manchester man as being objectionable. How could it do so? When the Romans built Mancunium they laid down a stone-paved road, and the roads in Manchester have ever since been stone-paved, and what Manchester has always done is right. They even build schools on the edges of these “stony griefs”; and while I was there, I used to watch day by day the gradual rise of an enormous hospital bounded by one of the noisiest of main thoroughfares. That was not my business, but the schools were my business, and I never ceased to protest against the tortures inflicted on teachers and children in those places.
My particular bugbear was a Board School in the Pandemonium Road, a still noisier street than the one chosen for the hospital patients. During school hours there is seldom a lull in the infernal din. And there was no conceivable reason why the school should not have been built at the back, except that the School Board wanted to shine before men, and to allow the passer-by to see the magnificence of a Manchester Board School. The noise of the street was so overwhelming, that arrangements were made to work the school in “shifts,” each class taking one month of noise in a class-room facing the street, and a month of comparative quiet on the opposite side of the building. On the noisy side you might see the teachers, with careworn faces and outstretched necks, striving to make their voices cut through the cross waves of sound; and you would see the children, with knitted brows and open mouths, straining their ears to catch what was said, and at times shaking their heads in despair, and sinking back into their seats with resignation, as who should say, “I have done my best, but after all it is your look-out more than mine.”