There were two other schools, both Board (or Council) schools, in the same plight: many were but slightly less tormented. Some had been planted in remote streets, and the electric tram lines had broken in on their retirement, not only destroying their peace, but threatening the children with dismemberment.
The obvious remedy was wood pavement outside the schools. This was conceded to churches and chapels, that were open two or three times on Sundays, and once or twice in the week: but schools, that were at work for five hours and a half five days a week, and where it was important that one should hear what was said, were denied so much relief. Remonstrance was in vain. The inordinate self-satisfaction of Manchester was never more apparent than in this instance: “Just look at our traffic.” Their traffic! If they could only see Oxford Street, or the Strand, and take the evidence of men who remembered the old granite pavement there!
Noise was not the worst of their offences. Many of the school buildings, church, chapel, Roman Catholic, and board, were incredibly bad. In a note-book I have a record of my last visit to Hewitt Street Council School, on a November afternoon in a thick yellow fog. One hundred and forty-three boys in four classes were being taught in a large hall: the windows were shut to keep out the fog, and from eighty to a hundred gas-jets were adding pollution to the poisoned air: thirty-two more boys were struggling for existence in a small and vilely-lighted classroom. Both rooms were on the second floor: on the ground floor india-rubber was stored: on the first floor there was calico: there was only one staircase. If a fire had broken out on either of the two lower floors, hardly a child could have escaped; for the thick smoke mounting upwards would have proved as deadly as fire-damp. After this it is hardly worth noting that there was not a foot of playground; the boys played in the street. And this, remember, was thirty-five years after the formation of the first School Board for Manchester.
Two years later, in 1907, the school was closed.
Do not suppose that these horrors were confined to Manchester; many less important towns in the district might plead that they had their standards of comfort and decency lowered by the example of their capital. There is a range of hills running from the Scotch border to the Peak, known to geography book writers (but not locally) as the Pennine Range. On the west side of this range lay my division, and from Preston to Congleton there was a succession of large manufacturing towns, differing from one another in some respects, but agreeing in their notions of school building. The root idea was a large main room, having, if possible, a raised platform, or daïs, at one end, and several small classrooms. The main room should be from thirty-four to forty feet wide: it would be admirably adapted for Sunday school, and the superintendent should sit on the platform to direct the storm. The classrooms would hold from twenty to thirty children on the eight square feet allowance of the Education Department: the walls might be lined with cupboards to hold the crockery for tea parties, and the assorted literature of the Band of Hope and other societies; also the Band of Hope’s big drum, and the huge tea-urns. The societies would meet in the main room, and the best classroom would serve for the committee to assemble in. There would be no cloak-room, and no washing-room.
Incidentally the rooms would be used for day-school purposes: in this way the repairs of the fabric, and a good deal of the gas and coal bills, and cleaning expenses would be provided for; and if a really energetic schoolmaster could be found to farm the school, he would certainly relieve the managers of any financial liability, and might even be induced to pay a comfortable rent, thereby strengthening the Cause. A very convenient addition to the scheme was to build the school underneath a chapel, more or less in a basement—this economised space.
For some years the plan worked well. Then trouble arose, as new inspectors arose, and propounded startling theories of health and comfort. Some men went so far as to assert that a schoolroom 34 feet wide, with four rows of desks on either side of a central gangway—“double-banked” is the technical name—was intolerably noisy: and that classrooms, which, even if cleared of the cupboards, and tea-urns, held only twenty-five children, were insanitary when sixty-five were black-holed in them. But the managers were very powerful, and the school-farmers (lineal descendants of the Syrian publicani) commanded many votes. Lancashire and Cheshire M.P.’s wrote private letters to the Vice-President denouncing the misplaced zeal of the Inspector: or they called at the Office and talked to the Secretary. All the powers of obstruction were used. The Roman Catholics kept an Archbishop, a Duke, and an Earl in readiness:
“With belted sword and spur on heel
They quitted not their harness bright,
Neither by day, nor yet by night,”
and the Wesleyans had their doughty champion at the Westminster Training College, who
“Carved at the meal
With gloves of steel,
And he drank the red wine through the helmet barred.”