These flocked to the Office, and the Secretary for the time being threw all his children to the wolves, on condition that the wolves went away.
Do you call this exaggeration? Well, I will not insist on the barred helmet; and the “red wine” may have been toast and water. But for the rest, the story is true in essentials. In 1903 I was taken by a colleague to a Wesleyan school in one of the cotton towns, and was shown the buildings which, in a former year, Mundella, when Vice-President of the Department, had denounced to the managers: he had added the offensive remark, in the presence of the District Inspector, that he “could not understand how H.M. Inspector allowed such a building to be recognised.” That official placidly murmured, “I will tell you about that downstairs,” and when they were outside, he said, “I have done all I could to get the place shut up, but your Office has always blocked me.” Did Mundella go by an early train to Whitehall to insist on immediate justice? “That,” continued my colleague, “was twenty-five years ago, and the school has gone on ever since.”
The Circular of 1893, issued by Mr. Acland with the aim of securing sanitary buildings, has already been mentioned. How other places escaped just condemnation I know not; but from careful study of portfolios I discovered that Manchester won through the nineteenth century by the policy of Fabius. In 1904 I visited a horrible den, squalid, noisy, noisome, then under the Manchester Committee, and I reported its defects in full. The Committee replied that they had appointed a sub-committee to look out for a site for a new school. What more could be expected? But I turned to the previous correspondence, and there I read that in 1894 my predecessor had denounced the school, and that the School Board had replied, “A sub-committee has been appointed to look out for a new site.”
One can picture the relief of the Department in 1894 on finding that their suggestion had received due attention, and the relief of the School Board on finding that the Department was so easily pacified. As a searcher Diogenes was not more unsuccessful.
In the twentieth century the patience of Whitehall had been exhausted. On my predecessor’s report a considerable number of these dens had been condemned, and their dates of execution had been fixed. But, like Prior’s Thief, they
“Seem’d not in great haste that the show should begin:
Now fitted the halter, now traversed the cart,
And often took leave, but seem’d loath to depart,”
and, as in the well-known Rheims case, “nobody seem’d one penny the worse.”
The Act of 1902, however, gave new life to the champions of health. We demanded execution of the condemned, and proceeded to draw up a fearful list of new indictments against other offenders. Looking down the list of schools, though time and imperfect memory have already confused North Street with South Street, and St. John’s C.E. with St. John’s R.C., it is easy to pick out 50 habitual criminals, who were brought up for correction.
The contest raged fiercely over the whole town; emissaries from the local authorities hurried up to London and besieged the doors of the Board; the Post Office groaned under the protests; architects of the Board visited and reported; the great Panjandrum himself, with the little round button on top, was called in; and still we fought. In some parts of the field we won easily; every Wesleyan school in the town was condemned and temporarily transferred; after a desperate fight a group of four of the worst offenders received sentence. Hewitt Street, as I said before, is gone; reversing Disraeli’s epigram,[47] it is not only d——d, it is dead. The others are, I suppose, still in the former stage.
And all the time the usual struggle with the Code went on, varied now with resistance to an attack from the local authority; now with presentment of a cold shoulder to obstruction offered by the Teachers’ Union; now with the soothing of indignant managers, upon whose toes all the other parties were treading. It was only in the intervals between the recitation of Standard V. and the geography of Standard VI. that one had time to notice that the rooms in which both classes were taught were unfit for human habitation; it was only on a chance visit to a cookery or woodwork class that one discovered, that the instruction was given in what the local authority called a basement, and I called a cellar; it was only on a similar chance visit to a school that I discovered abominations which almost took away my appetite for dinner.