“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.