Antonio, Liberal, Leader of the Opposition.
Stephano, a drunken butler, representing the Trade.
Caliban, Agricultural Labourers’ Union, Primitive Methodist interest. There you are; five members complete.”
“And Ariel?” I asked, much interested.
“The tricksy spirit shall be Clerk to the Board, and shall bamboozle the lot, and My Lords too.”
There are some Educationists who never get free of the shop.
Another Board annually stirred me to mirthful compassion, because I knew, and none other knew, that it owed its birth to defective arithmetic. The parish had a population of several thousands; when the school accommodation and requirements were compared in the early ’seventies, a nought got wrong, as noughts will do at times, and a deficit of 130 places was announced. The real deficit was 13, but it was no one’s business to check the figures, and 130 prevailed. The parish declined to build, and a School Board was duly elected. It spent the next ten years in pointing out to the Department in London that no new school was wanted; and My Lords unwillingly agreed: but no one found out about the nought. And it was a very useful Board, and, like the young man, Godfrey Bertram Hewitt, in Guy Mannering, was “in a fair way of doing well in the world, although he came somewhat irregularly into it.”
We often laughed, or groaned—according to our stand-point—at the niggardliness of country School Boards; but the shoe did not pinch us. Both in North Wales and in Norfolk we had to deal with many parishes where a penny rate brought in less than £10. Every third year there might be a contested election, and the cost varied from ¹⁄₂d. to 1¹⁄₂d. in the pound. Add to this the cost to each candidate, and the intolerable worry of a storm in a tea-cup, and it is not surprising that parishes thus afflicted were held up as awful warnings to unwilling subscribers elsewhere. An experienced observer in Cheshire once remarked, “If the average farmer had to choose between the Colorado beetle and a School Board, he wouldn’t know which way to go.”
In all these small parish Boards there was a clerk, who charged from £10 to £20 a year for carrying on the correspondence which the rector had hitherto undertaken gratuitously. An Anglesey incumbent told me that he had offered to do the clerk’s work for nothing; but the chapel leader said that nothing should induce him to entrust the work to a churchman. One Norfolk Board School had an average attendance of five children; they cost £26 apiece, and it took a 3d. rate to pay the clerk: the total rate was 13d. in the pound. A Norfolk farmer rated on his thousand acres might be pardoned for an economic zeal that was not always well directed. It was proposed in one parish to raise the salary (£40 a year) of the head mistress. “Why,” said one member, “thet there young woman is gettin a matter of saxteen shellin a week: look what thet is for a young woman as hesn’t only harself tu keep.”
“Don’t shoot them: they are doing their best,” might have been inscribed on the council chambers of many Boards. It was unfamiliar and uninteresting work for most of them; and they must have spent many weary days on it. In the early days of the institution it was usual for two or three members to attend the school inspection. I think the clerk would tell them it might soften “than which what’s harder? the (Jewish) heart” of the Inspector. They touched their foreheads like ploughboys, when H.M.I. arrived, and huddled together like their own ewes in nervous apprehension—near the gate. Where would this questioning end? Were the Board immune? “If yow were tu ast me some of them questions yow ast the childer,” said one bucolic bulwark of education, “I’d be tarrible put about. Same time, if I had yow on my farm——”