“My father, a little time since, was speaking of me to my friend William Matthews, when he said, ‘Once in my life I struck him, but I afterwards found that it was unjustly; and I’d give this right hand to recall that blow. I hope Rowland has forgotten it; I wish that I could.’ It is unnecessary to say that, when my friend told me this, I felt both great pleasure and pain. It is now about eleven years since the affair happened to which he referred. Many a tear has that blow cost me, though my father acknowledged himself sorry for having struck me very soon after.”
So much did the young man take upon his own shoulders, that before he was of age he was, in almost everything but name, the real Head-master.
“My first reform,” he one day told me, “was about the school-bell. I was then not more than twelve. It rang very irregularly. I looked into the matter and discovered the cause. It was owing to the following rule of my father’s. There was a monitor whose duty it was to ring the bell, and a penalty was fixed for any delay. But any one who happened to be in the school-room at the time was bound to ring the bell, and was fined for omission. This was one of my first attempts at legislation. I with difficulty persuaded my father to reverse his rule—to fine any one who did ring the bell, except the monitor. That change was eminently successful.” In the hours of meals there had also been great irregularity. The bell was never rung till everything was ready. He proposed that henceforth the bell should be rung at fixed times, it being taken for granted that everything was ready. “My mother said it was impossible to have the dinner at the exact time, as a large leg of mutton required more time to roast than a smaller one. I said no doubt it must have more time, but the cook must begin earlier. She gave in on my earnestly desiring it.”
In his Journal for the year 1817 he records: “If the monitor neglect to ring the bell at the proper time, he incurs heavy penalties, which I take care to collect rigorously, convinced that in the end it is the most merciful mode of proceeding.” As he grew older he was more inclined in every case to fix lighter penalties; but whether he was dealing with his pupils, with the servants of the London and Brighton Railway, or the servants of the Post Office, he always rigorously enforced whatever penalty had been justly incurred.
Many duties he undertook, he said, as it was less trouble for him to do them himself than to be called in to help another. His father did not keep his accounts on any good system—he had not even an index to his ledger—nor did he make them out at any fixed time. To him they were a necessary evil, and were treated accordingly. The bills were never sent out till the very end of the holidays. “I had a great liking for working in the carpenter’s shop. All through my holidays I was in constant dread lest my father should come up to ask me to help him in making out the accounts, and so call me off from some piece of construction. At last I said that I would rather make up the accounts myself, as I got so tired of these constant interruptions. One of my cousins helped me. He and I used to rise very early one morning just before the holidays, and at last we always completed the posting from the ledger, which before had been spread over the whole holidays, by breakfast-time, while the accounts were sent off with the boys.” Rowland was about fourteen when he thus began to make up the school-bills. At the age of sixteen or seventeen he took into his own hands the entire management of his father’s money affairs, and “a heavy responsibility it was.” There were not a few debts owing, but in no long time, by dint of great efforts, he paid off all that was due. “I went round and discharged all the debts, and was very much complimented by my father’s creditors.”
About the same time the two brothers were planning to have a kind of “Speech Day”—an Exhibition, as they called it. “We are busily employed,” wrote Rowland in his Journal, in the year 1813, “in preparing for an Exhibition at Christmas of oratory, penmanship, arithmetic, parsing, &c.” In the dramatic part of the entertainment the boys were chiefly drilled by Matthew. The rest of the work mainly fell on Rowland. Three years later his brother was away in London, “eating his terms,” and his father had fallen sick. “I had to drill,” he said, “the boys in recitation. I disliked the work very much, and was very unfit for it; but I had to do it. We always printed the pieces the boys were to repeat. In the scene from ‘Hamlet,’ where Horatio says, ‘My lord, I think I saw him yesternight!’ and Hamlet answers, ‘Saw?—who?’ I thought ‘who’ ought to be ‘whom.’ I consulted my father, who agreed with me; and so we printed it. Matthew—[the old man, as he came to this part of the story, laughed heartily]—Matthew was very angry with me for thus correcting Shakespeare.” He has made in his Journal the following record of the Exhibition of this year:—
“At the last Christmas exhibition, the first act of Plautus’s ‘Captives’ was performed in Latin. For this I painted a street scene, which took me several days. I believe I never worked harder than when preparing for this exhibition. The boys were brought to such a pitch of excellence in mental arithmetic, and their other exercises, that we were obliged to give them a great deal of practice that they might not recede. Besides this I gave a great many lessons from home, attended to a class who were drawing maps and plans; and at the same time painted the scenes.
“During more than three weeks, including even Sundays, I was hard at work on an average at least eighteen hours to each day; sometimes much more. This I could have borne without injury, but I had almost all the care and responsibility of the school on my hands at the same time; for my brother Matthew was in London several weeks just before the holidays, and my father was unwell. I am not yet recovered from the ill effects upon my health of the exertions I then made; but, however, that exhibition raised our school very high in the public estimation. The mental arithmetic astonished very much, and as we invited questions from the audience, they could not suppose that the boys had been practised in the questions which I asked them.”
To what a pitch of excellence he raised his classes is shown by the following record:—