What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

But on to the mail we climbed at ten o’clock. I believe the good hostess of “The Fountain” genuinely thought our proceeding suicidal, and the refusal of her beds absolutely insane.

That journey from Canterbury to London was by far the worst I ever made. It really was a very bad business. But at every change of horses I got down, and holding on by the coach behind ran as far as my breath and strength would allow me, and thus knocked a little warmth into my veins. I could not persuade my companion to do likewise. He seemed to be wearied and frozen into apathy. The consequence was that whereas I was after some twelve hours in bed not a jot the worse, he was laid up for a fortnight.

Shortly afterwards I assumed my new duties at Birmingham. The new building had been completed, and was—or rather is, as all the world may see to the present day—a very handsome one. The head master, whose assistant I specially was, was Dr. Jeune, who became subsequently Bishop of Peterborough. The second master, Mr. Gedge, had also an assistant named Mason. Our duties were to teach Latin and Greek to any of the sons of the inhabitants of Birmingham who chose to avail themselves of King Edward’s benevolent foundation. None of the masters had anything to do with the business of lodging or victualling boys. The boys were all day boys, and our business was to teach them Latin and Greek during certain hours of every day.

I soon became aware by a strangely subtle process of feeling rather than observation that my eight years’ Winchester experience of schoolboy life and ways had not constituted a favourable preparation for my present work. I felt that I was working in an atmosphere and on a material that was new to me. It would be absurd to imagine that all those sons of Birmingham tradesmen were stupider or duller boys than the average of our Winchester lads. But it appeared to me that it was far more difficult to teach them with any fair amount of success. They were no doubt all, or nearly all, the sons of men who had never learned anything in their lives save the elements of a strictly commercial education. And I felt myself tempted to believe that the results of heredity must extend themselves even to the greater or lesser receptivity of one description of teaching instead of another. I suppose that the descendant of a long line of shoemakers would be more readily taught how to make a shoe than how to build a ship. And it may be in like manner that ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes comes more readily to a boy whose forefathers have for generations done the same thing than it would to the descendant of generations unmoulded by any such discipline!

Corporal punishment was used, and naturally had to be resorted to much more frequently by me than by my superior, whose work was concerned with the older and better conducted portion of the boys. In fact as far as my recollection at the present day goes, it seems to me that hardly any morning or afternoon passed without the application of the cane. And this corporal castigation, though devoid of all the judicial formality which might have made our Winchester “scourging” a really moral punishment if the frequency of it and the prevailing sentiment upon the subject both of masters and scholars had been other than it was, was in truth a very much severer infliction as regards the absolute pain to be suffered by the patient. Three or four strokes with the cane over the palm of the hand would be very much worse than the perfunctory swishing with the peculiar Winchester rod. I do not remember that this caning was ever judicially used as a sentence to be executed at any future time, or that it was ever, for the most part, used to punish the idleness which had prevented a boy from learning his lessons at his home. It was used almost exclusively, as far as I remember, for the preservation of order and silence during the school hours, and the correction of the offender followed instantly on the commission of the offence.

And this necessity of enforcing order among a very undisciplined crew of some forty or fifty lads of ages varying from perhaps twelve to about fourteen or fifteen was by far the most irksome and difficult part of my duty. I was accustomed to tuition. But the cumulation of the office of beadle with that of teacher was new to me, and I did not like it. And still less did I like the constant tendency of the urgent duties of the first office to encroach upon those of the second.

My scholastic experiences had accustomed me to a state of things in which idleness, violence, daredevil audacity, and neglect of duty had been common enough, but in which organised trickery and deception had been rarely seen. And I felt myself unfitted for the duties of a policeman among these turbulent Birmingham lads. I never saw the face of any one of them save during the school hours; and I remember thinking at the time that, had this been otherwise, I might have obtained a moral influence over at least some of them, which might have been more useful than all my efforts during school hours to force the rules and principles of syntax into unwilling brains, accustomed to the habitual defiance of them during all the remainder of their lives.

It appeared to me that I was engaged in the perpetual, and somewhat hopeless, task of endeavouring to manufacture silk purses out of sows’ ears; and I confess that I never put on my academical gown to go into school without feeling that I was going to an irksome, and, I feared, unprofitable labour. I tried hard to do my duty; but I fear that I was by no means the right man in the right place.

No preparation of any kind, beyond assuming my gown and trencher cap, before going into school was needed, and I had, therefore, abundance of leisure, during which I did a considerable quantity of miscellaneous reading, not perhaps altogether so unprofitable as the advocates of regular study devoted to some well-defined end might suppose.

We endeavoured—my colleague Mason and I—I remember, to get up a debating society among the few—very few—young men, with whom we had become acquainted. But it did not succeed. Young Birmingham, intent on making, and on its way to make, “plums” in hardware, did not think that “debating” was the best way of employing the hours that could be spared from the counting-house.