Education: Really No Clue

In contrast to the shining examples of education saving the family, no-one could do anything with the Bond boys of Ditcheat, Somerset who were sharp as suet pudding. They were by turns ‘hopelessly dull’, ‘a disgrace to my school’, or pleading guilty to the most inept crimes.

You see there was usually an embarrassment of poor cousins to remind people what would happen if you didn’t get a trade or education. . .

It is nonetheless a naughty treat to read of their behaviour and wish one had the nerve to have behaved similarly. Happily it was not necessary to be able to read and write to succeed in life. The village midwife of Ilketshall St Margaret, Suffolk, mother of 13 children, kept the pub and owned several other properties in the village including the Post Office during the decades 1880-1920 despite being illiterate. But she slipped up when her son emigrated to Australia. Not realising that he would be making the long journey by sea she begged him not to go fishing, as he had in Lowestoft as a boy with his brothers. Jack in fact may have kept his promise ‑ he went straight to work on a farm in rural, inland, Queensland upon his arrival there aged seventeen.

Education: No Helping Hand

For many , there was no helping hand up, just the fruits of one’s effort and dedication. My grandfather was the son of Irish immigrants, born in Stockwell 1902. He was a bright child, pushed by his father, a draper’s assistant who in later years read and re-read Homer’s Iliad. This father took him to the park where they would together go through the dictionary learning new words. This attitude was also typical of the Methodist community in Wales who had great respect for learning. They saw it as a way out of the mines. So much so that when William Phillips went to visit his wife’s second cousin in Wales in the 1920s, she was on record as saying (about some fact he couldn’t recall) ‘Fancy you not knowing that! And you a teacher!’ I met Doris Hanney (born 1902 in Swansea) who told me that her family fought hard for her to go to school. In the end her grandfather deeded his house to his daughter as it was necessary to own a property in the area for Doris to get a place. Then there were those who had an opportunity and could not take it up. Winifred Jenkins had a scholarship for a grammar school in London during WW1 but was not allowed to go, her family saying that ‘it’s not for the likes of us’. She ended up a clerk in an opticians and although she was cheerful about it, regretted the curtailing of her education.  Sometimes you can see exactly what your ancestors learnt. My great-grandfather Creed recalls mastering his ABC and the recitation of the catechism in the 1880s.  I have his grandmother’s cousin’s grammar book from 1815 in my possession.

Education: Helping Hand

Education was important if one wanted to get on in life. Then as now, not being able to sign one’s name or read aloud would bar you from many callings. I give an example later on, though, where illiteracy presented no obstacle in a Suffolk village (1890s). My great-grandmother’s ability to guess the weight of the cake at well-to-do London social functions (1920s) came from being able to guess the weight of the offal in an inner-city Salford grocer’s store thirty years earlier. Polite applause greeted her winning guess but the owners of the gloved hands would not have been regular customers at the family grocers – not they, buyer of broken biscuits or half-cigarettes. Astonishingly, the children of her grocer mother were given opportunities in addition to helping out at the store, training as a pupil teacher, a theatre sister and as a milliner. In more moneyed areas businessmen might give their young relatives a start in life. Joseph Carline favoured his ne’er-do-well grandson Charles over the others (1850s), while Joseph Padfield was able to start a coal-carrying trade with five pounds from his uncle Isaac, with which he bought two horses and a cart (1770s).

Education: Get Me out of Here

Temple Cloud, Somerset, 1890s

Tick tock went the clock in the darkened library as the three Oliver children studied the classics once again. They saw little of their mother, an invalid; their father, a Church of England priest, having the responsibility of their upbringing. It was whispered that he had been a real spendthrift in his youth, but it was a severe house where the children grew up. In their thirties they finally found they could live as they pleased. Cyril sired an illegitimate son while Aletheia worked among the women of Borneo until the Japanese invasion.