Patriotes and British Radicals in the 1830s

More than France or the United States, it was in Great Britain that the strategists of the Patriote Party tried to make links beyond the borders of Lower Canada. The Patriotes estimated, rightly, that it was there that the important decisions regarding their programme would be made and recognised that divisions within both Parliament and the Whig government of Lord Melbourne made it possible to advance the Canadian cause.[1] Since the failed attempt at union in 1822, the strategy of the Canadian party had generally consisted in sending delegates to England with a mandate to contact all those who, especially in Parliament, were sympathetic to their arguments. There were three missions in the 1820s and 1830s: Papineau and Neilson in 1823, Neilson, Viger and Cuvillier five years later and especially the mission of Denis-Benjamin Viger between 1832 and 1834.

In the aftermath of the passage of the 92 Resolutions though the Assembly at the beginning of 1834 and growing intransigence of the reform movement in Lower Canada, the Patriote Party decided that it would be better to persist with its strategy in England largely because of the emergence of a group of radical MPs. Electoral reform in 1832 led to the appearance of a group of MPs, largely middle class and strongly influenced by the ideas of Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo. These Philosophic Radicals denounced the political dominance of the traditional aristocratic elite and called for a democratisation of the political life and social reforms. They did not constitute a ‘party’ because they were too small in numbers and lacked political cohesion. Their electoral failure in July 1837 and the departure of Lord Durham, a possible leader of this loose grouping, for Canada at the beginning of 1838 led to rapid decline of their importance.

Augustin-Norbert Morin was charged with carrying the text of the Ninety-two Resolutions and the petition that accompanied it to England. [2] He left London on 19 August 1834 and was back in Montreal on 5 October. For his part, Denis-Benjamin Viger returned to Montreal on 1 November after two years in London. Immediately after the Assembly elections in the autumn 1834, Robert Nelson and Henry S. Chapman left Montreal on 24 December for New York on their way for London. [3] Chapman was charged with making contact with the English and Irish Radicals, particularly with John A. Roebuck to bring English opinion up-to-date with the Canadian crisis and to inform the Assembly of the progress of the Canadian cause in Great Britain. On 9 March 1835, Chapman and Nelson distributed copies of the text of a petition of Canadian citizens in Parliament. The petition was presented to the Commons the same day followed by a lengthy debate with a second debate the day after in the House of Lords.

Nelson was back in Montreal by the spring of 1835, but Chapman remained in London working with Roebuck and supplying the British press with articles on Canada. However, there were already active and well organised special interest groups in England. Wood merchants lobbied vigorously for the maintenance of preferential rates on Canadian wood to the detriment of wood coming from the Baltic. What gave this lobby its strength was an alliance with Society of Ship-owners, one of the best organised interest groups in nineteenth century England. It was fiercely opposed to the reform agenda and Chapman described it as noisy, active and uninformed. Other special interest groups with commercial interests in Great Britain had less influence on the development of colonial policy. The fisheries and Hudson’s Bay Company, for example, had few defenders in Parliament. Finally, there were family-owned companies that carried out businesses on both sides of the Atlantic. Although, these merchants may have been important in the colonies, they had limited influence at Westminster. During the 1830s, financial companies extend their influence on British North America. In 1836, the Bank of British North America was launched with the support of powerful financial institutions. The large land companies were closely linked to the banks and were beginning to sell their vast land monopolies. The banking and land companies combined with the wood merchants formed a protectionist and elitist group in Canada. Since 1810, these interests had started to meet at Canada Club. In 1831, it became the North American Colonial Association that had interests in finance, land and commerce and controlled three London newspapers: The Morning Herald, The London Post and Morning Chronicle. The official spokesmen of this association to the Commons were George Richard Robinson (Worcester), Patrick Stewart (Lancaster), Henry Bliss and especially Nathaniel Gould, who voted under the Whig banner. This anti-Patriote lobby could also count on the occasional support from the Church of England.

The strength of this network of interests can be contrasted with limited support available to the Patriote lobby whose support came almost exclusively from the radical movement. Apart from occasional aid from the Chartist movement, O’Connell’s Irish nationalists and some Whigs reformers like Henry Labouchere and Edward Ellice, the bulk of Patriote support came from some journalists and MPs with radical leanings. This relationship went back to the campaign against the union of Lower and Upper Canada in 1822 when James Mackintosh defended the position of the Canadian party. From the session of 1834, certain Radicals became increasingly interested in Canadian questions and Roebuck, Hume, Leader and on occasions, Molesworth questioned the government on its Canadian policy.

The defence of the Patriote ideas in England is particularly associated with John Arthur Roebuck, one of the MPs for Bath since 1832. [4] Roebuck lived for ten years in Upper Canada, but was not interested in the particular case of Lower Canada until a meeting with Pierre de Sales Laterrière and then with Denis-Benjamin Viger probably in 1833. It is often assumed that it was Roebuck who presented the 92 Resolutions to the House of Commons; in fact it was Joseph Hume. It was, however, Roebuck’s intervention on 15 April 1834 that led to the setting-up of Canada Commission. A battle took place in Canada over the nomination of Roebuck as official agent of Assembly as the legislative Council vigorously opposed it. The bill appointing an agent in Great Britain was voted on several times but rejected by the Council. However, following a unilateral vote of the Assembly, Papineau announced on 25 March 1835 that Roebuck could now act as the official agent of the Parliament of Lower Canada. It was not until 8 September that Lord Glenelg allowed Roebuck to express the views of the parliamentary majority of Lower Canada. Roebuck was paid a fee of £600 per year with an additional £500 for other expenditure. In fact, because of the dispute over subsidies in Lower Canada, Roebuck did not receive anything and it was ten years later following an expensive legal case before he was actually paid. Despite this, Roebuck continued to promote the Patriote cause in England.

Though Roebuck was central to the pro-patriot activities in England, other MPs were also engaged in this cause. Among those, the most assiduous defender of Canadian freedoms was Joseph Hume who had been the agent of the Upper Canadian Assembly and had presented, on its behalf, petitions questioning the administration of the governors Colborne and then Head. Hume had long been a defender of colonial freedoms and hoped one day to see the colonies represented in Westminster. The Radicals wanted to promote certain democratic reforms even at the price of an alliance with the Whig government. John Temple Leader, the young MP for Westminster since 1835 also defended the Patriote position in the Commons. Like Hume, he accepted the political economy of Adam Smith and believed that independence would be the eventual result of the relations between England and Canada. Leader was, according to Chapman an excellent speaker and very popular in the Commons and after Roebuck’s defeat at the polls in July 1837 became parliamentary spokesman for the interests of Lower Canadians. Henry Brougham was, with Hume, another veteran of the British politics and came from the great Whig tradition of Wilberforce and Lord Holland. Brougham was an important Whig politician under Grey but had broken with Melbourne and acted almost as an independent in the House of Lords where he was virtually the only defender of the Patriote ideas. More important support came from the Irish leader Daniel O’Connell who led about thirty Irish MPs in the Commons. According to Chapman, O’Connell saw the problems of Lower Canada in a similar light to problems of Ireland. The relationship between the Radicals and the Irish MPs was complex at the time of the Rebellions particularly because the Radicals supported the Irish Poor Law Bill. O’Connell and his MPs voted with the Radicals in opposition to the Russell Resolutions in early 1837 but in January 1838 supported the government when it suspended the constitution of Lower Canada. The pro-Patriote lobby could also count on the support of about fifteen less important MPs like William Clay (Tower Hamlets), Thomas Wakley (Finsbury), Henry George Ward (Bridgeport), William Ewart (Liverpool) and especially George Grote and Sir William Molesworth, a close friend of Lord Durham.

Beyond the House of Commons, Henry Samuel Chapman, who acted as Roebuck’s secretary, was critical to the wider expression of pro-Patriote ideas. Born in 1803 in London, Chapman was a merchant initially in Amsterdam and, after 1823, in Quebec. Until 1834, each winter he came to England where he attended the radical circles. [5] In February 1833, he established Montreal Daily Advertiser, the first Canadian daily newspaper in Montreal, a newspaper devoted to economic news. The drafting of the Ninety-Two Resolutions in February 1834 and especially the Patriote victory with the 1834 elections, abruptly made him aware of the nature of the Lower Canadian crisis. In What is the Result of the Canadian Election?, an extremely radical leading article that was reprinted in French and then republished in England, Chapman noted that the Lower Canadian crisis was by no means simply an ethnic dispute but was a contest between two great opposing principles: the aristocratic principle and the democratic principle. On the one hand, there was a largely English political oligarchy supported by protectionist merchants and on the other the Patriote party supported by many Canadians. In his many other writings on the question, Chapman had occasion to refine his thought. In his bipolar vision, there is no place for the moderate opinion either in England or in Canada. He attacked the moderate wing of the Patriote party in Canada as much as it attacked the Whig government. Chapman noted that the Philosophic Radicals, who defended democracy, free trade and certain social reforms, were similar to the Patriote movement of Louis-Joseph Papineau. Disowned by his Tory partners, Chapman promptly gave up publication of the Daily Advertiser. As a result, he agreed to act as emissary of the Patriote party in Great Britain.

Initially the mission of Chapman was to last only until the end of 1835 but his mandate was renewed on 8 September 1835 and he was given an additional £50 to the £300 pounds already paid. Unlike the fees paid to Roebuck, Chapman’s did not have to be authorised by the Council. After 1836, as Roebuck’s secretary, Chapman was occupied forwarding official documents of the British government to the Assembly, receiving letters from Papineau and other Patriote leaders, getting articles on Canada published in the British press and supplying the radical and Irish MPs with documents relating to Canada. [6] Chapman’s most remarkable contribution was the articles he wrote for the Vindicator, a leading radical newspaper in Montreal. Chapman undertook to write on 29 January 1835, five days after his arrival in England and his letters appeared each week with astonishing regularity, a total of 125 letters were published before the Vindicator closed on 6 November 1837. They were translated and re-published in several newspapers such as L’Écho du Pays and Minerve. The work of Chapman cannot be disassociated from that of Samuel Revans, his long-standing collaborator. He was born in Kennington in 1803 and the two men were close from their infancy. Revans arrived in Quebec in 1823 and became involved in the trade of dry goods also making many trips to and from America and Europe. It is from Revans that Chapman acquired the printing equipment in 1833 to launch Montreal Daily Adverstiser and who assumed the losses when it closed. After Chapman moved to England as the agent of the Patriote Party, Revans became a sales representative combining this with his work with the Radicals and Patriotes. His brother John Revans was a convinced free-trader and a future member of Anti-Corn Law Association.

Lastly, Thomas Falconer came from one of the great families of Bath. Roebuck’s marriage to Harriett Falconer and the support of her family were invaluable assets at the time of the election of 1832. Falconer was called to the bar in 1830. He was thirty-two years old at the time of the rebellions and, filled with enthusiasm by the resistance of Mackenzie on Navy Island, went to Canada remaining there until 1840. The group around Chapman was concerned with other causes than the Patriotes. Their names are often associated with reformers such as David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, John Bowring and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. They campaigned against stamp duty of newspaper or the ‘tax on knowledge’, in favour of municipal reform, the abolition of the rotted boroughs and the defence of oppressed Poland. The most important contribution of this group was the publication of the Pamphlets for the People. Thirty-six appeared at each week between 11 June 1835 and 11 February 1836 and it was an important medium for Radical writers such as William Allen, Robert Hammesley and Francis Place. Chapman published twenty-seven articles relating especially to universal suffrage, the tax on the press and colonisation and also contributed to The London Review and The London and Westminster Review. The diversity of interest of these individuals shows that their pro-Canadian activities must be seen within their broader aims of transforming society.

Several Radical MPs opposed Russell’s Resolutions and the debate continued on 8 March. Hume advocated greater autonomy for Canada while Roebuck warned that, if the government provoked a rebellion, the United States of America would almost certainly intervene against Britain. Spokesmen for the ‘colonial reform’ movement, which advocated colonial self-government, maintained that the policy violated Lower Canada’s constitutional arrangements. [7] Thompson argued that withholding of supply was the proper way to have grievances addressed arguing that British public opinion would take the colonists’ side if the dispute escalated. [8] Just as the influence of elected bodies should be extended in Britain, Thompson declared, the same was true of Canada. Constitutional reform was the only way to create a more workable imperial connection. The Commons decisively rejected calls for an elected Legislative Council by 318 votes to 56 and on 14 April 1837 and endorsed the Government’s refusal to subject the Executive Council to the Assembly in Lower Canada by 269 votes to 46. The remaining resolutions were carried over two further nights of debate and were accepted by both Houses in early May. Gosford was instructed to convene the Assembly in a final attempt to obtain the arrears before parliament appropriated provincial funds. Yet, the death of William IV in June 1837 and the need to call a general election, delayed further discussion. The British Government and Papineau’s Patriotes were on a collision course and the Ten Resolutions accelerated the polarisation of opinion. The Government’s position was that there could be no middle way between maintaining British rule and Canada’s separation from Britain while Patriotes recognised that accepting the Resolutions meant acknowledging the sovereignty of the imperial parliament to which they were now obstinately opposed. [9]

One of the most important initiatives taken by the Radicals concerning Lower Canada was a large working-class meeting on 3 April 1837 organised by London Working Men’s Association that formed the core of the Chartist movement. The Russell Resolutions occupied many in the House of Commons in February 1837 and the organised labour followed discussions in the Commons with great interest. The meeting denounced Russell’s Resolutions as a further expression of aristocratic power that the radical MPs had been unable to defeat. Both the speakers and the tone of the speeches suggest close links with the emergent Chartist movement. The principal speakers were William Lovett, William Molesworth and John Temple Leader, two radical MPs, and Henry S. Chapman. The first reports of the rebellions started to arrive to England in mid-December of 1837. Chapman and Roebuck were then in London. Samuel Revans was in Lower Canada and had taken part in some Patriote assemblies. However, he went to the United States as the rebellions began and was back in England early in 1838. The Radicals were surprised but not disappointed by the outbreak of violence and, in fact, it had an invigorating effect on their work. The English press was suddenly interested in the Canadas and the Radicals contributed a series of articles to The Sun, a London newspaper. Once the rebellions started, communications with Canada became very difficult and subterfuge was used to prevent letters revealing Patriote supporters to the authorities.

The fact that colonial grievances had developed into armed struggle prompted many radicals to condemn Melbourne’s government for mis­managing the crisis. A stand could now be made on ministerial responsibility as well as on the Canadians’ claim for political rights. However, a radical campaign would not be easy to set in motion. He questioned the reliability of Roebuck and Hume, for example, and not without reason. Seeking to increase his own influence, Roebuck had encouraged Papineau’s inflexibility. In so doing he had made an insurrection more likely, however much he blamed the government for failing to appease the Patriotes and his main concern subsequently was to obtain the salary that he was owed as agent for Lower Canada. Hume had also encouraged the Canadians to resist. He had been advising Mackenzie since the latter’s visit to London in 1832, and although Hume avoided violence, it was his denunciations of the British government that most impressed the opposition in Upper Canada. Mackenzie’s rising embarrassed Hume, whose reputation among moderates in Upper Canada declined. There were other problems for the radicals. They were divided on tactics and losing influence in the Commons. Some hated the Whig government and cared nothing about keeping out the Tories, while others, including Hume wanted to keep the ministers in place and urged their colleagues not to add to the ministry’s difficulties. Radical numbers in the Commons had fallen after the 1837 general election; Roebuck was among the casualties, as was Thompson. Nevertheless, both in and outside parliament, there were still activists ready to give priority to the Canada question, to denounce the government for causing the rebellion and to campaign against the coercive measures to which the imperial authorities had resorted.[10]

When radical leaders did come together for a decisive show of opposition to the government’s Canadian policy, discord resulted. On 4 January 1838, the Radicals organised the largest pro-Patriote gathering to have taken place in Great Britain. Three to four thousand people gathered at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in London to attend a meeting of London Working Men’s Association. Roebuck, Molesworth, Lovett, Leader, Harvey, O’Connor and Chapman addressed the crowd and, according to Chapman, ‘when it was mentioned that the peasantry had beaten the troops at St-Denis, they gave three Cheers for the honest Canadians. This meeting will the tone to the country …and I am glad to say that the general feeling of sympathy is growing in your favour.’ A committee is set up after the meeting to make 50,000 copies of the report of the speeches and to launch a periodical on the Canadian question called The Canadian Portfolio.

Hume took the chair, explained Canada’s grievances and, eager to maintain good relations with the Whigs, advised against the use of intemperate language. Leader then introduced the main resolution: ‘That the meeting, while they deeply lament the disastrous disturbance now existing in the colony of Lower Canada, are of opinion that this deplorable occurrence is to be ascribed to the misconduct of the British ministry, in refusing timely redress to the repeated complaints of the Canadian people, and in attempting to sustain that refusal by measures of gross injustice and coercion.’ Thompson seconded the resolution, ‘not because he was altogether contented with it, but because he had been asked to do so’, and he disapproved of the manner in which the resolutions had been altered. Thompson was, however, glad that Leader had described Canada as the scene of ‘civil war’ and not merely a disturbance. To cheers, Thompson admitted that he was prepared to go further. He asserted that the attempt of Melbourne’s government to seize the supplies in Lower Canada, against the wishes of the representative assembly, was an act of treason; in the seventeenth century Charles I had lost his head for the same offence. Thompson brushed aside Hume’s warning against ‘hard words’, insisting ‘words were not hard when true’. He viewed the British government as the original aggressor and believed that the Canadians were within their constitutional rights to stop supplies. To execute rebel leaders, moreover, would be like murdering prisoners of war. ‘Oppression cancels allegiance’, Thompson declared. In fact, resistance was a duty when rulers broke with their subjects and ‘unsheathed the sword’. Finally, he hoped that the public would forgive the weak part of the resolutions, strengthen the sound part and press the government to change course[11].

Five numbers of The Canadian Portfolio appeared between the 4 and 23 January 1838 containing many letters on Canada that the Radicals had written for the British press, as well as extracts of speeches by Roebuck in the Commons. Chapman explains to O’Callaghan that ‘The object was to influence in some degree the early discussions in Parliament and to place the case fairly before the public. This they have accomplished to the full extent of their power which it must be confessed in the midst of so much prejudice is but small’. Indeed, the vote on 29 January on the Canada Government Bill that suspended the Constitution of Lower Canada saw radical opposition reduced to eight votes against 110. In addition, the appointment of Lord Durham as governor-general had modified the situation considerably and rendered the campaign of The Canadian Portfolio increasingly unnecessary. Chapman conceded that ‘there is another reason why they cannot be continued. Printing is expensive every where, as you know, your friends here are poor. If I had £300 I could have raised the whole country in favour of Canada.’

The radical MPs seldom spoke specifically about the Ninety-Two Resolutions preferring to stick to general ideas that the English public was able to understand: principally calls for an elective legislative Council, the complete control by the Assembly of money matters, the abolition of the Tenure Act and the concession to the Assembly of Lower Canada of responsibility for distributing Crown lands. In promoting these principles, the Radicals constantly restated the parallels between their own disputes and those of the Patriote deputies arguing that on both sides of the Atlantic, the people and their representatives were engaged in a battle against monopolistic aristocracies and merchants. The Radicals were as convinced as the Canadians that the British government would not introduce reform as long as the Whigs were in power. Therefore, when they used the term ‘Party of the People’, they were making a clear comparison between themselves and the Patriotes and at the same time establishing a clear alliance between the English and Canadian radicals and the mandate of the people.

Why were radical MPs interested in Canadian affairs? According to their Tory critics, it gave them the opportunity to embarrass and attack the Whig government. According to certain historians, the interest of the Radicals in the Canadian question was related to considerations of domestic policy. By denouncing the Lower Canadian oligarchy, they were also denouncing the British aristocratic elite. The Radicals tended to vote en bloc against the government on the questions concerning Canada, in particular during the debate on the Russell Resolutions where they vigorously opposed Melbourne’s government. The debate on Canada gave the radical movement the cohesion and strength necessary to form a ‘party’. However, their support for the Patriote cause left them in an uncomfortable minority and contributed to their alienation from the more progressive Whigs. ‘We want no twilight reformers...’ wrote Chapman. Progressive Whigs like Edward Ellice or Henry Labouchere or those like Charles Buller or Lord Howick, more closely associated with the ideas of John Stuart Mill, were a disappointment to most Radicals on this question and were attacked by Chapman and Roebuck who opposed any suggestion of compromise with the government. Buller wrote to Mill concerning Lower Canada that ‘Your article delighted us all and in particular Lord Durham. I approve your new conserving attitude and I support your principle relating to the need for limiting the power of the majority.’ On the position to be taken on the Lower Canadian crisis, the correspondence between Radicals became sourer. Buller continues: ‘Leader really behaved like a stupid ass. I am happy to note that Molesworth continues to act well. It is said to me that Grote has gone completely off the rails; was it his temperament, his lack of judgement, his stubbornness or the influence of Ritoul that caused this?’ These quarrels contributed to divisions in the party at the time when John Stuart Mill was trying to set it up. The Canadian crisis, according to Mill ‘suspends all united action among Radicals…sets one portion of the friends of popular institutions at variance with another, and interrupts for the time all movements and all discussions tending to the great objects of domestic policy.’ Francis Parkes, a moderate Radical close to Mill went further and implied that the Radicals could harm the Patriote cause in England since ‘Unluckily, the advocates of the Lower Canadians here have damaged their cause’. For him, associating the fight of the Patriotes with that of the English Radicals was a grave error: ‘They hailed the outbreak for its insurrectionary spirit and domestic effect; an ignorant and absurd rejoicing’. Papineau wrote that: ‘By choosing our agent from the opposition, we have made it clear that we do not expect benevolence from Downing Street, but only of its fears…It is by denouncing injustice that we will claim our dues on this side of the Atlantic and the other’. This judgement is confirmed by the majority of the historians, in particular Philip Buckner who stated: ‘In appointing ‘tear ‘em Roebuck as their delegate, the Canadian party, as Papineau admitted, embarked upon its policy of confrontation’. [12]

The task entrusted to the Radicals by the Patriotes was ambiguous. On the one hand, they asked the Radicals to advance the Canadian cause in Great Britain and, on the other hand, to make no concession and to attack the Whig government on the whole of its colonial policy. This approach assumed the continued development of the Radical movement in London. However, as their influence in the Commons declined especially after the election during the summer of 1837, the Radicals suggested that the Patriotes resorted to arms as only means of advancing their cause and embarrassed the government for refusing to act on its warnings. Since 1835, the Vindicator had increased its calls for mobilisation and had invited parishes to organise armed groups. In 1836, it devoted a long article to a plan to seize Montreal without violence and there were only two thousand regular troops scattered over the vast extent of country. By not collaborating with progressive Whigs and, at the same time sticking to its hard line on the Canadian question, the Radicals limited the extent to which the government could resolve the problem. Caught between their populist mandate, their partisan perceptions and their reading of the political scene, they acknowledged that the use of force as the only means of resolving the dispute at the time when the influence of their own ‘party’ in England declined.

The arrival in London, in January 1838, of the Patriote leader Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine is significant and represented a change of strategy by certain Canadian reformers vis-à-vis the metropolis. [13] Following the failure of the rebellion in late 1837, the moderate members of the Patriote Party gave up their connection with the Radicals and sought to establish more constructive contacts with the British government. Papineau and O’Callaghan, in exile in the United States, were unable to assert their leadership over the Patriote movement. This change was at the expense of the strategy until then supported by Roebuck and Chapman.

On 19 November 1837, Lafontaine had written to the governor Lord Gosford to convince him to convene the Assembly urgently in order to avoid the rebellion that seemed imminent. Faced by Gosford’s refusal to do this, Lafontaine left Quebec for London arriving in early 1838. There, he met all those who campaigned for Canadian freedoms: Chapman and of course Roebuck, but also Hume, Brougham and Daniel O’ Connell. Roebuck, who has lost his seat in the 1837 election, was all the same invited to make two speeches to both the House of Commons and the House of Lords to explain his position on the Canadian crisis. Lafontaine attended his speech in front of the Lords on 5 February 1838. On the same platform were Samuel Revans, Thomas Falconer and seated just behind Chapman, Lord Durham himself. From the start, relations between Lafontaine and the Radicals were bad. Lafontaine was in London when Lord Durham was appointed governor-general, an appointment he supported and which some Radicals did not. For him, Durham was better placed than anyone to consider the problem. At that time, Roebuck sought to coordinate the efforts of the Radicals in order to influence the members of the Durham Commission. La Fontaine adopted an approach distinct the Radicals. Chapman did not appreciate this at all especially as Lafontaine largely kept his own counsel though he did communicate with Ellice. Thomas Falconer openly reproached Lafontaine for short-circuiting the work of the Radicals writing that ‘he met too many officials; he had even gone to supper with Joseph Parkes, who is nothing less than a government spy. He had met members of the government and discussed the possibility of amnesty whereas the true friends of Canada had been speaking about amnesty since the beginning of the Rebellion.’

In the final analysis, the Radicals were not part of Lafontaine’s diplomacy and this undermined their credibility in England as representatives of the majority of Canadians. Lafontaine was back in New York on 11 June 1838. Probably informed by the letters of O’Callaghan, Papineau met him soon after. We do not have a report of this meeting but Papineau certainly had many issues to discuss with his former lieutenant. However, the authority of Papineau and O’Callaghan was already in decline by the summer of 1838 and they were the major supporters of the English Radicals’ approach to Lower Canada. The establishment of the Durham Commission represented a triple disappointment for the Radicals. [14] First, it made any pressure on the government of little value since Durham was given extensive powers and discretion to resolve the problem. Secondly, the departure of Durham for Canada revealed a deep crisis of leadership inside the English radical party since Durham himself was the most serious candidate for leader. Finally, it represented the triumph of the moderates within the Patriote party who were prepared to enter into a dialogue with the Whig government and who would soon agree to the union of Upper and Lower Canadas.

The fact that it was the radical movement in England that was entrusted with the task of defending Canadian interests between 1834 and 1838 was characteristic of the hardening of attitudes and growing radicalism that occurred within the Patriote Party. However, the Radicals formed only a small group hostile to the Whig government and there are significant doubts about the constructive character of their action in Great Britain on behalf of Lower Canada. After the failure of the rebellion and the eclipse of Papineau, moderate Patriotes reconsidered their alliance with the Radicals and recognised that there needed to be more diffuse action and more cooperation with the English government. The bulk of the Patriote Party no longer needed the Radicals and their influence over Canadian affairs rapidly waned.

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[1] Knowles, E. C., The English Philosophical Radicals and Lower Canada, 1820-1830, London, 1929 provides the context. Thomas, William, The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817-1841, (Oxford University Press), 1979 is the best examination of this amorphous and highly ambiguous political ‘party’. There is also an interesting discussion of the Canadian question in Turner, Michael J., Independent Radicalism in Early Victorian Britain, (Praeger), 2004, pp. 207-215.

[2] Paradis, Jean Marc, Augustin-Norbert Morin, 1803-1865, (Septentrion), 2005 must be regarded as the best biography of this moderate Patriote.

[3] Laporte, Gilles, Le radical britannique Chapman et le Bas-Canada: 1832-1839, mémoire présenté à l’Université du Québec à Montréal comme exigence partielle de la maîtrise en histoire par Gilles Laporte, (Université du Québec à Montréal), 1987.

[4] Ajzenstat, Janet, ‘Collectivity and individual right in mainstream liberalism: John Arthur Roebuck and the Patriotes’, Revue d`études canadiennes / Journal of Canadian studies, Vol. 19, (1984), pp. 99-111, reprinted in Ajzenstat, Janet, The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament, (McGill-Queen’s University Press), 2007, pp. 163-179.

[5] Chapman, Henry Samuel, Correct Account of the Rise and Progress of the Recent Popular Movements in Lower Canada, (John Childs and Sons), 1837 gave his side of the story.

[6] Dufebvre, B., ‘La presse anglaise en 1837-38. Adam Thom, John Neilson et John Fisher’, La Revue de l’Université Laval, Vol. 8, (1953), pp. 267-274 is a valuable critique of the attitude of the anglophone press to the Canadian crisis and on how the Lower Canadians sought to influence public opinion in Britain.

[7] Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 3^rd series, Vol. xxxvi, cols. 1287-1362, (1837); Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 3^rd series, xxxvii, cols. 76-147, (1837); ibid, Buckner, Phillip, The Transition to Responsible Government, pp. 218-223; Chancellor, V., The Political Life of Joseph Hume, 1777-1855: the Scot who was for 30 Years a Radical Leader in the British House of Commons, (V. Chancellor), 1986, pp. 80, 106-107; Huch, R. K., and Ziegler, P. R., Joseph Hume: the People’s M.P., Philadelphia, Pa., 1985, pp. 63, 101-102; see also above Burroughs, Peter, (ed.), The Colonial Reformers and Canada, 1830-49: Selections from Documents and Publications of the Times, Toronto, 1969, pp. 109-114; The Spectator, 11, 18 March 1837.

[8] Johnson, L. G., General T. Perronet Thompson, 1783-1869: his Military, Literary and Political Campaigns, (Allen & Unwin), 1957, and Turner, Michael J., ‘Radical opinion in an age of reform: Thomas Perronet Thompson and the Westminster Review’, History, Vol. 84, (2001), pp. 18-40, and Independent Radicalism in Early Victorian Britain, pp. 204-217, passim, consider Thompson’s role in debates on Canada in the 1830s.

[9] ‘To the secretary of the Hull Reform Association’, Hull Advertiser, 21 April 1837; ibid, Burroughs, Peter, The Canadian Crisis and British Colonial Policy, pp. 86-93; ibid, Prest, John, Lord John Russell, p. 129; see also above Buckner, Phillip, The Transition to Responsible Government, pp. 223-225.

[10] Maccoby, S. English Radicalism, 1832-52, (Allen & Unwin), 1935, pp. 354-356; Ibid, Buckner, Phillip, The Transition to Responsible Government: British Policy in British North America, 1815-50, pp. 27-29, 239-240.

[11] Morning Chronicle, 5^th January 1838; ibid, Maccoby, S. English Radicalism, 1832-52, pp. 356-357. The Times, 5 January 1838, accused speakers of ‘absurdities, extravagances and calumnies’ and stigmatised the event as an ‘unprincipled and atrocious meeting, which, in so far as it tends to uphold the Canadians in their treason, assists in the shedding [of] every drop of human blood, whether English or Canadian, which may be spilt in the progress of this wanton and cruel strife’

[12] Buckner, Phillip, The Transition to Responsible Government: British Policy in British North America 1815-1850, (Greenwood Press), 1985, p. 28.

[13] Aubin, Georges, (ed.), Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine: Journal de voyage en Europe 1837-1838, (Septentrion), 1999, pp. 12-16, 38-77.

[14] New, Chester, ‘Lord Durham and the British Background of his Report’, Canadian Historical Review, Vol. 20, (1939), pp. 119-161 remains an important paper on this issue.

University education 1800-1870

These were not glorious years for the ‘ancient’ universities. Cambridge[1] and Oxford[2] reposed in a social and curricular inertia that limited their value to society.[3] Their intake was socially remarkably stable and narrow: between 1752 and 1886, 51% of Oxford students and 58% of those at Cambridge came from two social groups, the gentry and the clergy. The future careers were even narrower: 64% of Oxford and 54% of Cambridge men went into the Church. The student body was limited by its connection with the Church of England and the requirement at both universities that graduates should subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles excluded Nonconformists. They were thus isolated from the new potential clientele of Nonconformist business families enriched by industrialisation. High costs, a course could cost over £300 per year also limited the social composition of courses. Oxford became socially exclusive in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. As a result many people needed scholarships, the bulk of which were in classics and mathematics. This had an impact of the school curriculum and led to a focus on and perpetuation of classical education in grammar and public schools. The provision of fellowships also had a similar effect. Most fellowships were tied to classics at Oxford and mathematics at Cambridge. In this way the whole financial scholarship-fellowship system locked the older subjects into the ancient universities.

This was also tied into the power struggle within the institutions between the university and the colleges. At Oxford and Cambridge the colleges were powerful and wealthy and the universities relatively weak as financial and administrative entities. This suited colleges that ran like private companies. They were aware the classics and mathematics were very cheap subjects to teach and did not entail research or expensive equipment or even rapidly growing libraries. The colleges were not only conservative about new subjects for financial reasons; they also feared a tilting of the balance of power in favour of the universities. More university power as, for example, in the building of common science laboratories, meant less college autonomy. Curricular conservatism was rooted in a defence of a private financial system and resistance to the growth of centralised power in the university.

What was the function of the university? The debate on the role of universities in society had several dimensions. There was an important argument about research as a function of the university. Advocates of research in the 1860s such as Mark Pattison and Henry Halford Vaughan were influenced by German universities and accepted the discovery of new knowledge as part of their obligations.[4] They wished to move Oxford and Cambridge away from being merely advanced public schools towards a more liberal education with more money on research on the sciences, history and archaeology. This viewpoint inevitably involved a clash with the established college position. The financial provision of scholarships and fellowships outside the classics and mathematics brought conflict with the curricular conservatism in college-based anti-research teaching. Until some changes were made to the autonomy of the colleges there could be no change in teaching and the colleges would continue to exert a stranglehold not just over university but also the schools that aimed to send their boys to Oxford or Cambridge.

Curriculum conservatism was defended as a positive virtue in a lively debate about ‘liberal education’ in relation to universities. This was an important argument against those who attacked the classics as a patently useless form of study on crudely utilitarian grounds. This argument had two basic propositions. There is a distinction between ends and means. Some activities and qualities are ends in themselves and cannot be justified by reference to some ends beyond themselves. This is the essence of the ‘education for its own sake’ case. As well as being ‘an end in itself’, the study of the classics fitted a man for no particular occupation thereby fitting him for all. This was a belief that was to become very influential in the 1850s when the general intellectual training given by classics was regarded as the most suitable for civil service recruitment through public examinations. The culmination of the old liberal education ideal was expressed by John Henry Newman in his Discourses on University Education that he gave in Dublin in 1852.[5] Liberal education made the gentlemen and was ‘the especial characteristic or property of a University and of a gentleman’. The end result of such education was ‘a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid equitable dispassionate mind’.[6] The purpose was not vocational training but the general development of the intellect and of moral and social qualities for their own sake. This expressed what the ancient universities thought about themselves and what many others conceived the purpose of a university education to be.[7]

From 1850, the ancient universities began a limited reform. Following Royal Commissions for both universities in 1852, an Act for Oxford in 1854 and for Cambridge two years later enabled Nonconformists both to matriculate and to graduate. This solved one problem but created another for graduated Nonconformists were still barred from becoming fellows of colleges throughout the 1860s and were not finally removed until the Universities‘ Religious Tests Act 1871, that also obviated the need for fellows to be ordained clergymen. There was also some curricular innovation. In 1848, Cambridge established new tripos in Natural Sciences and in Moral Sciences that included history and law. In Oxford two years later, the Schools of Law and Modern history and of Natural Sciences were established. Since both universities now claimed to teach science to degree level they both built laboratories: the Oxford Museum in 1855 and the New Museum at Cambridge in 1865. The watershed for Oxford and Cambridge came after 1870 with the Cleveland Commission of 1873 leading to the Act of 1877 and the revision of the statutes of colleges. The latter were obliged to release some of their funds for the creation of scientific professorships and university institutions. Only then, with this rebalancing of power between colleges and the universities was it possible to create an Oxford and Cambridge more oriented to research in science and scholarship, professional training, a widening curriculum and a strong professoriat.

Oxford and Cambridge had considerable defects that were only beginning to be resolved in the 1850s and 1860s but there was no effective civic university movement that could serve as an alternative. The Church of England had founded Durham University in 1832 but it became virtually a clergy training college with 90% of its students going into Holy Orders.[8] By trying to ape Oxford without having the latter’s resources it had very little success either with poor students or in the eyes of local industrialists who rejected it in favour of Newcastle as a centre of urgently needed mining education. Owens College, Manchester, fared little better. It began in 1851 with £100,000 left by John Owen, a local textile manufacturer. Yet its intention was not as a technological university to serve industry but a college to give ‘instruction in the branches of learning and science taught in the English universities‘. It was to be the Oxford of the north! The Manchester business classes were unimpressed and it was not until the 1870s when it acquired a new sense of purpose in service to industry that it began to take its place in the forefront of the civic universities movement.[9] A more vital root of the future civic universities lay in the emergence of provincial medical schools. The Apothecaries’ Act 1815 made it illegal to practise as an apothecary unless licensed by the Society of Apothecaries. This stimulated the creation of medical schools to prepare students for the examinations and, from 1831, those of the Royal College of Surgeons. Schools were founded in Manchester (1825), Sheffield (1827), Birmingham (1828), Bristol (1828), Leeds (1830), Liverpool (1834) and Newcastle (1834). Both Durham and Owens before 1870 were abortive provincial initiatives stifled by the ancient universities and channelled into the dead end of being deferential and unsuccessful imitations rather than challenging alternatives. The medical schools, by contrast, provided one of the strands out of which civic universities were to emerge after 1870.

The origins of the University of London, by contrast, were rooted in an open antipathy to the ancient universities and not with any concern to reproduce them.[10] Founded in 1828, it differed from existing institutions in three respects: first, it was free of religious tests and open to nonconformists and unbelievers; secondly, it was to be cheaper than the ancient universities to cater for ‘middling rich people’; and finally, there was a strong emphasis on professional training in the medical, legal, engineering and economic studies neglected at Oxford and Cambridge. It was to be useful and vocational. The Church of England did not regard the creation of the new University College in ‘Godless Gower Street’ with kindness and established their own rival King’s College in 1828 as an exclusively Anglican institution but also with a focus on vocational training. From 1836, the University of London became the body managing examinations and degrees for its now constituent colleges, University and King’s. From 1858, it became the examining body dealing not only with London institutions but providing external examinations for all comers. The chief criticism levelled at universities in this period was that their neglect of science meant they could contribute little to the needs of industrialisation. Oxford and Cambridge produced clergy, gentlemen and, after 1850, civil servants. They did not appeal to the commercial classes or to the new professions; nor did Durham and Manchester before 1870. Only the London colleges thrived on a close linkage with the new business and professional classes. Nor did the university sector keep up with rising population and during the decade between 1855 and 1865 only one in 77,000 went to university. Higher education was still accessible to only a small minority.

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[1] Searby, Peter, A history of the University of Cambridge: Vol. 3: 1750-1870, (Cambridge University Press), 1997 and Brooke, C.N.L., A history of the university of Cambridge: Vol. 4: 1870-1990, (Cambridge University Press), 1992.

[2] Brock, M.G. and Curthoys, Mark C., (eds.), The history of the University of Oxford, Vol. 6: Nineteenth-century Oxford, part I, (Oxford University Press), 1997 and The history of the University of Oxford, Vol. 7: Nineteenth-century Oxford, part 2, (Oxford University Press), 2000.

[3] Anderson, R.D., Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800, (Macmillan), 1992, (Cambridge University Press), 1995 is a very useful, short summary of current research on the role of universities in nineteenth century society.

[4] See, Pattison, Mark, Suggestions on academical organisation with especial reference to Oxford, (Edmonston and Douglas), 1868, Sparrow, John, Mark Pattison and the Idea of a University, (Cambridge University Press), 1967, 2008, Jones, H. Stuart, Bill, Intellect and character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the invention of the don, (Cambridge University Press), 2007, E.G.W., University reform in nineteenth-century Oxford: a study of Henry Halford Vaughan, 1811-1885, (Oxford University Press), 1973

[5] Newman, J.H., Discourses on the scope and nature of university education: addressed to the Catholics of Dublin, (James Duffy), 1852.

[6] Newman, J.H., The idea of a university: defined and illustrated : I, in nine discourses delivered to the Catholics of Dublin : II, in occasional lectures and essays addressed to the members of the Catholic University, (Longman), 1891, p. 110

[7] Harvie, Christopher, The lights of liberalism: university liberals and the challenge of democracy, 1860-86, (Allen Lane), 1976.

[8] Watson, Nigel, The Durham difference: the story of Durham University, (James & James), 2007.

[9] Fiddes, Edward, Chapters in the History of Owens College and of Manchester University, 1851-1914, (Manchester University Press), 1937

[10] Harte, N.B. and North, John, The world of University College, London, 1828-1990, (London University Press), 1991 and Harte, N.B., The University of London, 1836-1986: an illustrated history, (Athlone), 1986.

Educating the middle-classes 1800-1870

Before 1850, no one seriously argued the need for the state to provide schools for middle and upper-class children largely because it was thought the free market was functioning effectively. Certainly it seems there was considerable activity and formal schooling appears to have been becoming the norm for boys. This sense of activity had to remain an impressionistic one and is difficult to quantify.[1] In the early-nineteenth century, families who aimed to raise their sons as gentlemen and who could afford to do so employed tutors to educate their children at home. Home education was though to be more conducive to virtue than the public schools with their low standards of morality and harsh corporal discipline. Rising urban populations and living standards brought an increase in middle-class families able to afford modest fees for private day schooling in their home towns. It was these demands that were to revitalise the grammar schools and subsequently the public boarding schools.

St Margaret’s School, Durham which was opened in 1861.

Durham University Library, ref Pam L372.9 Dur

Grammar schools responded strongly to demands for middle-class education. Endowed often in the sixteenth century to provide free education for the poor, it was unclear what ‘grammar schools’ were by 1800.[2] Many taught elementary subjects sometimes with classics, took all social classes, included girls and acted simply as the local village or parochial school. The first half of the nineteenth century saw a process of change in three areas. Grammar schools began to change their curriculum, often including commercial subjects alongside the classics. The new curriculum enabled the schools to charge fees. There was a decisive shift to a fee-paying middle-class clientele and away from the poorer former free pupils. [3] The move away from the original charitable intentions of the founders of grammar schools led to several disputes between trustees, who wanted to charge fees, and schoolmasters who did not. The most famous case was between the trustees and schoolmaster at Leeds Grammar School and led to a ten-year case in the Court of Chancery that resulted in Lord Eldon’s judgement in 1805 that grammar schools could not use their endowments to teach non-classical subjects free of charge. The Grammar Schools Act 1840 made it lawful to apply the income of grammar schools to purposes other than the teaching of classical languages, but this change still required the consent of the schoolmaster. Some schools pressed further along the road and turned themselves into boarding schools, Victorian public schools in embryo.[4]

In the mid-nineteenth century, three factors revitalised those grammar schools that had already made the change and those that had not. A new breed of headmaster seemed to appear at this time, of high Victorian moral purpose and strength of personality. Such men often took over ailing or mediocre grammar schools and made them centres of academic excellence: for example, Caldicott at Bristol (1860), Jessopp at Norwich (1859), Mitchinson at Canterbury (1859) and Walker at Manchester (1859).[5] The schools were stimulated by the creation of a system of ‘middle-class’ examinations from the 1850s. T.D. Acland in Exeter started these as a private venture in 1856 but so great was demand that their administration was taken over by Oxford and Cambridge in 1858 and they became known as the Local examinations. For middle-class boys not intending to go to university they were a valuable school-leaving qualification and gave grammar schools something to aim for, and a perception of how they measured up to a common standard. The Higher Locals began at Cambridge in 1868 and at Oxford in 1877. In 1873 the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examining Board was established.

The third factor was the Taunton Commission that investigated some 800 endowed schools between 1864 and 1867.[6] Its investigations revealed the poor provision of secondary education, its uneven distribution and the misuse of endowments. It also showed that there were only thirteen secondary schools for girls in the country. It addressed the problem of middle-class parents who could not afford to send their children to public schools but who wanted a local grammar school offering a curriculum that would provide entry to universities or to the professions for their sons. The Commissioners recommended the establishment of a national system of secondary education based on existing endowed schools. This solution led to the abolition of free education in grammar schools excluding free boys from the lower middle-class, artisan and tradesman classes who had no university or professional ambitions and enable the curriculum to be determined by the market demand of fee-payers. The Endowed Schools Act 1869 established three Commissioners who, by making schemes and regulations for some 3,000 endowments, created throughout the country the middle-class fee-paying academic grammar school.[7] Their defect was in failing to provide for the tradesman-artisan class who had to resort to the new Board Schools created after 1870.

Public schools differed from grammar schools because they catered for the upper and upper-middle-classes and were boarding establishments.[8] The body of Victorian public schools were made up of various groups. There were the ancient nine schools investigated by the Clarendon Commission in the 1860s (Eton,[9] Winchester, Harrow[10], Charterhouse[11], Rugby[12], Westminster[13], Merchant Taylors’,[14] St. Paul’s and Shrewsbury[15]). To these were added certain grammar schools that had changed their status like Sedburgh and Giggleswick.

There were also waves of new foundations: nine in the 1840s (including Rossall, Marlborough and Cheltenham) and ten in the 1860s (including Clifton and Malvern). Most were run as commercial ventures but many had wider purposes: schools at Lancing and Hurstpierpoint promoted high Anglicanism while those at Cranleigh and Framlingham stressed science and agriculture for farmers’ sons. The schools achieved cohesion informally by inter-school games playing and formally by membership of the Headmasters’ Conference that met first in 1869 initially comprising the non-Clarendon public schools.

Rugby school c1860

Public schools also underwent a process of changing vitality after 1830. Increasing numbers of middle-class children survived infancy and they could no longer conveniently be taught at home. They had to be sent away to school. Improvements in transport facilities, fast road-coaches and then railways, made possible a national market in education. Newly founded schools or old town grammar schools could set out to attract a regional or even national catchment of clients who would reside as boarders. The growing empire meant that many more families lived abroad but for cultural and climatic reasons they preferred their children to be educated in England in institutions that provided a home environment. Public schools were sought by newly prospering social groups who wished to confirm their status by assimilation with existing landed and professional elites. Thomas Arnold‘s reforms at Rugby and the spread of his masters into other schools raised the moral tone of public schools making them attractive to those who cared for their children’s nurture and who had shunned the violence and neglect of welfare that characterised many public schools before 1830.

Important changes took place in the content of education in public schools. Science was accepted into the curriculum, especially in the 1860s. Various factors changed this situation: the introduction of science degrees in the 1850s; army reforms of the 1850s that placed an emphasis on competitive examining including two papers in science helped by the increase in the numbers of graduate science masters; and a new generation of headmasters with particular interests in science: for example, H.M. Butler and F.W. Farrer at Harrow and Frederick Temple at Rugby. Almost as important as change in the formal curriculum was a change in the value systems of the public schools.

Thomas Arnold

Thomas Arnold raised the tone of the schools from the 1820s with ‘godliness and good learning’ with the aim of producing the Christian Gentleman.[16] From the 1850s, these ideals came to be replaced by a more secular and robust emphasis on manliness and character training. ‘Muscular Christianity‘, as advocated by Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley, equated virile good health with Christian values and in the 1860s was expressed in a concern for organised games, athleticism and militarism.[17] Arnold had effected a change in the ethos of public schools and the changes of the 1860s matched them with secular needs outside.

These developments made public schools highly attractive to social groups of parents somewhat below the traditional clientele and there was a marked change in the social intake of such schools after 1850. In the first half of the century, the social class of parents at eight leading public schools showed that the gentry provided 38.1% of boys, titled persons 12.2%, clergy 12.0% and professional parents 5.2%. There was an expected and large predominance of the rural elites of gentry, titled and clerical families. From the 1850s, there is clear evidence of the rise of business families beginning to send their sons to Winchester and as more businessmen’s sons went to these schools so in turn more public school boys went into careers in business and industry. At Winchester this rose from 7.2% of boys born in the 1820s to 17.6% of those born in the 1850s. These upward trends in businessmen sending their sons to public school and in public schoolboys entering business were to be of great importance. There was a link between class, public school, education and business leadership in the larger companies from the 1860s. An extended public school network gradually replaced the older Nonconformist network that had characterised the early industrial entrepreneurs.

The strong expansion of middle-class education both in grammar and public schools after 1830 was a response to the demands for education from parents. The Royal Commission under Lord Clarendon, established in 1859, looked at the nine ‘ancient institutions’ that still focussed on the classics and which found themselves facing stiff competition from newer and more progressive institutions. Clarendon was concerned that these newer schools were giving the middle-classes a better education that the upper-classes did not have and that this was socially dangerous. The problem of the decaying grammar schools led the government to concede another Royal Commission in 1864, under Lord Taunton, to look at all schools not looked at by either Clarendon or Newcastle.[18] The two Commissions took as a given the stratification of schooling for the middle-classes as it had developed in the first half of the century and formalised it into a hierarchy. At the top were the ‘first grade schools’ modelled on Eton and its eight correspondents, mostly boarding, with a classical education, sending boys to universities. Next came the ‘second grade schools’, mostly day, teaching a Latin but no Greek, whose boys would leave at sixteen. Finally there were ‘third grade schools’, all day, teaching a little Latin, sending boys into employment at fourteen. The three grades were conceived as parallel, separate tracks, only the common study of Latin allowing mobility via scholarships from one track to another for the very bright. The Public Schools Act of 1868 and the Endowed Schools Act the following year greatly helped the process.

The three-grade division proved over elaborate. However, an increasingly clear distinction emerged between schools for gentlemen and schools for those who aimed at respectability not gentility. The problem was not the grading but the opportunities open to the educated. Too many public schoolboys were being produced between 1851 and 1871 when there were fewer opportunities in the Church, law and medicine and young men with middle-class aspirations also outstripped the availability of careers. The fastest growing occupations lay in lower middle-class employment such as clerks and shop assistants to which ex-public schoolboys would be unlikely to be attracted. The Empire provided a safety valve as products of these new schools sought in colonial lifestyles a status they would have been denied at home.

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[1] For this area of education see Bamford, T.W., The Rise of the Public Schools, (Nelson), 1967 and Allsobrook, David, Schools for the shire: The reform of middle-class education in mid-Victorian England, (Manchester University Press), 1986.

[2] Timpson, Richard S., Classics or charity?: the dilemma of the 18^th century grammar school, (Manchester University Press), 1971.

[3] Edwards, Edward, An inquiry into the revenues and abuses of the free grammar school at Brentwood, (C. Roworth), 1823 demonstrates the problems of turning a free school into a fee-paying one.

[4] Carlisle, Nicholas, A concise description of the endowed grammar schools in England and Wales, 2 Vols. (Baldwin, Cradock and Joy), 1818 provides a detailed description of the development and state of grammar schools.

[5] Hill, C.P., The History of Bristol Grammar School, (Pitman), 1951, pp. 78-107, Saunders, H.W., A History of Norwich Grammar School, (Jarrold and Sons Ltd.), 1932, Mumford, A.A., The Manchester Grammar School, 1515-1915; A Regional Study of the Advancement of Learning in Manchester Since the Reformation, (Longman, Green and Co.), 1919.

[6] Schools Inquiry Commission: report of the commissioners plus Minutes of evidence etc., Parliamentary papers, [3966] H.C. (1867-8), Vol. XXVIII, pt. 1, 1; Parliamentary papers, [3966-I to XX] H.C. (1867-8) and Vol. XXVIII, pts. II to XVII.

[7] Balls, F.E., ‘The Endowed Schools Act, 1869, and the development of the English grammar schools in the 19^th century’, Durham Research Review, Vol. 19, (1967), pp. 207-218; Vol. 20, (1968), 219-229 and Goldman, Lawrence, ‘The defection of the middle class: The Endowed Schools Act, the Liberal Party, and the 1874 election’, in Ghosh, Peter and Goldman, Lawrence, (eds.), Politics and culture in Victorian Britain : essays in memory of Colin Matthew, (Oxford University Press), 2006, pp. 118-135.

[8] Chandos, John, Boys together: English public schools, 1800-1864, (Hutchinson), 1984, Huggins, M.J.W. and Rees, A.D.J., The making of an English public school, (Hiroona), 1982 and Simon, Brian and Bradley, Ian C., (eds.), The Victorian public school: studies in the development of an educational institution: a symposium, (Gill and Macmillan), 1975.

[9] Card, Tim, Eton established: a history from 1440 to 1860, (John Murray), 2001.

[10] Tyerman, Christopher, A history of Harrow School, 1324-1991, (Oxford University Press), 2000.

[11] Quick, Anthony, Charterhouse: a history of the school, (James & James), 1991.

[12] Bettinson, G.H., Rugby School, (printed for the author and publisher by Harold Saunders), 1929.

[13] Carleton, J.D., Westminster School: a history, (Country life, Ltd.), 1934, 2^nd ed., (R. Hart-Davis), 1965.

[14] Draper, Frederick W.M., Four centuries of Merchant Taylors’ school, 1561-1961, (Oxford University Press), 1962.

[15] Oldham, J.B., A history of Shrewsbury School, 1552-1952, (Oxford University Press), 1952.

[16] Copley, Terence, Black Tom: Arnold of Rugby: the myth and the man, (Continuum), 2002.

[17] Many schools began cadet corps in the 1860s, notably Eton, Winchester, Harrow and Rugby. See, Money, Tony, Manly and muscular diversions: public schools and the nineteenth-century sporting revival, (Duckworth), 1997 and Neddam, Fabrice, ‘Constructing masculinities under Thomas Arnold of Rugby (1828-1842): gender, educational policy and school life in an early-Victorian public school’, Gender & Education, Vol. 16, (2004), pp. 303-326.

[18] Anon. Report from the select committee of the House of Lords on the Public Schools Bill [H.L.], Parliamentary papers, H.C. 481 (1865), Vol. X, 263 and Shrosbree, Colin, Public schools and private education: the Clarendon Commission, 1861-1864, and the Public Schools Acts, (Manchester University Press), 1988, pp. 73-134.

Adult migration 1600-1980

Migration was an integral part of the political process through which British identity, the British state and the British Empire were constructed. Although the notion of imperial Britain may not have been well received in Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was greater common ground in the idea of imperial Britain existing overseas. British settlement in the American colonies became the basis for Britain’s notion of empire and emigration, at least until the late eighteenth century, was an expression of the movement of British energies from east to west in Ireland and then further west to the American colonies. Attitudes to emigration were, however, ambivalent and Parliament banned the emigration of groups such as artisans who were seen as central to Britain’s economic expansion. Adam Smith suggested that colonial wealth could impoverish countries rather than enrich them and implied that emigration reduced the energies of the country when population was needed for the transformation of Britain itself. Colonies could be populated by slaves and by Protestants from northern Europe rather than British emigrants and Britain could still expand its empire.

During the nineteenth century, retaining Britain’s population was increasingly viewed not as the basis for economic and commercial growth but as a cancer that threatened the basis of British society. Emigration provided a solution that allowed the poor to escape from the impoverished rural and urban slums to the expanding colonies, themselves a source of wealth for Britain’s continuing prosperity and greatness. Emigration to the British colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was openly encouraged by the government and charities and by individuals and parishes. Whether this was the British state ‘shovelling out the poor’ as some colonial commentators believed, its aim was to populate the empire with British citizens as well as alleviating social distress in Britain and Ireland. [1] Rising levels of literacy meant that pamphlets calling for emigration proved popular among working- and middle-class audiences. For instance, John A. Etzler published Emigration to the tropical world for the melioration of all classes of the people of all nations in 1844, while J. Boyd wrote State directed emigration in 1883 and P. J. Andrews The coming race?: some reflections on the inherent dangers of mass civilisation in Britain and the opportunities for balanced spiritual development by peopling the dominions in 1929. The Empire Parliamentary Association issued pamphlets on emigration to Canada and Australia and the Salvation Army Organised Empire migration and settlement in 1930. There were also publications from other organisations such as the Imperial Immigration League, the Landholders and Commercial Association of British India, the London Compositors’ Emigration Aid Society, the Fund for Promoting Female Emancipation and the Clerkenwell Emigration Society. Books, children’s literature, souvenirs, paintings, public monuments and lectures all transmitted narratives of martial heroism from the mid-nineteenth century reinforcing the notion that emigration was not only practical but also, in some ways, heroic. [2] Foreign missionary representatives canvassed working-class Sunday schools and chapels and middle-class philanthropists for subscriptions but the missionary presence at local level extended far beyond this. [3] The effectiveness of missionary organisations was such that contemporaries could justifiably claim that ‘many a small tradesman or rustic knows more of African or Polynesian life than London journalists’. [4] Popular culture was saturated by imperial images from films and plays to sauce bottles and biscuit tins. This was populist propaganda on an industrial scale. [5]

Scottish and especially Irish emigration were far greater than that of the English in proportion to the size of their respective populations. Emigration from proved particularly successful. [6] Sir Charles Dilke, writing in 1869, remarked:

In British settlements, from Canada to Ceylon, from Dunedin to Bombay, for every Englishman that you meet who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings without external aid, you find ten Scotchmen. [7]

The Scots grasped the opportunities afforded by union in 1707 and there were large outflows of men and women looking for a new life and a new beginning, initially in North America. Between 1763 and 1777, 50,000 Scots largely from the west of Scotland settled in North America. [8] They quickly dominated the tobacco trade and other areas of economic life, such as fur-trapping in Canada. Education and religion were other areas of cultural life where the Scottish influence was dominant. Such was the strength of the Scottish presence in America that 19 of the 56 delegates who signed the Declaration of Independence came from Scotland or Ulster. The Scottish presence was also strongly present in India. Henry Dundas became President of the Board of Control in 1784 and with his support Scots came to dominate the activities of the East India Company. By 1792, they made up one in nine Company officials, one in eleven common soldiers and one in three officers. The first three Governor-Generals of India were Scots. Scottish scholars and scientists made important contributions to Indian culture and society: for instance, Colin Campbell completed the first geographical survey of India; Alexander Kydd created the Botanic gardens in Calcutta while others developed the infrastructure of India. Even after the dissolution of the East India Company in 1857 and the introduction of competitive entry into the British administration, they still played an important part in the running of India. Scots were important to the development of the Empire in diverse ways: as businessmen, as educators, as missionaries, as imperial administrators and soldiers. Whether this made the empire a ‘Scottish empire’, as some historians have argued is debatable. [9] Whatever the importance of Scots as emigrants or administrators of empire, decisions about the direction of empire and the policies through which it was ruled were made in London. It was the British state that dominated the empire.

As concerns over ‘surplus population’ grew, there was an increase in landless peasants from the Highlands and unemployed craftsmen, labourers and small farmers from the Lowlands willing to emigrate. Most were aged between 16 and 29 and men rather than women. Whatever the cause, Scotland lost between 10 and 47% of its natural population increase every decade between 1830 and 1940; a rate exceeded only in Ireland and Norway. However, even these countries were dwarfed by emigration from Scotland in the years 1904-1913 and again in 1921-1930, when over half a million people emigrated exceeding the entire natural increase and constituted one-fifth of the total working population. [10]

Until about 1855, a number of the emigrants from the Highlands were actually forced to leave the land because of mass evictions. The Emigration Act in 1851 made emigration more freely available to the poorest with the Highlands and Islands Emigration Society established to manage the process of resettlement. Under the scheme a landlord could secure a passage to Australia for a nominee at the cost of £1 and between 1846 and 1857, over 16,000 people, largely poor young men, were assisted to emigrate. Many settled in Canada in places such as Ontario and Nova Scotia, where they could continue to farm and maintain their style of life and ethnic identity. In Nova Scotia in the first half of the nineteenth century, 59% of settlers from Britain were Scots-born. In the Lowlands, the decision to move abroad was nearly always the outcome of the desire to improve living standards because they experienced low wages, poor housing conditions and unemployment and, unlike in the Highlands, was voluntary. Emigration was seen by trades unions and other voluntary groups as a practical solution to unemployment and economic depression. The high points in emigration corresponded with years of severe economic depression in the late 1840s and early 1850s, the mid-1880s and between 1906 and 1913. Emigration was so heavy in the period 1871-1931 but it more than offset the increase in the population due to new births. This trend was brought to a halt in the 1930s as the global depression saw emigrants returning home and the numbers leaving Scotland were at their lowest for a century. [11]

Canada was the most important destination of emigrants during the first half of the nineteenth century and between 1825 and 1835, over 70% of emigrants from Scotland settled there. [12] However, this changed substantially after 1860 and especially 1900 as skilled urban workers became the most important emigrants. In 1912 and 1913, 47% of adult male emigrants from Scotland described themselves as skilled, compared with 36% of those from England and Wales. Only 29% classed themselves as labourers. It seems also that in the late-nineteenth century wore on and emigration, individuals’ social standing determining the country where they settled. Unskilled labourers tended to opt for Canada and Australia, while skilled workers preferred South Africa and the USA. [13] The middle-classes strongly preferred South Africa. Emigration acted as a safety valve for modern Scotland and although the British Empire was the main beneficiary of this process, Scotland also benefited in terms of wealth and profit. The great commercial mansions of Edinburgh and Glasgow were built from the profits of the colonial trade. In addition, substantial areas of employment were dependent on Empire providing the economic mortar that held the Union together. The collapse of the Empire after 1945 forced Scotland to make a painful transition from an economy based on heavy industry to one dependent on services and electronics. It also led to a redrawing of the political map as the Unionist vote evaporated. In 1955, Scottish Conservative Party took 50.1% of the popular vote and held half of Scotland’s 72 parliamentary seats. This high-point was followed by a gradual decline from 1964 until in 1997, with 17.5% of the popular vote, it took no seats at all and only one seat in the 2001, 2005 and 2010 general elections [14]

The adult experience of emigration in England and Wales paralleled that in Scotland. The bulk of the migrant population went to the United States in the eighteenth century, although Canada and Australia were popular destinations after 1815. After 1900, America fell behind Canada and Australia in attracting large groups of emigrants and South Africa was beginning to attract emigrant in significant numbers. In 1911, of the more than 450,000 Britons who left the United Kingdom, almost half settled in Canada, nearly a quarter in Australia and approximately one tenth in South Africa. Subsided emigration made it possible for certain sections of the population to be sent abroad, most to North America and Australia. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 secured the passage of more than 25, 000 ‘paupers’ by 1860 and the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners helped 370,000 people move to Australia between 1840 and 1869. Young men tended to make up the vast majority of migrants, although couples and family units were also prominent. Migrants came from many different types of occupations. For instance, most Welsh emigrants were miners or worked in the iron, steel, copper and tin industries. However, general labourers and worker of the building trades and textile workers, engineers, farmers, clerical and commercial workers were also represented. In the 1880s, when emigration had reached massive proportions, the most important group among the immigrants was urban unskilled workers. This suggests that, by the 1880s, the occupations of British emigrants reflected closely those of the population as a whole. [15]

Adult emigration, whatever its motivation in Britain, was determined by the economic needs of the colonies that were different at different times. The majority of New Zealand’s English, at least until 1920, were largely from the rural, working-class. Unlike the United States, which attracted unskilled labourers and industrial workers, NZ recruited agricultural labourers and pre-industrial craftsmen among the men and domestic servants among the women. NZ needed labourers and tradesmen for its farms, ports, mines and towns and artisans to meet the needs of its growing population. Builders were in especial demand and emigrated in large numbers helped by the introduction of assisted migration in 1871. Migration from England tailed off in the late-1880s and 1890s because of depression in the NZ economy. [16] This also corresponded with a change the regional origins and occupations of the English arrivals. The numbers engaged in agricultural work declined, while those working in industry and mining increased. These trends continued in the twentieth century and became even more marked after 1945. The post-1900 development of coal mining in New Zealand was aided by the arrival of miners from northern England. Industry expanded with the influx of skilled industrial workers from Yorkshire and Lancashire. The rapid growth of trade unions after 1890 was associated with the migration of English workers in the textile, clothing, footwear, mining and marine transport industries. Over 80,000 assisted British migrants arrived in NZ between 1947 and 1975, selected for the contribution that they could make to industry, education and health. [17] As NZ became less focused on England and ended all forms of assisted migration, and as England turned its attention to Europe rather than to the Commonwealth, so the appeal of migrating to New Zealand began to fade.[18]

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[1] See, for example, Moran, Gerard. ‘‘Shovelling out the poor’: assisted emigration from Ireland from the great famine to the fall of Parnell’, in ibid, Duffy, Patrick J., and Moran, Gerard, (eds.), To and from Ireland: planned migration schemes c.1600-2000, (Geography Publications), 2004, pp. 137-154.

[2] MacKenzie, J. M., ‘Heroic myths of empire,’ in MacKenzie, J. M., (ed.), Popular Imperialism and the Military, (Manchester University Press), 1992, pp. 10-38, considers the heroic reputation of Henry Haverlock, David Livingstone, Charles Gordon and T. E. Lawrence.

[3] Thorne, Susan, ‘‘The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable’: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain’, in Cooper, Frederick, and Stoler, Laura Ann, (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, (University of California Press), 1997, pp. 238-262.

[4] London Quarterly Review, Vol. 7, (1856), p. 238.

[5] Porter, Bernard, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain, (Oxford University Press), 2004, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, insists that popular culture promoting the imperial ideal had no effect on the general public.

[6] Gray, M., ‘The Course of Scottish Emigration 1750-1914: Enduring Influences and Changing Circumstances’, in Devine, T. M., (ed.), Scottish Emigration and Scottish Society, (John Donald), 1992), pp. 16-36, provides a good summary.

[7] Dilke, Charles W., Greater Britain: A record of travel in English-speaking countries during 1866 and 1867, (Harper & Brothers), 1969, p. 511.

[8] Dobson, D., Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607-1785, (University of Georgia Press), 2004, and Landsman, Ned C., ‘Nation, Migration and the Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas 1600-1800’, American Historical Review, Vol. 104, (1999), pp. 463-475.

[9] On this issue see, Devine, T M, Scotland's Empire, (Penguin), 2003, and Fry, M, The Scottish Empire, (Tuckwell Press), 2001.

[10] Richards, E., ‘Varieties of Scottish emigration in the nineteenth century, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 21, (1985), pp. 473-494.

[11] Harper, M, Emigration from Scotland between the wars: opportunity or exile?, (Manchester University Press), 1998.

[12] Hornsby, Stephen J., ‘Patterns of Scottish emigration to Canada, 1750-1870’, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 18, (1992), pp. 397-416. See also, Campey, Lucille H., The Scottish Pioneers of Upper Canada, 1784-1855: Glengarry and beyond, (Dundurn Press), 2005, and An Unstoppable Force: The Scottish Exodus to Canada, (Dundurn Press), 2008. On Canadian immigration policy, see Kelley, Ninette, and Trebilcock, M. J., The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy, (University of Toronto Press), 1999.

[13] Macmillan, D. S., Scotland and Australia, 1788-1850: emigration, commerce and investment, (Oxford University Press), 1967, ‘The Scots’, in Jupp, James, (ed.), The Australian people: an Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins, (Cambridge University Press), 2001, pp. 644-665, and Prentice, Malcolm D., The Scots in Australia: A Study of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland 1788-1900, (University of Sydney Press), 1983, provide the context.

[14] Devine, T. M., ‘The Break-up of Britain?: Scotland and the end of Empire: The Prothero Lecture’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, Vol. 16, (2006), pp. 163-180.

[15] Erickson, Charlotte, Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century, (Cornell University Press), 1994.

[16] Simpson, Tony, The immigrants: the great migration from Britain to New Zealand, 1830-1890, (Godwit), 1997.

[17] Hutching, Megan, Long Journey for Sevenpence: Assisted Immigration to New Zealand from the United Kingdom, 1947-1975, (Victoria University Press), 1999..

[18] Phillips, Jock, & Hearn, Terry, Settlers: New Zealand Immigrants from England, Ireland & Scotland 1800-1945, (Auckland University Press), 2008: see http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/home-away-from-home/sources

The state intervenes 1833-1862

Everyone was agreed that any education worth the name had a moral and therefore a religious core. But if religious, which denomination? Anglicans, as members of the established church, argued that any school named in law and supported by government funds should be theirs. Nonconformists and Roman Catholics hotly disputed this. It was for this reason that the two voluntary day school societies were joined by the Catholic Poor School Committee, in 1849. This was the sectarian divide that dominated developments in elementary education up to 1870 and arguably 1902.

Public provision for elementary education began with a grant of £20,000 in 1833 in aid of school buildings. This was channelled inevitably through the two religious societies because these alone could show any degree of efficiency. This was the beginning of a system of ‘giving to them that hath’. Government initiatives and funding were most needed in areas of ‘educational destitution’ where there were no middle-class enthusiasts to start schools. In 1839, therefore, the Whigs attempted to grasp the nettle of the ‘religious problem’ with a scheme that included grants to districts according to need and government training schools for teachers organised on a non-denominational basis.[1] The Tories mobilised against it in both Commons and Lords and the opposition of almost the entire bench of bishops brought most of the scheme down to defeat.

In 1843, the Tories attempted to take the initiative in the education clauses of Graham’s Factory Bill creating Anglican-run factory schools. They faced a comparable storm from Nonconformists and Catholics and likewise retreated.[2] Thereafter there was a stalemate with neither side strong enough to break through to a new system. The amount of grant continued to rise but still the money went only to localities already making an effort. Middle-class enthusiasts broadly agreed that working-class children should be in school, not at work. The problem was which school they should attend and whether government aid could be deployed to ensure that there were schools within the reach of all working-class children.This was finally broken by the Education Act of 1870.[3]

The debacle of 1839, where non-sectarian developments were effectively vetoed by the churches, did result in the creation of the Committee of the Privy Council on Education. Opposition continued from the Church of England resulting in the ‘Concordat’ of 1840 under which the church authorities secured control of the appointment of the inspectors of state-aided schools and the right to frame the instructions for religious education, though not over non-Anglican schools. The most positive result of the Concordat was the appointment as secretary to the new Committee of Education of James Kay-Shuttleworth.[4] Resistance to state elementary education and the sectarian conflict made it impossible to start a national system using the established technique of a Royal Commission followed by a governing statute. A step-by-step approach was adopted: from the small grant of 1833 to the Privy Council Minutes of 1846 that governed the mid-century expansion. However, in the 1830s and 1840s, there were two other roots from which a national system of primary education might have grown: the new Poor Law and the Factory Acts.[5]

Chadwick saw education as a depauperising influence sharing the assumption that universal education would in some unexplained way cure unemployment and render poor relief largely unnecessary. His enthusiasm was shared by several of the Poor Law Assistant Commissioners, who believed that pauperism as well as crime could be eradicated by early training. The architect of poor law education was James Phillips Kay (Kay-Shuttleworth as he called himself after his marriage). Son of a Rochdale cotton manufacturer, trained as a physician in Edinburgh, founder-member of the Manchester Statistical Society and a writer on social questions, he was recruited as Assistant Commissioner for Norfolk and Suffolk in 1835. He found little or no education for pauper children: some were sent to local schools, but always the cheapest and worst and there was no industrial training. Kay began by persuading more enlightened guardians to employ young trainee teachers.[6] He claimed in his autobiography, that this improved the workhouse schools up to a point where the Guardians would be persuaded to take more interest in pauper education and perhaps consent to the creation of school districts.[7] When Kay was appointed Secretary to the new Committee of Council on Education in 1839, he selected an establishment in Norwood for his experiment in pauper education. In three years, he turned it into a model for the district school movement and a nursery of pupil teachers for elementary schools. After 1842, however, Peel‘s government slowed down the plans for district schools as it was not prepared to coerce the Unions and the movement never achieved more than three Metropolitan School Districts and six small rural ones. [8] The failure of the district-school movement was partly compensated by the growth of separate schools in the more enlightened Unions. By 1857, 57 of these were listed. Some smaller workhouses had detached schools on the workhouse site. School standards greatly improved after 1846 with the beginnings of poor law school inspection and the decline in the use of untrained pauper teachers. Poor Law education never aspired to becoming a basis or a model for state elementary education.[9] It was intended for workhouse children but there were, in 1855, some 277,000 children in families on outdoor relief not provided with any education except in refuges or mission or ‘ragged’ schools. It was on too small a scale even to fulfil its own task, a criticism evident once the Local Government Board took responsibility for their operation in 1872.[10] Workhouse schools provided national coverage but the stigma attached to the workhouse meant that they could never provide the nationwide system of elementary education that by the 1860s many regarded as essential.

The factory school was not new in 1833.[11] Voluntary provision can be traced back to the 1780s and was pioneered by enlightened manufacturers such as Henry Ashton at Turton Mill, the Peel family and Robert Owen. The factory master was traditionally responsible for the education of his apprentices. Many progressive millowners were alienated by the education clauses: W.R. Greg, an enthusiastic organiser of factory schools, became a leading opponent of the Act.[12] After 1833, much of the enthusiasm for the voluntary provision of factory schooling was lost.[13] The Factory Act 1833 made millowners responsible for the education of children workers who were not their apprentices but lived with their own parents. 80% of all pupils attending factory schools were concentrated in Lancashire, Cheshire, the West Riding and Monmouthshire, where literacy levels were low and there is little to suggest any marked improvement in factory districts in the aftermath of the legislation. Inspectors were authorised to enforce attendance but the Act did not require employers to provide education themselves, only to obtain a certificate of school attendance for the previous week. Millowners unable or unwilling to provide their own schools tried to obey the law by sending their children to the local day schools. These arrangements were often unsuccessful. Factory education became embroiled in the sectarian debate over Graham’s Factory Bill of 1843 and the act eventually passed in 1844 was shorn of its education clauses.[14] The Newcastle Commission was damning in its indictment of the inadequacies of factory education. Factory education might have improved, at least in small mills, if the millowners had co-operated in setting up shared schools. The failures of factory education, especially its involvement in sectarian disputes, certainly delayed the spread of elementary education. Disgusted Nonconformists turned to the voluntarist movement and Anglicans seemed to prefer the perpetuation of ignorance to giving up their own control of education. Faced with such attitudes, the government contribution to the development of education in the mid-century had to be made largely be stealth.

Government intervention in education was made more difficult as a result of sectarian conflict. Grants provided the first form of intervention but during the 1840s and 1850s other forms of central control over education were instituted largely through the work of Kay-Shuttleworth whose period as secretary of the Committee of Council for Education lasted between 1839 and 1849. He believed that the key to better standards was better-paid and trained teachers. He set out to change the monitorial system into a sound preliminary to a professional training and to attract teachers of the right class and calibre by raising salaries. [15] By the Minutes of 1846 selected pupils would be apprenticed at the age of 13 to their teachers and would receive a grant of £10 increased annually to £20 when they were 18. [16] They were taught by the master for 90 minutes a day and had to pass the annual Inspector’s examination.[17] They were to assist the master in teaching and he would train them in class management and routine duties and would be paid according to their level of success in the examinations. This system was not new. Kay-Shuttleworth had used it at Norwood. Although the first pupil-teachers came from pauper schools, he intended that the bulk of them should form a social link between the children of labourers in elementary schools and the school managers, who were clergy or gentry. They would therefore be mostly from the upper-working and lower-middle-classes. The top section of this ladder of recruitment and training was formed by the teacher training colleges. In 1839, there were four training colleges with model schools in the United Kingdom that took students through very inadequate courses of six weeks to three or four months. Beginning with the Battersea Training College in 1840[18], by 1858 there were thirty-four colleges partly financed by the Education Department through Queen’s Scholarships.[19]

The Minutes of 1846 may have led to the trained elementary teacher but did it really improve the standard of teaching?[20] To some degree any response to this question is subjective. Much school teaching was mechanical, overloaded with ‘facts’ for memorisation. The Teacher Training Colleges did provide a little teaching material, method and possible much-needed self-confidence. They were, however, severely criticised by the Newcastle Commission for their long hours, vast syllabuses, and addiction to textbooks and the superficial nature of many of their courses. The main cause of poor teaching in elementary schools was generally considered to be the low wages of teachers. The Minutes attempted to solve the problem by state grants but the basic variations and inequities were left untouched. Salaries varied from area to area and school to school depending on endowments, contributions and school fees. By 1855, the average annual pay of a certificated schoolteacher was assessed at £90. Higher pay would have removed elementary teachers too far from the class of their pupils and weakened the sympathy and understanding supposed to be felt between them. The reality was often different. Elementary teachers were educated above their station and in the 1850s began to demand promotion of the Inspectorate, to leave the schools for better jobs or to go into the church

The growth of grants to elementary schools increased dramatically from the original £20,000 of 1833 to £724,000 by 1860. From 1856, the Committee of Council on Education had a Vice-President to represent it in parliament. Yet the 1850s were considered a period of comparative educational stagnation. This was partly because all reformers (except the voluntarists) were not convinced that a national school system could not be completed without support from the rates. In addition, continuing sectarian bitterness defeated all attempts to secure rate support: bills in 1850, 1852, 1853 and 1862 all failed as did the recommendation of the Newcastle Commission in 1861. The continuation of central grants ensured the survival and increase of the Inspectorate; from 2 in 1840, they had become 23 with 2 Assistant Inspectors in 1852, 36 with 25 Assistants in 1861 and 62 with 14 Assistants in 1864. Grants and inspectors came together with the introduction of the payment by results principle in the reconstruction of the government grant in the Revised Code of 1862-1863.[21] The bulk of a school’s grant, roughly half its income, was to be dependent upon satisfactory performance by each child over seven in examinations conducted by HMIs. It was unwelcome to those who thought that government should be doing more but was praised by those who though expenditure was mushrooming out of control and who doubted that the grants were giving value for money. Grant aid to education fell almost by a quarter and the levels of 1861 were not reached again until 1869. In effect, payment by results was a piece-rate system, putting teachers in the position of factory operatives.

Kay-Shuttleworth had, through the central government department, established an inspectorate and a system of training teachers. Under his successor Ralph Lingen (1849-1869) the work of the Education Department, as it became in 1856, steadily expanded but on more formal and bureaucratised lines.[22] The age of creative innovation was over and the department’s primary goal was to manage the system as efficiently and economically as possible. Lingen saw his job as being to

...stem the growth of a system of subsidies and to control the expansionist tendencies of inspectorate and educational public.[23]

A Royal Commission on Elementary Education, chaired by the Duke of Newcastle was appointed in 1858 and reported in 1861. [24] In general, it considered that the system of state aid had worked well, but argued that the objectives had been set too high for the majority of children who attended the schools. It was desirable that results should be tested to ensure that schools were providing value for money, a recommendation used by Robert Lowe, the minister who spoke for the education department in the House of Commons, to establish the Revised Code in 1862 linking annual grants to pupil results.[25] It also recommended involving local as well as central government in the provision of schools, allowing local government agencies to offer rate support to supplement government grants and suggested that this rate support should be dependent on the school’s results, in effect a series of incentive payments.

Until the late 1850s, much of the schooling of the working-classes was still informal or semi-formal. Efforts to bring government resources to bear had so far been hampered by the ‘religious problem’ and it took another twenty years to cut through this knot. Elementary education in the 1860s entered a period of some regression. The Newcastle Commission set low intellectual targets for the education of the poor and this can be compared with the hardening of Poor Law attitudes in the 1870s.[26] A national system of elementary education had to await the legislation of 1870 and 1880.

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[1] On this issue see, Newbould, I.D.C., ‘The Whigs, the Church, and Education, 1839’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 26, (1987), pp. 332-346.

[2] Ibid, Ward, J.T. and Treble, James H., ‘Religion and education in 1843: reaction to the ‘Factory Education Bill’’.

[3] Paz, D.G., The Politics of Working-class Education 1830-1850, (Manchester University Press), 1980 is the best analysis of state intervention.

[4] Ibid, Selleck, R.J.W., James Kay-Shuttleworth: Journey of an Outsider, is now the standard biography of this seminal figure.

[5] Ibid, Paz, D.G., The Politics of Working-class Education 1830-1850, pp. 44-69.

[6] On the early development of workhouse schools see, Kay-Shuttleworth, James, Four Periods of Public Education as reviewed in 1832-1839--1846-1862 in papers, (Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts), 1862, pp. 287-292.

[7] Bloomfield, B.C., (ed.), The autobiography of Sir James Kay Shuttleworth, (Institute of Education, University of London), 1964.

[8] Hill, Florence Davenport, Children of the state: the training of juvenile paupers, (Macmillan and Co.), 1868, pp. 63-78 considers critically the development of District Schools.

[9] Richson, Charles, Pauper education: its provisions and defects; with certain objections to its extension, considered in a letter to the Right Hon. Sir Geo. Grey, Bart., M.P., (Rivington), 1850 and Browne, Walter, ‘Facts and Fallacies of Pauper Education’, Fraser’s magazine for town and country, Vol, 18, (Longmans, Green), 1878, pp. 197-207 considers the problems posed by pauper education while Chance, William, Children under the poor law: their education, training and after-care, together with a criticism of the report of the departmental committee on metropolitan poor law schools, 2 Vols, (S. Sonnenschein & Co.), 1897 provides later, more positive analysis.

[10] See, for example, Local Government Board, Annual Report, Vol. 1, (HMS0), 1872, pp. 224-235.

[11] See, for example, Sanderson, Michael, ‘Education and the Factory in Industrial Lancashire, 1780-1840’, Economic History Review, new sereies, Vol. 20, (2), (1967), pp. 266-279. Robson, A.H., The Education of Children Engaged in Industry, 1833-1876, (K. Paul, Trench, Trubner), 1931.

[12] See Rose, Mary B., The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill: The Rise and Decline of a Family Firm, 1750-1914, (Cambridge University Press), 1986, pp. 56-58.

[13] Robson, A.H., The Education of Children Engaged in Industry, 1833-1876, (K. Paul, Trench, Trubner), 1931.

[14] Ibid, Paz, D.G., The Politics of Working-class Education 1830-1850, pp. 114-125 considers the 1843 Bill.

[15] Ross, A.M., ‘Kay-Shuttleworth and the training of teachers for pauper schools’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 15, (1967), pp. 275-283.

[16] These were the minutes of the Committee of Council on Education minutes of August and December 1846. See, Kay-Shuttleworth, James, Public Education: as affected by the Minutes of the Committee of Privy Council from 1846 to 1852; with suggestions as to future policy, (Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans), 1853, pp. 54-112.

[17] Dunford, J.E., Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools in England and Wales, 1860-1870, Leeds, 1980.

[18] For Kay-Shuttleworth’s take on the Battersea Training College, see, ibid, Kay-Shuttleworth, James, Four Periods of Public Education as reviewed in 1832-1839--1846-1862 in papers, pp. 294-431.

[19] Dent, H.C., The training of teachers in England and Wales, 1800-1975, (Routledge), 1977.

[20] Ibid, Kay-Shuttleworth, James, Four Periods of Public Education as reviewed in 1832-1839--1846-1862 in papers, pp. 437-551 provides an explanation of the Minutes of 1846.

[21] Mason, Donald, ‘Peelite opinion and the genesis of payment by results: the true story of the Newcastle Commission’, History of Education, Vol. 17, (1988), 269-281 and Marcham, A.J., ‘The revised Code of Education, 1862: reinterpretations and misinterpretations’, History of Education, Vol. 10, (1981), pp. 81-99.

[22] Bishop, A. S., ‘Ralph Lingen, Secretary to the Education Department, 1849-76’, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 16, (1968), pp. 138-163.

[23] Cit, Johnson, Richard, ‘Administrators in education before 1870: patronage, social position and role’, in Sutherland, Gillian, (ed.), Studies in the growth of Nineteenth-century Government, (Routledge), 1972, p. 135.

[24] Anon. Report of the commissioners appointed to inquire into the state of popular education in England; Reports of assistant commissioners etc.; Correspondence etc. Parliamentary papers, [2794-I] H.C. (1861), Vol. XXI, pt. 1, 1; Parliamentary papers, [2794-II-VI] H.C. (1861), Vol. XXI, pt. I-VI; Parliamentary papers, H.C. 231 (1861), Vol. XLVIII, 295; Parliamentary papers, H.C. 354 (1861), Vol. XLVIII, 307; Parliamentary papers, H.C. 410 (1861), Vol. XLVIII, 341; Parliamentary papers, H.C. 325 (1861) and Vol. XLVIII, 305.

[25] ‘Payment by results’ proved highly divisive issue; see for example, ‘Popular Education—The New Code’, London Quaterly Review, Vol. CCXXI, (1862), pp. 38-59, Menet, John, The Revised Code: A Letter to a Friend, suggested by the pamphlets of the Rev. C.J. Vaughan, D.D., Vicar of Doncaster, and the Rev. J. Fraser, Rector of Upton, (Rivingtons), 1862 and Kay-Shuttleworth, James, Memorandum on Popular Education, (Ridgway), 1868. See also, Rapple, Brendan A., ‘A Victorian experiment in economic efficiency in education’, Economics of Education Review, Vol. 11, (4), (1992), pp. 301-316 and Fletcher, Ladden, ‘A Further Comment on Recent Interpretations of the Revised Code, 1862’, History of Education, Vol. 10, (1), pp. 21-31.

[26] Several areas of social administration went through periods of administrative regression in the third quarter of the nineteenth century: education in the 1860s and the poor law and public health in the 1870s.