Among the Bohemians (18 page)

In the nineteenth century, intellectual achievement in girls was regarded at best as being unnecessary for their station in life, at worst as being sick and degenerate.
Education for girls was, like sex, religion and lavatories, one of those things that ‘nice’ people didn’t discuss.
Girls whose parents took the conventional view of learning were obliged to endure years of futile inactivity, like Diana Cooper.
‘Nothing much was done about my education,’ she remembered.
A series of inadequate governesses left Diana with a soupcon of French, and she was an avid reader.
But mathematics was a closed book, German, Latin and Geography were non-existent, philosophy unthought-of and domestic science ignored.
She remembered a good deal of piano practice and embroidery – ‘making our dreadful Christmas presents of sachets and velvet holders of shot to act as my father’s paperweights’ –
and little else.
What was left to this incapacitated young woman, except to become a Beauty?
– in Cecil Beaton’s eyes, an apotheosised Bohemian in her gypsy straw hat, peasant dirndl skirt and sandals.

Being sent away to school was thought to be very ‘modern’, while day schools for girls were generally considered ‘bad’.
Further down the scale girls might be sent to inadequate private establishments where the emphasis was on ‘accomplishments’, otherwise they were left more or less uneducated.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century certain enlightened spirits were looking critically at the unwieldy giant that was the Victorian school system and asking whether there was not some better way to educate children.
The First World War divided the progressives from the authoritarians; those who gloried in its outcome claimed supremacy for that system which had instilled unquestioning obedience and reverence for hierarchy into a generation of young soldiers; while those who deplored the war equally denounced its negation of individualism.

For such as these there was, at the turn of the century, very little to choose from.
Rosalind Thornycroft’s mother was not content for her daughters to waste their childhoods embroidering paperweights; when Rosalind was only eight she taught them herself at home, drawing up a rigorous timetable for their lessons which included Dictation, Arithmetic, Design, Reading, Dancing, Geometry, Clubs,
^*
German and Skipping.
She showed a rare commitment in this; few parents were prepared to assume the burden of educating their own children, whatever their reservations about the choice available.
Bit by bit however, the new wave of thinkers began to put their ideas into practice, opening schools that took a Rousseauesque view of human nature, and claimed to respect the individual.
The names of Dr Reddie, Homer Lane, J.
H.
Badley, Dora and Bertrand Russell and A.
S.
Neill were to become indelibly associated with a certain kind of progressive education, one that elicited sympathetic responses from the libertarian or Bohemian parent.

Badley’s school Bedales was one of the first and most successful, becoming famous ever after for breaking all the rules and introducing co-education.
This was little short of revolutionary in 1898.
Contemporary theorists had argued that co-education was strongly detrimental to both girls and boys; it was thought to thwart progress and to undermine sexual roles.
Boys would lose their manliness, while girls would develop undesirably assertive qualities.
No other boarding school had ever attempted this, and several parents withdrew their children, regarding Badley’s move as a ‘preposterous
experiment’.
But what is perhaps even more surprising to us today is the ground-breaking curriculum adopted by such pioneer educationists: it included butter-making, taxidermy, Swedish woodcarving, ‘and a frightful lot of digging’.
It was also the pupils’job to cart away the excrement from the ‘sets’ or earth closets in wheelbarrows.
Admittedly there was a slightly devitalising earnestness about Bedales, a ‘do-gooding’ institutional quality which cramped some people’s style.
The twelve-year-old Julia Strachey felt like an oddball, alienated from the hearty, clean, positive approach of her seniors.
Caught playing a jazz record on the gramophone, Julia was taken aside by a prefect and given a well-meaning but infuriating lecture on irresponsibility:

‘The school is in a sense a sort of lifeboat, you know.
Life is a difficult sea, and the Principal and the Vice are trying their very hardest to help us row across you know, and teach us to play our part in the body corporate.’

‘I don’t think the body corporate, whatever it is, minds my playing a Boston one-step in my free time, if I’m alone and nobody else hears it…’

‘But THINK!
A Boston one-step BEFORE BREAKFAST!
Have you lost all your sense of values?
You see,’ she continued on a lower tone, ‘they are giving us the benefit of such a new, free way of life, preparing for a beautiful new world, where people can throw off the old constraints and prejudices and revel in light and freedom and loveliness.
And they trust us so!’ Her voice trembled happily.
‘And that, you see, is why it seems a little underhand and – well – cheap to do ugly mean things, even if no-one is looking.’

Julia’s best friend Frances Partridge, also a pupil at Bedales, remembers how punishments included being asked to weed the maths master’s flowerbed.
She remembers too the girls bathing naked in the school pool while the masters squinted at them through the cracks in the surrounding fence.
But there were excellent things about Bedales, the best for her being the way reading was encouraged: ‘It was the thing in my day, to go from one class to the next with one’s nose in a book – I mean, books were “in”.’ At fourteen Frances was reading the recently published
Problems of Philosophy
(1912) by Bertrand Russell – ‘easier to understand when you’re young’.
She was also encouraged to take up botany, which became a lifelong interest.

The success of Bedales opened the door to more educational experiments.
Gresham’s School, Holt was available to progressive parents who didn’t care to risk going the final mile by sending their son to a co-educational school, but in other respects it had much in common with Bedales.
St Christopher’s
School in Letchworth Garden City was vegetarian and co-educational.
Then there were the Rudolf Steiner schools, which offered a spiritual and holistic approach to education, while King Alfred’s School attracted the sons and daughters of progressive parents in north-west London.
When Rosalind Thornycroft and her sister outgrew their mother’s ability to teach them, the family moved to Hampstead to send them there; it was co-educational, non-religious, and there were no exams or artificial inducements to work.
At King Alfred’s the girls learnt English folk songs from the great Cecil Sharp himself, while carpentry was taught by George Earle, who was also an inspiring English teacher:

Indeed a combination of the two went on in the carpentry class.
Keats and Shakespeare lines flew about with the wood shavings, and in his white carpenter’s apron and flashing glasses he actively demonstrated the mystery of spirit and material made

When Bertrand and Dora Russell were unable to find a school that they could contemplate sending their children to, they decided to found one.
Beacon Hill School opened in 1927.
It was co-educational, and the emphasis was supposed to be on the development of independent judgement and personality, on freedom, and on ‘a natural evolution to maturity and self-discipline’ along Rousseauesque lines; it was thought that children could pick up dates and facts at any stage with no trouble.
Unfortunately the Russells found that Beacon Hill was a popular choice for parents who could find no other place willing to take their problem children, and these wilful individuals soon had all the others at their mercy.
Russell was depressed by the jungle law he saw prevailing, for physical punishment was not permitted.
The children had been divided by the Russells into ‘bigs’, ‘middles’ and ‘smalls’: ‘One of the middles was perpetually ill-treating the smalls, so I asked him why he did it.
His answer was: “The bigs hit me, so I hit the smalls; that’s fair.” And he really thought it was.’ Two other pupils made a bonfire on which they attempted to incinerate a third child’s pet rabbits, thereby nearly setting fire to the house; another child was caught putting sharp objects into people’s soup.
Bertrand Russell now began to question the Rousseauesque experiment; children without order or routine in their lives were bound, he concluded, to turn to bullying and destruction.

Bunny Garnett sent his nine-year-old son Richard – not a problem child – to Beacon Hill.
There Richard learnt about the reproductive systems of worms and snails; he also learnt how to construct fireworks under the tutelage of a pyromaniac Russian called Uvarov, and under Ted ‘Wozzums’
learnt how to distil cherry brandy.
Wozzums also demonstrated the effects of constriction on respiration by hugging the younger girls in the class so tightly that they couldn’t breathe.
Bunny Garnett had hated his own conventional schooling, and was thrilled at the prospect of having his son taught mathematics by the great man himself – but unfortunately the Russell marriage had split up and the ‘great man’ had packed his bags and left by the time Richard got there.
Without him, Dora’s influence was everywhere.
She encouraged drama, particularly improvisation, which she felt expressed the deepest feelings of the pupils; but according to Richard these ‘improvisations’ were orchestrated by a teacher who largely edited, wrote and directed the dialogue:

Dora liked to think that there was something miraculously spontaneous about the whole thing, and that
das Volk dichtet
– but not as I recall it…

If my memories of these plays are at all accurate they seem to indicate that Dora was not fully aware of what was going on in the school.
From a child’s point of view she was somebody who talked about us to visiting adults in a way that we found embarrassing.
We were exhibits, we were being used to prove a point, and much of what she was saying about us was, we felt, untrue.
This added to the embarrassment of being ‘seen over’.
There was much talk of freedom, and in many ways (especially our superb environment) we were freer than most.

But ‘freedom’ was taken too literally by some, and the more wayward children rebelled when required to do simple things like wash their faces and clean their teeth.
It put the staff in an awkward position when sarcastic older pupils growled at them, ‘Call this a free school!’, and the naughtier ones pushed at the limits continually.

The children had an equally superficial understanding of Dora Russell’s dearly held tenets of atheism, sexual liberty and communism.
At a school council meeting – in itself a great innovation – the pupils earnestly agreed to abolish private property, but Richard Garnett recalled the children’s way of adapting to this edict: ‘Do you mind if I borrow the chess set that
used
to be yours?’ Richard had his entire stamp collection expropriated, stamp by stamp.
As a result he became a bit cynical about isms and notions.
Even more off-putting was Dora’s gushing maternalism.
When Richard first arrived Dora had recently given birth to her child by the journalist Griffin Barry and was breast-feeding: ‘She put some of her milk in a mug for me to drink.
I think she would have liked to have given suck to all the children in the school…”

But the progressive school that carried this ‘child-centricity’ to its extreme
was, and remains, A.
S.
Neill’s Summerhill, founded in 1921, a school in which freedom was a way of life:

I’ve started a school called Liberty Hall

Upon the latest system;

We take them big, we take them small,

And we try not to mould or twist ’em;

Repression is the great pitfall,

Of this we live in terror,

So we do our best to do nothing at all,

Lest we should commit some error.

We don’t have lessons, we don’t have sports,

We don’t have rules of any sorts,

And the boys and the girls write their own reports

In Liberty Hall, the free school;

We don’t encourage, we don’t suppress,

We don’t say No, we don’t say Yes,

And when we want, we just undress

In Liberty Hall, the free school.

(From
Nine Sharp and Earlier
by

Herbert Farjeon 1938)

Farjeon’s send-up was barely an exaggeration.
‘If you turned up to lunch in a loin-cloth nobody would take much notice,’ Ethel Mannin recalled.
The cornerstones of Neill’s educational philosophy were, like Rousseau, a belief in the innate goodness of children, and a commitment to absolute freedom for each child.
This meant that lessons at Summerhill were strictly optional: ‘All outside compulsion is wrong,… inner compulsion is the only value.
And if Mary or David wants to laze about, lazing about is the one thing necessary for their personalities at the moment.’

Ethel Mannin was one of Neill’s most ardent disciples, and when she wrote
Commonsense and the Child
(1931) he contributed an enthusiastic preface.
In this book Mannin declared that’… there is no such thing as the naughty child… there are only happy children and unhappy children’.
Incalculable damage was caused by the imposition of ‘moral training’ and ‘orthodox education’.
Children would be much better off parted from their parents, whom she saw as damaging, authoritarian fusspots, blighting the child’s self-expression and autonomous carefree existence:

Ideally, children should run wild until they are twelve or thirteen or fourteen, and then, when they have outlived their childish interests in climbing trees and whittling sticks and sailing boats and all the rest of it,
when they are ready
, in fact, they might be taught to read and write and do simple arithmetic.
The despised Three R’s, do you see.
Not having had their minds cluttered up with a lot of superfluous information for years before, they would learn these things very quickly…