Donald Naismith

History boy from Bradford

Donald Naismith recalls some of his early days in the wool capital of the North and how it prepared him for his future career as an educational administrator – first in Bradford and then in three London boroughs during the Thatcher era

Heroes of antiquity

‘A door is open in Bradford for a boy of special ability to pass right through to the universities’. The Bryce Commission on Secondary Education, 1895.

The Bradford I grew up in was not, of course, the Bradford of today.  Then it was substantially the same as the Victorians left it: the wool capital of the world, a city full of grand public buildings: the Town Hall, the Wool Exchange, the Court House, the Post Office, Kirkgate Market, St George’s Hall, the Exchange Railway Station, interspersed with the no less impressive warehouses and mills which gave them purpose and meaning.  And, of course, the factory chimneys, many of which I could see from my room in the roof of the Town Hall, throwing a coating of soot over everything – a constant reminder, if one were needed, that this was a place of work, of energy, a place to be reckoned with, a place of moment and consequence.

J.B.Priestley, an old boy of the secondary school I went to, recalled his home town, the city I remember, as one of beauty, ‘exquisite compositions of light and shadow, of smoke and sunlight and dark stone’.  Bradford was also a city of statues.  They were at every turn, sermons in stone:  Richard Oastler, sheltering mill children, Richard Cobden, advocating free trade, Robert Peel, abolishing Corn Laws, Samuel Lister and Titus Salt, contemplating their latest commercial and philanthropic schemes, and, of course, above all for me, W.E Forster, planning educational change. 

Heroes all. Because the city had been built rapidly – doubling its population no fewer than five times in the nineteenth century – its architecture, although drawn from every European tradition, came together to create a powerful sense of identity and character, embodying the nonconformist qualities on which the city’s wealth was based: hard work, enterprise, self-improvement, social obligation, values borne upon me from other sources, family, Sunday Schools, social class, education.  They gave me, living and working there, the feeling of being part of a tradition of worthwhile endeavour and achievement to be emulated.

Bradford was not only one of the country’s most important industrial cities, it was one of the foremost education authorities, and I took inspiration from its record, which I outline here, not only because of the prominent part it played in shaping my outlook, but because many of the issues it wrestled with in its time are alive today.  At the hear t of the city’s policies was the aim of to extend educational opportunity, particularly for the disadvantaged, from which I, like countless others, benefited.

It was one of its MPs, no less – William Forster – who laid the foundation of the national education system in 1870, by extending elementary education to all children for the first time through locally elected school boards, charged with the duty to provide new schools where none had existed before.  In Bradford, no fewer than eight new schools were completed between April and August 1874.  Among them were two in whose buildings I was to be educated: as an infant at Whetley Lane, and as a junior at Lilycroft. Both schools continue to this day …

The 1944 generation

By 1944 the continuing debate over which kinds of secondary education there should be had, rather disgracefully, reached the conclusion that there should be three types of secondary school enjoying parity of esteem: the (selective) grammar school, the (selective) technical school, and the ‘modern’ school, each corresponding to three ‘rough groupings’ of pupils: those who were interested in ‘learning for its own sake’; those whose abilities ‘lie in the field of applied science or applied art … certain crafts … engineering, agriculture and the like’, and finally those who ‘deal more easily with concrete things than with ideas’.  We had not seemingly come very far from the conclusion of a Schools Enquiry Commission of 1868 that ‘the different classes of society, the different occupations of life, require different teaching’.

Significantly, the law-makers did not feel sufficiently confident of this consensus to put these categories into legislation.  The 1944 Act, which at long last introduced free secondary education for all, was silent on the types of secondary school to be established and left it open to local authorities to design their own system.  In the same way, however, as the new education authorities, established at the beginning of the twentieth century, had been hamstrung by Regulations, effectively imposing g the Government’s view of what constituted secondary education,  the post-war education authorities were trammelled by Government ‘guidance’ on the implementation of the Act, which went so far as to lay down the proportion of children to be allocated between modern schools (70 – 75 per cent) and the selective technical and grammar schools (30 – 35 per cent) – a proportion to which Bradford was well and perceptively accustomed. 

Bradford had, however, long recognised and experienced the inherent limitations of such a division, which had been embedded in its local system since the earliest days.  Not all eligible pupils were suited to a grammar school education.  For this reason it wished to take the opportunity presented by the 1944 Act to get rid of selection at 11 and replace its grammar schools and modern schools with multilateral (comprehensive) schools, most to be built on new, more spacious sites on the outskirts of the city.

Unfortunately, the practical and financial difficulties of replacing so much of the city’s educational stock in postwar conditions of scarcity, proved too great: a bitter legacy of its pioneering record and a far cry from the day when Bradford’s school board was prepared and able to spend more on its new schools than any other school board in the country.  A major disagreement had broken out between the Labour and Conservative members of the council, the Conservatives opposing moves to a complete comprehensive system. Instead, therefore, of heading towards the plate-glass utopian ideal of an all-ability education in fresh green fields, I entered the blackened buildings of Belle Vue Boys School on Manningham Lane, originally provided by the Bradford School Board in 1877….

History boy

My favourite subject has always been history, peopled by heroes I never tired of hearing about: King Alfred and his cakes, James Watt and his kettle, Captain Cook and General Wolfe, scaling the Heights of Abraham, Nelson running away from home and being found by the banks of the river unafraid.  This fascination fed into a growing interest in current events in the outside world, the world of politics which over the years gradually came into sharper focus.  The war was into its third year when I first went to Whetley Lane infants school. I have not many memories there, except carrying a gas mask to school, collecting paper and books for the war effort and coming home one day to find the iron gates taken away to be made into munitions.  I was not caught up in the mass evacuation of school children which had already taken place in the city. Before coming to Bradford we had lived in Lee for a short time.  There I do remember the bombs falling and taking refuge in an Anderson shelter, excitingly armed with thermos flasks of tea and somewhat unpatriotically, Garibaldi biscuits.  I remember aw well the air raid sirens, the all-clears, the sandbags in the streets: most dramatically being brought downstairs in pyjamas to hear Hitler ranting on the wireless and the more measured tones of Winston Churchill.  Obviously, my parents thought it important that I should get some sense of history through which we were passing. 

I was also fascinated by the nature table at primary school.  I liked the shiny conkers, the scarlet autumn leaves and the wings of sycamore seeds – but best of all, where there was movement day by day, bursting sticky buds, frogspawn, imperceptibly and primevally changing into life, the broad bean casting forth its unlikely tendrils between the blotting paper and the glass; the chrysalis transforming itself into a butterfly.  I would have liked to have joined the gardening class. Paddy was chosen to go, but Elmers, the brightest boy in the class in maths, and I, the brightest boys in English, and a few others, had to stay behind.  As surely and as silently as the plants and creatures in the jars, we were being prepared for the next stage in our evolution,  the grammar school.  But to get there , we had to pass the eleven-plus, which in due course I did.  And so it was that in September I took up my place at Belle Vue.  Miss Pritchard and Mr Beck had done their job and done it well….

The eleven-plus, the Intelligence Test, would more accurately have been described as the 10-plus because it was taken at age 10, and it did not test intelligence in the abstract reasoning sense. The test I took, along with most of the country, gave marks for mental ability, arithmetic, English, conscientiousness, perseverance, and suitability.  Hence the grooming and the, perhaps not so revolutionary, wish expressed by Sir Edward Boyle, when he was Minister of Education, that ‘all children should have an equal opportunity of acquiring intelligence’. 

The purpose of the test I took at Lilycroft was to select some 35 per cent of the primary school population, either to take one of the 100 places the council paid for at the fee-paying endowed grammar schools in the city, or take up a place at one of the nine municipal grammar schools where the places were free.

The proportion of children admitted to grammar schools was amongst the highest in the country.  One of the deserved criticisms of the selective system was that the availability of a grammar school place varied from education authority to education authority, from Merioneth offering the highest percentage of places,60 per cent, to Gateshead offering the lowest, 8 per cent. The proportion of places offered in the West Riding ranged from 15 to 40 per cent.  Had I lived in the adjoining borough of Halifax, where there grammar school places for only 15 per cent of the primary population, I might not have received a grammar school education at all.

Bennett’s Boys

During my sixth form years preparing for university, newer teachers were entering the school, more alive to the changing needs of society and the universities.  I was fortunate in having a history teacher who had recently graduated from Jesus College, Cambridge, and it was for its entrance examination that I was entered for a place to study history, which I had decided in preference to English. I was getting better marks in history and in any case this was the only way in which I could really find out what really happened after the agrarian and industrial revolutions.

A picture of sixth forms of a northern grammar school preparing for Oxbridge has been deliciously and definitively capture by Alan Bennett in his entertaining play ‘The History Boys’.  Once a working-class boy himself from Bradford’s neighbour, Leeds, whose grammar school helped him on his way to Oxford,  Alan Bennett describes how pupils were in some kind of betrayal of the higher purposes of education, coached in the tricks of passing exams to assemble a ‘Cheat’s Visa’.  Leaving aside the sex, which could not have featured in the way portrayed in the 1950s (where the action is really set), on all other points I can testify to the play’s razor-sharp accuracy, as I was a ‘history boy’ myself, like Posner and Dakin and the rest.
  What is disappointing, however, is that the play pits two clichéd views of education against each other.  On the one hand, there education for its own sake (admirable) – I have the suspicion that Mr Bennett  agrees with the fatuous assertion that ‘All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human need’, implying the superiority of abstract knowledge, and that we are meant to go along with this. On the other hand, there are all the other kinds of education, again by implication, those which can be put to good use – like going to university or writing a play (of less account!).

These two views are posited as if they were mutually exclusive and as if there is nothing in between – a far more difficult and fruitful ground and more deserving of Mr Bennett’s formidable powers. Such an artificial polarisation of these two ideas about the nature of education and the superiority accorded to pure over applied learning has bedevilled debate and held back progress in this country. By perpetuating it, ‘The History Boys’ unfortunately reinforces the very institutional divisions it purports to attack.

Regrettably, the play stands in the hypocritical tradition of works by writers who scorn the rungs by which they climbed.  Scientists rarely do this.  Alan Bennett did not get to Oxbridge because he played the system.  He got there because he was clever.  Oxford knew that – and no doubt played a part in making him cleverer.

As for me,  I and a few others made the journey to Cambridge, symbolically and fittingly setting out from Forster Square Railway Station  I will always be grateful to Bradford and its schools for an education which gave me a better start in life than I would otherwise have had, and which has enriched my life as well as enabling me to learn a living. 

More than Cambridge, Bradford can claim to be my alma mater.