In Victorian Britain, newspapers and periodicals were a dominant feature of political life. At their zenith in the mid-nineteenth century there were more than 150 fifty paid-for serious journals. Politicians who wanted to get their voices heard wrote articles and the government reacted to campaigns in much the same way they do when the Daily Mail takes up an issue today. One journalist stood above all others with a reputation for aggressive, campaigning journalism: Matthew James Higgins. And in 1860 he had the public schools in his sights.
Writing under a pseudonym in Cornhill Magazine, Higgins alleged that Eton masters were exploiting boys financially. They were supposed to behave like parents (‘in loco parentis’), he complained, yet they ran the school as a business, working not through a sense of disinterested vocation but from vested interest. The extravagant lifestyles they supported, moreover, encouraged among boys a taste for ‘expense and self-indulgence’ whereas he said the ideal teacher should embrace a life of simplicity and self-denial.
He also challenged the high pupil–teacher ratio (48:1), which maximised profit but prevented personal, sympathetic relations developing between masters and boys and made the proper supervision of leisure time impossible. The underlying problems of a school were not caused by the inherent rebelliousness of boys, he implied, but by the masters’ mercenary attitude to their work.1
Higgins’s article was followed by others that went further, accusing the Eton masters of stealing funds. The Edinburgh Review summed up the totality of the charge: ‘That the statutes of such a foundation as Eton College should be carried out to the letter in the present day is, we admit, neither possible nor desirable; but it is both possible and desirable that the enormous revenues willed by an English king for the promotion of education… should not be illegally diverted from their original destination into the pockets of a small number of individuals who are not entitled to them.’2
Public indignation over schools’ failure to honour their charitable status was becoming impossible to ignore. The focus on Eton made uncomfortable reading for parliament, where 105 MPs were Old Etonians, including the speaker and the chancellor of the exchequer.3 In earlier times they could have been relied upon to quash any inquiry into their alma mater, but the nature of popular politics had changed. The Reform Act of 1832 had given the middle classes the vote and not all of them were sympathetic to the notion of government by public school. Dissatisfaction turned to anger when parliament voted down a series of bills designed to provide free education for the poor.
In 1861 a Scottish politician called Grant Duff, a barrister and member of the Liberal Party, proposed the establishment of a commission to investigate the public schools and make recommendations for their reform. Duff had been educated at the Edinburgh Academy, a public school established in 1823 to offer Scottish society a classical education to compete with the very best of English public schools. Yet Duff strongly believed Germany and France had taken a lead over English schools by giving young men an education that was based on sciences, not the classics. If Britain wanted to retain its superior industrialised advantage, its schools needed urgent reform. The idea of English vulnerability was a popular topic in the media and the Eton scandal gave the reformers their chance to act.
What Duff and his supporters had in mind was a wholesale shake-up of the public schools, broadening both the syllabus and the intake – the first unsteady steps towards a national curriculum. Duff wanted an inquiry of all endowed schools, numbering some 800, which had been established or maintained for the public benefit.4 Duff was surprised at his initial success, confiding to his Scottish constituents that he feared blocking measures led by the cry ‘floreat Etona’.
The minister tasked with assembling the commission into public schools was Sir George Lewis (Eton), who was now home secretary in Lord Palmerston’s government. Lewis, an editor of the Edinburgh Review, had resigned his post in 1855 to succeed William Gladstone as chancellor of the exchequer – a George Osborne in reverse. Lewis was a baronet and related by marriage to George Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon.5 It was to the former foreign secretary Clarendon whom Lewis turned to chair the inquiry. A third influential member of the commission, joining Duff and Villiers, was another former foreign secretary, Granville George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville (Eton).
Today it seems remarkable that all four men in charge of reforming public schools owed their careers to private education and that two of these reformers (Lewis and Granville) were products of Eton, the very school which had sparked the inquiry in the first place. But there were political reasons for the appointment: Palmerston viewed Clarendon as a contender for his crown and sidelining him as chair of a lengthy royal commission would keep him busy and out of domestic and foreign politics. Few disagreed that Lord Granville and Lord Clarendon were seriously interested in reform but their ambitions were modest. What Duff had wanted was a full inquiry into all 800 public schools so that, reformed, they could form the basis of a national secondary education system. To this end, he had written to all the leading schools seeking their views on a commission.
In his own correspondence with Duff, Lewis accepted that endowed schools had been brought under the jurisdiction of parliament and the charity commissioners and that they must yield to government investigation. But he distinguished what he identified as a ‘principal class’ of endowed school whose permission would be needed before such an inquiry could take place.6 In so doing Lewis had found a way of protecting the elite schools from the intrusive and further-reaching conclusions of a broader inquiry which was to follow Clarendon. By ‘ring-fencing’ a select number of schools from this second inquiry and allowing the ‘elite’ to dictate the terms of reference of their own inquiry, he could offer them special protection.
When the terms of the commission inquiry were published in July 1861, it was clear that Grant Duff had been out-thought by the wily Lewis. Instead of all 800 endowed schools, only nine were to be asked to give evidence to the Clarendon Commission. They were Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, St Paul’s, Merchant Taylors’, Harrow, Rugby and Shrewsbury. They had a combined pupil population of 2,708 and each was considered the crème de la crème of aristocratic schooling, being the institutions from which the majority of parliament was drawn.
The fact there was no serious attempt by the schools to avoid the benign terms of this inquiry speaks volumes. When Clarendon finally published its conclusions they came as no surprise or concern to the public schools. There was some genuine progressive reform, which the schools themselves recognised as necessary. An improved management structure, better accommodation and the quality of the curriculum and the teaching was to be subject to oversight. It was also agreed that more must be done to embrace the teaching of science to bring the schools in line with Europe.
By accepting the modest reforms of Clarendon, these nine leading public schools had escaped the radical shake-up of 782 grammars established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to help educate the community. Under the later Taunton Commission it was decided that these schools were too unevenly spread across the country, leaving neglected pockets of illiteracy and innumeracy. To remedy this, the Endowed Schools Commission was created to remodel the schools using fee-paying pupils to supplement the endowments. Overnight, Britain’s grammar schools were turned into quasi-public schools open to those who could afford a fee-paying education.
Far from Duff’s original intentions, the overriding effect of the Clarendon and Taunton commissions, and the acts of parliament which followed, was to preserve and strengthen the status quo of a class-based education system in England for the next 150 years. The public did not get a root-and-branch reform of public schools, nor a redistribution of their vast resources, accumulated over the centuries from state endowments and philanthropic bequests.
For the free scholars, who came from the communities the schools were supposed to serve, this was a disastrous result. By the late nineteenth century most had already been sidelined by the wealth brought in by the fee-paying pupils, but after Clarendon the very statutes upon which they could make a claim for a free education were recast to give a much gentler interpretation of what constituted charitable service.7
The only saving grace was that foundation boys at some schools, including Eton and Harrow, were now recognised in law: ‘Speaking generally, the foundation boys are, in the eyes of the law, the school. The legal position of the Head Master of Eton is that of a teacher or “informator” of seventy poor and indigent boys, received and boarded within Eton College; the Head Master of Harrow is legally the master of a daily grammar school, established in a country village for the benefit primarily of its immediate neighbourhood.’8 But the poor’s right to a public school education was immediately undermined by Clarendon’s countervailing conclusion that the free scholar owed his education to the paying pupil, the former’s place in the school subsidised by the latter.
And so public school fee-paying education became a right enshrined in law.9
The Public Schools Act 1868 gave public schools independence from direct jurisdiction or responsibility of the Crown, the established church or the government. The following year, the headmaster of Uppingham School invited seventy of his fellow headmasters to form what became the Headmasters’ Conference – later the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC). The independent school movement was born.