CHAPTER XIII
CHESHIRE
“Then there is the County Palatine.”
Merchant of Venice.
Three profitable years I spent in Norfolk, learning my business, and I became weary of exile. When on my appointment I received my instructions from the Secretary, he said that, looking to my experience gained as Inspector of Returns, it was not necessary that I should serve any further apprenticeship: I “need not take up my headquarters in Norfolk.” This in official language meant that as soon as possible I should be given a district of my own; and in my ignorance of official life I took no thought for the morrow. But, as my third year of expatriation began to draw to a close, it occurred to me that the Secretary was not personally interested in me, and that in the Civil Service, as elsewhere, a man who wants promotion must see that he gets it.
I reminded Sir Francis that I was hungry—not for promotion, but for amotion to less remoteness. He at once admitted my claim, and created a new district for me, the headquarters of which would be King’s Lynn, and the territory West Norfolk and East Cambridgeshire. I remember that Wisbech and Whittlesey were included. I never saw either, but I should class them with Timbuctoo and Borrioboola Gha. My capital had a population of 17,000, and a member of Parliament: the grass grew in the streets, and on Tuesdays the cattle from the Hinterland came to market and ate it down. There was no Grand hotel, and no place where I could lodge; it would be necessary to take a house, and manage it. Matrimony stared me in the face. The greater part of the aforesaid Hinterland was fen district, imprudently reclaimed from the great dismal swamp. I pointed out these drawbacks to the Secretary, and he kindly suggested that I should beguile the tedium of existence by shooting gulls. It might have come to secretary-birds.
In a few weeks Providence intervened. I heard that H.M.I. at Chester wanted, for family reasons, to live near Lynn: would I change? I felt as Clive must have felt when the pistol, which he snapped at his own head, failed to go off. “He burst forth (says Macaulay) into an exclamation that surely he was reserved for something great.” Can it ever at any other time have happened that a man wanted to leave Chester to go to King’s Lynn?
With great difficulty I persuaded Sir Francis that to the Cheshire and Norfolk people it must be a matter of profound indifference whether Gyas or Cloanthus inspected their schools. Granted that Cheshire suffered loss, yet how pleasant to think of the joy of Norfolk. He grudgingly agreed, and in due course it was arranged. On October 1, 1877, I took charge of the Chester district.
We read at times in the history of great men that after some turning-point in their career they “never looked back.” I am not a great man, and in one sense I often looked back. There were many days when I thought of my successor; in winter frostbitten in the fens; in spring shivering in a dogcart, beating up against the east wind, smothered with yellow dust on Roudham Heath; at any time of the year wearily waiting for slow trains at dismal roadside stations: and at such times the old pious ejaculation rose to my lips, “There but for the Grace of God goes poor John Bradford.”
For I had got the best, or at least the most comfortable, district in England. In six months I was relieved of the eastern side of Cheshire, and my limit was a radius of from 10 to 20 miles round Chester. There were eight railway lines centred in the ancient city to carry me about, and on some of the lines trains were frequent. The school inspections had been so craftily arranged that I could spend the winter months in Birkenhead, where all the travelling was done in cabs; the spring in and around Chester, where there were hansom cabs instead of the perilous dogcart; the summer months in the more distant places at the end of my chain; and the autumn in the Wirral peninsula, between the Dee and the Mersey.
Late in the ’eighties an old colleague asked why I did not apply for a London district, and so get rid of all the travelling. There was the leading case of S. who used to inspect the four northern counties, giving six months to Northumberland and Durham, and six to Cumberland and Westmorland: now he had a compact area in East London, a mile across one way, and a mile and a quarter the other.
“And a yellow fog by way of a change from a black fog, and absolute monotony of schools all the year round,” I replied: “town children differing only in degrees of dirt; school buildings which would not be tolerated outside the large towns; and managers who take a cab to Whitehall, if they don’t like their Report. And at the back, and using private and political influence at the Office, a Debating Society calling itself the London School Board. Here in Cheshire I get variety. On Monday I had a town school of 400 boys in a black hole: on Tuesday a suburban school of 150 girls in a beautiful building with a lavish supply of teachers: on Wednesday I drove 10 miles to a country village, where the whole 45 lambs of the flock were collected in what an esteemed inspector called ‘a third class waiting-room and a jam cupboard.’ I am going to get Monday’s school shut up in 12 months: in London it would take 12 years. London! I had rather be a country dog, and bay the moon.”
He admitted that the School Board was as bad as the fog. H.M.I. is all but powerless in Board Schools; the Board inspectors hold the purse strings and control the promotion, and if H.M.I. tries to raise the standard of education to the level of other towns the Board combine with the teachers to worry his life out.
“But,” he added, “H.M.I. sometimes has an innings and scores freely. Did you hear about Bouncer? Member of the Board, you know: prominent educational reformer. Went down to a Board School the other day, and walked through the class-rooms. When he got to Standard V. he found them sitting upright, and a middle-aged sort of man balanced on the fireguard in front of the class.
“‘Hallo,’ said Bouncer, ‘what is this class doing?’
“‘At present,’ said the middle-aged man, not liking the Bouncerian manner, ‘they are doing nothing.’
“‘Nothing! then they had better go home,’ snorted Bouncer.
“‘Not a bad idea,’ said the middle-aged man meditatively.
“Bouncer was furious. ‘Pray, sir,’ he asked, ‘do you know who I am?’
“‘Haven’t a notion,’ said the middle-aged man.
“‘My name is Bouncer, sir, John Bouncer; and I am a member of the School Management Committee.’
“‘Ah,’ said the man on the fireguard, ‘and do you know who I am?’
“‘You, sir? No, I do NOT know.’
“‘I am the inspector, what you call Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools. Now, boys, here is teacher with the map of Europe. What is the capital of Herzegovina?’”
I thought I would do without Bouncer. No one behaved like that in West Cheshire: I should be frightened.
“And then,” I continued, “look at my playground. There are three railways to take me into Wales; eighty minutes to Llandudno, three and a half hours to the foot of Snowdon, two and a half hours to the foot of Cader Idris. Do you offer me Margate and Primrose Hill?”
So I abode in Chester for twenty-five years. This is not a biography. I got to know the whole district topographically and individually—managers, teachers, and children. A new generation of managers sprang up; many of the teachers had been children under my inspection; the children were the sons and daughters of my earliest victims. The buildings had grown up with the teachers and children; there were few, indeed, that had not been enlarged, modernised, or practically reconstructed, and many of them brought pleasant recollections of hard fought battles waged with managers for the sake of the children, or with the powers of darkness for the sake of both managers and children.
But I began to think that I had been there too long. We knew one another too well, and there was an increasing danger of my standard being regarded as the standard standard. So I mused, and waited.