“You do yet taste
Some subtilties of the isle, that will not let you
Believe things certain.”—Tempest.

It next became necessary to find out what an “Inspector of Returns” had to do. What were these “Returns”? There was the Elementary Education Act, 1870, to study, and there were Instructions of the vaguest kind. In after years I became familiar with many dozens of such documents; and I used to associate them with the words which (“with that universal applicability which characterizes the bard of Avon”—to quote Mr. Micawber) Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Macbeth:

But in these cases
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor.

It appeared that the Returns were answers to questions sent by the Department to every parish in the country; What was the population? What schools had they in the parish? What schools outside the parish did they use? and so on. When we had verified the answers, we were to recommend recognition of such schools as we found to be efficient, and to state what further provision was required, with detailed suggestions. For Parliament had decreed that every child should have an efficient school within reasonable distance of his home.

This seemed simple. But the word “parish” gave us endless trouble. When we speak of a parish, we think of an ecclesiastical district; and we picture to ourselves a cluster of houses, a long street, and an old church, with the village inn and a butcher’s shop in the background. But Parliament meant, or defined, a civil parish; that is, a finite area in which a separate rate can be collected. In most parts of England the difference is immaterial; but in Anglesey, and sometimes in other places, we were baffled at the outset. The people had long ago left the old centres, and had settled down where four cross-roads met, or near the railway station, or near a quarry, or a mine. There they had put up two chapels, three beer-shops, and a general store: they had called the place after the bigger chapel, Moriah, or Carmel, or Bethesda; and, except for a wedding or a funeral, they ceased to go up to Jerusalem.[1] Now Moriah was nearly always on the edge of two or more civil parishes, and if it wanted a school, the two or three parishes would have to pay for it, though they might have perfectly efficient schools of their own in the old centres. This of course roused protests.

Then there came another stumbling-block. If a school were ordered, it would probably be built and managed by a School Board; and in Anglesey the members of the Board would be five men whose opinion on a pig might be accepted, if the pig belonged to a perfect stranger, but on school matters the pig’s opinion would be equally valuable.

A third trouble. These parishes were often so small that one could not hope to see a competent Board, unless several parishes were united. But the parishes would often rather die single than live united to their next-door neighbours. I cannot forget the fury of the Rector of Llantwyddeldwm, when it was proposed to yoke him unequally with Llantwyddeldy, and to build a joint school for the two parishes.

Lastly came the great question of rates. All the Dissenters were determined to have School Boards elected everywhere; and, to calm the minds of the small-souled brethren who feared for their pockets, word had been passed round that the rate could not exceed 3d. in the pound. To prove this they appealed to the declarations of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Forster, and to Section 97 of the Education Act. That Section is nineteen lines long in the official copy, and there is nothing bigger than a comma by way of relief from beginning to end. In the seventh line occur the words “3d. in the pound.” Who can blame a Welshman imperfectly acquainted with English, if after diving into this sea of troubles he came up gasping for breath, but firmly clutching the comfortable words THREEPENCE IN THE POUND? Finding that I was a barrister, and supposing in the innocence of their hearts that this implied some knowledge of the law, the combatants frequently appealed to me; and I assured them, with all the self-assurance of the briefless, that the Section did not limit the rate: it merely provided an aid-grant for poor parishes. And it happened that I was right. When, in the ’nineties, they came to pay rates of from one to three shillings in the pound, they must have said a good deal.[2]

Our instructions said no word about any of these special difficulties. But the difficulties faced us everywhere we went, and caused us no little perplexity. At the same time the discussion roused much interest among the leaders of the contending parties, as we moved about from centre to centre. I think it was the most stormy month of my official life.

There were few compensating pleasures. Anglesey is not a good county for an uncommercial traveller. In 1871 it was almost wholly unknown to the ordinary Briton. Travellers to Ireland were whirled through twenty miles of desolation between the Straits and Holyhead. Yachting men knew the beautiful coast facing the Straits. Occasionally a Liverpool steamer full of sea-sick tourists called at Beaumaris. Once John Bright visited that dreary capital, admired the fine view of the Snowdon range, and deplored the deadness of the town. Finding that the landlord was a Baronet, he snorted, and described it as “withering in the cold shade of aristocracy.”

Also, of course, thousands of trippers visited the great bridges. But the interior was, and is, wholly uninteresting, and the fine sea-coast was at that time almost inaccessible by land, and had no accommodation for summer visitors. The roads, except the great London and Holyhead road, were generally atrocious, and there were only three or four places where a carriage could be hired. Trees, even hedges, were rare, and there was no shelter from the frequent gales. Marshes and moorland divided villages apparently connected. Who could ask a child to go to school across a mile of wind-swept “morfa” or “rhos”? I was told the current, and recurrent, anecdote of the Tutor of Jesus College, the Welsh College of Oxford. Jones, of Jesus, asked how it was that Tacitus spoke of Anglesey as “insula umbrosa,”[3] whereas nowadays there is hardly a tree to be seen inland. And the Tutor replied deprecatingly, “Well, you know, Mr. Jones, it’s rather a shady island still.” Also William Williams, Ysgol-feistr, had said that in most parishes there was “not a stick in the place except the parson.”

The inhabitants of this terra incognita were themselves incognitiores; for even the travellers who knew the railway and the coastline had no dealings with the people. In those days Anglesey was almost wholly ignorant of English. Our dealings lay, of course, chiefly with the clergy and the parish overseers; but the latter usually brought their own ministers and elders to support them. Then the proceedings raged lengthily in the vernacular: my chief, or his assistant, conducted the enquiries: “Druidaeque circum, preces diras sublatis ad caelum manibus fundentes” (as Tacitus said of their ancestors) denounced the Catechism, while I looked on and yawned.

Thanks to the freehold tenure of Church Benefices, the island was in the hands of the Chapel. There were practically only two Dissenting bodies in Anglesey; the Calvinistic Methodists and the Congregationalists. The Wesleyans locally were a small body. The Calvinists, like the Wesleyans, were an offshoot from the Church, forced out by the folly of its rulers. They held all the vital doctrines of the Church, and, even now, could accept the Thirty-nine Articles and the Liturgy as freely and with the same mental reservations as an orthodox Low Churchman. An intelligent Calvinist told me that “Calvinistic” had ceased to be anything but an epitheton ornans: but that may have been merely his own position. I imagine there is no difference in doctrine between the Calvinists, the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, and the Wesleyans; but their views on Church government vary.

However this may be, and my ideas on the subject are very hazy, there is no doubt that the Chapel forms part of the Anglesey life, as the Kirk (of whatever sort) does of the Scottish life. But it does not produce the Scottish virtues, and the ministers of that date, 1871, were not morally, intellectually, or educationally of the Scottish type. Certainly Truth and Honesty were not well cultivated, or else the soil was bad.

These are the rival cries, and the reader may choose which he prefers.

There is no freehold in the Chapel pulpit: a minister who was carried out of the “King’s Arms” would have short shrift. And morality is not the only rock on which the preacher may strike. During the South African War I was spending a Sunday at a Welsh watering place, and after lunch I was talking to the landlord at the door of the hotel.

“See that chapel?” he said: “they had a new minister this morning; preached his first sermon; turned out to be a pro-Boer, and preached against the war. They had a meeting in the vestry after service, and gave him the sack before dinner. Smart work, wasn’t it?”

Wales is chapel-ridden, but it is not priest-ridden: the wary minister adopts the platform of The Cause: and there is a tendency to put The Cause above the Great First Cause. Certainly there was a lamentable want of truth and honesty in the “Returns” investigated by us in 1871, and made by, and under the influence of, these ministers and elders: and also in their ordinary school statistics.

These schools were always known as British Schools; and in theory they were carried on in connexion with the British and Foreign School Society, one guiding principle of which was that the children should have plain, undenominational Bible teaching. Up to 1871 the inspection of Elementary schools was carried on by three sorts of H.M. Inspectors. The Church schools were inspected by clergymen; the Roman Catholic schools by Roman Catholic laymen; and the other schools by laymen, of whom the best known was Matthew Arnold. In Wales the British Schools in receipt of Government grant were not numerous; and North Wales was grouped with Lancashire and Cheshire. As a rule their inspector lived in London, and, except when he paid his annual visit, they saw nothing of him. Nor indeed had he, I believe, before May, 1871, the right to enter the doors without due notice. And as the managers were for the most part unlearned men, whose interest lay chiefly in the balance sheet, the schoolmaster farmed the whole concern—that is, he took the children’s school pence, the annual grant, and the subscriptions, and paid the expenses, retaining the remainder for his salary—or, alternatively, he had a salary varying with the grant. In either case his income depended on the regular attendance of the children: for the grant was paid in part on the unit of average attendance, and in part on the success in examination of each child who had attended 250 times.

All these statistics were recorded in registers, and it is easy to see that there were many temptations to fraud and few checks. In one case the master of a large British school confessed to me that he had had no registers for three months: he had recorded the attendance in copybooks and he was “going to transcribe them.”

The religious instruction which these worthies were supposed to give—and I believe that up to 1871 it was a condition precedent of the Code grant in all schools, as it certainly was an essential feature of British schools—often seemed to have been dropped. In one case I asked casually and unofficially what the arrangements were, and the master told me he read a chapter of the Bible every morning.

“In English or in Welsh?”

“Oh, in English,” he replied eagerly; for Welsh was discouraged by My Lords.

“And do the children understand it?”

“Well, no, indeed; but it is just while they are coming in, and it doesn’t matter.”

I made no remark. We were forbidden to make any enquiry.

A charge freely brought against these schools was that when the British school inspector came down from London, capable children likely to earn a grant were passed on from school to school to be examined under the names of less capable children on the books of the recipient school. The story was generally believed, and special precautions were taken to thwart the conspirators. Detection would be almost impossible, for children in the bulk are much alike, and in North Wales few are so eccentric as not to be called by one of the six names, Jones, Evans, Hughes, Davies, Williams, Roberts. Also the inspector would be always in a hurry, and always ignorant of Welsh, and enquiries could hardly be made. But I am bound to say that I never came across an instance of this particular fraud. The only authentic case within my knowledge occurred in a Church school in Liverpool, where an inspector who had the royal gift of remembering faces, recognized a number of children whom he had seen in another school. Let it be said for the manager’s sake that he was asking for recognition only, not for grant. Recognition, quotha! Well, he got that.

I believe the trick is more common in flower shows.

It will be gathered from the foregoing account that I was not favourably impressed by the islanders, though in many cases “the barbarous people showed me no little kindness.” This opinion was not confined to visitors. I received a letter from a resident, who gave me much help in my work, speaking doubtfully of the chances of success in dealing “with these Cretan people.”

“Cretan”? or was it “crétin”? No: clearly C-r-e-t-a-n. Crete is an island—ah, I have it—

I might add “Cretensis incidit in Cretenses”; the Anglesey man is down on the Anglesey men. But I would rather not translate the Greek. You will find it in St. Paul’s letter to the first bishop of Crete, Chapter I.

This, of course, is all ancient history. More than a generation of men has passed, and the new generation may be vastly different. Moreover, there was a revival in the island not long since. The people are changed in heart.

“Do you think a Tory candidate will be returned at the next election, Mr. Jones, Ynys Fôn?” (Mona’s Isle).

“’Deed, I don’t know; yes, perhaps, I think.”