Paul Jennings, Schools and Schooldays in Nineteenth-Century Harrogate (Palatine Books by Carnegie, 2026)
Harrogate over the course of the nineteenth century became an internationally renowned spa. It also attracted a substantial middle-class population of retirees, those living on private incomes and the families of businessmen commuting to the nearby cities of Bradford and Leeds. The spa and those middle-class residents were supported by a substantial working-class population of servants, hotel workers, men in the building trades and transport, especially railways, as well as such as cleaners, laundry workers, shop assistants, gardeners and workers for the spa itself. All those people were documented in a previous book, Working-class Lives in Edwardian Harrogate (Palatine Books by Carnegie, 2021).
This book compares and contrasts the schools for the children of those working-class and middle-class populations, shaping the analysis through the trio of class, gender and religion. The two school systems were almost wholly separate. On the one hand, were the charity, church, board and council schools for the children of the working-class. On the other, were private schools for the children of middle-class residents and families particularly from the north of England. These smaller private schools, which formed by far the biggest part of the private sector, have been relatively neglected in favour of the better-known public, grammar and high schools.
Charity schools were founded through endowments by local landowners towards the end of the eighteenth century in the two settlements adjoining the spa town itself, Bilton and Pannal, agricultural communities. It was only with the further growth of the spa that a working-class population led to demands for schools for them, not only from church leaders and others anxious that these children should receive an education to fit them for their status and roles in life, but from parents of the children. It was the Church of England which dominated, providing the majority of the new schools. It was this Anglican dominance which fuelled local resistance to the creation of school boards under the landmark legislation of 1870. Only in 1883 was a board established in Pannal and ten years later in Bilton/Starbeck and Harrogate itself, chiefly due to the inability of church schools to finance the new government standards for schools, the abolition of fees and the introduction of compulsion.
The book then looks at the sometimes-troubled work of these three new school boards to build sufficient schools for the town’s children, until the three were united in a single board in 1900, which in turn in 1904 became the Local Education Authority.
Turning to the private schools, over the years from around 1800 to 1914, some 170 schools were opened, of which 100 were for girls, both day and boarding. By the Edwardian period there were some 700 children boarding, according to the decennial censuses. These were small schools, generally of thirty or fewer pupils, with the exception chiefly of two schools which are still in existence as independent schools, Ashville and Harrogate Ladies’ College, the latter soon to go co-educational and change its name to Duchy College, from its location in Harrogate. It looks in detail at the men and women who set up these schools, which often had only brief existences, their family backgrounds, previous education and careers. In addition, there was much movement from premises within the town and to and from other towns.
The pupils of both types of school are then examined in detail. This confirms that the church, board and council schools were indeed the schools for working-class children, but with a sizeable minority of lower middle-class sons and daughters of shopkeepers, small businessmen and the like. This varied between individual schools. Those boarders in the private schools were, as indicated, from the middle class of industrialists, merchants and professional families predominantly, but not exclusively from the north of England. The book charts in detail the family backgrounds of some of these boys and girls.
Similar detail is then provided for the teachers in the elementary schools, a group increasingly comprised of women, and the masters and mistresses who staffed the private schools, looking again at their family backgrounds, education and previous careers. One significant finding was that this became an increasingly graduate profession.
Subsequent chapters examine the teaching and learning in the two sectors, what was taught and in what ways and how this was influenced by emerging pedagogy and the varied demands of parents and employers, especially in the private schools, the growth of an examination system. Also detailed is life at school, the accommodation, including the all-important school toilets in the context of the frequent ill health of working-class children and the anxiety for their health which had led middle-class parents to send their children to school in a spa town in the first place, the structure of the day, attendance, discipline and punishment.
A final chapter explores life after school, which for the vast majority of the working-class children was work and, for girls, home and family. However, through the introduction of scholarships, a minority of working-class children did go on to secondary schooling and from 1903, the town had its own municipal secondary school, later Harrogate Grammar School, now a comprehensive school. For the boys of private schools, the world of work also beckoned, often into the family business or the same trade or profession but also for some, to university. For the girls, a home was the expected destination of the majority, but for a growing minority there was also a profession, usually teaching. Only a very small number went on to university at this time and they almost all from the Ladies’ College, the most academically prestigious of the girls’ schools.
A brief conclusion summarises the book’s key findings, looks at how schools experienced the First World War and sketches out twentieth-century developments.
The book therefore seeks to address many key themes in the history of education in the nineteenth century through the lenses of class, gender and religion. To do so, it makes use of a wide variety of sources: records of the schools themselves, log books, admission registers and punishment books for the voluntary and board schools, admission registers and school magazines for the private schools; the decennial census from 1841 to 1911; trade directories; and the two local newspapers. Use is also made of the several parliamentary enquiries into schools over the period.
Overall, the book is therefore scholarly but also intended for a wide audience. It is informed by a belief in the importance of locality, how schooling developed in different ways in different places according to particular local circumstances and how those circumstances interacted with wider developments. It is informed too by a belief in so-called history from below, which is taken to be not only the lives of the poor but also those of the more well-to-do who also got on with their lives.