The best days of your life...

...is what my grandmother used to say about your schooldays, and to judge from the following further extracts from the elementary school reports at TNA that I've been looking at, I may have been too dismissive; she may have been on to something:

ED 21/23419: Ballaugh Supplementary Class, 14 May 1913 (Mr J. W. Veysey)

• 'Nature study is taken with considerable success and the children are keenly interested in this branch of their studies. Another year they might be encouraged to collect and classify the wild flowers in which the district is unusually rich.'

ED 21/23419: Ballaugh Supplementary Class, 8 June 1914 (Mr H. Ward)

• 'They display a special interest in Nature Study of all kinds and have an intimate knowledge of both the plants and birds of the locality.'

An interesting contrast to the previous extracts I made, and it's difficult to imagine a better evocation of the last gasp of golden Edwardian nostalgia without resorting to fiction - might be time to reread Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie, although that was slightly later of course.

Further wanderings

The following brief extracts from Isle of Man elementary school inspection reports at TNA paint a particularly vivid picture:

ED 21/47210: Maughold New Central Board School, 9 July 1920

• 'Children should not be allowed to render songs in violently discordant fashion & slackness, hesitancy, indifference should not characterise physical exercises.'

ED 21/47211: Michael Parochial Board School, 13 July 1921

• 'The children recite well & sing sweetly; sight singing from both notations is well taught & with considerable success. Drawing presents pleasing features, appreciation of form, colour & finish seem to be well marked.'

ED 21/47213: Dalby Board School, 28 May and 2 June 1919

• '... the older children have recently made creditable progress, though they are still backward for their age.'

ED 21/47218: St Maughold's RC School, 6 and 18 July 1921

• '... energy in general is low, so they read silently & study in a vague, otiose way, not without enjoyment, but without scrutiny or criticism.'

Now that's the sort of bracing stuff that would knock our young people into shape! 

Further wanderings...

The loss of the London pub: now that is an ongoing tragedy that will surely be of great interest to economic and social historians in the future. And as a measure of how bad things have got in my part of east London what better place to start than Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, where we find a gem of a document in a somewhat unlikely setting:

L/BGM/A/12/1/13: Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green, Housing Committee: Minutes 1946-48 

• See 8 April 1947 for a remarkable report that lists all of the licenced premises in the old metropolitan borough of Bethnal Green, giving name, exact location and brewery. A grand total of 175 premises for the discerning drinker to choose from: what, I dread to think, remains - a question of interest for CAMRA members and any other pub historians out there.  

Wanderings (and wonderings) among the archives

First in a series of random and surprising items that may be of interest to someone somewhere, stumbled upon by chance and hurriedly noted while working in various London archives.

This week's offering from the London Metropolitan Archives, and the political powerhouse that was the Parks and Open Spaces Committee:

LCC/MIN/09014: London County Council, Parks and Open Spaces Committee: Presented Papers 1942-43

The POSC meeting of 26 February 1943 considered the following:

• Letter from the Ministry of Information, dated 12 February 1943, re proposal to erect a plaque at 8 Gray's Inn Place to commemorate the fact that Sun Yat-Sen had lived there from 1896. The letter makes clear that this was a gesture to keep the Chinese sweet...

A wayward political journey

In spite of all of the evidence to the contrary, I still tend to think of individuals as staying fixed in a political sense, probably because I am myself and most of the the people I know personally are too. But of course such steadfastness/stupidity (delete according to choice) does not apply to many people, and some time ago I came across a striking example in the League of Nations Union papers at the London School of Economics of just how far an individual can travel politically. The Union was the type of rather well-meaning (but, with the benefit of hindsight, hapless) inter-war organisation that is likely to have attracted some acerbic comment from George Orwell: who should be listed as a rather generous donor in the 1922 Annual Report but Oswald Mosley - 'put me down for £50', he probably didn't say. That rather eccentric individual's political journey has been well researched, but this does show just how far people can shift.

There are two ways of looking at these political journeys: either people are so ideologically confused that they themselves don't know and understand what they profess to believe; or they are brave and original thinkers who nimbly react to changing political conditions and refuse to be contained by any orthodoxies. A tough one to decide: it could be the latter, except that the political journey always seems to be one way - rather a sign of simply having given up I fear.

The working-class autodidact: fact or fiction?

We can get this one out of the way easily enough: don't let anyone ever tell you that the working-class autodidact was a creature of myth. The breed may now have become all but extinct, gone with the particular social cultures of the heavy industries that produced them, but we can still glory in their achievements. How about this for a superb example, uncovered whilst looking at early 20th-century trade union reports among the TUC collections at London Metropolitan University Archives.

National Union of Foundry Workers, Monthly Journal and Report, May 1921.

Why did these industrial cultures - so primitive, limited and limiting in many respects - produce outstanding men such as Robert Dunlop? My own view - based, I sometimes despondently think, more on blind hope that sufficient evidence - is that the desire for knowledge and self-improvement is simply an eternal verity of human nature. But perhaps a more pertinent question for us to consider in our time is why we don't seem to have our own Robert Dunlops: surely somewhere out there, enduring and rising above the petty miseries of call-centre, zero-hours contract Britain, are his 21st century equivalents. For what it's worth I think that they are still with us, but whether they will ever be recognised by a culture that does not seem to revere knowledge and intellectual prowess, let alone be celebrated by future generations is debatable.

'We already know what happened...'

Thus Lord Tebbit on the recent decision not to hold a public enquiry into the events at Orgreave Coking Plant on 18 June 1984. Well, what else would he say, you might reasonably ask: we can safely predict with some accuracy that individual's views on most issues, and anyway the past is immutable and fixed, is it not? In this case we even have television footage of the events (the plural is deliberate) in question so what else is there to add to what we can see with our own eyes?

Leaving aside the fact that some creative editing can do wonders for reconfiguring the past as it appears to be preserved in moving visual images, what is perhaps most exasperating about this stunted view of history is that it underestimates just how difficult it is to reconstruct a plausible past using inevitably incomplete sources. Any fool can put together a pre-fabricated version of historic events to serve political ends, but try honestly reconstructing even small incidents from the recent past and see how you get on. You'll soon find that the past is actually riddled with black holes which it sometimes seems that no amount of research can fill.

I have been frequently reminded of this basic truth over the past few months while I've been trying to put together a history of the small allotment association of which I am secretary (don't roll your eyes: the history of land use in London is fascinating and highly relevant - we'll need to be organised if and when the developers come sniffing around the site). The organisation dates from the early 1980s and is still going strong, so yes, we already know what happened, but this seemingly straightforward research task has thrown up some formidable difficulties, many of which are probably insuperable: the people involved are long gone, the local council's records seem to be incomplete and who knows what was lost when the GLC was abolished - an archival retreat from Moscow if ever there was one. In fact, it's a remarkable thing but I've had easier times of it researching events from 200 years ago!
          
I sometimes think that we'd do well to admit that vast swathes of history - including ostensibly well-documented events - are nigh on irretrievable, but the point is that we shouldn't stop trying: it's what makes the subject exciting.