HOW THE SCHOOL BEGAN II

[Kenneth Barnes, Sunday Talks to the School] 

There are some people in the School who have heard in a casual way stories of the earlier days and who think I ought to say more about them. So I will continue the account of those first few years. Let’s start with the food problem – because whatever else we may or may not do to keep a school going, we must provide food. There was about an acre of excellent kitchen garden well stocked and a delightful gardener, Kelby Tomlinson, from whom we learnt to talk North Country English. I daren’t say which county, because although just inside Lancashire we were within a mile or two of Yorkshire and Westmoreland. Kelby kept us supplied with all that we wanted in green stuff and root vegetables and tomatoes from the greenhouse. I noticed however that he hardly ever ate any vegetables other than potatoes for his own dinner, and one day when I wanted to make sure he had a good share of the tomatoes he grew he replied “Never touch ‘em. Can’t bear the smell of ‘em”.

There was one garden product that I had not expected – spring flowers. In the early spring about five months after we had taken over the building these flowers began to appear all over the grounds. Someone many years previously must have planted bulbs with a very lavish hand and nature had multiplied them, so that in April, all over the fields, right through the shrubberies and under the trees in the wood there were literally hundreds of thousands of daffodils, narcissus and jonquils in almost every possible variety. The sight was overwhelming. While our chief and first reaction was one of delight, we realised that we had here a source of badly needed income. Marks and Spencer made us the best offer and we were soon taking in huge bundles. But however many we picked it seemed to make no difference to the appearance of these great drifts of flowers.

We had great ideas, prompted perhaps by the ominous development of war, of making the school community really self-supporting. We made plans for hens, pigs and goats. I went off to a poultry auction and bought about forty or fifty Rhode Island Pullets at a ridiculously low price. It was the same at all auctions in the early years of the war; things went very cheaply. There were few bidders. Alas, those pullets grew and grew, apparently quite normally, but showed not the slightest inclination to lay eggs. At last, overcome by curiosity, I killed and dissected one of those hens. Yes, it had ovaries all right, but surprisingly undeveloped. About that time a man joined our staff who knew just everything that was to be known about the poultry industry, and he had those hens laying in no time.

Pigs were easier, but they set different problems. We bought them at two or three months and fed them on the swill from the kitchen together with a ration of meal. They grew, as pigs are apt to do, enormous. There were real pigsties – an integral part of the courtyard buildings, but Kelby who fed them decided that they needed daily exercise. They raced round the courtyard at 8.30 every morning. They had a bit of open-air enclosure on the outside of the courtyard building but their desire for exercise became so great that they defeated nearly every attempt to keep them in it. I remember we had a member of the School governors – a university don – staying with us for a while at that time, and he took on the job of out-manoeuvring Tweedledum and Tweedledee, as we called them. He started to make their fence higher. But since we did not have much material available for this he was not able to increase the height immediately by a sufficient amount. As the height increased the pigs learnt to jump steadily higher, and it was almost unbelievable what they ultimately achieved. I remember gasping with astonishment as I saw one of these huge porkers take a run at the fence and jump so that he just got on top of it. There he rocked backwards and forwards on his round tummy; but he rocked and rocked in such a way that he eventually rocked himself off on the free side, and off he went, with me in hot but hilarious pursuit. We used to meet these two pigs in extraordinary places after they had escaped. Once they came marching up the main staircase with all the confidence of well-established pupils. At another time, on my way back from the Friends Meeting, at Bentham one Sunday morning, I met them about a mile away from the School, trotting steadily along, exactly side by side, in the middle of the tarmac road.

This is not the end of the pig saga; they continued to embarrass us even in death. A certain member of the staff who owned the only means of transport – a three-wheeler – was our liaison officer for the neighbourhood. He most unwisely arranged for the slaughter of these pigs – or one of them – on the last day of the holidays, with the result that the carcass and ‘innards’ arrived at almost the same time as the parents with their children, many of them new. I think it must have been a time when we were short of cooks, because my wife and I had to cope with the pig, and we rushed from pig to parents and parents to pig until we hardly knew which was which. We got advice from a local farmer on the salting of hams, and oh what wonderful meals we had of loin chops! Another vivid memory is of the beauty – yes, the beauty – 0f a pig’s liver spread out on a white tray.

Then there were the goats. We had had most encouraging accounts of goats. They were much hardier than cows, we were told. Cows were too much of a risk if you had two or three cows and one died, that would be a loss of thirty or forty pounds. But you could buy three goats for the cost of one cow – and that would spread the risk better; anyway, goats just didn’t die. Moreover they might give a gallon of milk each per day. So of my wife went one day to Hebden Bridge and came back with two goats in the guard’s van. They were in kid, and the smaller, a white one soon gave birth. This was a momentous event in the School, and kid of course became everyone’s darling. The tap-tap of its tiny hoofs on the stairs and the gallery soon became a familiar sound. My secretary nobly undertook the task of milking the nanny, but the results dashed all our hopes. The nanny resisted with all her considerable strength. My poor secretary found it an all-in wrestling match, but every day she stuck at it, the result being about a pint of milk. Often when the nanny had at last submitted to being milked, she waited until the end and then either put her dirty foot right in the milk or sent the pail flying with one accurately-placed kick. The other goat, as she came near to kidding time, began to ail. We looked up the book and it seemed that the symptoms were those of spring scouring, not too serious a complaint. A local farmer, who knew something about goats, confirmed our opinion and we gave her the appropriate medicine. But she became weaker and I finally got a vet to look at her. The diagnosis was intestinal worms. He purged her, and when I saw the evidence I was staggered that any animal could have carried such a mass of worms in her body. But it was too late. That night, after all the boys and girls had gone to bed, I went out and dug a wide deep grave, then went to find another member of staff. At about midnight, when the moon shone now and then between rifts in heavy black clouds, two figures staggered out of the courtyard with their grisly burden. I remember the hollow sort of thud with which the body tumbled into the grave.

Rabbits were a serious pest in the grounds, so thinking of their food value as well as the need to get rid of them, I bought a gun – the weapon that even now is occasionally seen when a rat invades the scullery or the apple-store. Having had no experience with guns I got the usual thick lip from my first pull of the trigger. I was no sportsman and had no particular desire to shoot rabbits on the run. I found that rabbits regained confidence about 15 minutes after being sent scurrying to their holes, so I went out and crouched behind a bush a few yards a way from the long bank that held their warren. After 15 minutes – usually this was at dusk – several rabbits began to advance into the grass, and it was very easy even for a beginner to shoot one every quarter of an hour. Once three of them obligingly arranged themselves all in a line and fairly close together. They all fell to a single cartridge. I didn’t very much enjoy this, however, and soon called in the pest officer to cope with the rabbits; moreover I’m not sure that the School very much liked rabbit to eat.

Some of the boys became intensely interested in another source of natural food. One came back one day with several small trout, which he was permitted to cook himself and for his friends. He had been caught by the owner of the fishing rights, but with superb self-confidence and charm of manner had by-passed the man’s anger, inveigling him into a learned discussion on the habits of trout and the art of fishing. The near-by river, by the way, was a great delight to us.

Our visits to the Lune for bathing made us aware of a number of huge salmon living in its pools. Conversation with local inhabitants brought forth the most fascinating stories of poaching and of their brushes with the water-bailiffs. We were amused to hear that in an earlier generation the local Catholic priest was the most efficient poacher of all and was never caught. Two boys consulted a local blacksmith and found out all about gaff hooks; he even made them one free. I heard about this but was not worried; I knew just enough about poaching salmon to know that more skill was required than those boys possessed. Right to the end of our time at Wennington no salmon came our way. From one point of view I was just a little sorry.

I have just remembered one other experiment in the keeping of livestock that we began at Wennington Hall – the keeping of bees. That was – and still is – reasonably successful, though the boys and girls who now see me going out to deal with the hives completely protected over every square inch of my body will hardly credit the fact that in those days I handled bees in complete confidence clad I only shirt and shorts, with no veil or gloves – and was never stung. It was the handling of a new colony that had arrived by rail and was very angry that broke my confidence forever. I had to retire into seclusion for two or three days after that episode. I had another great encounter when the removal took place. We moved in 1945 over the Pennines to our present building, and the School, which had started in 1940 with hardly any money and no educational equipment, required a whole fleet of vans to transfer its accumulated property. In the middle of the operation I remembered my hives. I went out at night and closed them up, ready for the next day’s vans to take them, But when I went to shift them next morning, one of the hives sent out an endless stream of bees to dive-bomb me. Being unprotected I had to run for it. But when I returned to the house I found that all my protective equipment had been whisked away in one of the earlier loads. I borrowed a pair of gloves and crept out to see what I could do with that hive. I could not find out how the bees were getting out. They began to attack again so back I went to the house. I found a small flour bag, cut two holes for my eyes and put it over my head. But how was I to protect my eyes? I spotted an old gas mask of the elaborate type with a long ribbed hose pipe coming out in front, and put it on. Just as I was coming down stairs looking like nothing human, some visitors – prospective buyers of the house – came up. I never heard what they thought of this strange spectacle. Again I was defeated, this time by moisture condensing on the inside of the glasses in the mask. Eventually I was able to borrow a veil, discover the gap in the woodwork out of which the bees were swarming and slam wet clay into it. Nowadays whenever I move hives I keep a ball of clay in my pocket. I must have been stung by several hundred bees on this occasion, chiefly round the ankles and wrists, and I remember when the veil for a fraction of a second fell against my face, two bees stung me on the nose. Fortunately I had developed a fair degree of immunity by the time this battle took place.

I travelled in the van that carried the bee hives and I remember opening the back of the van at the end of the journey with great anxiety. But all was well; there was not a single stray bee. 

These are only a few of the many stories that can be told about the excitement and adventures of those early days. But as in all human endeavours the practical developments and lively adventures that everyone could see were by no means all that were important. They were happening, so to speak, on the front of the stage. What was happening in the background and in the wings? I have already shown that it was not easy to get boys and girls with varying attitudes and habits to cooperate well on practical jobs. But behind this there was a failure to understand the principles on which we wanted to run the School and a failure to understand us – my wife and myself. We had never believed in letting children do just as they liked and ride roughshod over adults. We knew from previous experience that it was possible to have an orderly school and at the same time understanding and affectionate relationships between children and their teachers – relationships that made a harsh or arbitrary use of authority unnecessary and punishment a rare event. In this, the new school that we had at last established ourselves, we found it very difficult to create this sort of relationship. Much of what we did was suspect. If we were friendly, we had some crafty motive for being so. If we were firm and used our authority when the difficult situations had to be coped with, then we were not being consistent. I remember one boy thought I was a very poor headmaster because I would not cane him when he misbehaved. Eventually he got his father to take him away. He was the sort of boy who when be had committed a crime, wanted to pay for it quickly, so that he could get on with the next. To be challenged to look into himself and do something to sort out his destructive tendencies was intolerable to him.

We had not sufficiently allowed for the tendency of boys and girls to bring with them their habitual attitudes. Many of them had always accepted that teachers and pupils belonged to two hostile camps, each of which plotted to outwit the other most of the time. This is a very common situation in schools, much encouraged by the very large classes their teachers usually have to control. It was difficult for these pupils to believe that our friendship was genuine. Even our present pupils are a little bewildered when we have to change from being on easy friendly terms to being officers-in-command, so to speak, firmly taking charge of the situation simply because the situation must be taken charge of. But our present pupils know us sufficiently well to trust our motives; those early pupils did not.

Some members of our staff were keen to establish self-government, that is, to create a school council that could control much of the out-of-class life of the school much as our present council does. Again this was an arrangement that I had known to work very responsibly and efficiently. We tried it but it was a mistake. It brought to the surface too many bad impulses and feelings before there was any understanding and trust to provide an atmosphere in which they could be dealt with. All of us adults were working under great strain. The sheer physical task of building up a school in war-time with hardly any money left us with too little time or energy to deal personally with all the difficulties that this was beginning to create. So I judged that the most practical thing to so was to abolish the school council and to declare myself a benevolent dictator – in other words an ordinary headmaster – until we had the conditions of confidence and friendship in which self- government could succeed. Subsequent events showed that this was wise. To have a firm headmaster gave the school a sense of security that it needed at that time. My faith that we could ultimately re-introduce self-government also was justified, as our present pupils know, for the council that we now have is a really representative, efficient and constructive body.

Perhaps those early years are sufficiently long ago for me to be able to say something about the staff of those days without feeling that I am opening a cupboard that contains disturbing skeletons. Today in the school we have a group of teachers and other staff members, working together, as visitors have often testified, with goodwill and unusually deep understanding of each other and the school’s purpose. They are honest and outspoken and at the same time they enjoy each other and their work, and we seem never to have any cynics. These very good conditions were not achieved all at once. I see no harm in our present pupils knowing that the understanding cooperation we now have has been secured only through a difficult and at times painful discipline. In fact, I think it important that they should know this. Any of our present pupils may, when they are adults, have to undertake some new venture in which people have to be got together to work for a common cause, and they must not be discouraged by the difficulties they are bound to meet.

It is interesting – and a very important fact – that the more a task involves people’s ideals and inner aspirations the greater are the difficulties they have to meet in working together. When people think a great deal about their ideals and their hopes for society and the world, they are apt to neglect the fact that under the surface of their minds they are very ordinary people, perhaps insensitive and inconsiderate, capable of being obtuse and even bitter. In a school like this everything that is in our personalities comes into the picture. We can’t work with part of ourselves and leave the rest at home. So in those very difficult days we all discovered that in spite of our ideals we were all difficult people who had a lot to learn about ourselves before we were really fit to live together in the same building. My wife and I were, I think, the worst sufferers, for in any community where things go wrong those in charge are the ones most blamed. Moreover, as everywhere during the war, there were people who came, stayed only for a short while and then left. They didn’t stay long enough really to join those of us who were accepting the severe discipline of living and working together. They just criticised and went their way. There were times when this burden oppressed us so much that we went through sleepless nights of almost complete despair.

We should not have come through these trials without the discipline of the weekly Friends’ Meeting. This is not an official Friends’ School, so our pupils are not compelled to attend a Friends’ Meeting, but most of them know roughly what it is like – a few people sitting in meditative silence, waiting for some new light, some stimulating thought – what they hope will be in fact the word of God – to break into the silence, either making itself known directly to them, or coming out of the mouth of another member of the meeting. Friends’ Meetings, like all other forms of worship, can fall very far below their proper standard, can become devoid of inspiration and dull. One sometimes hears a complaint made, perhaps by a Bishop of (sic) other dignitary of the Church, that people forget God when all goes well with them and only remember him in times of pain and tribulation. There is certainly something to criticise in this, but it is understandable. At least it shows this, that though men in times of ease and success think they need no other strength but their own, in times of severe difficulty some of them at best least face the fact that they cannot go on in their own strength. I have never known a Friends’ Meeting fail to meet the needs of a group facing extreme difficulties and willingly undertaking its discipline. We were greatly helped by the regular attendance at these meetings of a number of local Friends – including one who had tried to apply to an industry much the same principles as we were trying in our school and who had had to face much the same misunderstanding and difficulty. The meetings were not occasions where we suddenly found all our burdens magically lifted from us, making us new people. No, they were occasions where we gradually got to know ourselves, faced our inadequacy and slowly found the power and courage to see our way through. They did not make the job easy for us, but held us to it. That is what religious experience does; it does not make our tasks seem less formidable than they really are, but makes us less afraid of them.

We were emerging from the worst of our difficulties when the war came to an end. I remember so clearly the night when the blackout was lifted, when we switched on every light in the building and all went out into the grounds to watch the sight in silent ecstasy. The move to the new building in 1945, soon after the war ended, seemed to mark the entry upon a new period of development; for here we had what, for the time being at least, were all the opportunities for development; all the space we needed for games, a magnificent swimming pool all ready, all the buildings we needed for workshops and laboratories and class rooms, and the best kitchen I had seen in all my tours through the stately homes of England.

But all that we have achieved in the eight years that we have enjoyed in the new building has been built upon the wisdom and experience we gained from our struggles in the awkward old building and with the miscellaneous staff of war time. In thirteen years we have grown from the little frightened group of evacuees from the bombed towns to a school that is now able to send a proportion of its pupils to universities. Those who are now in the school can depend only on hearsay for their knowledge of what went on in the school during the war years, but I want them to know enough to realise that the foundations were laid then for what is good in the school now, and although I would not want to go through those painful struggles again, I know that our true capital – our spiritual capital – was stored up during that time. Our ability to tackle our own jobs, to make use of our own resources and our own hands – this derives from the tradition that grew up in those difficult days.

Much of this spiritual capital is I think, durable. It shows itself in the way we all live and work together. It is the most precious thing the school possesses and its existence is the chief reason why the school must continue. It could not be built up again by any other way than through the same pain and difficulty. It will not, however, persist whatever we do. Our present pupils have to try to understand it; they must try to reach the heart of the school’s life. We spend every day a bit of the capital we have inherited from the past and it is the responsibility of everyone in the school to help to recreate as least as much as we spend.

Archive reference: PP KCB/3-7-3/doc 13