Archives and Documents

How the School Began

by Kenneth Barnes

Now and then I become acutely aware that there are many children in the school who know little about the schools’ history. They may find it difficult to understand the schools’ ways to accept some of the demands made on them, simply because they do not know how these ways became part of school life.

The school began its life in the first wave of intensive bombing, in 1940, when children had been evacuated from towns and education everywhere was tremendously upset, when country schools had to share their buildings with town schools dumped in their neighbourhoods and conditions were so difficult that education for a while was gravely reduced. It was then, in August 1940 that my wife and I were offered the use of Wennington Hall for a school. This happened in August 1940. For ten years before that I had been very happily teaching at Bedales School. That school has a very stimulating effect on those who work in it, and in several of its teachers during the fifty years of its existence, this effect has been to make them want to found new schools developing along similar lines. My wife and I had laid our plans several years before the war broke out but we had no money ourselves and could find no one at that time who wanted to provide us with the money we needed for the foundation of a school. We imagined that not less than £5000 would be required. By the time the war came we had become almost hopeless and I had become, not altogether unhappily, resigned to remaining a science teacher for the rest of my teaching career.

Then, surprisingly, the war that we feared and deplored made it possible to start a school almost without money. It’s interesting that we who, as Quakers, had so earnestly condemned war and fought against all policies that seemed to lead to war, should have found in the circumstances of war precisely the conditions that we needed for the work we cared about most. War brings both good and evil to the surface. So when the war flared into its acute phase in 1940 it not only set people destroying each other with ruthless and fiendish efficiency, but it also stirred up constructive and cooperative and loving impulses that had been only partially expressed in peace time. So it happened that We were suddenly offered the use of a furnished building – equipped as a guest house but not likely to be used as such in war time – to open a school that would take in some of the many children whose education who had perhaps lost their homes or whose education had been seriously upset. So it happened that August, while the ground shook with the sound of guns and waves of bombers droned over every night, we packed up our belongings and set off for North Lancashire.

Only a few of our present pupils you will remember what Wennington Hall was like. It was built in a style that we call ‘Baronial Gothic’, typically Victorian: a cross between a Scottish castle and St. Pancras Statt Station. It was not at all the sort of house one would choose for a school: damp and draughty, with great echoing spaces, wide staircases and echoing galleries, great cellars that reeked of mould and damp decay. There were mullioned windows, battlements and spiral staircases. Incidentally, those spiral staircases, had they been really ancient, would have been a serious mistake; only a left handed swordsman could have tackled an enemy in them. There was a great courtyard and a postern gate. Round the courtyard were many mouldering rooms, and attics stacked with moth-eaten deer heads and antlers.

Though it was unavailable for permanent use as a school, you will it will be realised that it had its advantages as a place to begin. Moreover, having been in use as a guest house, it was furnished and equipped so we could start almost without spending money. We owe it largely to three men; Sir Arthur Leonard, J.H.Ward, and Samuel Maltby that we were able to make use of this building.[1]

It was set in a fascinating countryside. Ingleborough Over to the east there was Ingleborough, like a crouching lion. Or when there was snow over it, like a great wedding cake out of which a giant had taken a huge curving slice. To the west there was the wide valley of the Lane Lune, with its bird life and its salmon. North and south of us stretched mile upon mile of wild deserted moorland. There was no difficulty in surroundings like that in persuading boys and girls to go out on walks and excursions; it was largely the beauty and wildness of that hill country that gave us the strength to meet the tremendous difficulties of those early days.

We recruited our staff from the many people who immediately offered to help us. War shook most people out of their accustomed habits and there were many who had ceased to take thought for the morrow, whose only desire was to find wh worth-while construction work no matter how little they were paid for it. A great deal of energy and goodwill had come to the surface and that was the real capital put into the school.

Children came quickly. There were twenty-five at the end of the first term, most of them hurriedly brought from Manchester or Liverpool or other blitzed towns. After we had put them to bed at night we often paused at the dormitory windows looking southward and watched the skies whiten to the south as the first showers of incendiaries fell on the towns where their parents lived; and while we waited the sky turned from white to red as the buildings caught fire and the bombs tore them apart. Sometimes I felt like Noah, saving a few lives as the flood of fire and destruction poured over the land.

We were anxious that in such dangerous times no child who needed the sanctuary that the school could offer should be denied it, so we let them come for whatever their parents could pay, no matter how little. Sometimes it was only a few shillings a week. This was possibly only because all the adults in the school community were prepared to live on next-to-nothing. In fact during that first term - we the adults - all paid 25/- a week for the privilege of being in the school. The next term we neither paid nor received anything and in the third term we all received 5/- a week. There was no feeling of sacrifice or deprivation. The war had swept away all habitual and comfortable ideas of what mattered; we were face to face with realities and trivial things were seen for what they were. We could feel, in a way, immensely privileged to be able to do this constructive work when so much of mankind’s’ energy was being hurled into destruction.

The war not only swept away conventional notions as to what matters in social life but it also for us as for so many others, it completely changed our ideas as to what was proper for us to do to our job, what was professional and dignified. We had called ourselves teachers, but now there was no job that we could refuse to do, whether it was teaching, cooking, cleaning, carpentry, painting & repairs, or coping with blocked drains. This abandonment of professional dignity was overwhelmingly repaid in the excitement, thrill and satisfaction of doing a whole job, seeing all round it and knowing that every little thing we did, however trivial or menial our duty was something that added to our spiritual defences, our courage and our faith.

The workshop was the first department to be equipped properly, for without it we could not have made the other equipment we needed. We had started the school before the supply of materials had become very rigidly controlled and we were able at first to get a good supply of timber, which was of course the thing needed most.

We went to many auction sales. I remember especially an occasion when I went to one at a joiners shop; it was a pathetic experience for the joiner was an oldish man and was selling up before going into a war factory. His tools, smoothed and polished by many years of handling, seemed so much part of his personality, that it was almost sacrilege to be bidding for them; and they went absurdly cheaply, for it was a very wet day and there were very few bidders at the sale. I remember also buying a large number of pullets at a poultry sale. One thing that I did not know much about was the feeding of poultry it was not until we added a poultry expert to our staff that those hens laid any eggs.

It can be well imagined that with all the need for construction and alterations and for the production of food there was plenty of physical labour and outdoor work for the boys girls. This was part of our scheme of education anyway. I had seen how valuable this can be at Bedales, where I had been in charge of outdoor work squads on two afternoons a week throughout the ten years I taught there. It was one of the many excellent things in which that school was a pioneer. Bedales never had an O.T.C: the whole feeling of the school was dead against it. Yet it was said of its boys in the first world war that they were of more value in the army than were boys from other schools who had trained in O.T.Cs. because in trench warfare where square-bashing was irrelevant the Bedalian had the resources and ingenuity necessary to cope with difficult conditions; he knew how to use tools and pick and spade. Just very rarely at Bedales I heard a boy or girl say “Why should we do this work when our parents pay high fees to provide salaries for teachers and servants?” The far more general feeling was that it was significant and enjoyable training, part of a very practical preparation for life, and also a symbol of our acceptance of manual

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they find those aims in some measure expressed in everything we do.

To return Returning to the matter of outdoor work, I remember what grumbling we had to deal with when we had to deal face from some of the boys or girls when it was necessary to dig land for potato planting. I remember too what utterly unsuitable clothing people would appear in for such work. That was before we had established a school uniform and it was experiences of this sort that decided us to have one. Girls came to school with shoes that were fit only for walking a few hundred yards on city pavements and they had no idea of adjusting what they wore to the sort of work they were doing. But as time went on we began to find a better attitude growing up - especially when our labours began to bear fruit. Boys and girls do not usually look far ahead. Digging for them is just a burdensome labour; they do not connect it with the harvest they will reap later in the year. Only when the harvest actually comes and they experience the satisfaction of digging up the potatoes and measuring the quantity from each of several plots, do they begin to understand and accept. One of the great significant events of this period was the building of our first kiln for the firing of pottery. The satisfaction that came to the boys and girls who built it and used it must have contributed a very great deal to the development of their the schools attitude to manual and constructional work. It was, by the way, a coal fired kiln built to a design of the Rural Industries Bureau and held about a hundred pots. I remember very clearly the opening of it after the first firing. The quality of those first vases and bowls seemed miraculous. The pottery we do in the school has grown now to such factory-like dimensions that we take for granted the weekly firing and opening of the kiln. And we take for granted the great beauty of glazes and patterns^. Only those of you who wait anxiously to see your their first successful pot and finally lift it from the kiln will have any idea of the joy and wonder that those first firings brought to us. You It should be understood too that every experience of beauty and satisfaction was greatly heightened in those days by the contrast with the dark background of the war. One of the activities that was at first resented, or at least disliked, was the washing-up after meals. Teachers often joined in this, precisely because it was a dull job and therefore needed all the good will and tolerance we could put into it. For some time it was a rather haphazard muddling through – until one or two boys and girls said : One of the reasons why we dislike this job is that it is a mess and a muddle. We might enjoy it, or at least tolerate it better, if we did it thoroughly systematically. They worked out a system and made everyone conform to it. They dragooned their fellow-pupils and their teachers into proper sorting out and stacking. They saw that everything went through in proper order. As a result the attitude to the work did radically change. We found – as we have often found – that the acceptance of a discipline set us free. Often after that we heard the washing up squad singing in chorus over the sinks.

I have perhaps said enough to explain how all this manual work, this work of maintenance and alteration, has become part of our school life. It began as you see out of sheer necessity, but it also belonged to a tradition that had completely proved its worth. Even if we had been able to fund pay servants to do the work we could not have got them in wartime. In peace time we shall everyone is having to learn more and more how to manage without servants, how to replace them with labour-saving appliances and how to plan daily life to fit in the necessary chores. So what we still expect of the boys and girls in the school is an absolutely necessary training for life as it has to be lived. We have obtained a little domestic help to relieve what had become, with the rapid growth of the school, a rather heavy burden of domestic work, but we shall always expect every boy & girl to have sufficient share in this work to accept it as part of life and to know how to do it. We’ve made no

There are other values in this work to be mentioned. I had never been happy about the class-division that existed in most boarding schools: about the fact that in them behind a certain door there lived a whole group of domestic workers, not very well paid, who were not regarded as in any true personal sense members of the school community, with whom pupils did not associate and were perhaps even forbidden to associate. It seemed to me to be an almost complete condemnation of boarding school education that everywhere there was this sharp class-distinction under in a relatively small group of people under one roof. I would never have thought it worth while to start yet another boarding school if I had not believed it possible to get rid of this evil – for evil it undoubtedly is. You will I hope have realised that Alongside our demand that everyone should take a share in the domestic and manual work we have insisted that any people who come into the school community to do domestic this work as their job should be personally regarded as on a level with all the other adults; able to share the same common room and sit down at the same tables. I hope too that we can maintain in the school a respect for this work as having its own dignity: requiring discipline and intelligence. The worst that a boy or girl can do is to regard domestic work as work that is of little importance and therefore to be skimped; this attitude will ruin the value of it. I specially mention this in connection with domestic work because this attitude that it is unimportant is altogether too widespread among the public. As a result domestic workers are despised and allowed no dignity in their contribution to our common life. It is not difficult to develop in you’re a respect for skill in many of the outdoor tasks boys and girls are very willing to learn how to fell a tree exactly where they want it, how to lay bricks or lay a concrete floor accurately. Many probably look back with the greatest satisfaction to jobs of this sort which they have taken part, and I hope this will always be work of this sort for them to enjoy at some time in their school career. I am sorry when I see boys and girls in schools provided with everything ready-made: buildings and apparatus, equipment, everything laid on. What a valuable educational experience they miss. And what a false idea about life it encourages.

This brings me to the last point I want to make. The variety of things that boys and girls do in this school encourages them to be versatile and adaptable; they should be more able than most children young people to cope with unexpected demands on their ability and resourcefulness. There are very strong influences at work in modern life education to narrow down peoples’ training so that they are at a loss when called upon to tackle something unfamiliar. This is a very bad preparation for the world as it is likely to be in the future; it certainly does not fit young people for an adventurous life. I hope that the boys and girls in this school will have an adventurous life, even though it may mean crises and problems and difficulties; and I believe that if they take full advantage of the training they receive in the school they will find themselves not only able to meet difficulties but able also to enjoy the struggle.

Archive reference: PP KCB 3/7/2 document 14