Merchant Taylors' School
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Merchant Taylors' School is a British public school, located in Northwood in the London Borough of Hillingdon. It was founded in 1561 by members of the Worshipful Company of Merchant Taylors.
A second school, Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby in Liverpool was founded in 1620. A third school, Merchant Taylors' Girls' School, also in Crosby, was founded in the 19th Century.
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School history
1561 - 1605
The school was founded in 1561 by members of the Merchant Taylors' Company. The site of the original school was a manor house called the Manor of the Rose in the parish of St. Lawrence Pountney in the City of London. The school remained on this site until 1875 when it moved to Charterhouse Square, moving again in 1933 to Sandy Lodge in Northwood.
MTS was not the first school to be founded by members of the Merchant Taylors' Company for the Tudor period in England was a period of expansion for education. Sir John Percival (Master of the Company in 1485, Lord Mayor of London in 1498) established a grammar school at Macclesfield in 1502, while in 1508 his widow founded one at St. Mary's Wike in Cornwall (which moved to Launceston shortly thereafter). Also in 1508, Sir Steven Jenyns (Master in 1490, Lord Mayor in 1508) founded Wolverhampton Grammar School which still maintains strong links with the Company.
Many of the earlier Tudor schools were attached to monasteries and were dissolved after 1535 by Henry VIII and his son Edward VI, only to re-emerge after 1550, some of them even bearing Edward's name as founder. MTS missed these turbulent times being founded instead at the opening of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and in a period of cultural richness and advancement.
Being in the City of London and having pupils from a wide range of backgrounds, the school experienced many of the social, political and economic events at first hand and its masters sometimes became embroiled in them.
One recurring event was plague which had a damaging effect on the school and its pupils. When the plague appeared, as in 1592, 1603, 1626, 1630, 1637 and 1666, the school was obliged to break up, it may have lost pupils and was sometimes unable to take on new ones. The headmaster, Nicholas Gray, in 1626 complained of the loss of pupils and was given £20 to keep the school going; in 1630 he was given £40. Many parents kept their sons away from school and boarders were summoned home.
The school was closed for at least a year 1n 1636 and 1637 with no new boys admitted until the contagion abated. The outbreak of 1666 was curtailed by the Great Fire of London which started on 2 September close to Suffolk Lane and completely destroyed the school buildings.
In the aftermath of the fire the headmaster and ushers gathered what pupils they could and carried on the work of the school in temporary accommodation in Kentish Town. In 1672 the school had just 155 pupils on roll but by 1675 it was rebuilt on the same site and reopened. The headmaster of this time, John Goad, was a tower of strength to the school and its pupils but in 1681 he was dismissed for alleged sympathy with Catholic doctrines.
1606 - 1633
In 1606 a member of the Company called Robert Dow instigated the process of 'probation ' or inspection whereby the Court would visit the school three times each year and observe the school at work. Dow was concerned that the school was not meeting the challenge of being one of the great schools of the time and needed regular inspection to maintain and raise its standards. The Court appointed a committee to investigate and concluded:
'Being situate neere the middest of this honourable and renowned citty is famous throughout all England ...First, for number of schollers, it is the greateste schoole included under one roofe. Secondly, the schollers are taught jointly by one master and three ushers. Thirdly it is a schoole for liberty most free, being open especially for poore mens children, as well of all nations, as for the merchauntailors themselves '.
The probation was imposed without consultation with the schoolmasters. During the probation the headmaster was required to open his copy of Cicero at random and read out a passage to the Sixth form. The boys had to copy the passage from dictation and then translate it, first into English, then into Greek and then into Latin verse . After this they had to write a passage of Latin and some verses on some topic chosen for the day. This was for the morning - in the afternoon the process was repeated in Greek, based on the Greek Testament, Aesop's Fables, "or some other very easie Greeke author". The standard in Greek was not as high as in Latin but Hebrew was also taught.
This form of inspection was also the model for teaching every day of the school year, there being no maths or science in the curriculum. The pattern of teaching seen in the Probations at MTS was described in a popular work published in 1660, A New Discovery of the Art of Teaching Schoole by Charles Hoole. Points made by Hoole which give a guide to the nature of education at this time include:
- 6.00 a.m. was considered the time for children to start their studies but 7.00 a.m. was more common
- Pupils of upper forms were appointed to give lessons to younger ones
- Pupils were required to examine each other in pairs
- Children frequently went to 'Writing-schooles' at the end of the school day, the purpose of which was to 'learn a good hand'. Good handwriting was supposed to be a condition of entry to a school like MTS but Hayne for one tended to ignore it and was eventually dismissed for, among other things, low standards of hand writing. In Germany at this time there were Writing Schools too and many citizens attended only these in order to learn sufficient skills for commerce and trade; English businessmen founded schools which encouraged an academic curriculum based on the classics.
The headmaster William Hayne (1599-1624) presided over these new methods of examination but his success here did not save him from dismissal for purported financial misdemeanours including the selling of text books to pupils for profit, and receiving gifts of money at the end of term and on Shrove Tuesday when the 'Victory Penny' might be presented by pupils.
1634 - 1685
William Staple (headmaster 1634-1644) fell victim to contemporary politics. In October 1643 Parliament ordered 'That the Committee for plundered Ministers shall have power to enquire after malignant School-masters'. In March 1644 Staple was ordered to appear before this committee but as a royalist he had no intention of so doing and he was subsequently dismissed, forcing the Company to seek a new headmaster.
The next headmaster William Dugard (1644-1661) also ran into trouble when in 1649 he acquired a printing press and published a pamphlet by Claudius Salmasius, a continental sympathiser with Charles I, entitled Defensio Regia pro Carolo Primo. Dugard was arrested and imprisoned but the pamphlet was not actually published and his cousin Sir James Harrington was able to exert sufficient influence to have him released .
In 1647 Dugard had been appointed a member of the Stationers Company but he did not declare his interests to the Court and they were most annoyed at this extra-curricular activity. In 1652, a puritanical and intolerant time, Dugard again put his head above the parapet with his publication of Catechesis Ecclesiarum Poloniae et Lithuaniae, which you may gather from the title was not written in praise of Luther, Cromwell or Protestantism. The work was seized and publicly burned yet Dugard once again survived as headmaster, requiring only that he should give up his printing enterprise.
At this time the school fees were set at 2s2 or 5s (£0.11 or £0.25) per quarter or nothing but Dugard charged a variety of amounts and the number of pupils was down on the 250 expected by the Company. When he left in 1661 he set up a new school in Coleman Street and took a number of MTS pupils with him.
The dismissal of John Goad may have been strongly influenced by the accusations of Titus Oates who was a pupil at MTS for a few months in 1665-66. Oates had similarly brief stays at other schools, being dismissed from each in turn. In 1678 Oates 'discovered ' the 'Popish Plot' which was supposed to include a threat to kill Charles II but was later found to be a hoax dreamed up by Oates. William Smith, a master at MTS and later headmaster at the Brewers' School in Islington, writes of his first encounter with Oates thus:
'In the year 1664 he was brought to Merchant Taylors' School, as a free Schollar, by Nicholas Delves, Esq., now living; he happening to be in Books that were taught in my Form, I was sent down to receive him into the School, which I did in an unlucky hour. And truly, the first trick he played me was That he cheated me of our Entrance Money which his father sent me, which the Doctor generously confessed in his Greatness at Whitehall and very Honestly paid me then.'
In 1676 Oates caught up with Smith and accused him of involvement in another imaginary plot so the latter was obliged to commit perjury to escape punishment. In the MTS Probation Book Oates was initially listed as 'The saviour of the nation, first discoverer of ye damnable Popish Plot in 1678; in 1685 a postscript was added: 'Perjurd upon Record and a Scoundrell Fellow'. In this suspicious climate just a whiff of Romanism was enough to condemn a man like Goad. After his dismissal Goad became a member of the Roman Catholic Church.
1686 - 1759
The headmastership fell vacant again in 1686 whereon King James II tried to force his nominee James Lee on the Company. The election was postponed and the Master, Sir William Dodson, persuaded James to withdraw his nomination. James Lee, formerly second usher at MTS and then headmaster at St Saviour's Free School, Southwark, then stood against Ambrose Bonwicke but lost. Bonwicke, OMT, was a former pupil of Goad and had an acute mind but he too suffered dismissal for his sentiments.
James abdicated in 1688, William and Mary acceded and men were obliged once again to proclaim their loyalties. The majority avoided controversy by swearing allegiance to 'the king', whoever he may be, but Bonwicke was more scrupulous and delayed for a year before the Court was forced by Act of Parliament to hear his oath of allegiance . Bonwicke declared himself a supporter of James and was duly dismissed.
Under Mat thew Shortyng, headmaster 1691-1707, the top boys of the Sixth began to be called 'The Table' and 'The Bench', with nine at the Table, the captain and eight monitors, and nine at the Bench, called prompters because they prompted the monitors on election day.
In 1710 Ambrose Bonwicke, son of the former headmaster, was captain of the school and refused to read prayers for King William on St Barnabas Day. Despite his intellectual prowess his family's continuing support for James cost him his election to St. John's Oxford and he went to St. John's Cambridge instead. At this time there was a shortage of places at the school as its reputation for scholarship and consequent chance of a university education attracted parents from all over the country. In 1750 a regulation was passed that boys should not be eligible for election to St. John's Oxford unless they had been in the school for at least three years.
One pupil who would not have qualified for election under this rule was Robert Clive, a pupil from 1738-1739 who completed his education at Shrewsbury in his native Shropshire. The headmaster at this time was John Criche, OMT, a man who had occupied every position in the school and was not predisposed to change it. Criche was also a Jacobite and the school suffered because parents were unwilling to send their sons to a school where anti-dynastic sentiments might prevail. He died in office at the age of 80 and by then the school numbers had fallen from 244 to 116.
1760 - 1813
The next headmaster, James Townley, OMT, was in office from 1760 to 1768. Criche's financial situation before him had become desperate which explained his continuance in office into his 80th year and the Company duly raised the headmaster's salary from £10 to £100. Salaries were at this time boosted by 'capitation grants' so Criche suffered badly while a more successful headmaster could do rather better. Townley had worked at Christ's Hospital School which had the Royal Mathematical School and included maths in its curriculum. He therefore proposed the introduction of maths at MTS in 1760 but the Court deferred consideration and subsequently dropped the matter. Townley did succeed, however, in introducing Geography to the curriculum . Like Mulcaster and numerous pupils before him Townley was keen on the stage and in 1762 proposed the staging of a Latin play at the school, partly to regain some interest in the school which had waned in the last year's of Criche's headmastership . Townley wrote a successful play, High Life Below Stairs, which was staged at Drury Lane by David Garrick and proved very popular. The identity of the author was kept secret and most assumed it was written by Garrick rather than a schoolmaster.
Schools in the 18th century were not generally in good shape, with understaffing leading to poor teaching, brutal enforcement of discipline, lack of supervision outside school and self-government by the pupils. The London schools were more successful in retaining numbers but apart from Christ's Hospital and Westminster none changed its curriculum and classics reigned supreme until the mid 19th century. As Gibbon wrote: 'A finished scholar may emerge from the head of Westminster or Eton in total ignorance of the business and conversation of English gentlemen in the latter end of the 18th century.'
The next three headmasters over the period 1778-1819, Green, Bishop and Cherry were all OMTs. One of Bishop's pupils, Charles Matthews, went on to become a successful actor. His memoirs, from the late 18th century, include these observations:
'I was now translated from Dominie the flagellator's garden of knowledge in St Martin-in-the-Fields to Merchant Tailors' School, to gain what Pope so aptly terms 'a dangerous thing', a little learning. This was about the year 1786. Bishop, the head master, wore a huge powdered wig, larger than any other bishop's wig. It invited invasion, and we shot paper darts with such singular dexterity into the protruding bush behind that it looked like 'a fretful porcupine'. He had chalkstone knuckles too, which he used to rap on my head like a bag of marbles, and, eccentric as it may appear, pinching was his favourite amusement, which he brought to great perfection .
There were six forms. I entered the school at the lowest, and got no higher than the fifth, but was of course alternately under the care and tuition of the four masters . Gardner, the lowest in the grade, was the only mild person amongst them; the others had a little too much, and perhaps he had much too little, of the severe in him for his station.
Two more cruel tyrants than Bishop and Rose never existed... Lord, the fourth master, was rather an invalid, and, I believe, had been prescribed gentle exercise; he therefore put up for, and was the successful candidate for, the flogging department. Rose was so adept at the cane, that I once saw a boy strip, after a thrashing from him, that he might expose his barbarous cruelty, when the back was actually striped with dark streaks like a zebra.
Bishop's wife claimed that the headmaster 'avoided all unnecessary severity' and 'there was no revolt or riot during the whole time of his continuance at the school '. It is more than likely that Matthews' account is true for there were at the beginning of the 19th century a number of rebellions in schools, some of which had to be put down by troops - at Westminster in 1791, 1801 and 1820, at Eton in 1768, 1783, 1810 and 1818, at Harrow in 1805 and 1808, at Winchester in 1770, 1774, 1778, 1793 and 1818, at Rugby in 1786, 1797, 1822, and at Charterhouse and Shrewsbury in 1818 - which left only St. Paul's riot-less from the so-called 'Great Nine' of the Clarendon Commission of the 1860s.
This behaviour may have been influenced by the French Revolution and the Gordon Riots in London in June 1780. (The Gordon Riots were fomented by Lord George Gordon following the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 which lifted some restrictions on British Catholics and angered fanatical Protestants.) In 1796 two pupils at MTS, John Grose and Richard Hayward, were expelled for hoisting a French tricolour over the Tower of London and for writing anti-dynastic graffiti on the walls near Suffolk Lane. On 11th April 1811 there was a pitched battle between boys of St. Paul's and Merchant Taylors' in Old Change at the western end of Cheapside as the boys met on their way to school. On the building of the City of London School in Honeylane Market, Cheapside, frequent fights took place between the pupils of that school and M.T.S.
1814 - 1844
In 1814 Cherry made a detailed proposal for the setting up of an arithmetic and writing school and for the teaching of maths and accounts. Again the proposal was first deferred and then dropped. It was to be a further 15 years before maths was finally admitted into the school curriculum. In 1811 H.B. Wilson was granted permission to write a history of the school but he was overlooked as headmaster in 1819 on the appointment of James Bellamy, OMT, headmaster 1819-45. In 1828 Bellamy advised the Company of the need to modernise to 'meet the daily increasing demand for a more general education', by which he meant in particular the founding of University College and King's College at the University of London. In 1830 education was as topical as it is today with writers like Christopher North advocating its spread, though fearful of the consequences, 'from the classes to the masses'. The Court voted £200 towards the founding of King's College and in 1829 Bellamy once again pleaded that the school be placed on the same level as other places of education. Beginning in 1830 classics was taught in the morning and maths in the afternoon, specialist teachers were appointed and by 1845 French was being considered for two afternoons per week . The last proposal proved too expensive but the further success of the school began to make it clear that the current premises were too small and new ones should be found.
Still, in the 1870s, Sir D'Arcy Power comments on the curriculum he faced: 'It seems to me, as I look back on the education at school in my time, that it was conducted with the design of giving a broad training without any utilitarian object. Every boy gained a sound knowledge of the classics, could write a little Latin and Greek prose and make a few verses; if he reached the higher forms, he learnt at least the Hebrew alphabet, but every boy was passed through the same mould without discrimination, no attempt was made to find out what his special aptitude might be. The best boys got on through sheer ability... The vast majority of boys went as stockbrokers' clerks, into merchants' offices or into business.'
Nor was there much teaching of English. Bishop Samuel Thornton wrote: 'Incredible as it may seem, we were left to pick up our acquaintance with the classics of our own language out of school, as best we could. I read my English poets in the street as I walked from school.' He adds however: 'In what was professedly taught there was instilled (and this is my deepest debt to Merchant Taylors') a passion for thoroughness and accuracy, and a contempt for all smatteriness and mere pretence of knowledge '. It is likely that many parents cared little what was taught as long as their boys did well enough to attain a scholarship to university.
The city environment around it included a brewery which belched smoke and soot and a printing works whose apprentices fought with M.T.S. boys almost daily. According to the Rev. A. J. Church in 1857: 'there were no desks in the schoolroom. The monitors had a table; the prompters had a bench. Everyone else had to write, when there was occasion for writing, on his knees. And there were no lights. Every boy had to supply his own candle, which was required to be of wax...
For more than two centuries the only place where teaching was carried on was the Great Schoolroom; its dimensions were about 85 feet by 30 feet. It as lighted very imperfectly by windows on either side, large enough, indeed, but obscured by the heavy leading of the diamond panes and by the long-standing accumulations of dirt ... The four classrooms were all more or less recent additions to the school accommodation . Bishop Samuel Thornton remembered the London fogs of his schooldays in the 1840s when 'little was done on those dark days, the dreamy and unwonted state of affairs generating an excited condition in the Forms, unfavourable to discipline and work '. There was also a constant din from outside the school which interfered greatly with the conduct of lessons. Until the 1860s no provision was made for feeding the boys at lunch time. In 1838 there were 58 boys in the Fourth, being taught in this room and without gas lighting - small wonder that the masters resorted to the stick to keep control.
1845 - 1865
James Hessey, headmaster from 1845 to 1870, improved many aspects of the school, increasing the number of masters, introducing school lunches and appointing a 'superior' teacher of mathematics. The rough practices of among the boys 'pulling' on clothes and 'bumping' against the pillars of the cloisters were banned, something which at first caused open rebellion among the younger boys but in which Hessey had his way by his firm insistence on more civilised behaviour. Hessey was also agitating for a change of location. Two Commissions of this time, the Oxford Commission and the Public Schools Commission (under Lord Clarendon), threatened the well-being of the school. The Oxford Commission restructured the arrangements for scholarships between the school and St. John's College so there was no longer such an easy path for boys to reach university. There had grown a general feeling that all was not well with Eton and other 'public' schools and the Commission was appointed to investigate and put this right. The Schools Commission visited M.T.S. in 1862 and published its report in 1864. It was noted that parents were increasingly reluctant to send their sons to school in London due to the overcrowding, the lack of games facilities and increasing accessibility to country schools. It was proposed that Charterhouse and Westminster, boarding schools, should move out of London and that Merchant Taylors' and St. Paul's, day schools, should increase their premises. It was also recommended that, while the classical character of the curriculum should be continued, science, German, music and more drawing should be introduced.
1866 - 1907
In 1866, following reasoned argument from Hessey and the report of the Commission, the Company bought five and a half acres (22,000 m²) of estate in Goswell Street for £90,000 from the Governors of the Charterhouse. Building of the new school began in 1873 and was completed in 1875. Plans for the new school included immediate expansion to 350 and thence to 500, the development of a more modern curriculum to meet demand for 'Modern Languages, Science and Commerce', and the raising of fees from 10 to 12 guineas for the lower school and 12 guineas to 15 guineas for the upper. William Baker, OMT, headmaster from 1870-1900, wanted to develop the whole of the new site for games, 'to foster a corporate and public spirit among the boys of the School, by drawing them together in common amusements and giving them common interests'. On the development of playing fields around the school Baker wrote in 1872: 'Besides this, I regard such an arrangement as desirable for the healthy development of a boy's character and as furnishing a wholesome corrective to the narrowing effects of excessive competition'. These ideas were not radical for this time but they were fairly new and perhaps surprising from a venerable institution like Merchant Taylors' School. Baker was conservative in his views, considering the classics as the best means of training the mind but he was almost equally keen on mathematics and paid much attention to its development in the school. Also in his time chemistry and physics were introduced and a new science building was finished in 1891. Dr. Baker proposed the introduction of biology which was introduced as an extra in 1900.
French was still in a precarious position within the school curriculum - from a total of 3900 marks (from 78 scripts worth 50 marks each) in an examination in 1874 only 123 marks were actually scored and 53 boys submitted blank papers. The master in charge of the 'Modern Side' pointed out that boys joined his area not because they showed promise in French but because they had no obvious gift for the classics . On the appointment of John Nairn in 1900 to succeed Dr. Baker the new headmaster asked Professor Ernest Weekly to inspect the modern language teaching. He drew attention to the dominant role of Latin in determining a boy's promotion, to the beginning of Greek at too young an age and to the lack of systematic instruction in English . Meanwhile, Dr. Baker recommended the adoption of the newly established Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examination Board for examination of higher work which for the first time provided a means for comparison between schools. Until this point schools could differ considerably in the ways they assessed pupils and conducted their affairs; today we take for granted the existence of national standards and criteria and the use of public examination results to compare one school, however invidiously, against another.
In the early 1900s the number of boys at the school began to fall, due in part to the rise of good and not too expensive schools in the country around London such as Bedford Grammar, Berkhamstead, Tonbridge, University College School, King's College School, St. Dunstans, St Olave's and Latymer Upper School, amongst others. Science and technical subjects were being developed in institutions funded by public money and there was some pressure on the incomes of the class that sent its sons to schools like Merchant Taylors'. It became increasingly apparent that boys were travelling long distances to school each day, from as far as Hertford, Guildford and Leigh-on -Sea, the school needed a prep. school for boys aged 8-11 and a sports ground nearer than Bellingham. Nairn began to think that the school might be better placed on the outskirts of London. In 1914 the Oxford and Cambridge School Examination Board inspected the school and, amongst their conclusions, found the hours of the school too short and the homeworks too long, all of which limited their time for fresh air and recreation . The Board also said that the curriculum was too narrow, that the needs of a few potential classical scholars were dominating the needs of the many. Even at this stage the only education in English teaching was gained from the translation of Latin and Greek. In the 1860s the school had been 'one of the nine' but its position was declining annually in the face of competition. In 1925 the matter of the school's location was raised again but any suggestion that it should be moved was vetoed by the School Committee.
1908 - 1933
In 1908 Lord Haldane reorganised school cadet corps, making them into a single body, the Officer Training Corps, which provided an essential source of officers for the First World War. In 1912 the London Rifle Brigade was permitted to billet three companies in the school and when war came the regiment was billeted there. The Old Merchant Taylors held a meeting at the Hall and 200 enlisted forthwith. In 1918 enlistment in the O.T.C. became compulsory and in 1921 a house system was introduced with four houses named Hilles, White, Spenser and Clive.
The next headmaster, Spencer Leeson, served for just nine years but in that time he proposed and supervised what was probably the greatest single event in the history of the school, the movement from the city of London to the green suburbs of Northwood, Watford and Rickmansworth, an area bounded by branches of the Metropolitan Railway Company. Many of the pupils of the school in the city now came from north London and the movement of the school was perhaps a case of Mohammed going to the mountain . Leeson made his mind up quickly and advised a move and the Company fell quickly behind him. He invited an inspection by the Board of Education in 1928 and concluded from their report that the school must move: 'At Charterhouse Square we can never rejoin the number of the great schools of England'. He attached a letter from Cyril Norwood which included these words:
'In these next twenty years we shall see a belt of good secondary schools built all round London at a sufficient distance out to provide playing fields and space, and with all that is modern in equipment. These schools will be efficient and the middle class parent will send his sons either to boarding schools, if he can afford it, or to these schools. He will not send them to the noise and congestion of London, to premises which are congested and largely out of date, with playing fields miles away from the teaching centre...'
The site at Sandy Lodge was bought in late 1929 and plans were drawn up for the new school. The cost of the initial proposals was greeted with some dismay but the Court eventually accepted them. The site at Charterhouse Square was sold to St. Bartholomew's Hospital who had been previous owners, having bought the site in 1349 from the Master of the Spital Croft hospital. Both the senior partner of the architects chosen to design the new school and the prime mover of the Charterhouse sale to Bart's were O.M.T.s The move to Sandy Lodge was completed in March 1933 and the school was formally opened on June 12.
Alumni
- Sir William Joynson-Hicks, Home Secretary 1924-1929
- Sir John E. Sulston, Nobel Laureate (2002)
- Robert Clive (Clive of India)
- Reginald Maudling, politician
- Edmund Spenser, poet
- Titus Oates, (expelled) Troublemaker
- Hugh Boulter, Archbishop of Armagh
- Alfred Marshall, economist
External links
- Merchant Taylors' School website (http://www.mtsn.org.uk/)
- Merchant Taylors' School Crosby website (http://www.merchanttaylors.sefton.sch.uk/)
- Merchant Taylors' Girls' School website (http://www.mtgs.co.uk/)
- Merchant Taylors' Company (http://www.merchanttaylors.co.uk/)