In and out of the classroom – how pupils were taught 1918-60s

In 1956 the Historical Association celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with an exhibition, conference and book of articles about its development. Professor of the history of education at King’s College, London, ACF Beales, skimmed through the changes in the classroom over the fifty years:

The bad old days, of 1906, were the days of the ‘conscript army’ in the elementary schools, sprinkled with pupil-teachers who taught all subjects, frequently to classes of over 100; and the ‘professional army in a quite separate and privileged world of secondary schools. They all had chalk-and-talk. But many of them had already the reality (though thank God not yet the label) of visual aids.¹

This chapter will look at what those aids were and what other ways of teaching there were besides the ubiquitous ‘chalk and talk’. Inevitably the account will be anecdotal and impressionistic. As Professor Beales pointed out, even looking at 1956, the year in which he was writing, it was difficult to know what was really happening across the country in schools.

It would be highly instructive to know how widely the various new developments have in fact ‘taken’. The [HA Celebration] Exhibition is rich in the developments – syllabuses, charting, local and social studies, films, models, all the rest of it. But we none of us know, quantitatively, what proportion of Modern and Grammar Schools use Lines of Development, or teach through Patches, or base one or more terms on the neighbourhood, or have Ancient History anywhere else but in the lowest forms…²

It is even more difficult to know what was really happening in schools before this period

Philip Gardner suggests that there were changes in the relationship between teacher and taught in elementary schools between the beginning of the twentieth century and the outbreak of the Second World War but they were not as great as in the subsequent forty years. During the school board years, 1870 to 1902, the relationship between teachers and parents which he sees as “framed by endemic conflict” gradually changed. The teachers’ principal objective was “to master the perceived fecklessness of working-class parents in conspiring with their offspring to avoid regular attendance at school”, and by the early 1900s the battle was won, with “the principle of regular, sustained and universal elementary schooling passing from policy into popular culture”.³ This change had enormous implications for the classroom experience of the taught, as did the improved social and professional status of elementary school teachers in the first part of the twentieth century (gained though their improved education and training) which inevitably gave them more confidence. So as classes gradually declined in size there were opportunities for more forward-thinking teachers to move on from rote-learning and other survival techniques.

Teaching aids 1918-60

Many history teachers, it must be emphasised, continued to teach with very little help from aids of any sort, other than blackboards and chalk. Norman Roper (born 1923) described history at a central technical school in south London;

... you had a form master, who stayed with you as you went through, and each form master took a different subject, obviously. And our particular one was a history master. And it was all very formal. As far as I remember you had blackboards which slid out one behind the other. And I don’t know how, but he would enter all sorts of notes and things on it before you started, and then he’d pull the board down and there it was.⁴

Ernie Dodd was born in 1924 and left elementary school at 14. His history teacher’s main aid was a cane:

...when Mr Andrews had a history test, normally 20 questions, if you got less marks in the current test than you had in the previous test you received that number of cane strokes. So everyone tried for about 18 correct answers, that way you had a little leeway as you may not get 20 correct answers every time.

Nevertheless,

... he was a good teacher... he was very political. We used to get him on to current affairs which to us was more interesting than old history. ⁵

Kenneth Kelsey, born 1923, enjoyed history at his grammar school but:

there were no visual or audio aids at all. It was you listened to the master, if he had a map over the blackboard you could look at that, but basically you took it in from what he was saying and you read the book and you did your homework and that was it.⁶

However this traditional way of teaching was certainly not common to all teachers in the interwar years. A variety of teaching aids had been available since long before the First World War and many teachers continued to use these even if they did not adopt new methods; indeed lantern slides were used in some schools even after the Second World War. In 1938 60,000 of the LCC’s library of half a million slides were lent to schools every month⁷, and the HA maintained its collection for schools to borrow until the 1960s. Enterprising (and well-financed) schools and local authorities invested in more sophisticated projectors – episcopes and epidiascopes which were more versatile and could project postcards and photographs as well as slides. These were used in some schools until the widespread use of computers. ‘Filmstrips’ were widely used after the Second World War; despite their name they were actually a way of projecting still pictures. By 1960 there were about 30,000 filmstrip projectors in use in schools, and about 4,500 filmstrips covering most of the subjects in the school curriculum. They were popular as the strips were cheap enough to be purchased by schools and the projection equipment was comparatively light and simple. Many of the history teachers who completed our survey forms remember using them in the 1950s and 60s.

Duplicating machines had a similarly long history; the ‘gestetners’ and ‘bandas’ used from the 1950s had ancestors dating back to the nineteenth century using mimeography or cyclostyle processes which were a more primitive version of the post Second World War duplicating machines. However although books of guidance for history teachers and teachers’ magazines sometimes advocated duplicating sources or maps there was very little mention of them being used by history teachers in the general literature, and the pupils we interviewed who were at school in the interwar years suggested that other subject teachers made much more use of these early technologies, particularly those teaching geography and book-keeping. For example, Kenneth Kelsey again:

the geography room was well equipped and the method of teaching geography was completely different. I’ve got reams of cyclostyled notes that the geography master distributed, but not for history.⁸

Use of illustrations remained a popular way to bring history to life; in 1930 the Historical Association produced a pamphlet on ‘Illustrations for use in History Teaching in Schools’ which listed literally thousands of available pictures for schools to borrow or buy. Dorothy Dymond, who edited the pamphlet, introduced it by saying, “members of the Association who have supplied evidence of their work agree that the ideal is not the wall picture, which is expensive and cumbersome and does not command individual attention, but the small loose picture which can be put into the child’s own hands”.⁹ She therefore particularly recommended postcards issued by museums and “good photographers”.

Film in schools

By the 1920s the value of lantern slides in teaching history (and other subjects)had long been accepted but that did not prevent the use of film being controversial. As early as 1919, Birmingham LEA decided to hire cinemas to show educational films to its pupils¹⁰ but many educationalists were unconvinced, and by the mid 1920s there was considerable debate about the value for teaching of the ‘cinematograph’. Various committees sought to find out how far film was used in education; one of these, the Imperial Education Conference (representing educationalists across the Empire who met for conferences in London every few years), set up a committee, chaired by Lord Gorell, to look at the issue. Its 1924 report concluded that, “more use is being made of the cinematograph in connection with educational purposes than has been generally known” either in schools, or in ‘picture-houses’ where special screenings were provided for children. On the whole the report was positive about the potential for film in education in general although more dubious about its use for history which it felt might be better served by the ‘magic lantern’. The report also felt that many questions remained to be answered about the practical dilemmas of how film should be used by schools.¹¹

Teachers’ associations were divided over the use of film in history teaching. GT Hankin, an HMI and prominent member of the Historical Association who was an enthusiastic advocate for all the ‘new media’ of the time ( see below for his important role in school radio broadcasting)¹², persuaded the Historical Association to set up a Cinema subcommittee in 1923 and went as far as publishing in History magazine his own scenario for an educational film which would deal with woollen manufacturing in Yorkshire.¹³ A dry comment in the journal said: “we do not believe that real history could ever be taught be such means; but the historical imagination might be awakened, and a certain amount of useful information acquired”.¹⁴ On the whole the historical establishment remained unconvinced: Professor Pollard was quoted doubting “the demand for illustration in schools – even the cinema. They are alright in their own way so long as you remember that you cannot make visible to the eye the really vital things. You can portray the King, but not the monarchy”.¹⁵ Although whether elementary school teachers of under 14 year olds were able to convey the concept of ‘the monarchy’ to their pupils by any means is doubtful. The debate which followed the showing of a League of Nations film ‘The Star of Hope’ at the Historical Association AGM in 1926 was largely negative although GT Hankin did his best to keep the discussion constructive.¹⁶

The real drawbacks remained the lack of equipment in schools to show films, and the lack of suitable films. In 1930 only 268 schools had cinema projectors¹⁷ and seven years later the estimated figure was still only 657 to 1000, (figures vary). In 1931 a report commissioned by the Historical Association into the value of films in teaching history was largely favourable and gradually there was more interest and support for film; however there were still very few appropriate films – in 1937 the British Film Institute’s list of educational films contained twenty eight historical ones out of a total of 2,250 for all subjects.¹⁸ As far as equipment was concerned, support from the Board of Education began to change the situation, at least in regards to projectors: in 1937 it announced it was encouraging the use of film and offered a 50% grant towards equipment. By early 1940 the number of projectors in schools had doubled.¹⁹ As with schools radio, the War was to prove a boost for schools film; film generally, like radio, proved enormously valuable for the war effort in terms of instruction as well as entertainment for a rationed population. Educationally, film shows proved useful as a way of bringing information and novelty to schools which were short of teachers and overcrowded with evacuees. A respondent to our survey described her school:

It was war-time and spare cash for schools was almost non-existent, but if there was a film at the cinema depicting an event relevant to the curriculum, we were taken, eg when we reached William Pitt there was a film about his life produced at that time, which we all saw together and discussed in school. (female, born 1927, attended grammar school) ²⁰

Admittedly she is quite unusual – most respondents make no mention of ever seeing films except ‘Henry V’ which was more for English than History.

In 1945 HE Dance of the Board of Education is reported saying the Ministry hoped shortly to have 20,000 projectors in schools and 150,000 in ten years time.²¹ In fact in 1960 the Yearbook of Education suggested the number of schools in 1960 with projectors (and some schools might have several), was over 11,000. By then the Educational Foundation for Visual Aids, which was established in 1948 by the Ministry of Education in conjunction with local authorities, had a catalogue listing about 6000 films and filmstrips made specifically for teaching purposes. It held copies of all of them and by 1958-59 it was making 60,000 loans of films to schools every year.²²

Schools radio

In 1924 John Reith, the ‘general manager ‘ of what was then the British Broadcasting Company Ltd²³, appointed JC Stobart, an HMI at the Board of Education, to be Director of the BBC’s new Education Department. Under Stobart’s leadership (he died in 1933), “between 1927 and 1933 a most successful system of schools broadcasting was devised by the BBC which soon became the envy of educationalists in every other country”.²⁴ Over its first fifteen years it became increasingly popular: “in 1927, at a generous estimate, 3000 schools were listening to the BBC’s schools broadcasts in England and Wales, as against 220 in late 1924: at the outbreak of war in 1939 the figure had risen to 9,953.”²⁵ A Central Educational Advisory Committee, with representatives from various education associations across the country, was appointed to guide the department. Schools broadcasting was initially run from local radio stations with their own local committees; in 1925 ‘educational transmissions’ went out from eight ‘main stations’ and four ‘relay stations’. These generally provided their own weekly programme; in autumn 1925, the Leeds relay station had, “Fridays from 3.30 to 4pm to pupils of the ages from 10-15 years. Talks will be given by Leeds University speakers on History and Travel”.²⁶ A year later Charles Quennell, the architect and co-author with his wife Marjorie of extremely successful illustrated social history books, gave a series of thirteen talks on ‘Everyday Life in Wessex in Ancient Times’ for Bournemouth Radio. The following year he and Marjorie gave a more general series of talks which were broadcast nationally.

The early years were not all plain sailing: schools radio was the particular responsibility of Mary Somerville, and after two years of producing school programmes she and the members of the Department “became uneasily aware that a good many teachers in the listening schools, who…had been altogether ready to welcome the help of a broadcasting colleague with gifts and experiences they knew themselves to lack, were somewhat disappointed with school broadcasting”.²⁷ The programmes tended either to talk down to children or be way above what they could understand. This realisation led to a major study of schools and their reaction to school broadcasting, using a sample of seventy two schools in Kent²⁸:

It was a year of eating humble pie, of noting what worked with the children and what did not, of discussing what we thought we had learned with the teachers, the Kent Education officials, and the HMIs; a year of rapid modification of programme plans, and innovations in studio technique. At the end of the year a sufficient number of Kent teachers confirmed our faith in the educational possibilities of our medium. We had come very near to failure, but we had at least begun to work as pioneers in radio education.²⁹

The BBC Schools Department took these lessons to heart; over the next twenty years they spent a remarkable amount of time consulting with teachers and inspectors and schools, carrying out numerous surveys every year to find out what pupils and teachers thought of their programmes. They started to extend their publication of illustrated pamphlets to accompany programmes – even in 1927, 233,000 were distributed to schools. They had also learnt that the most successful programmes, especially where younger children were concerned, were stories rather than lectures. “We watched in a Kent school the delighted response of the children to the first of Rhoda Power’s dramatized history lessons”.³⁰ This was the start of Power’s ‘Boys and Girls of Other Days’ series of programmes which was extremely successful. It grew out of the school books she and her sister, the medieval historian Eileen Power, had started writing entitled Boys and Girls of History.³¹ At first the BBC staff had to act out the dramatised programmes, but as the BBC’s income grew professional actors could be employed.

The Department was also helped by the establishment in 1929 of the Central Council for School Broadcasting³² which replaced the old Advisory Committee. Its first Chairman was HAL Fisher, its second (from 1932), Lord Eustace Percy, both former Presidents of the Board of Education and the former a distinguished historian. Subject sub-committees were set up at its first meeting to provide guidance on programmes and accompanying publications, with a majority of members being teachers from listening schools to ensure that the needs of the children were kept foremost rather than the enthusiasms of the experts. The History subcommittee’s first chairman was GT Hankin, the HMI mentioned above who was passionate about using the new technologies – cinema and radio – in history lessons. He was also an influential member of the Central Council.

In 1931, at the initiative of the History Committee a new kind of history course was introduced called ‘Tracing History Backwards’; it was “an attempt to deepen knowledge of current problems by examining them in historical perspective”.³³ It was initially written and presented by Commander Stephen King-Hall of the Institute of International Affairs who went on to broadcast for schools for many years. His first topics included ‘The Budget’, ‘The British Empire’ and ‘Disarmament’; they were aimed for the top classes in elementary schools who had already completed a chronological study of history. That year also saw the beginning of programmes on ‘World History’ – the first series entitled ‘Empires, Movements and Nations’.

After 1935 changes in the way schools broadcasting was organised left the subject committees with less initiative than before but they continued to advise and monitor the programmes. GT Hankin remained deeply involved, and consistently worked to keep the programmes down to earth and appealing to ordinary children. The BBC’s official historian, Asa Briggs, quoted him commenting on an English history pamphlet: “The whole attitude in the script seems to me middle-class. Our History is for the children of the workers”.³⁴

By 1935 problems with radio reception, which had been endemic in the early years of broadcasting in schools, were greatly reduced. The main difficulty now was how to finance the provision of wireless sets for the schools who did not have them. Lord Eustace Percy and BBC officials tried to persuade the Board of Education or the BBC itself to provide the money (estimated at £420,000 in 1935³⁵) but it was not a good time financially for either organisation and it was left to local authorities or individual schools to provide funding. By 1935, 973 schools were listening to British history programmes (cf 555 to world history) although by 1938 this had risen considerably - 3,739 schools (pupils aged 9-11) were listening to world history courses and 3,531 to British history (pupils 11-14).

During the Second World War the schools radio broadcasting kept going, although production moved around the country and the pamphlets accompanying programmes had to be discontinued. The broadcasts were seen as particularly crucial as children were evacuated or kept at home with very limited schooling: an official directive drew attention to their value in keeping young minds active in air-raid shelters.”³⁶ The long-running series ‘How Things Began’ which dealt with life on earth up to the first settled civilisations was started during the war. After the Second World War schools radio became increasingly popular: there were 9,121 listening schools in England in 1938-39 – by 1952-53 there were 21,180 and by 1960-61 there were 23,448³⁷, and over 9 million pamphlets accompanying them were sold to schools in 1960.³⁸ Throughout the 1950s there were four weekly history programmes running every term aimed at different age groups between eight and fifteen. The series were usually ‘Stories from World History’, ‘Stories from British History’, ‘How Things Began’ and ‘Modern History’ for older children.³⁹

Asa Briggs lauded “the impact of the BBC on the quality of effort and imagination inside the schools. It played a key role in a still unfinished ‘silent revolution’, in part a revolution of educational provision and technology – books, pianos, projectors, and materials for art and crafts as well as wireless sets – in part a revolution of educational aspiration and ambition, associated with the widening of curricula, the use of experimental teaching methods, and the relaxation of purely external discipline”.⁴⁰

Schools television

The BBC began its general television service in 1936 (suspending the service during the Second World War until 1946), and potentially television could have been offering school television programmes much earlier than it did; there was some interest in it doing so – but even more mistrust. Eventually it was not until 1952 that it finally set up a pilot project, under the aegis of a School Television Sub-committee. The conclusions from the pilot project – twenty programmes of 20-30 minutes (none apparently on history), each transmitted to six schools in Middlesex – appear to have been mixed, but in any event the BBC was reluctant to go ahead with more unless a minimum number of schools had television sets. These were still very expensive and the Ministry of Education made it plain that no money would be forthcoming for such purposes. In fact by the end of 1953 it appeared that many local authorities would be prepared to meet the costs but the Ministry of Education remained reluctant about the whole idea.⁴¹ Eventually it was Associated-Rediffusion, one of the ITV (Independent Television) companies, which first started broadcasting school television with one programme a day for secondary schools in the summer of 1957. Both ITV and the BBC then started an extended service from September 1957 although even then they were still called ‘experimental’: and the BBC did not drop this description until 1959. In autumn 1960 still only 2000 of the country’s 23,000 schools had television sets but by now there were nine weekly schools programmes running each term. The BBC ran its first schools history broadcasts in autumn 1959 with a series called ‘The Twentieth Century’ for 13 to 15 year olds. In summer 1960 ‘Men of the Past – From the remotest past to Roman times’ was shown for 11 to 15 year olds. The following year it ran ‘A Century of Change – 1860 – 1960’for 13-15 year olds, a series “designed to illustrate the major changes in the social history of Britain and her relationships with other countries during the last hundred years”.⁴²

School visits to museums had been encouraged by the Board of Education since the turn of the century but Gaynor Kavanagh suggests that during the First World War a number of them took a more pro-active role in educational activity. In Manchester, twenty schools had had their buildings appropriated for ‘military purposes’ so they had to double up with other schools and do a ‘half-time’ system. To help the situation, pupils were taught in some of the museum galleries on the ‘off half-days’ by trained teachers using the collections. (Manchester, it should be said, already had a long history of encouraging school children to come to its museums; before 1901 the Art Museum was running weekly series of courses for elementary school children.⁴³) A number of other areas also used their museums directly for education. HAL Fisher and other government ministers were very interested in these developments and after the War there were moves to link museums and local authorities much more closely. The museum organisations rejected them, concerned that their role in conservation and research would be jeopardised.⁴⁴

By the Second World War a number of museums were running thriving educational services– John Elliott described services at Norwich Castle Museum, Leicester, Hull and the Royal Naval Museum at Greenwich. However earlier, the 1928 report on museums by Sir Henry Miers , mineralogist and former Vice Chancellor of Manchester University, had showed that only twelve museums in the British Isles provided specific services for schools, and only 20% of provincial museums were regularly visited by school parties. Miers’ report –funded by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trustees who also funded the reports mentioned above on schools radio in Kent and the Historical Association’s commissioned report on film and history teaching. – was fairly damning about many provincial museums. “In a fair number of museums a class of school-children might be hearing a lecture from their teacher, or from the Curator, and busily making notes and sketches of exhibits”, but in “less important and less prosperous museums” a visitor would find them, “deserted, the caretaker would be asleep, and the side rooms would be locked lest stray children should get into them unobserved”; and in the “worst and most neglected”, the visitor would see “dark and dilapidated rooms with old cases full of decaying curiosities, among which he would descry a certain number of rare and valuable objects perishing irretrievably”. ⁴⁵

Ten years later the Carnegie Trust funded another report by SF Markham, Museums and Art Galleries of the British Isles, which was more encouraging. It described an increase in museums “actively encouraging school visits and also in those providing special facilities with extensive school loan collections”.⁴⁶ Of the nearly 800 museums in the UK, nearly 400 received visits from school parties and of these about 150 made arrangements for the parties to be accompanied by a curator or staff member.⁴⁷ Eighty had some form of loan service for schools. By now a few local education authorities were taking a direct interest in museums; Derbyshire and the LCC in particular developed extensive educational services. The Geffrye Museum in East London, first under the curatorship of Marjorie Quennell, and then Mollie Harrison, pioneered the approach of involving children in all aspects of the museum’s activities. In 1952 another report, this one prepared for the International Council of Museums, listed thirty seven museums doing intensive educational work with children, half of these having a full-time organiser for the purpose and providing special classrooms equipped with relevant visual aids – charts, illustrations, slides, filmstrips and film.

Interviewees and respondents who were at school during the Second World War unsurprisingly reported that they never went on any trips, or visits to museums. Some at school before and after the War did remember visiting local museums with the school although David Newham (who was born in 1938 and went to a secondary modern and then a grammar school) said “...we never went on outings or anything like that. It just wasn’t... It was unheard‑of. Unheard‑of”⁴⁸; and Miss Rosa Major (born 1920, attended grammar school) wrote that:

There were no outside activities except visits to museums & these all cost our parents money. This meant that these trips were impossible for pupils who, like me, had parents who could not possibly afford the cost.⁴⁹

Whereas for Christine Jackson (born 1937), at grammar school in the late 1940s, a museum visit was a revelation:

I’d never been in a museum, I didn’t know what they were like... Our teachers at Grammar School said, “Yes, you must go, you must see this, you must see that”. We did go and I went to the Pitt Rivers Museum, which deals with things like sarcophagus... Which, of course, I mean, at 13, you think it’s, you know, really interesting.⁵⁰

Pupils at school after the Second World War generally remembered going on at least one school trip to an archaeological site or historic town or castle. Ceril Little (born in 1938), who attended a small girls’ grammar school, went on several including a long weekend, when she was about sixteen:

...just a small select group of us. I think there were eight of us went with two teachers, our history teacher and our art teacher, and spent the February half‑term weekend in York. That further increased my fascination with the Middle Ages.⁵¹

A teacher who taught from 1946-84 described how every year each form would go on a day visit to somewhere like ‘Verulanium and St Albans’ and there were also a few residential trips to places like Norwich, staying in youth hostels. After the grammar school she taught in joined with another school in 1973 to become a comprehensive these trips became less frequent – partly because there were so many pupils, but also because “more families had cars, so outings were less of a treat!”⁵²

Jenny Keating

History in Education Project

Institute of Historical Research

University of London

April 2011