We have become quite used to seeing both student and staff strikes at our universities as budgets contract. In May there was talk of a national strike of lecturers, and unions at the Manchester College and University of Glasgow balloted members on strike action. The sadly longstanding complaints about the arts and humanities being steadily shelved in favour of more perceptibly vocational, career-by-numbers subject areas have also produced debates and letters recently. However, early in the last century it was the country’s schoolchildren, or at least some of them, who went on strike.
While theirs was not a protest against education being reduced to employable (employability, employabulous) qualifications, the children’s hundred-year-old complaints about schoolwork and punishments do, refreshingly, cast doubt on the scornful viewing of campus unrest as a ‘modern phenomenon’ (liberalisation of course structures and teaching staff, lack of routine/contact time…anything to discuss the issue in terms of betrayed schoolroom methods, rather than weakness in course content or funding). The strike also challenges that insufferable faith in historical school days when children sat in proud compliance, willing to graft and to take masters’ instructions, too scared (or too scarred) to misbehave.
On the 5th September 1911 about thirty children walked out of Bigyn council school in Llanelli, southeast Wales. They did this in response to another pupil being caned. Thanks to the newspaper coverage this received, children in over sixty other towns had done the same after a few days. The editor of the Educational Times commented: ‘The daily press has done much to spread the epidemic; for instead [of] paying little heed to the pranks of the scholars in one or two towns, has published full details….and a real game of “Follow my Leader” has been the result’ [1].
As the readings for a Radio Four Long View programme on the strikes show, strikes in Aberdeen, Burton-on-Trent, Dublin, Middlesborough, Newcastle, Paisley, Portsmouth, Stoke-on-Trent and West Hartlepool were all reported in the Times. Some of the boys at Hartlepool looted a hotel storeroom, taking bottles of stout and whiskey, and boxes of cigars. In most places there were marches and meetings, but in Burton-on-Trent there was also a fight between the boys who had marched and those who hadn’t (scablets?). Some children appear to have taken their rhymes to heart, using sticks and stones to smash school windows, and those of other properties.
Different school strikers asked for different things. Less caning seems to have been common to some of them. At Southall Street School in Manchester the children wanted the cane abolished, and also a shilling a week paid to the monitors, who were ‘just used as lackeys’ [2]. The curiously ageless ‘bigger boys’ at Sandyford Road Council School in Newcastle demanded the abolition of homework. Schools in Llanelli (Lakefield and Copperworks schools, as well as Bigyn) took issue with both punishment and the school morning hours, which had recently been changed by the Education Committee, shaving time off of the children’s dinner break [3].
The strikes should be seen in context though, inasmuch as the context of 1911 can be appreciated in 2010. As the Long View programme noted back in 2003: ‘Numerically, while thousands were involved nationally they represented less than one per cent of the total school-age population’ [4]. At the time, and afterwards, the events were seen as something of a novelty. A book published to celebrate George V’s silver jubilee in 1935 reminisced about the strikes: ‘Children sprang a surprise on their elders by going on strike for less caning and more half-holidays. The youngsters took themselves quite seriously, but were soon back again at their desks after this juvenile attack of strike fever was cured’ [5].
There is something more serious about the children’s strike, however. Not least because corporal punishment in schools - which was still so normal in 1935 that it seemed rather amusing that children might rebel from it - became more of a dilemma further into the century, and was made illegal in 1987 (though not until 1999 for English and Welsh private schools, and into the early 2000s for their counterparts in Scotland and Ireland). There were also contemporaneous precedents for strike action. There had been a national rail strike over the 17th-19th of August 1911, and for Llanelli this spilled over into its docking and other industries [6]. The Long View adds:
600 soldiers were sent into Llanelli to keep the peace, but in the ensuing riot there were several fatalities. Children were not immune from all of this - some of their parents were directly involved as employees within the respective industries. They were also aware of the emerging adult labour movement - as one boy told a Daily Mirror reporter, 'our fathers strike - why shouldn't we?'While the children soon returned to work, it is worth noting what happened at one of the schools in the aftermath of the strike. At Southall Street School in Manchester, where the strike had lasted for three days, the pupils were lined up to witness the punishment (the ubiquitous cane) that the ringleaders received. As retold by his younger brother, Larry, Jack Goldstone surprised the teacher when it came to his turn, grabbing the cane and hitting the educator with it before running out of school. The boys’ father accompanied Jack to Southall Street the next morning, and told the headmaster that he did not approve of the beatings (school punishments that - Larry claimed - made a lot of the parents angry). Larry added:
...he gave the headmaster a strict warning that if anyone dared apply any punishment to his son Jack, then he would go up and mete out far worse to the one responsible. If his lad did anything that required punishment, they were to send a note and he would deal with his son by his own disciplinary methods.Carefully quoted, that story has the potential to articulate the ideal of parental engagement invoked by both the big society (Dave C) and accepting your responsibilities as well as your rights (Gordon B, and perhaps his successor).
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[1] The Editor, The Educational Times, 1911. Quoted in ‘The Long View,’ BBC Radio Four, April 2003. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/longview/longview_20030408_readings.shtml>.
[2] Larry Goldsmith, ‘Letter to Stephen Humphries’, quoted in SOCIALIST REVIEW, 180, November 1994 <http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr180/rosen.htm>.
[3] The Times, 15th September, 1911, and ‘Play and Punishment at Llanelly – Editorial from the Local Press.’ Quoted in ‘The Long View,’ BBC Radio Four, April 2003. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/longview/longview_20030408_readings.shtml>.
[4] ‘The Long View,’ BBC Radio Four, April 2003. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/longview/longview_20030408.shtml>.
[5] The Story of 25 Eventful Years in Pictures, (London: Odhams Press Ltd, 1935). p.46.
[6] Ibid., p.42.
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