Though the guild system used at Bembridge (and other schools)
in the 1920s and 30s derived from the arts and crafts movement, it had nothing
to do, Whitehouse averred, with guild
socialism in industrial organisation, such as that advocated by William
Morris and G.D.H. Cole. His was rather ‘an experiment in reasonable freedom in
education’, under which ‘certain special activities within the school have been
organised in the spirit of the craft guilds of the middle ages’ – which left
him with plenty of room for interpretative improvisation.
By Christmas 1920 there were probably still fewer than fifty
boys on the school roll. But the newspaper that term reports the formation of
no less than five guilds: woodworkers, printers, gardeners, builders and
toymakers (for younger boys). Already from the autumn of 1919 the builders had
been busy constructing a photographic dark room (a priority which reminds us
that, while he had little time for modernism in art and literature, Whitehouse
easily engaged with many features of technical
modernity, including broadcast radio and the automobile – he liked big American
cars) and by 1922, the gardeners had taken over a piece of ground to work, he
says,
as a communal market garden, paying for the seed themselves,
and selling the harvest to the school at current rates, and themselves deciding
what they could [sic] do with the profit. It is a guild built on a basis of
co-partnership. Careful accounts are kept…
However, all guilds, he maintained, would ‘undertake certain
work for the general good of the school community’ – but some more, perhaps,
than others.
In theory, at least, boys could join as many guilds as they
liked, according to their interests. Each guild was ‘a little fraternity with
three degrees of rank – apprentices, journeymen, masters.’
The boy passes from one to degree to another, according to
merit, as he acquires the requisite skill. [The fraternity] is largely
self-governing. The members of the guild have regular meetings, when they talk
over the work they are doing, or contemplate doing – its difficulties and
problems. They do a large part of the organization.
But at Bembridge the hierarchy was more extensive than this.
The member of staff in charge of the activity covered by the guild was the
‘Grand Master’ – a title which in the case of the printers the sub-Warden
Edward Daws only relinquished to arts and crafts teacher Ronald Muirhead in
1922, when press and composing rooms were united in a part of the sports
pavilion. In addition, each guild had a President - who was of course
Whitehouse himself.
How did all this work in practice? Writing sometime in the
mid-1920s, Whitehouse found that there was ‘no feature in the life of the
school that has given us more encouragement’, and the first government
inspection, in 1932, commended the effectiveness of the guild system in
motivating boys and developing a sense of responsibility. Printing room reports
in the school newspaper at this period frequently close with notes on boys’
graduation within the guild (these only finally come to an end in the 1950s),
and towards the end of the 1930s yet another rank, that of ‘Vice-Master’ was
added, the building of the dedicated printing room in 1931 having significantly
increased participation in printing.
But it’s rather doubtful as to how much genuine influence over
their affairs was ever exercised by the printers as a community. I think to
Whitehouse the availability of the resources of the printing room to the school
as a whole, principally in the production of the school newspaper, and
increasingly in the provision of all manner of useful ephemera - but also, at
times, in a more idealistic sense, as a species of noble potentiality - was
simply too important to permit any arrangement that might compromise what he
conceived as its central role of service. There never seems to have been any
question, for example, of control of funds, such as (so he claims) was the case
with the gardeners, or the exercise of any form of entrepreneurship for the
benefit of the guild alone. Independence, individual responsibility and
initiative were admirable, and were certainly to be encouraged, but only within
a firmly established pattern of obligations.
In fact, in the context of the system as a whole at Bembridge,
there’s no pretence of self-government in Whitehouse’s description of the
printers’ guild. Instead, he reiterates the craft’s educational values, and
celebrates the continuity enacted as the boys ‘try to proceed upon the historic
methods of printing’. He presents an almost hallowed occupation, the printers
‘keeping always before them the principle of perfect simplicity’.
What must have seemed latterly rather quaint, and more suited
anyway to the small school (with its readier interaction of groups of mixed
ages) which was by then being left behind, the guild hierarchy gradually fell
out of favour after the second world war. Master Printers were replaced by
Senior Printers (of which there were usually no more than two, chosen as much
for their ability to take charge as their technical skill), and a somewhat
ill-defined group of enthusiasts, never more than a dozen or so in number,
known simply as ‘the printers’. After the late 1950s the guild survived really
only in name, though it should be added that the spirit of a fraternity was
always there to be rekindled in the printing room.
There is a reference to a ‘printers’ festival’ on 23rd November
1920, but for most of the 1920s and 30s the printers’ main social event was the
termly Guild Tea. There is very little information to be found about these
gatherings, but they appear to have been somewhat archly formal occasions. If
he was able to, Whitehouse would preside; there would be his address, to which
a senior boy might reply, and so on. To be looked forward to with relish,
however, was the ‘printers’ breakfast’, a reward on the last day of term, or
thereabouts, to those boys who had contributed most to the production of the
school newspaper. It’s first mentioned as a tradition to be continued, at
Coniston, and was perhaps an innovation of the 1930s, presumably Tom Stedman’s.
Though not always available, as the cooperation of the school caterers couldn’t
be guaranteed, it was enjoyed by generations of Bembridge printers until well
into the 1980s.
The origins of ‘night printing’ and its attendant mysteries
are appropriately obscure. The usefulness of a regular, flexible, late-night
session, in the final weeks of term, to ensure the newspaper’s timely
completion, may have been realised at almost any time. It was certainly taking
place in 1957 when Dearden returned to Bembridge, but in living memory ‘night
printing’ can only really be illuminated from the beginning of the 1960s. Following
certain preparations for bed, ‘the printers’ would repair in the evening, after
prep, to the printing room - and carry on into the night, with more or less
commitment, with whatever had to be done: setting, dissing, wire-stitching,
guillotining, working the Albion in teams of four - though the official hour or
so was perhaps exceeded rather less often than many imagined. In the golden age
before the link (in 1965) with the Whitehouse Memorial Building brought central
heating, putting an end to it, there might be culinary feats performed on the
printing room gas fire, hot toast and a drink perhaps, before the walk back to
one’s far-away, long-since darkened dormitory.
Memory swarms around ‘night printing’. To some it was the
simple pleasure of being out of uniform, or of being able to confound the
suspicions of one’s adult superiors:
‘And where are you off to?’
‘Night printing, sir!’
To a few it was the chance to slip out into the privacy of the
nearby squash-court for a cigarette. There might have been high jinks. The
practice of an old trade initiation rite by which ink was rolled onto the torso
of a new recruit to ‘the printers’ has been reliably reported, but it’s
difficult to believe that this ever became established, as its consequences
would have been so hard to conceal from the staff who would have quickly put an
end to it. Doubtless ‘night printing’ lost much of its allure with the
liberalisation of evening routines in the 1970s and 80s, but such was the
geography of the Bembridge site – as a working school building the printing
room was about as far as it was possible to get from the sleeping accommodation
- the perception of whatever took place there was always enhanced by the sense
of remoteness, heightened in bad weather, from the rest of the life of the
school.
