‘A site [for a summer
camp] should first be secured, preferably on the coast…Here should be erected a
rough wooden cook-house and lavatories, and perhaps, a wooden shelter and
mess-room combined.’
J.H. Whitehouse, Problems of a Scottish provincial town, 1905,
p.109
In 1923, four years after the school’s foundation, John Howard
Whitehouse published Bembridge: An
historical and general survey by members of Bembridge School. ‘The record’,
he declared (with a characteristic sweep), ‘of a co-operative experiment,
voluntarily undertaken’, it is a wide-ranging study by staff and pupils of the
history, natural history, geology, geography and current socio-politics of the
area. In his own contribution, ‘Bembridge Today’, he doesn’t shy from making
various proposals for improvements, such as a new secondary school ‘with
generous facilities for creative work’, a youth club for older boys, and a
craftsmen’s guild, as ‘a scientific attempt to organise crafts as a village
industry’. In these, and other things, the local well-to-do are invited to
realise their civic responsibilities – and one can’t help wondering how they
received the suggestion. But the book’s most substantial article is more
closely focused: it’s a detailed account, by the arts and crafts master Ronald
Muirhead, of ‘The physical history of Yar Island’.
The name refers to the predominantly high ground, upon which
Bembridge is the main settlement, to the east of the river Yar (including its
ancient southern arm debouching between Yaverland and Sandown), which forms the
easternmost land mass of the Isle of Wight. On the map it makes a rough parallelogram
whose four corners are, to the north-west, Bembridge Point, to the north-east,
the Forelands, to the south-east, Culver Cliff and Whitecliff Ledge, and to the
south-west, Yarbridge, at the end of Bembridge Down. Up until the middle ages
it was, at least at high tide, a separate island (Brading, as is well known,
was a Roman port) and from a suitable vantage point, in the right conditions -
the top of the green at St Helens, say, looking south-east on a bright winter’s
morning, blue sky above, a blanket of mist covering the marshland below - it
can still be seen plainly as such. ‘Lord of the valleys of peace,’ wrote
Whitehouse in 1938, ‘Guard Thou our sea-girt school’.
Muirhead’s article is illustrated with a striking photograph.
It shows a large-scale model, it must be several feet long, of Yar Island, made
by the boys. Carefully raised from a scaled-up contour map it renders the
overall shape and form of the landscape with wonderful fidelity. It would have
provided a focus for learning across the curriculum and must have been fun to
build and, possibly, play with. It was produced, undoubtedly, under the
supervision of Ernest Baggaley, who had very recently joined the staff. A
Reading science graduate, he had been employed to teach physics and chemistry,
but his passion was geography (and especially, polar exploration). He,
Muirhead, Whitehouse and Whitehouse’s deputy, Edward Daws, were the principal
pioneers of the experiment in reformed public school education begun at
Bembridge in 1919.
Daws, later head of Lindisfarne College, is sometimes
described as a Christian evangelical. He was a native of the Island, from
Shanklin. How he met Whitehouse isn’t known but it was Daws who in 1914 noticed
a small tract of land for sale overlooking Whitecliff Bay. This Whitehouse
bought (probably with funds from the philanthropist Claude Roden Buxton) at
first for the use of the secondary boys’ summer camp he had been running for
several years, most recently at a site near Weymouth. But with the additional
purchase, a year later, of the nearby Whitecliff Bay House, formerly a hotel,
he acquired the premises for the school he had been contemplating.
*
Whitehouse’s early career as a social worker and as a Liberal
MP is admirably outlined in Dearden’s DNB article and can be examined in
more detail in the chapter devoted to him in Stuart Eagles’s study of Ruskin’s
cultural legacy, After Ruskin. Born in 1873, of modest background and
with only an elementary formal education (though this would be later extended
by intensive evening class studies) he had in the 1890s successfully
established himself in the prosperous Birmingham Quaker milieu of the Cadburys.
As an employee of their company, over a period of several years, he introduced
many of the elements of a recognisably modern social welfare organisation,
including the pensions scheme, a library, a youth club and works magazine. It
was also at this time that he came under the influence of the writings of John
Ruskin. He became committed to the furtherance of Ruskin’s work, remaining a
steadfast disciple and memorialist even as the great Victorian’s reputation
waned in the twentieth century. Eventually, Whitehouse assembled at Bembridge
the leading collection of Ruskin’s books, letters, manuscripts and drawings.
From his time in Birmingham there emerges a man of singular
self-possession (as all the portraits show), armed with unusual organisational
and managerial skills (including financial control) - also an uncommon gift for
persuading men of status and influence to endorse his ideas and, in a few
cases, provide material support for the causes to which he would become
attached. In this, we can see perhaps how an essentially Victorian habit of
Carlyleian hero-worship combined with something much newer: the deliberate
cultivation of public profile, using especially, alongside the older forms of
the printed word, modern newspaper publicity.
Whitehouse grew up with the New Journalism and would be part
of one of the first British governments known for its exploitation of the power
of the popular press. All four of the men who would give their names to the
Houses of Bembridge School – Fridtjof Nansen, John Masefield, H.W. Nevinson and
William Inge - were well-known as authors, and the latter two were noted
journalists (even if in Dean Inge’s case, it was a secondary vocation). Though
as a libertarian he would always strive to instil resistance to the ‘mass mind’
(which might so easily be turned into the ‘war mind’), Whitehouse was quite at
home with some of the contemporary means by which it was influenced. The range
of the contacts he developed among the political, social and cultural elite of
his day was remarkable, though as social relationships most of them appear to
have been strictly limited and transactional in character, and in fact he had
very few friends (and hardly seems to have valued, for himself, close
friendship). One of them, C.K. Organ, who knew Whitehouse from childhood,
described him as ‘a lonely soul’.
Between 1903, when Whitehouse left Birmingham, and 1910, when
he entered the House of Commons as Liberal MP for Mid-Lanarck, his career is
characterised by the relative brevity of his appointments, not infrequent
conflict with his employers and colleagues, and as he advanced himself,
principally in the area of boys’ welfare, the improving social and economic
status of those served by the youth organisations with which he was mainly
associated. Though his interest in and commitment to the welfare of young
people is not in doubt, it might not be unduly cynical to observe that for
Whitehouse a little front-line work with the seriously disadvantaged went a
long way. At any rate, it was on the threshold of what was perceived to be
potentially his most decisive intervention in the field of active social work,
as warden of the University Settlement at Ancoats, Manchester (his experience
there would provide him with one of his most striking Bembridge chapel
addresses) that he turned to politics.
A promising career beckoned and although he never achieved
ministerial office himself he was parliamentary private secretary to various
ministers in the socially reforming Liberal governments of Asquith and Lloyd
George. He concerned himself in particular with issues of child employment and,
increasingly, the plight of refugees. But at that crucial turning point in the
history of the old Liberal party, the conscription crisis at the beginning of
1916, he joined the small minority opposed to Lloyd George. This opposition,
born of libertarian insistence on the primacy of individual conscience,
together with his belief in the integrity of the family (and an element,
surely, of Quaker anti-militarism), cost him his political career (though his
support for women’s suffrage is also cited in this context).
A common thread in accounts of the civics and current affairs
classes Whitehouse conducted at Bembridge is his evident love of parliament, in
all its aspects - and perhaps its then very masculine club atmosphere of
equality within hierarchy was particularly congenial to him. If the loss of his
seat in 1918 gave him the opportunity to proceed with his idea of founding a
boys’ boarding school, he wasn’t exactly moving on: he fought every subsequent
general election, up to and including that of 1935 - with ‘equal unsuccess’ as
he told Tom Stedman. (The earliest extant school prospectus, which dates from
the beginning of the 1920s, has Daws not as sub-warden but headmaster: it
appears Whitehouse was planning for his own frequent absence from Bembridge.)
That prospectus is also notable for the school motto on its
front cover: ‘There is no wealth but life’, which just a little later was
replaced by the less politically contentious (but also Ruskin-derived) ‘Today’.
Whitehouse’s plan for Bembridge School drew on various ideas and models, most
of them influenced by John Ruskin, directly or indirectly. Ruskin’s proposals,
in Fors Clavigera, for the schools attached to his unrealised St George
settlements provided a definite, if partial, template. The pattern of the
educational extensions in Whitehouse’s model, first set forth in 1905, of a
secondary boys’ summer camp - and especially the investigation of aspects of
the immediate locality we see in Bembridge: An historical and general survey
- provided another. More generally, there were the many current ideas for a
reformed curriculum and social organisation, arising from a developing public
critique of the older public schools. To this debate, in 1919, Whitehouse had
contributed The English Public School: A symposium, a direct response to
the revelations, particularly of homosexual practice, in Alec Waugh’s Loom
of Youth.
Directly from Ruskin’s St George’s Schools comes the vision of
a village-like community including as well as school rooms and living quarters a
library, laboratory, productive gardens and craft workshops (specifically a
carpentry shop and pottery, both of which were established early on at
Bembridge); from Ruskin, too, comes the idea of liberal space for
self-education in a rich and beautiful learning environment, much of it
outdoors; also a minimally-competitive, mutually supportive and (perhaps
unrealistically) familial spirit in the conduct of daily life. Beyond this
broad enclosure lay the diverse opportunities for study, service and
exploration available in the wider locality of the school, with its
neighbouring settlements, its distinctive topography, its engrossing natural
environment.
Whitehouse favoured modern languages and history, English
literature and the use of translations, challenging the traditional role of the
classics (though Latin, as a requirement for university entrance, was
retained). Art, woodwork and printing were established in the curriculum as
timetabled subjects, as well as being part of a broad range of activities
designed to engage boys in their spare time, addressing ‘the problem of
leisure’ while avoiding the fetishisation of sport. The discipline of manual
work was celebrated, and the dignity of labour recognised. The cruelties of
fagging and excessive corporal punishment were rejected, as well as all
perceived incursions into school life of militarism (though Whitehouse became
less emphatic here, as the 1930s progressed). Instead, senior boys were required
to lead juniors, in kindness and chivalry, to ideals of service and
cooperation, and the pursuit of noble character (well, that was the idea).
Citizenship was taught from a broad base of investigation into political and
social economy, of how government worked, and in the context of international
affairs.
Has there been some embarrassment in Bembridge School historiography
over the extent of Whitehouse’s inter-war pacifism? In itself, it was hardly
unusual for the time. At least two pre-war witnesses to his chapel addresses –
Robin Day and John Heath-Stubbs - had no doubt they were listening to a
pacifist and it’s clear that – as Stuart Eagles’s research has confirmed –
Whitehouse came to accept the need for armed conflict only with extreme
reluctance, and at the last moment.
Whitehouse’s debt to Quakerism, acknowledged by Stedman, still
needs to be explored. Figures of Quaker and other Protestant dissident rhetoric
emerge strongly in some of his writing in the 1930s, and in the ideas of the
so-called Quaker Renaissance of the late nineteenth-century there may lie a
framework for understanding the peculiar nature of the liberal,
non-denominational Christianity he established at Bembridge. These ideas were a
reaction to the severe, scripture-based, evangelical Quakerism that had become
dominant earlier in the century, and represented both a modernisation - in the acceptance
of Darwinism and modern biblical criticism - and a return to what were
perceived as the sect’s mystical roots in the seventeenth century. The life of
Christ was seen principally as a call to social action, and the doctrine of
atonement, together with the imagery of the crucifixion, conspicuously
downplayed. This latter aspect spoke especially to that commonly-felt
revulsion, shared by Whitehouse, following the unprecedented destruction of
human life in the first world war.
As one of the contributors to The English Public School declared:
‘We have passed through a supreme agony and we have found the church
inadequate’. There was no cross in the school chapel Whitehouse built at
Bembridge and the main Christian festival celebrated there would be that of the
Nativity. The inward-facing seating surely owes something to a Quaker
meeting-house - though there is another, more bizarre resemblance (not lost on
the young John Heath-Stubbs as he sat listening to Warden holding forth), which
is to the chamber of the House of Commons.
*
By the time Bembridge School opened Whitehouse was already the
author or editor of several books, mainly on matters of education and social
welfare, and had some experience as a journal editor and publisher, as well.
The stream of writing would continue (and broaden in subject-matter) but after
1919 there is a change in the character of his output: his style begins to
fragment somewhat, as if there were a loosening of the bonds within the body of
his thought and beliefs.
To a great extent this was a product of the changing
composition of his audience and those to whom he was accountable (and
occasionally it’s simply a matter of excessive haste, as he tumbles into print
without sufficient thought or research - The Craftsmanship of Books (1929)
is a case in point here) but perhaps most of all it reflects the new scope
afforded the benevolent despot in him. Removed from the parliament he loved,
he’d perhaps somewhat unexpectedly found himself with a single, over-riding
course and identity, that of Warden of Bembridge School. As Tom Stedman
observed, this had two sides: there was the humane and kindly ‘Warden’, but
there was also ‘The Warden’, who was very much a Victorian autocrat.
Next to the energetic organiser, the competent manager and
campaigner, henceforth we see more of a much less worldly figure, who can only
be described as Whitehouse the fabulist, embarked upon an apparently open-ended
quest to assimilate the world of human affairs to a kind of Ruskin-inspired
pageant of progress and becoming. It was a process which would take him
eventually, in some of his writing, out of touch with reality (Eagles casts a
cruel light on the later Whitehouse in the extremity of his uncritical devotion
to Ruskin). But at the beginning of the Bembridge experiment there was little sign
of this, and indeed, in response to that first sense of relaxation and enlarged
opportunity, as he reflected on the early years of putting into practice his
own and Ruskin’s educational ideas, he produced one of his best books, Creative
education at an English school (1928).
*
Whitehouse’s ideas about the educational value of printing are
set out in Chapter 5 (and they’re restated, sometimes word for word, in Education
(1935), the volume he contributed to Rich & Cowan’s ‘In our time’ series).
‘Of the manual activities for boys,’ he wrote, ‘I should place very high those
associated with the printing press’. It was ‘an engine of creative literacy’
which at Bembridge was mainly engaged in the
production of the school newspaper. This was entirely set up and printed
by the boys, and illustrated with their wood-cuts, and this experience, he
maintained, unconsciously improved boys’ spelling and literary style, as well
as stimulating the creative spirit in English composition.
The second element in Whitehouse’s justification of school
printing is his notion of the value of the experience of an ‘historic method’
of craftsmanship, through which boys might ‘acquire…a certain standard, simple
as it may be, of taste and criticism’. This he believed might have ‘an
influence far beyond the limited subject of printing’. It’s a bold claim which
makes most sense in the context of a learning environment well furnished with
fine examples of the historical printed book, as well as other crafts – which
was certainly the case in the early life of the school.
Finally, and perhaps least controversially, Whitehouse held
that the practice of printing enabled boys ‘to look through a window upon the
great world of industry’. It was an observation whose truth could only become
more apparent as printing was established above all in the role of service at
Bembridge School.
