J.H. Whitehouse and 'creative education'

‘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.