JL Robertson: an educational story
John Lindsay
Robertson was born in Stornoway in 1854, one of twin boys. His mother was from
Montrose, his father was a “Ship Master” (1861 census) and “Ship Owner” (1871
census) from Stornoway and they lived in a 3-roomed house at No. 17 Kenneth Street,
subsequently migrating to No. 29. So Robertson belonged to a reasonably
affluent family. He was educated at the local General Assembly School in
Stornoway i.e. one of the church schools that preceded both the 1872 school
reforms in Scotland and the 1873 foundation of the Nicolson Institute in
Stornoway.
By the 1871 census, he is still living at home,
aged 17, but is a “pupil teacher”. “Pupil teacher” generally indicated a
student staying on at school beyond the usual leaving age of 12 or 13 and
possibly intending to become a certificated but non-graduate teacher via a
course in a teacher training college. This was a common and quite well-funded
route to upward mobility for both males and, increasingly, females in mid to late
19th century Scotland. “Pupil teachers” were paid up to £20 per
year, over £2000 at 2013 prices; and many of them at 18 were then awarded bursaries
to attend a college free of tuition fees.
Some pupil
teachers however, always males, used this as a route to university graduation;
and this appears to have been what Robertson did. By 1871, Scottish
universities had become increasingly rigorous in their entrance standards, and it
was to be 25 years before these standards could be met by study only in
Stornoway or indeed elsewhere in rural Scotland. So Robertson seemingly at some
point migrated to a mainland “higher school” (perhaps Inverness Royal Academy
or Aberdeen Grammar School or the Royal High School in Edinburgh). Thereafter he
attended the University of Edinburgh and graduated with distinction in Arts
(MA) and then in Law (LLB). So he packed a lot into the decade of the 1870s.
In 1880 (aged 26) he became an HMI (i.e. Her
Majesty’s Inspector of Schools) - “Her Majesty” was of course Victoria rather
than Elizabeth. We know from Professor TR Bone’s classic study of the Scottish
school inspectorate
that inspectors at the time were recruited on the basis of academic distinction
rather than experience in school teaching. Much to the disgust of the main
teacher union, then as now the Educational Institute of Scotland, some school
inspectors of that era had no school teaching experience at all. Whether Robertson himself had briefly been a
schoolteacher after graduation is uncertain but he had of course some years of
experience as an apprentice “pupil teacher”.
In 1888, the
school boards of Barvas, Lochs and Uig in the Island of Lewis and 10 others,
all in the Highlands, were in financial difficulties, largely through the
(related) issues of low attendance and poor payment of tuition fees; and they applied
to the Scottish Education Department for special assistance. This was granted,
subject to SED having some administrative control. It was JL Robertson who was appointed
the SED administrator of the scheme; and he was promoted to acting Chief
Inspector of Schools (HMCI), a position he later held on a permanent basis.
As Professor
Bone describes
Robertson was a
Stornoway man who, though quite young as an inspector, was admirably suited by
background, temperament and energy for the responsibilities now entrusted to
him. He had a shrewd understanding of the attitudes of the Highlanders, and by
an unusual combination of tactfulness and audacity he brought them to accept
the Department’s policy. The attendance figures were raised sharply, and though
strict economy was practised, educational advances were
made in the schools by the broadening and brightening of the curriculum. .......
it was generally admitted that he was just and sincere, and within a few years
the position was becoming satisfactory again, with the return of the boards to
a position of solvency”
By 1890 the three
Lewis boards were indeed balancing their books and the others followed at
various stages. School fees in elementary (primary) board
schools were abolished in 1890 (thereafter they relied, as their state
school successors do to this day, on a combination of government grant and local rates). Robertson was certainly not the key decision-
maker in that; but his experience with insolvent school boards must have fed
into the decision-making.
Thereafter
JL Robertson’s main responsibilities were as district inspector for the
Highlands.
Across
Scotland, attention had come to focus on what we now call “secondary education”.
In 1892, the first state grants for
secondary education appeared (10 years earlier than in England) and were used
to build up schools in smaller towns as well as to strengthen existing ones…….
They formed an effective national network able to prepare both for the universities
and for business careers.
This was
partly fuelled by the SED’s foundation in 1888 of the Higher Leaving
Certificate. It quickly became, as with remarkably few changes it remains today,
the major benchmark for university entrance – and for much else. There was
considerable agreement that post-elementary “higher” education should be
expanded, especially for bright but poor students; but great controversy as to
how.
In a complex and ongoing debate, the central decision was between the School
Boards developing their own “higher grade” provision (albeit with the SED
having a regulatory function as to how and where their grant was to be spent)
as opposed to the existing secondary provision of “endowed schools” and “higher
schools” e.g. Kelvinside Academy, Edinburgh Royal High School , Inverness Royal
Academy, Perth Academy (which were independent of the Boards) remaining under
individual governing body control but receiving SED grant to fund “deserving”
poor scholars and/or to expand their provision.
In essence
both sides won. Govan School Board on one side was particularly prominent and proactive
in this with the foundation of no less than five “higher grade” schools. Hillhead
High School (founded 1885) and Hyndland School (founded in Partick in 1887) are
still-functioning memorials to that. On the other hand, hitherto independent
schools also received SED grant to expand their provision; some of them (e.g.
Edinburgh Royal High School, Inverness Royal Academy, Perth Academy and indeed Paisley
Grammar School -much to the chagrin of its most notorious living alumnus, one
Andrew Neil) are today simply part of the state-funded system.
In the
Island of Lewis, the Nicolson Institute had been founded in 1873 by endowment
and gifts, but was to become a Board elementary i.e. primary school. Building
on moves initiated by his predecessor (the now somewhat maligned Forbes) a new
Rector WJ Gibson in 1894 took over the creation and expansion of a secondary
department; and bursaries “on the advice of Mr JL Robertson HMI” were awarded for
the best students from rural areas.
Hence Donald Maclean of Bragar and Robert Maciver of Stornoway became in 1898
the first Nicolson Institute students to go direct to university. Portree High School and Kirkwall Grammar School
began to do the same only a few years later. So across Scotland even in remote rural areas some
barriers to university access were coming down: and WJ Gibson in Stornoway and
JL Robertson across his Highland District were key players in this. But
formidable barriers remained. We know (from Maclean census data in Bragar and
from Professor Robert Maciver’s autobiography)
that the fathers Maclean and Maciver were both prosperous merchants; and this almost
certainly was a factor in the educational progress of their sons. And it was
certainly not an accident that the predecessor of Donald Maclean and of Robert
Maciver as a Nicolson Institute dux (Dina Macleod) had to settle for a
sub-degree LLA (the delightfully titled “Lady Literate in Arts”) qualification:
Scottish universities began to admit women undergraduates to degree courses
only in 1892, and initially the numbers were small.
JL Robertson
as District Inspector was also instrumental in the Nicolson Institute acquiring
and expanding its dedicated secondary building (on Francis Street) in 1898 and
in constructing its Matheson Road infant building in 1904.
But success in
secondary school provision across Scotland had put financial pressure on
government: for elementary students progressing to secondary schooling
attracted a high government grant for the School Boards. So Robertson and the
SED in the 1900s insisted that 13/14-yr-old rural students in elementary
schools passed a newly established “qualifying exam” to access the secondary
education provision: this was an institution which, if not quite as long-lived
as the “Higher Leaving Certificate”, blighted the lives of many of us until
well into the 1960s.
A perusal of
the school log of Shawbost School in the 1900s suggests that Shawbost was doing
poorly in “qualifying exam” results: so one
can understand why Ross the Shawbost head fell out with JL Robertson; and for
his pains was exiled to Scarp School for the residue of his career - a
Hebridean equivalent of being sent to Siberia.
Other rural
schools in Lewis were doing well in this new regime. We have tracked for example the 1900s school
careers of the great, if tragic, John Munro from Knock school (son of a
fisherman) and the almost equally great Murdo Murray from Back school (son of a
shoemaker), both examples of rural elementary school students who accessed
secondary education in the Nicolson Institute and subsequently became
university graduates just before 1914. (Munro was a teenage prodigy in writing
Miltonic verse in his second language, no mean Gaelic poet, a war hero and dead
in France before he was 30 years old. Murray was a war poet, a school teacher,
an HMI and -in his elderly years in the 1950s- a chronicler in Gaelic of his
dead pal Munro.)
Scottish
Education Department reports for the years 1910 to 1914 extolled what had
happened in developing secondary education in Lewis as a prime example of the
superlative nature of Scottish Education Department policy
(some public relations hype in the governance of Scotland does not change over
the years).
If Gibson
(and other heads) had played a large part in this at secondary school level and
if Robertson (and other HMCIs in Scotland) had played a big part at school
district level, another Scot, one Andrew Carnegie, had also made a very
decisive intervention in 1901. One can
think of Carnegie as a 19th century Donald Trump. Although he has a
better claim than Trump to Scottish ancestry and (at least in his later years)
a more secure record in philanthropy.
In 1901, Andrew Carnegie decided he would give about $5m to Scottish
universities (at today's prices about a quarter billion dollars, although
these conversions are tricky). But, never himself having been near a university,
he took some advice and decided it should go into a trust which might be
expected to generate a spending power of about £50,000 a year to pay tuition
fees for poor students. £50,000 per year was about what the state then spent
annually on Scottish universities and is over £2.5m a year at today’s prices.
Scottish university principals (again an unchanging breed to this day) were
unimpressed: the money would in essence go to students rather than to them. So
Carnegie doubled his investment; and gave the annual investment income from the
“new” half direct to universities for capital build – much of the expansion of
science build in the early 20th century in the University of Glasgow
(and the magnificent organ in the Bute Hall) came from Carnegie.
The Carnegie
Trust itself today says
To put this
in context, it should be stressed that, contrary to what is suggested, access
to university education in Scotland has not always been free. On the contrary, fees were charged by
the universities (originally by the professors directly) which represented a
significant barrier to access, and there was no provision for subsistence.
There was hot competition for the small number of available bursaries, and the
award of a bursary was, within living memory, the occasion of a school holiday.
It is precisely because student fees constituted such a serious barrier to
entry for the ‘qualified and deserving’ that Carnegie was first persuaded to
consider this endowment.”
By 1904,
half of all Scottish university undergraduates were benefitting from the Carnegie
endowment. An excellent summary of
the effect can be found in another Anderson publication.
The sons (and indeed by then the daughters) of fishermen and shoemakers had
found another source of support. It was hard enough for Robertson, Maclean and
Maciver, all sons of prosperous families, to have made their ways to university
in the 19th century. But in the early 20th century,
Carnegie made a further difference in opening up pathways to universities.
In 1912 JL Robertson
was given an Honorary LL.D. by Edinburgh University. A generation or more later
(1954) , Professor Robert M Maciver, the Nicolson alumnus who had profited from
the route to university opened up by Robertson and Gibson, received a similar
honour from Edinburgh; as, a further generation or more on from that (2004),
did another son of the Hebrides, Matthew Maciver, Chief Executive of the
General Teaching Council for Scotland.
In the same year, Robertson was more widely influential
in Scottish social development. He was a member of the small and high-powered Dewar
Committee:
The report presented a
vivid description of the social landscape of the time and highlighted the
desperate state of medical provision to the population, particularly in the
rural areas of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The report recommended setting up a new, centrally planned provision of
care that within 20 years transformed medical services to the area. This
organisation, the Highlands and Islands Medical
Service …….. acted as a working
blueprint for the NHS in Scotland.
In 1915, Dr JL
Robertson became HMSCI (Senior Chief Inspector. i.e. the top HMI in Scotland). In
1919 he was awarded a CB (Companion of the Order of the Bath), as have been some of our
more recent HMSCIs. In 1921 he retired. He subsequently gave a £5000 donation for
educational purposes. From a man whose maximum career salary would have been
£900 per year this was not an inconsequential sum: it is over £210,000 at 2013 prices.
When he died in Inverness, six years after
his retirement ………. his popularity was clear in the extent of the activity
surrounding his funeral; when his body was returned to Lewis the flags on the
island were at half mast and all businesses were closed at noon. All schools
throughout Lewis were closed and ‘the senior boys of Nicholson [sic]
Institute headed the funeral procession, which included the Lewis Pipe Band,
the Brethren of the Masonic Lodge, the Provost, Magistrates and Councillors of Stornoway
and members and officials of all the other public bodies’. In addition, ‘there
was a very large and representative attendance of the general public, including
people from all parts of the island’. Sir George Macdonald, the Secretary of
the Scottish Education Department, extolled his virtues and said ‘Few men in
our time have laid their native country under so deep an obligation as he has
done’.
It is
unlikely that even such Scottish-born educational luminaries as Michael Gove
and Michael Russell will receive such a send-off.
Back in the
1870s Robertson had faced five barriers to university access for Hebrideans,
many of which also applied elsewhere in Scotland:-
1.
One had to
be male.
2.
One required
access to a school which was teaching to University entrance standards: the
Island of Lewis and the Hebrides had no such schools.
3.
One had therefore
to pay the mainland school tuition fees; and the associated costs of travel,
food and lodgings.
4.
One had to
pay university tuition fees; and the associated costs of travel, food and
lodgings.
5.
One had to
stay on in education beyond the age of 13: and forego the wages available to
teenagers, notably in the (relatively lucrative) fishing industry of the time.
John Lindsay Robertson surmounted these
barriers in the 1870s: he was male; he had affluent parents; he may have won bursaries;
and most certainly he was talented and hard-working.
He then played a significant national role with
others in lowering these barriers for subsequent generations.
He should be better remembered than he is.
pp 55-84 Cruickshank M (1970) History of the Training of Teachers in
Scotland London
D Macdonald (1978)
pp 154-158 Lewis: A History of
the Island Edinburgh
p211 RD Anderson (2008) in Bryce TGK
and Humes WM (Eds) Scottish Education 3rd
Edition Edinburgh
RM MacIver (1968) As a Tale that is Told: The Autobiography
of R.M. MacIver Chicago and London
p242 RD Anderson (1978) Education &
Opportunity in Victorian Scotland Edinburgh)
pp 86, 100 N Haynes (2013) Building
Knowledge: An architectural history of the University of Glasgow Edinburgh
& Glasgow
p288 RD Anderson (1978) Education &
Opportunity in Victorian Scotland Edinburgh
p132 RD Anderson et al (2003) The
University of Edinburgh : An illustrated history Edinburgh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewar_Report http://ica-atom.tasglann.org.uk/index.php/dr-j-l-robertson-bequest-3;isad
