JL Robertson: an educational story
Iain Smith
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 i.e. one
of the church schools that preceded the 1873 foundation of the Nicolson
Institute in Stornoway.
By the 1871 census he is still living at home aged
17; and is a “pupil teacher”. “Pupil teacher” generally indicated a student
staying on at school beyond the usual school leaving age of 12 or 13 and possibly
intending to become a certificated but non-graduate teacher through a course in
a teacher training college. This was a common and quite well-funded route 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 college.
Some pupil
teachers however, always males, used this as a route to university; 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 or more before these standards could be met by study in Stornoway or
indeed in much of 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). He then attended the
University of Edinburgh and graduated with distinction in Arts (MA) and then in
Law (LLB). 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 that inspectors at the time were recruited on the basis
of academic distinction rather than experience in school teaching. Much to the
dismay 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 the apprentice “pupil teacher”.
In 1888, the
local school boards of Barvas, Lochs and Uig in the Island of Lewis and ten others,
all in the Highlands, were in financial difficulties, largely through low
attendance and poor payment of tuition fees; and they applied to the government
for special assistance. This was granted, subject to government having some
administrative control. It was JL Robertson who was appointed the administrator
of the scheme; and he was promoted to Chief Inspector of Schools (HMCI).
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. They then relied, as their local authority school successors
do to this day, on a combination of government grant and local rates.
Thereafter
JL Robertson’s main responsibilities were as chief district inspector for the
Highlands and Islands.
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 government’s foundation in Scotland in 1888 of the Higher
Leaving Certificate. It quickly became, as with remarkably few changes it
remains today, the major benchmark for university and college entrance. There
was considerable agreement that secondary education should be expanded, especially
for bright but poor students; but great controversy as to how. In a complex debate,
the central decision was between the School Boards developing their own “higher
grade” provision as opposed to the existing secondary provision of “endowed
schools” and “higher schools” e.g. Kelvinside Academy, Inverness Royal Academy,
Glasgow High School (which were independent of the Boards) remaining under
individual control but receiving government grant to fund “deserving” poor
scholars or to expand their provision.
In essence
both sides gained. Govan School Board on one side was particularly prominent
and proactive 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 side, existing independent
secondary schools also received government grant to expand their provision; some
of them (e.g. Inverness Royal Academy, Aberdeen Grammar School and Perth
Academy) are today simply part of the state-funded system.
In the
Island of Lewis, there was no existing secondary school to expand. The Nicolson
Institute had been founded in 1873 by endowment and gifts and had quickly become
a Board 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 incoming students. Hence Donald Maclean
of Bragar and Robert Maciver of Stornoway became in 1898 the first Nicolson
Institute students to go direct to university. JL Robertson as District Inspector was also instrumental
in the Nicolson Institute acquiring and expanding its dedicated secondary
building on Francis Street in 1898. Portree
High School and Kirkwall Grammar School began to follow the same route only a
few years later with the support of Robertson. So across Scotland even in remote rural areas some
barriers to university access were coming down: and WJ Gibson and JL Robertson were
key players in this.
But
formidable barriers remained. 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 not for a degree but for a sub-degree qualification,
the delightfully titled “Lady Literate in Arts”: Scottish universities began to
admit women undergraduates to degree courses only in 1892, and initially the
numbers were small. We also know from Maclean census data in Bragar and from
Professor Robert Maciver’s autobiography that the fathers of Maclean and
Maciver were both prosperous merchants; and this was almost certainly a factor
in the educational progress of their sons. Poor working class boys and certainly girls
from remote rural areas in Scotland did not, with rare exceptions, go to
university in the late 19th century.
The stories of the exceptions (e.g. the church-sponsored Rev. Alexander Macdonald,
son of a crofter from late 19th century Swordale) have contributed
to a mythology.
If Gibson and
other headteachers at school level and if Robertson and a few other chief HMIs
inspectors at school district level had played a big part in opening up
opportunity, another Scot, one Andrew Carnegie, then made a further intervention
in 1901.
One can
think of Carnegie as a 19th century Donald Trump. 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 a quarter billion US dollars (at
today's prices) to Scottish universities. 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 is about £2.5m a year
at today’s prices.
The Carnegie
Trust says today
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……. 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. The sons, and indeed by then the daughters, of fishermen and
crofters and labourers 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 paths to university for a wider group.
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 primary
school students from poor backgrounds who accessed secondary education in the
Nicolson Institute and subsequently became university graduates in the 1910s.
Munro was a teenage prodigy in writing Miltonic verse in his second language of
English; no mean Gaelic poet; a war hero; and dead in wartime 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 Gaelic chronicler of his long-dead school pal
Munro.
Success in
secondary school provision across Scotland had however put financial pressure
on government: for primary students progressing to secondary schooling
attracted a high government grant for the School Boards. So Robertson and the
government in the 1900s insisted that 13/14-yr-old students in primary schools
passed a newly established “qualifying exam” to access 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 William T Ross the then 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, like the Knock and Back Schools of Munro and Murray, were
doing well in this new regime. Government
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 government
education policy: some public relations hype in the governance of Scotland does
not change over the years.
In 1912 JL Robertson
was given an Honorary LL.D. by Edinburgh University. A generation or more later
(1952) , 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 (2008),
did another son of the Hebrides, Matthew Maciver, Chief Executive of the
General Teaching Council for Scotland. Matthew Maciver had in the 1960s been an
undergraduate holder at the University of Edinburgh of a JL Robertson bursary.
In 1912, Robertson was also 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 Senior Chief Inspector. i.e. the top HMI in Scotland. In 1919
he was awarded a CB (Companion of the Order of the Bath). 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. A residue of this money, sadly eroded by
inflation, remains today with Comhairle nan Eilean Siar.
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 many Scottish educational luminaries of today 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 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.
3.
One required
access to a school which was teaching to University entrance standards: the
Island of Lewis and the Hebrides had no such schools.
4.
Someone had therefore
to pay the mainland school tuition fees; and the associated costs of travel,
food and lodgings.
5.
Someone had
to pay university tuition fees; and the associated costs of travel, food and
lodgings.
John Lindsay Robertson surmounted these barriers in the 1870s: he was male; he had affluent parents; 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.
(Among the many sources on which we have drawn, we especially acknowledge:-
TR Bone (1968) School Inspection in Scotland 1840-1966 Edinburgh;
D Macdonald (1978) Lewis: A
History of the Island Edinburgh
Nicolson Institute (1973) Centenary
School Magazine Stornoway
Tasglann nan Eilean Siar (2014) at http://ica-atom.tasglann.org.uk/index.php/dr-j-l-robertson-bequest-3;isad )
(Iain Smith is a part-time writer of Lewis
origins.)
