JL Robertson: an educational story

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 19^th 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.[1]

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[2] 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”[3]

By 1890 the three Lewis boards were indeed balancing their books and the others followed at various stages.[4] 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.[5]

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[6]. 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[7]. 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[8]) 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[9] (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 19^th 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 20^th century in the University of Glasgow (and the magnificent organ in the Bute Hall) came from Carnegie.[10]

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.[11] An excellent summary of the effect can be found in another Anderson publication.[12] 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 19^th century. But in the early 20^th 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.[13]

 

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’[14].

 

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.

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[1] pp 55-84 Cruickshank M (1970) History of the Training of Teachers in Scotland  London

[2] TR Bone (1968)  School Inspection in Scotland 1840-1966  Edinburgh

[3] p129 TR Bone (1968)  School Inspection in Scotland 1840-1966 Edinburgh

[4] D Macdonald (1978)    pp 154-158 Lewis: A History of the Island Edinburgh

[5] p211 RD Anderson (2008) in Bryce TGK and Humes WM (Eds) Scottish Education 3^rd Edition Edinburgh

[6] An excellent, if very dense, discussion of the issues can be found in the definitive RD Anderson (1978) Education & Opportunity in Victorian Scotland Edinburgh

[7] Nicolson Institute 1973 Centenary School Magazine

[8] RM MacIver (1968) As a Tale that is Told: The Autobiography of R.M. MacIver Chicago and London
[9] p242 RD Anderson (1978) Education & Opportunity in Victorian Scotland Edinburgh)
[10] pp 86, 100 N Haynes (2013) Building Knowledge: An architectural history of the University of Glasgow Edinburgh & Glasgow
[11] p288 RD Anderson (1978) Education & Opportunity in Victorian Scotland Edinburgh
[12] p132 RD Anderson et al (2003) The University of Edinburgh : An illustrated history Edinburgh
[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewar_Report[14] http://ica-atom.tasglann.org.uk/index.php/dr-j-l-robertson-bequest-3;isad