An educational story

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 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 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 19^th century.  The stories of the exceptions (e.g. the church-sponsored Rev. Alexander Macdonald, son of a crofter from late 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th century. But in the early 20^th 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.

Records held by Tasglann nan Eilean Siar in Stornoway  say of Robertson:

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.)

 

The Lost Poet

John Munro ('Iain Beag'), son of a fisherman was born in 1889 in Swordale and raised in Aignish, an adjoining village in the Isle of Lewis. He was educated at the local school.

The teenage John Munro initially chose to stay on in that 'elementary' school as a 'pupil-teacher'. This was part of a teacher apprenticeship scheme of 19th-century Scotland: it consistently in the late 19th century gave poor bright kids a moderately financially secure route to a teacher training college; and is probably underestimated by educational historians. Stories of poor 19th-century working class Highland lads equipped only with a formidable intellect and with a sack of oatmeal heading to university in Edinburgh or in Glasgow are mostly that: rather isolated stories. A much more assured road was the teacher apprenticeship.

The scheme was phased out in 1906 before Munro could complete it; and he therefore went to spend three years (1908-1911) in the 'higher grade' Nicolson Institute in Stornoway. Munro decided that he wanted to go to university, still with a school teaching career in mind: the growth of 'higher grade' education and the 1901-founded Carnegie Trust had by then made university access for poor but talented students more feasible than it had been for much of the 19th century.

Shortly after Munro's arrival, the Nicolson rector, the nationally famous WG Gibson (the first Scottish headteacher to get a CBE) set up a school poetry competition. Munro chose the Isle of Lewis as his theme and composed an ode in blank verse. His schoolmate Murdo Murray tells us that there was an external adjudicator for this competition, Grierson (professor of English at the University of Edinburgh, a poetry specialist and subsequently tutor to the greatest Gaelic poet of the 20th century: Sorley Maclean). Grierson in his adjudication said that he would be surprised if a better poet than John Munro had ever been born in Lewis.

To digress for a moment, as all we Gaels do: Murdo Murray was born in 1890, the son of a shoe-maker; Nicolson Institute dux of 1909; and graduate of the University of Aberdeen in 1913. Like his friend Munro he went to war in 1914; like Munro he wrote innovative Gaelic poetry about his war experience; but unlike Munro he survived the the first world war. He returned to a teaching career, ultimately as a school inspector, and survived until 1964.

The John Munro school poem, written in English, was previously thought by most Celtic scholars to be lost: in the 1950s, Murdo Murray recorded it in a 1950s issue of 'Gairm' (an academic Gaelic journal, now defunct) as lost; and Gaelic academia accepted his mid-1950s verdict. However, sometime in the late 1950s or very early 1960s, Murray was sent a copy of the 'lost' English poem. As we have discovered, by serendipity rather than scholarship, that copy was reprinted in the 1963 Nicolson Institute magazine and has survived in the school archives. There it is topped and tailed by some interesting notes:

The following ode on 'Lewis' was written as a school exercise by the late John Munro (dux 1911, killed in France 1918). Miss Jane Gibson made this copy [and] writes: 'I doubt whether many schoolboys nowadays have ever tried to write Miltonic verse; and that...in itself gives this poem almost a historic interest'.
We are indebted to Mr Murdo Murray, H.M.I.S. (retired) for sending us the poem.

It is worth quoting a few (and these are just a few) of the extant lines from Munro, the 18/19-year-old school Milton (and one clearly with some geological understanding of the origins and scarring of Lewisian gneiss):

A grand old isle washed by the ocean grey.
A fitter theme it were for Homer's harp
Or Vergil's song – to sing the lands that first
From peaceful rest beneath a shoreless deep
Upreared brave forms into a world of waste!
Thou had'st a Homer of thine own, my Isle:
Blind Rodrick's harp struck happy strains
But these to thee were lost…
What wonder tho' thy hills be weather worn,
And surface bare of blooming trees, until
Th' unfeeling, thoughtless ever, call thee bleak?
Know they the sorrows that have o'er thee passed?
The scars thou bear'st to show how thou has felt
The grind of grating ice, ton upon ton
And oceans broad, that capped the long gone world?

On reading this, one understands why in the Nicolson Institute of 1963 there still remained oral folk memories of John Munro. Even the oldest teachers had of course not taught Munro. But they could recall the memories of senior staff of the 1930s: of Munro as the ablest of school students; and of the tears in the staffroom in April 1918. (This in a school where staff did not easily shed tears, then or now.)
After three years in the Nicolson Institute, having gained the higher leaving certificate and been awarded the school dux medal, John Munro went to university, probably with a Carnegie scholarship. Graduating from Aberdeen University in 1914, he by then planned to train for the Free Church of Scotland ministry, but these plans were put on hold with the outbreak of war. He enlisted immediately (as so many did – for reasons that remain speculative even to such an imaginative historian as Niall Ferguson); and served in France with the Seaforth Highlanders from 1914.
A 1919 source, now in public record, says:
When war broke out in August, he volunteered and joined the 4th Seaforths. He was sent to France about the end of 1914, and served there continuously but for the short period he was in training at Gales [almost certainly Gailes in Ayrshire] Camp for his commission. During these years, he was in many engagements with the enemy and had many miraculous escapes, till the fateful day, 16 April [1918], when his beautiful and promising life was ended.
He had something to say, from dire personal experience, of nearly every name of sinister import over there: Ypres, Neuve Chapelle, Festubert, Loos, La Bassee, Delville Wood, Beaumont-Hamel, Cambrai, the Somme. And yet though he had seen all and suffered many of the miseries of war, he had come out of it all with his fine body unscathed and his finer spirit unclouded.
Munro, in the same manner as the soldier-poet Wilfred Owen, was killed in action during the last year of the conflict. Both Munro and Owen were second lieutenants when they were killed; and both were awarded the Military Cross shortly before they died.

For the issue of why Munro and Owen – both of modest origins – were lieutenants, one has to read Jeremy Paxman and Niall Ferguson; and indeed Bob Holman. An army whose officer class in 1914 was heavily upper class had, albeit inadvertently, slaughtered so many of them by 1915/16 that it had to talent-spot from among its working-class ordinary soldiers for replacements. In those pre-television days it was a (macabre) early version of 'Britain's Got Talent'.

John Munro had a young lady-friend (to use early 20th-century English). We have seen extracts of letters, not in the public record, which she wrote to Munro's mother after his death. She quotes from a note received from Munro's commanding officer:
The battalion was taking part in a counter attack at Wytschaete on that day 16 April 1918 and he was killed while gallantly leading the men of his platoon against a position held by enemy machine guns...I do not know if you heard that he was awarded the Military Cross for the most excellent work done by him during the Somme at the end of March. The notification of this award only appeared three days after his death.
(March/April 1918 had seen the last major German offensive of the first world war: an offensive initially successful, but ultimately so unsuccessful that it was probably the key to the November armistice.)
It would be going too far, certainly in terms of fame, to call John Munro the 'Gaelic Wilfred Owen'; but the similarities are interesting.  Only three of his Gaelic war poems, albeit quite extensive ones, are currently known to have survived; but there are believed to have been more in now missing manuscripts. Here are but two verses – in English translation by the late Professor Derick Thomson of Glasgow University – from the surviving poems:
Our Land
Snow mantle on the mountain peaks,
like white hair lie the mist streaks,
the runnel and the moor-burn
leap and pour
tumbling and rumbling down the rough glens
that skirt and buttress the high bens;
antlered stags and red deer
roam the long slopes, heather-dun –
this is the Land of Brave Men,
a hero's land of hill and glen,
this is the Land of Brave Men.
Our Heroes Who Fell in Battle
With some of them, when they were alive,
we had our differences, did not see eye to eye.
Ah! They have fallen on the battle-field:
We found them lying, wounded to death –
their unsightly dust was all that was left –
five of them lying, like fingers outstretched,
summoning, guiding,
urging fresh effort upon us,
asking us to press on, together,
as when they fell, advancing,
over the plain of the battle-field.
John Munro can be described as the first modern Gaelic poet: Professor Thomson stated that his work was 'the finest early burgeoning of the "new poetry" of the century' and Dr Finlay Macleod has said that he was 'the first Gaelic poet to use a contemporary style'.  Sorley Maclean and George Campbell Hay, both war poets too but much later, are seen as the breakthrough poets from tradition to modernity in the Gaelic poetic tradition; but, 20 years before their work appeared, John Munro was taking Gaelic poetry in a new direction.

If his commanding officer (inevitably) was terse in his private words of consolation, local contemporaries (as the now-digitised records of 1918 show) were more effusive:

Lt Munro was recently home from France on furlough. He had returned to France shortly before the German offensive started. During the first fortnight and before the Germans were brought to a standstill, his parents and friends were very anxious as to his safety; but they received the welcome news that he had come through the ordeal without a scratch.

 

Mr Morrison of the Knock School, under whom Mr Munro served his apprenticeship as pupil teacher and between whom there was a strong mutual attachment, had a letter on Monday, written on the 14th : 'These are anxious times' Munro wrote 'and only strength from God can stand the strain of them. May He be with you all at home and with us here, and let His mercy go forth to us'.
On Wednesday, his father received a wire [i.e. telegram] from the Record Office, Perth, informing him that his son, Lt. John Munro, was killed in action on the 16th April. The sad news has cast a gloom over the whole parish.
John Munro was only one of some eight million or more service personnel who died worldwide in the first world war; and but one of the 720,000 United Kingdom dead. Some are moderately well-remembered: Raymond Asquith, son of the UK prime minister; John Kipling, son of Rudyard; Jack Cornwell, all of 16 years when killed at the Battle of Jutland and posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
Among the best-remembered dead, there are certainly poets, including Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke ('If I should die, think only...') and the Canadian John McCrae ('In Flanders fields, the poppies blow...'). John Munro is not remembered in that way. But he has his place in Gaelic literary history. He wrote what turned out to be his own epitaph:

Ar Gaisgich a Thuit sna Blàir
S iomadh fear àlainn òg sgairteil,
ait-fhaoilt air chinn a bhlàth-chridh,
tric le ceum daingeann làidir,
ceum aotrom, glan, sàil-ghlan,
dhìrich bràigh nam beann mòra,
chaidh a choinneamh a’ bhàis -
tric ga fhaireach’ roimh-làimh -
a chaidh suas chum a’ bhlàir;
‘s tha feur glas an-diugh ‘fàs
air na dh’fhàg innleachdan nàmh,
innleachdan dhubh-sgrios an nàmh a chòrr dheth.
The English translation is again by Professor Thomson:
Many a handsome man, young, agile, quick of hand,
with gay mien matching warm heart,
who had often climbed, with strong step, light, foot-sure, bright
to the high upland of the great hill,
went to his meeting with death –
often fore-knowing its skaith –
went out to the war:
the green grass grows over
the shreds his enemies’ arms
left, when holocaust had had its fill.
John Munro was a good man, a scholar and a soldier. He was also a fine poet.


Iain Smith is a part-time writer and Ruairidh Maciver is a research student in the University of Glasgow. They acknowledge the help they have had in writing this story, notably from the Nicolson Institute, Stornoway; and from various friends and relations. They also wish to thank the National Library of Scotland: which has brought to the most ordinary of us stories of our past which previously, if not lost, had certainly been hard to find. An earlier version of this was published in the Lewis print journal, the Rudhach