A school such as Hutchesons', which has adapted ceaselessly to changing circumstances for over 350 years and would not otherwise have remained at the forefront of Scottish schooling, develops a tradition, a way of being in the world, which seems to have an existence independent of those who inhabit the institution. Made of people's thoughts and actions , the tradtion is yet more than their sum. Tradition, perhaps, is a spirit, an ethos, which by informing acion perpetuates itself and communicates its worth to those informed by it. The newcomer, adult or child, pupil, teacher, janitor, dinner lady or secretary,enters into a mood, an atmosphere, and their actions and feelings informed by that atmosphere cause its continuous recuperation.
And so by tracing the beliefs and practices of those charged with the leadership of Hutchesons' Schools since the beginning of what might be called its modern period in the mid-nineteenth century, it is instructive to observe a commonality of understanding and purpose which permits the identification of a spirit in action, the ethos of the Hutchesons' Schools.
In 1862, when the School has just appointed Thomas Menzies as Headteacher and Rector, Hutchesons' is basically a larger version of the original charity school first located in the basement of the Trongate Hospital. Yet it is about to begin a long march of change and, although none can foresee quite where change will lead, the mid-Victorians and their successors knew change was coming. They hammered out a value system to take them forward, one which built on the Mortification of the Founders, and which can be shown to be remarkably durable down to a present-day world unimaginably different..
In the year of Menzies' appointment, 1862, a Patron (a Hospital Governor) says he is unhappy the Hospital is paying fees for Hospital-educated boys who go on to the High School. This provision had been in Thomas's Will, and had been happening certainly since the beginning if the 19th century (if not very often before then). But now when they go to the High it was to find they had covered much of the work already - "it was found in the case of boys recently that they had been put to a large extent through the whole curriculum" (of the High School) during their time in Crown Street. The curriculum at the High had recently broadened from the purely classical, and the Patron's remark indicates that in such a broadening the High was only coming up to a standard already provided by Hutchesons', as yet not formally a provider of secondary education..
At the time, modern distinctions between primary and secondary were only beginning to be formalised. The notion of a school being restricted to a primary or "elementary" education was firmly denied by adherents to the old Scottish tradition of the parish school where, it was said, " there never was that arbitrary division betwee what was called elementary education and other kinds of education" ("Hear, hear" said this meeting of the City and General Endowment Boards in 1885.) In the steady subject addition which built it up towards becoming a secondary school in all but name, Hutchesons' was doing what came naturally to the traditional Scottish school as well as making possible its future.
Another Patron observes in 1862 that the cost of paying for the education of boys generally is not justified when pupils subsequently take no advantage of their "superior education" and instead their parents "sent them to trades where they would earn perhaps 2s 6d a week". He is unhappy at people having "their children educated in connection with the Hospital merely for the sake of the clothing and the money". Patrons now believed the Hutchesons' education should be an improving experience - it should be of a higher order and promote upward social mobility. There is only one dissenting voice, who in the eighteenth century would have been in the majority (for few went on to the Grammar Schol then). This Patron says the boys' education will be sufficiently justified if it makes them better tradesmen, and the fact they were well-clothed while at school was more important than educating them. This tension, between a charity tradition concerned with the betterment of the poor, and a more instrumental perspective desirous of maximising advantage for the most able, was implicit in the Mortification and would run through the next century and beyond.
In 1864, the Patrons made their annual examination of the school, as usual asking the questions themselves:
"The boys underwent a lengthened and searching examination in the various branches of a sound elementary and commercial education, and elicited the admiration of all present by the accuracy and promptness of their answers. Great attention is paid to religious instruction, and the more advanced boys are taught Latin and geometry, in which their requirements reflect the highest credit on the ability and assiduity of their teachers."
All the annual examinations of this period make such remarks.
By 1867, "the practice of apprenticing boys has fallen into disuse", Only the Dux used to go forward to the High but now money is available for more to go on to the High and "College",
In 1871, the Preceptor (the Chairman of Patrons) "did not know that there was any school in Glasgow superior to it".
In 1872, "it was thought that the funds of the Hospital might very properly be devoted to education in the higher class of mechanical engineering, drawing and other branches of that description". This followed a public plea to the Patrons to update the curriculum "in favour of systematically imparting instruction in science" (1869), the request being aroused by the brave new world suggested in the Paris Exhibition of 1867.
In 1873, discussions on establishing the Girls' School led to the headmaster and a city chamberlain being despatched throughout the realm to find out "the most recent information on female education". They found that "none" were teaching domestic economy "systematically in the interests of the pupils". The Preceptor suggested they "should initiate a movement in this direction" when they set up the Girls' School.
Patrons' plans were that: "Here, girls of a class similar to that of the Hutchesons' boys, should, in addition to the ordinary literary education, with music and drawing, be taught knitting, cutting-out, and sewing, both by hand and with the machine, domestic work generally and specially economical cooking."
The School was to have "appliances which are unknown even in England" It was to be a "model school for the training of girls, not of the poorest classes - for these will be attended to by the School Board - but the children of respectable widows".
The Lord Provost said, speaking precisely of Hutchesons' plans, "It is very remarkable that no education of this kind has been established in the country previous to this time."
There was an entrance examination for both schools ("minimum age of application is 8 years") and its advertisement made clear that "inability to pass the required Standard of Attainment would necessitate the rejection of such Applicants". Once in the school, progress was by results: "Advancement is made from time to time to higher classes according to attainment." The modern way was taking shape.
In 1875, the 27 endowed schools in Glasgow were the largest group of free or charity schools in Scotland. Thirteen were not under Government inspection - nine because they were "not in operation". The Endowed Schools (Scotland) Commission sent in its own Inspector to look at the other 14, J.M.D Meiklejohn, Professor of the Theory, History and Practice of Education in the University of St. Andrews. He found only four to be efficient, "Alexander's, Glen's, Hutcheson's (sic) Hospital and McLachlan's schools". When inspecting Hutchesons', he applied "higher standards than used in any other school, and also demanded a much superior style of execution" as the boys "seemed to come from a higher class than those in either Buchanan's or in Glen's school".
He found "the reading wonderfully good" and had never found it as good in any school "either in England or Scotland".
"The boys read leading articles from the Pall Mall Gazette and also parts of Scott's Lady of the Lake. The emphasis was always true and good; the boys understood the full weight of each word, phrase and clause; they had a wonderfully fine sense for pauses, and a somewhat eloquent and slightly argumentative style. The articulation and expression were admirable, and the general tone of the whole class (with only one exception) seemed to be that of an agreeable and persuasive platform orator. The astonishing point was that Mr. Menzies had not only conquered their usual defects in articulation, and had given them habits of clear and distinct articulation, but that he had infused into every boy his own style. There was one exception which "proved the rule" - a boy who had been at school only three months.There cannot be the least doubt that this has been obtained only by the expenditure of great pains, by the constant upholding of a high standard and by an inventiveness perpetually at work to find the ways and means to reach that standard." Menzies was evidently the template for the Hutchie pedagogue.
Meiklejohn summed up the school: "This is a primary school of the highest class, with a strong and sound germ of a secondary school in it. It would be most unfair to the school to characterise it only as a primary school because, even in the subjects which are generally called primary, the methods Mr. Menzies follows, and the lines on which he works, seem to point everywhere to a "liberal" education and to pass beyond mere temporary "results". The teaching throughout appears to be informed with thought, and Mr. Menzies seems to be able to get intellectual training out of everything done in the school The boys have a sound knowledge of principles in every subject, and use their own judgements in applying them. The feeling, too, of the school is excellent. A delightful quiet and order lived in the room - the order and quiet that comes from everyone being busy and interested in his work. Each boy seemed filled with the sense that he had a great deal to do, and that others also were busy and must not be disturbed. There was no hurry or noise anywhere, but steady and tranquil diligence." Another template established -
In 1875, the original prospectus, as Hutchesons' set out on the secondary school path, "started with the well-defined aim that....this Educational Institution is intended to reproduce, in its best form, the old Grammar School, where in former days a superior education was to be had at a moderate fee; where the children of country gentlemen, professional men, tradesmen, and artisans, were educated side by side, and prepared either for the University or commercial life. Many of the best scholars were sent up from these Grammar Schools to the University, and many sent out from them who have left their mark on the world."
Governors (succeeding Patrons after the 1885 Endowments Act) quoted this in subsequent prospectuses, adding "The Governors intend to carry on the work of the Institution on the same lines, and with such educational improvements as experience may suggest from time to time."
Returning in 1880, and with a "certain prejudice" if the expansion undergone since 1874 could have been educationally advantageous (he says nothing of the fees charged since 1875-6) Professor Meiklejohn found, "there is no question that there exists both in the Rector and in the Masters a desire to make every class and department in the School as perfect as human things can be". He said this even although his main criticism was that classes were too large, "some... above eighty in number." Generally, Meiklejohn thought "fifty is an excellent limit in most subjects" in most schools, aware of how large numbers lead to learning by rote, with the teacher of necessity "appealing to a prompt memory rather than to a comparing judgement and an enquiring intellect". However, he finds HGS using little rote-learning even with such numbers.This would be consistent with Menzies' own beliefs in Stow-inspired explanatory methods and his dislike of monitors, who only used rote-learning.
Hutchesons' boys, Meiklejohn said, are "well-accustomed to paper examinations. They have four every year.."
His conclusions were: "so far as hard work, thorough and careful teaching, complete organisation, and a business-like working of the whole establishment are concerned, I do not think this School can be surpassed in Great Britain. The discipline and order are perfect; the organisation is like that of a first-rate man-of-war; and there is an atmosphere of vigour and purpose throughout the School. The Rector radiates energy; and it appears to me that the smallest boy in the place has the benefit of it. It would be difficult to find such results - results so level, and on so high a level - as those reached in this School in Arithmetic, Mathematics, and English, in any other school in this country. .......the character of the work done is plainly visible in the fact that, the longer a boy has been at the School, the greater seems to be his mental power, and the better his mental habits.........though English Composition is not one of the strong points, the papers received by me from the Forms from VIa upwards, (the last year of the primary, or "Preparatory" school) were superior to those I was in the habit of having sent to me some years ago, from young men from eighteen to twenty-two, who were candidates for direct Commissions in the army.......Each class seemed to move with one mind. To give to and maintain a healthy corporate life in a class is one of the highest successes of a high practical teaching skill."
He finished: "If a school, then, is a place where a boy is to be trained in infinite pains-takingness, from this point of view I should say that Hutchesons' Grammar School is engaged in the serious business of making a nearer and nearer approach to this ideal. There is hard and careful work from the lowest to the highest form in the School; and the higher boys seem to have a strong and steady appetite and liking for this hard work.
Probably the most just thing I can say of this School is that it satisfies in the completest and most satisfactory way the demands of the neighbourhood in which it stands, and that every individual boy - without exception - has the fullest care given to him. However lazy or careless he may be, he cannot escape the thorough organisation and arrangement of this School; he must work; and most of the boys work their hardest and do their best."
In the twentieth century, the same combinations of innovation and diligence continued to flourish - William Thomson, Girls'School Headmaster, said just before regulation-enforced age-retiral (a symbol of the new rule-bound schooling of this new century), in December, 1914, "All reforms of an external kind imposed by authority touched very lightly the question of questions - what education really means. True education was that which fitted the youth of a country to fill their places in the great tumultuous world outside the school. And from all competent quarters in that outside world there had arisen for many years a cry for more initiative power, more originality, more capacity for dealing with real problems in other than traditional and conventional ways. Many were beginning to realise that the school must become a place not of routine teaching but of independent and co-operative mental activity. The two principles expressed in the (Girls') school mottoes - "Do and ye shall know" - and "Be still and know" are the two great poles of all true education method. (These were the educational principles of the advanced theorist Maria Montessori, of whom Thomson was an early adherent in this country.The mottoes were engraved on the Assembly Hall in Kingarth Street.) After these the prime need of modern education is less pretentiousness and greater simplicity. Teachers had their lessons to learn. The things they did in the name of education were often cruel and wrong; one was often tempted to say that they were worse still, they were stupid. The profession had still to rise to a sense of its true dignity. There was every reason for confidence that if teachers as a body would show more initiative and self-reliance they would find the so-called fetters of the Department very elastic indeed; it was even possible that they might in time melt away."
Thomson disliked the School Board methodology of the hearing of lessons, where the teacher listened to what the pupil had learnt at home the previous evening. He also disliked the teaching and explanation of "things that could be learnt and explained by the pupil himself with little assistance or none".(his contemporary Head in the Boys' School, Robert Philp, shared these views). After a three year experiment of dispensing with prescriptive home lessons in favour of cultivating the pupil's own initiative, and overcoming staff and parental opposition to his plans, he asserted, "what was formerly done with strain and apprehension in three years, is now done with ease in two and a half. Ability to pass examinations is no longer aimed at. It is obtained as a by-product. No home lessons does not mean no home work, for more home work has been done by not prescribing lessons than was formerly done by prescribing them. The difference otherwise is incalculable. Pupils show initiative, power of planning and invention."
Thomson was "original in his ideas". The school, only nine years old when he took over in 1885, became under his charge, said the Inspector, an "eminently successful institution. From time to time all the subjects taught in the school had ingenious and successful methods of teaching brought to bear on them, for Mr. Thomson was a noted experimenter, but the special feature of his curriculum was the attention devoted to the teaching of modern languages". He taught exclusively through oral work until the latest national examination stages, and achieved results the Inspectors admitted were "nine times better" even if they disliked the method, as they did. Thomson "strongly championed the claim of the modern languages to be put on an equality with Latin and Greek as means of culture."
W. King Gillies, Rector of the Boys' School from 1913 to 1919, was a classicist and a formalist but like Thomson he knew what the world wanted and what they boys needed to get on in it. On appointment in September, 1913, he urged the boys "to be neat and accurate with their exercises, as he would not like employers to complain of the writing of Hutchesons' School boys". He emphasised also the importance of good manners, and hoped the pupils "would enrol for swimming and football in connection with the school".
At Prizegiving in 1916, he said, " The curriculum of the school was broad and cultural, well calculated to form the judgement and mould the imagination, and, while quacks of all kinds had seized upon the present crises to clamour for their pet nostrums in education recent events had shown irrefutably the need for greater and more intensive study of history and human letters, whether Hebrew, Greek or modern." Evidently he and Thomson were not kin when it came to method, but each would have respected the other's capacity to achieve results.
King Gillies left after only 6 years to become Rector of the Royal High School in Edinburgh, seemingly disillusioned with the lack of progress towards a new school building. He had set the school on the path it would follow for at least the next half-century, as a "classical" school with a strong athletic bias. During his tenure the "post-intermediate department" doubled, and "a very strong classical side has been built up. The school has also a large cadet corps, and has this session joined the ranks of the Rugby-playing schools". Perhaps had King Gillies stayed there might have been a move away from the grammar school heritage (as per the early prospectuses) towards something more anglicised, more English public school, or at least Edinburgh private school. But, on the basis of the historical evidence, it is perhaps more likely he would have changed, rather than the school.
J. C. Scott, his successor from Glasgow Academy in 1919, was evidently appointed with a view to embedding King Gillies' innovations. He was a Classics master and "devoted a large part of his leisure" to the "organisation and direction of the athletic activities" of the Academy. In his first year as Hutchesons' Rector he took over a rugby fixture list newly established under King Gillies and he promoted cricket (both played at the still-surviving Cartha Club grounds in Dumbreck Road). The first annual sports day took place under Scott, also in 1920 (at Ibrox).
No hidebound traditionalist when it came to equipping boys for a different future from his own when a child, Scott saw "an increase in scholars taking science in the senior classes".
At first sight, values in the two schools appeared slightly differently. Scott at Prizegiving speaks of the "activities of the school in the sphere of the athletics" . Before William McVicar, Thomson's successor at the Girls' School from 1914, describes how "athletic classes had never been stronger", he draws attention to to how "teachers and pupils had been active in benevolent work, and had raised considerable sums for various funds". Throughout the war, the Girls' School raised money and "worked out" garments for the forces, continuing after the war to provide clothing for "the destitute children of Central and Eastern Europe". But community service can only take the form that society sanctions, and the boys served too, just not the way the girls did. In the Boys' School 715 served in the forces, including 13 members of staff (4 teachers died). 135 overall were recorded as "fallen on service".
In 1921, Scott said, "no school in Scotland had a better record" in the University Bursary competitions. McVicar also said his results had been "excellent " and draws attention to the "high tone and earnestness of purpose displayed by the pupils" and the "splendid co-operation" between teachers and pupils in the "various activities of the school and the playing field". He did this most years, obviously seeing it as an important aim to foster a "healthy, happy tone in the school and the kindly feelings existing between the pupils and their teachers", as he said in 1926. His methods were not Thomson's, and while his aims were like Thomson's, in the sense of creating a particular mood in the school, when it came to realising the nineteenth-century founders' objectives of providing both "a higher education" and "womanly accomplishments", McVicar tended firmly towards the evolutionary side and the promotion of higher education.
1n 1922, at Prizegiving in the Girls' School, the Lord Provost said, "Today there was nothing a girl of intelligence and application could not do" and in that the girls were "much more fortunate than their mothers or their grandmothers". But he then went on to say they "should never forget that as long as time lasts there would always be a special place for women in the home and among children". He "impressed upon them never to lose their feminine qualities" since "no man really admired the masculine woman." Society, or at least male society, or at least the male society who were not Hutchesons' Girls' School Headmasters, was still a little uncertain about the new power of the educated female...(it is striking in contemporary reports that the Boys' School is commonly referred to as "the Grammar School" while the Girls' School is just that, even if the name "Grammar" appeared in both titles).
McVicar's Prizegiving remarks invariably drew attention, as he says in 1923, to the "breadth of interest the girls were encouraged to show". .Although he tolerated the continuance of the nineteenth century "womanly accomplishments" of Housewifery and Domestic Science, he never sems to have dome more than that - he was defintely re-defining the potentials contained within the term. Scott is just as insistent on his charges realising their potential and not leaving early to work. He "urged the importance of boys taking the full curriculum and especially the sixth year, if they were to enter on University or professional life with the best prospects of success". By this time, references to living up to the tradition have become commonplace on such occasions. The history has built an ethos which the present lives to emulate and advance. The aim was to equip their charges with a means to make progress in their society, just as in the beginning. The Boys' School "took it to be a special claim of their school that its training was peculiarly adapted to helping them to secure such a measure of commercial and professional prosperity as would enhance the value of their citizenship." The citizenship reference is interesting, a parallel to McVicar's aims within the Girls' School finding expression in the boys' lives when once they left school and joined the workforce. In 1923 the Boys' had twice the number of bursary winners as any other school, with six in the top 25, although Crown Street was already a slum, "antiquated and insanitary" in 1924, and the achievement of Scott and his staff was described as " a marvel". The Girls' did well too in 1924 - "no fewer then six" were "among the distinguished hundred " in the University bursary competition.
Both Scott and McVicar regretted the ending of intermediate certificates (Scott "deplored" its loss) as, said McVicar in 1925, "a large number of pupils in spite of honest endeavour found it very difficult to get through the examination work" required for award of the full group leaving certificate. Clearly neither school discounted the academically less able. (The five Glasgow fee-paying schools controlled by the City - the Boys' and Girls' High, Hillhead, Notre Dame and Allan Glen's, vigorously denied they selected only the best brains and an Allan Glen's Rector of the 1940s said he would find a school populated only by clever boys "like a world peopled by angels - serene but very dull.")
In 1926, although the Boys' School was top of the Bursary list again, with 8 in the top 100, Scott found the year academically "uneventful". For him, "the outstanding event of the year was the acquisition of a playing field for the school" (a result largely of his very public nagging of Governors and his vigorous fund-raising). The Provost said that sports, "when played in a gentlemanly way, developed character and helped to equip boys for the battle of life." Society had no doubts about what little boys were made for, and knew how to make them that way.
In 1927, Scott makes the statement of values which perhaps he had been waiting to make ever since appointment. Now that the school had a playing field, with the opening of Auldhouse, "far greater numbers of boys than ever before were playing games, and the field was thus realising the wishes of those who worked so hard to provide it. He would far rather see many trying to acquire for themselves a well-balanced education, giving mind, body and spirit all their due proportions of attention and development in the endeavour to make useful citizens than produce a few champions in either the academic or athletic sphere."
In this respect, he regrets the "unusually large number of boys" who had left school before the end of the session "for business openings of one kind or another." He believes that many would not have gone had it not been for the abolition of the intermediate certificate, and their belief they would fail in the full leaving certificate. Nevertheless, he feels they should have tried, and finds it "a pity" that "promising pupils" should "leave school with "the full certificate almost within their grasp." For Scott, the "trying to acquire" is the key point, and he lived as he taught. He "chose to retire at the comparatively early age of 60 in order to devote himself to public works." He was one of nature's commanders: when he died in 1952, a friendly obituarist, anonymous in the manner of the times, recorded how, perhaps because he had been "kept far too long dealing with junior classes" in his days at Glasgow Academy, "in everyday affairs he was subsequently apt to speak to adults as if they were a roomful of schoolboys, and very dull schoolboys at that."
1927 was McVicar's last Prizegiving. Remarkably enough, another Lord Provost says exactly the same as the one in 1922 about how "no man really admired a masculine woman" and goes on to say how women "should never abdicate their own empires of sympathy, motherliness and kindly feeling." But this Provost accepted as a given now that "all girls and women might meet men on an equal footing at business and play" and perhaps such sentiments are less sexist than they sound, and arguably expressive of a more ambitious bifurcated approach toward female education. McVicar's remarks over the years do indeed suggest that his aims may not be so very different from Scott's in the sense that each wants a "well-balanced" outcome in the individual. To achieve this each does no more than work with prevailing social circumstance and available experiences, and modern post-feminism at least would seem to have little quarrel with McVicar's Kingarth Street. It is striking how both McVicar and Scott laid stress on citizenship, on developing the social aspect of school life. In McVicar's school, "when there is any organisation to be done, a concert or a party, everything is carried out by the girls themselves. The tea, the programmes and the decorations - they do all, and do it well, without any grown-up assistance". McVicar, it was said on his retiral later that year, was "cultured, kindly and always just, qualities which had made him an ideal headmaster." The covenant of community in Hutchesons' life by then is suggested by the retiral gift to his wife being handed over by "Miss Lochead, a daughter of the first Rector of the School" who had retired the previous month from her post as "head of the sewing department". (Twelve days before, a reunion of FP Girls - by then with their own hockey, badminton and drama clubs - had unveiled a portrait of Rector Lochead.). An aim for a successful future was plainly to strengthen the sense of the past as a living force in the present.
W.Tod Ritchie was appointed in 1932 from a sub-committee's list, for the job was not advertised, to which many Governors objected, "They knew absolutely nothing about Mr. Tod Ritchie's career,"said one, and the appointment was only confirmed on the Chairman's casting vote. Ritchie expressed his aim as "carrying on the great tradition of the school". He "believed that the mind and the body should be well-balanced. For that reason, he looked upon the school playing field at Auldhouse as a classroom, and he hoped to be present at many classes there." When Ritchie joined the voices asking for a new building, as he soon did, he would specify it to be " in the suburbs, and the ideal place would be beside the playing fields, so that the playing field could be what he thought it ought to be, a classroom of the school." Boys of HGS past, said a prominent FP at the School and Club Trust dinner welcoming Ritchie, "had been taught self-reliance and the capacity to think things out for themselves" and "might have had too much work and too little play in their lives" and he was glad to see that "sport was getting a more interesting part in the school curriculum than it used to have."
With Ritchie, they were getting a continuation of the Scott ethos, and they seemed to want that. At a School and Club Trust meeting, after Ritchie's appointment, a councillor said to laughter that he "had heard it stated that his (Scott's) interest in athletics was rather stronger even than his interest in education. He did not think that was a libel. Athletics meant a hard game, putting forth one's physical energies and all one's physical skill. He had been familiar for many years with the performance of the school, and the high average attainment of its products was as notable as the instances of individual distinction". The words exactly matched Scott's sentiments quoted earlier from 1927. The Councillor continued that the new rector "was a man most eminently suited to maintain the traditions of the school."
Tod Ritchie, like Thomson, was a published scholar (although Thomson's work has not stood up to the test of time, and John Buchan found his thesis "amusing" -- an idiosyncratic account of English scansion.) Ritchie had edited an edition of Dunbar's poems, and the Bannatyne Manuscript of medieval Scots verse (volumes in the Archives.) With this background in the ancient languages of Scotland, and as former head of local authority North Kelvinside, Governors were not seeking to change the culture of the school and move it away from its localised roots (the disagreement over his appointment seems to have been over the doubters not knowing enough about the man rather than wanting a different kind of man). The Scottish Grammar School tradition continued, and the ethos was part of the city's culture.When in 1934, the City Council sought to take over the management of the schools and their funding entirely, thiis plan was done to spread the benefit of the Hutchesons' education to those who could not afford its fees. It had been a Trust aim at one time in the previous century to develop a chain of Hutchesons' schools throughout the city, and in the takeover attempt now the City was motivated not by a desire to destroy ( as in a later time) but by a wish to spread the Hutchesons' germ in the city scheme. (From 1920 on, both schools had been included in the city's scheme of secondary education and they were part-funded both by council ratepayers and by block grant). The public view of the schools was clear, as in this newspaper comment: (they were) "vigorous scholastic institutions, with a proper wide outlook on the physical exercise side of school life as well as on the purely scholastic".
In 1934, Tod Ritchie oversaw a 100% pass in the leaving certificate examinations. Miss Kennedy, appointed as Principal to the Girls' School in 1927, seems to have introduced a school intermediate certificate (clearly suggesting the drawing power of the school's name in the wider community). She made further moves towards allowing pupil individualism by bringing in a summer uniform, "summer dresses cut on exactly similar lines and carried out in five different shades. The innovation made for a very colourful prize day."
Her application for the post (of one page and a few lines) sets out the priorities of a new head for the future. Also from North Kelvinside (although before Tod Ritchie's time) she was Lady Superintendent for many years where "owing to the very great size of the school and the consequent complication of duties too numerous to be overtaken by the Headmaster alone" she felt she had enjoyed "unique opportunities of experience in discharging all the duties which ordinarily devolve directly upon a Headmistress". These were (and presumably her order of priority is deliberate):
a) dealing with the girls in matters of conduct, of application to their lessons, of physical health;
b) advising them as to courses of study in school and when leaving school for the University or Colleges, and discussing other possible careers;
c) the taking of Scripture with the 5th and 6th year classes;
d) oversight of the girls' athletic interests, hockey and tennis;
e) the arranging of all social functions;
f) the dealing privately with cases of necessity and the disposing of fund contributed by the Staff for such cases.
She had "a large part" in the "making of the following years Time-Tables", settling time-allocations to subjects, arranging senior girls' personal subject-groups, and deciding "with the Head of the Classical Department" who was fit to take two languages as well as English. She said it was on "the grounds of this administrative experience and also of the fact that I have had experience in an English as well as in a Scottish Secondary School" that she applied, promising to "maintain the high prestige of the School and to foster the best interests of the pupils."
The "English" school was Leamington Secondary Girls' School, not an exclusive private school. North Kelvinside Higher Grade School, said her rector in his testimonial, was " a school in a working class district" where "Miss Kennedy, with the loyal help of the Staff, took charge of a private charity fund, which she has administered with unfailing tact." As with the Boys' School headship a few years later, the intention of Governors is evidently to locate the schools firmly within the current Scottish mainstream. The experience of both Tod Ritchie and Kennedy would also make them sensitive to the Hutchesons' foundationer tradition.
Called Principal because the original documentation permitted only of a "head master", Miss Kennedy's appointment was itself representative of a world whose values were changing: "The Governors had realised that women whose education training and experience were quite on equality with those of men could now be found, and this was most clearly the case with Miss Kennedy."
She widened the curriculum. She "turned her mind to the needs of the un-academic girls whose talents should (also) receive the recognition of a Leaving Certificate. She welcomed the wider choice of subjects offered by the Education Department and spared no pains in organising suitable courses. The secretarial course was started, the domestic subjects department developed and in turn art, music, geography and games were strengthened." The wartime evacuation to Stewartry gave her the idea that every school should have its own country house, where every junior would spend a term in the course of their time, and every senior a week every year, the idea being to build a different conception of education, one built on sharing and co-operation. In this last, she is clearly enlarging the approaches of her predecessors, seeking a new synthesis of the academic and the social which was an accurate reflection of her school's historic past and a call to a different educational future for all.
By 1939, land for a new boys' school had finally been secured: "about 10 acres of ground at Crossmyloof Station, close to all the forms of transport." (The cost of the buildings "would be about £150,000" - 1960 eventual price was just under £500,000.) Tod Ritchie said of his staff that the chief reason for the success of Crown Street despite its appalling condition was that "they were at home in the atmosphere of Hutchesons' - an atmosphere of solid work". The sentence seems a perfect encapsulation of the ethos.
Governors had asked him to "draft a curriculum for the new conditions" and he said "there would be a practical side to the school for those who did not wish a classical course", an innovatory approach to the boys' curriculum which matched Miss Kennedy but which the war seems to have aborted as much as it did the building plans.
During the war, debate developed again over the retention of fee-paying schools within the city's educational provision. Ritchie said he was taking no part in the "local fees controversy" but he did anyway, making the important claim that Hutchesons' had "a more direct part in the controversy, for it was the success of Hutchesons' in those days before the State had undertaken the duty of providing secondary schools, that had pointed the way for Glasgow by the stimulus of its example. Hutchesons', by infecting the city with its idealism, had created both sides of the controversy, as it had also found the solution ....for in Hutchesons' scholar and fee-payer worked side by side in perfect amity, producing neither prig nor snob, but training men who led the city in service." It is fortunate for history that such a man was Head at such a time, and able to make such a crystalising statement of historic purpose and achievement. They knew what they did, the people of the Hutchesons' past, and they did it for the future of their land, not just their school..
If these values were challenged, he said, and if the vote of the majority was against fee-paying, then he did not fear for the school: "to those who believed that fee-paying schools should be maintained, if the belief was strong enough to guide the pocket as well as the pen, then Hutchesons' would benefit." But implicitly he is also regretting a loss if that happens: of the end of meritocratic access to the best education, with a subsequent loss of social utility and cohesiveness. The words unite George and Thomas's educational aspirations to a future the Rector could not know but evidently foresaw quite clearly.
At the end of the war, he continued to stress the significance of autonomy as a vital part of educational purpose. In 1944, he said that unless they could raise privately half the capital required for the new school then "the school would be handed over to the local authority." He thought it "unfortunate if a school of Hutchesons' character were handed over". In the same speech, he goes on to say that the finest memorial to those who had done war service and who had died in the war (600 and 60, respectively) "would be the assurance of the continuity of their old school in the post-war world, for it was being proved every day that the quintessence of scholarship was not pedantry but character" and to Tod Ritchie the character of the institution clearly created the character of the man. He retired through ill-health in 1945 and in his valedictory "defended the study of the classics, and pointed to the frequency with which he had observed that classics scholars achieved all-round distinction in sports as well as in academic subjects". The old order changeth but knows its own worth nonetheless.
This might seem a little less progressive than some earlier announcements, and along with the appointment of another Classics teacher, James Watson, as the next Head, perhaps suggested a desire amongst the school community to retrench and consolidate rather than boldly go forward, and in the climate of their austere post-war times this would not be surprising.
It seems that Hutchesonians were conscious of living in changed times, where some at least did not feel that social stability could be taken for granted, and where the problems of the wider society affected, potentially at least, the experience of a Hutchesons' education. At a School and Club Trust Dinner in 1946, a Rev. Dr., proposing the toast to the school, said "that the change that had come over the life of the scholar in a school like Hutchesons' created tremendous problems for the headmaster and his staff. Teachers have to adapt themselves to new conditions. They have to provide for new requirements". There is a new note here: one which sees a future whose nature is less certain, whose outcomes are less guaranteed, and where the old are having to adapt to the new rather than guide the new into the paths of the old. Age, said the speaker, "must try to force ourselves into sympathy with teachers and scholars and with young people generally" - an inconceivable statement on a pre-war Hutchesons' platform. But now "children speak a different language. In our time we had a sense of security, of continuity and purpose. We knew where we were going, but the youth of today finds himself in a very different position. He is the product of shattered homes and disrupted family connections". Nobody spoke like that at the end of World War I, at least not in Hutchesonia.
In the Girls' School, there is a variation on this response to the post-war world, with Miss Kennedy at Prize-giving in 1946 implicitly asserting the superiority of a Hutchesons' judgement over national certification: "None of the candidates who really deserved to pass had failed to do so," she said. As the Principal asserts her superior judgement over the exam board, authority itself is no longer indivisible. The following year, she did it again, this time saying implicitly that national standards were on the slide: "We were, I think, exceedingly fortunate in English". And in a beautiful double-edged remark: "We are fortunate in not being able to criticise the Higher Leaving Certificate examinations." The sense given here is of higher authority failing the young by not asserting a traditional standard which only the school can be seen to safeguard. Kennedy's values, like Tod Ritchie's views of his institution on character-building, became by all accounts very much post-war commonplaces of existence in both schools. By such means, these two shaped the post war mindset, and a perspective that would be maintained - until it was no longer possible - on the preference for autonomy over assimilation. It is at least arguable that it was the strength of this tradition which made it incumbent upon governors of a later date to go for independence when central funding was finally withdrawn, rather than go under control of the local authority .
Meanwhile the Boys had a new record, with 15 in the top 100 in the Bursary Competition in Watson's first year (the figure would be repeated in his last year, 1955), and in 1948 the Girls' gained the largest ever number of Leaving Certificates. Both schools were considerably over-subscribed with large numbers being turned down for admission. It was as Tod Ritchie had said, and would remain so for a long time. Miss Kennedy thought exactly as he did on this point and as she retired in 1948 she said, "It isn't a popular thing to say, but the truth is that Glasgow has not nearly enough fee-paying schools." It was the paradox that would preside over the next forty years until the final withdrawal of grant-in-aid, "in the city which officially frowns at fee-paying, there are more people than ever who want to pay school fees.", in the words of a Glasgow nwespaper editorial. In 1948, however, the City met more than half Hutchesons' expenditure, and provided substantial grants to the Trust in addition. Even the "frown" was in favour.
Miss Kennedy's last post on values came in 1949, donating the prizes as former Principal: "Cleverness and efficiency were well worth striving for, but they were not sufficient....Hutchesons' girls can reach a high standard in ability and I want them also to reach the same standard in the real charm of personality, which comes of thinking of other people. Grace and the art of being kind are what this sad world needs."
Under Watson, the Boys School in the 'fifties is routinely described in the press as "a classical school and a feeder for the University."(1949). In 1952, "Hutchesons' Grammar Schools have made it their tradition to dominate the Glasgow University bursary list." That year, the boys had 7 of the first 11. Watson's academic priorities were those of the classicist purist, perhaps more King Gillies than Tod Ritchie, and Greek was newly prominent as a subject chosen by his successful students in the bursary exams. The City's continuing pride in the place was, of course, shown by the Civic Reception granted the School on the 300th anniversary (the one that owed more to Robert Bain than Thomas Huchesone).
Miss McIver's values, rather like Watson's, seemed to have a quality recuperative of the past about them. As Principal of the Girls' School from 1948 to 1973, in a time where the Cold War meant that survival of the schools might seem of lesser importance than the survival of humanity itself, this was only normal, and it was the truth of life in post-war Scottish senior secondary education for a long time to come. Pupils in the late 'sixties, for example, had an English syllabus not markedly different from the 'forties pupil, and this was true of HGS until the end of the 'seventies - - if not later......An observer of the Girls' School at work in 1953 found it interesting to read in a report by a Patrons' Committee of 1881 that, "The characteristic of teaching in the whole school is the thoroughness and precision." And this, found the reporter after a tour, "is just as true today as it was then."
By the time Watson retired in 1955, Miss Kennedy's doubts over the Leaving Certificate's reliability seem to have spread, since it was by then a commonplace remark that "there are many who think the Glasgow University Bursary results give a better indication of a school's achievement than the Scottish Leaving Certificate." In the 10 years of Watson's tenure, the school's "reputation has grown" and the 15 he got in the top 100 this time were higher placed than first time. Watson himself thought it "a feat which had never been excelled by any other school in the country." By this date, the general view of the school , again in a press comment, was that "Hutchesons' Boys' Grammar School is regarded by the Scottish university authorities as the foremost school for classics in the country."
And if you added the Girls' results of this year, "more than one fifth of the principal awards (in the Bursary Competition) have been collected by the two schools."
The Evening Times made it the subject of an editorial:
Glasgow University bursary results are a runaway victory for the Hutchesons' boys and girls.
the first four places are taken by three Hutchie boys and one girl. Out of the first eleven places, seven (four boys, three girls) go to Hutchesons'.
It's an amazing performance. Both boys and girls have been working hard, obviously, and, equally obviously, the teachers have had good stuff to work with. But that's only part of the answer. The teachers at both schools have demonstrated that they have something the others haven't got.
Officials of the Department of Education ought to investigate the methods at these two schools until they find the answer to today's question - How does Hutchie do it?
"Rector Has Blaze of Glory Exit" was one headline. Mr. Watson handed on "a glowing torch - not a sputtering rushlight" said the Chairman at Prizegiving.
Signs of further shifts in society's values at least are visible in the Prizegiving speech of former Girls' Deputy Principal Agnes McKendrick in 1956. "The home and school should work in harmony to build up a child's personality", words that would once not need to have been said. But there were other forces than school shaping young persons by now and, Miss McKendrick went on, "she suggested to the pupils that, upon occasion, they should take a look at their own personality to ensure they were being the best person they possibly could be." The sense is of a lowering of expectations on the part of the institution - it is recognising the limits of its power to shape by example and empathy.
And perhaps it is this need to make statements of what could formerly be assumed, in order to ensure a communication that was once taken for granted over values and assumptions, which consciously or unconsciously leads John Hutchison, Boys' Rector from 1955 too 1966, to his Six Aims and their appearance on classroom walls in the new world of Crossmyloof in 1960. No earlier Rector or Principal seems to have felt the need for such a statement, and it can seem from the evidence of what people said and did in the history that this is because such aims were givens which were seen to follow necessarily as a consequence of carrying out activities which did not need the justification of a formal rationale. But now the world had changed; and aims could no longer be assumed to be held in common (although it was still possible in 1960 to advertise for an Assistant Teacher of Geography, "preferably male, but lady with good qualifications considered").
Hutchison's values were those of his predecessors: in 1957, he assured his audience the tradition was safe: "The reputation of Hutchesons' as one of the leading classical schools in Scotland is well known. This proud distinction must not be lost with the advent of the long-promised new building. It will be the school policy not to reduce one whit the exacting standard of Latin and Greek studies set in the past, but to strive to bring the modern side up to the level of the classical."
Six Aims of our Education
1. To seek for truth, through research and clear and honest thinking.
2. To appreciate beauty, in nature and in art in all its forms.
3. To develop a strong, healthy body, controlled by a clean, healthy mind.
4. To respect differences, whether they be differences in age, economic levels, educational levels, nationality, creed or colour.
5.To consider our fellows, and to use our talents, skills and knowledge to serve others as well as self.
6. To know the will of God, and to do it.
The Six Aims are threaded through the past of the Schools - this is what it can be seen people had been doing for the past eighty years. As a long-serving Hutchesonian master himself (from 1937 to 1947), Hutchison would have known the ethos intimately and it is impossible that his long experience of things Hutchesonian was not in his mind as he composed them. Nevertheless he is writing these for his own school (he has been Rector for five years) and its own future - they are his, but they are born of his present experience as well as his past and he must believe them capable of realisation and internalisation because he must believe they already exist. They are less of a challenge than a confirmation, their expression an assurance of institutional eternal verities in a culture increasingly aware that there is more than one way possible to live (even on the South Side of Glasgow). Yet while the Six Aims can seem quite an uncanny embodiment of the practices and principles of Hutchy history they don't answer the question from the Evening Times. The answer to that can only be the lived history, the actions of generations infused with trust in the virtue of actions that their situation in the school compelled of them. The Aims would go from the walls but would be lived as they always had - as teachers and pupils went about their working lives in George and Thomas's school. Hutchison's Aims were only possible because of Hutchesons' history.
In 2009, after some five years in post,the current Rector, Dr. Kenneth Greig, published the following statement of values. The affinities with John Hutchison's Six Aims are evident, even although these had been lost to view for decades.That such a statement from a new millenium can echo one written fify years before, which was itself an expression of continuity from origins, is perhaps the clearest possible symbol of the tradition's consistency and significance to the life of Hutchesons' School.
Values in Hutchesons', 2009.:
I hope by now that most pupils and staff are aware of the six values that underpin our academic curriculum: Honesty, Resilience, Independence, Curiosity, Creativity and Compassion. These were arrived at through a period of consultation with subject departments several years ago, and represent the sort of qualities or characteristics that we hope a pupil leaving Hutchesons' will have gained during their time here with us, through their academic studies.
There are clear dangers in trying to summarise a complex educational process in six words, just as there are dangers for any organisation in producing a 'mission statement' phrase or slogan. The full richness of what a child experiences during their time with us can end up being rather trivialised, and at worst the words themselves can immediately be reduced to a kind of cliché. But it is important to know what a school 'stands for' and although I feel sure we would all have an instinctive feeling of what makes Hutchesons' unique, it is not always easy to articulate that, and I think these words help us.
It is important to realise that although this list of values arose out of the academic curriculum, they apply to the curriculum in its widest sense as well. They are the values behind every aspect of the education we provide, and of the community which the school represents. It is surely a good aspiration that we might all represent a community which aims to be honest in its dealings with people, resilient in the face of difficulties, independent of spirit, curious and keen to explore new ideas, creative in how it makes things happen and always compassionate to others.
As time goes on I hope we will unpick the layers of meaning in each of the words, and explore more fully how what we do relates to them. To take just one example - Honesty carries power and historical resonance because of the link with the school motto Veritas, and has strong overtones of intellectual honesty and integrity in scholarship, as well as its more literal meaning. How sure are we that our curriculum promotes, recognises and praises Honesty at an individual and collective level? Which parts do this effectively, and can we find other new ways of reinforcing this?
All our core values should be visible in the day-to-day life of the school. Only then can we be sure that the curriculum is doing what we intend it to do. And our values are a touchstone, to which all future decisions on the curriculum can be referenced. If a change is proposed, can we say clearly how it will improve and strengthen the delivery of one or more of the values? If we cannot, then perhaps it is not a valuable change, and perhaps even an unnecessary one.
Dr. K. Greig, Rector
(Sources: mainly verbatim quotation from contemporary newspaper reports, preserved since the mid-nineteenth century by a series of unknown Hutchesonian record-keepers.)