Edward Thring

Maker of Uppingham School, Headmaster 1853-1887

W F Rawnsley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134533145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Originally published in 1926, this volume charts the achievements of Edward Thring, arguably the most original and striking figure in the schoolmaster world of England in the nineteenth century. Abroad, he was the only English schoolmaster of his generation widely known by name. The principles upon which he relied were that every boy should be taught, and the less able the boy, the more able should be the teacher who was set to deal with him; that no class should exceed twenty-five boys; that each boy should have privacy in the dormitories and that trust between boys and masters was paramount.

These were revolutionary principles in educational terms at the time but they have endured to form the cornerstones of British boarding-schools which are still recognized today.

EDWARD THRING

EDWARD THRING’S life has been written by Sir George Parkin, to whom Thring took a strong liking, when Parkin, a schoolmaster himself, came to Uppingham in the ’seventies of last century, to get first-hand information about school houses and classes and Thring’s own methods of dealing with boys, which had caused him to be considered in the States as the greatest living authority on teaching,

I was then a housemaster, and on Parkin’s first appearance, Thring handed him over to me to be shown the plans and arrangements of a typical Uppingham boarding house. He then had some stimulating talks with Thring on all that he most wanted to discuss, and when he re-crossed the Atlantic he plunged at once into matters concerned with education, eventually being promoted to take up the headship of the Upper Canada College at Toronto.

He had come to England at first on a mission in the cause of Empire Federation. All that he spoke for has come to pass, but Thring needed no convincing, he was all for it, and wrote to Parkin : “ Your programme is the right one ; more than that, in one form or another it must come to pass.”

Subsequently he was chosen to be Organising Secretary of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, and had to spend a good deal of his time in England. Here he became a devoted friend of Thring, who left him the task of writing his life, so much was he struck by Parkin’s breadth of view and the similarity of their ideas on education.

Parkin wrote the book, but as he knew little of Thring’s joyous boylike life in the holidays, his merriment and power of throwing aside all care, and putting his whole heart into the fun of the holidays, he had to draw very largely upon the private diaries, in which Thring conscientiously noted down all his difficulties with his masters, all his lifelong trouble to find money to keep things going, and all his secret joys and sorrows—joys happily predominating—in his daily handling of his boys. His boys were always in his mind, and he more than once spoke of his hope and belief that he may have them round him and converse with them as friend to friends, in a future existence ; he looked forward to that as his greatest delight.

Anyone who reads these diaries must be greatly struck with the deeply religious nature of the man, who saw God’s Hand in all that happened, and whether the happening brought joy or sorrow, was content to accept it and think it best, because he never for a moment mistrusted the Divine leading.

Parkin, even before he became acquainted with these diaries, had written thus : “ Edward Thring was unquestionably the most original and striking figure in the schoolmaster world of his time in England ; and abroad, he was the only English schoolmaster of the present generation widely and popularly known by name.”

His father was Rector of Alford in Somersetshire and squire of the parish. He ruled his family with autocratic severity and lived to be ninety. Mrs Thring, who lived to be over a hundred, was gentle and patient and adored by all her children. Her ancestors had been clergymen for seven generations and her eldest brother, Dr R. Jenkyns, became Master of Balliol.

One of her sons said : “ Mother’s idea was that everything should be sacrificed to work and duty,” and Edward wrote that “ a more saintly woman in practice and faith I believe cannot be found.”

We can easily see the qualities of both parents reproduced in the son.

His mother, in a letter, tells us that the five boys, two older and two younger than Edward, were always out of doors, but that she did teach four of them to read ; Edward, however, taught himself and learnt the poetry that was set to his elder brothers by listening to them saying it aloud. Also, we gather from the little that has been handed down of his childhood that he was a boy singularly full of energy and with an independent spirit not easily ruled. This occasioned his being sent to a private school in Ilminster at an early age, where severity and restraint were the leading principles, which rendered, and properly rendered in the opinion of the Headmaster, the young lives with whom he had been entrusted, as miserable as possible.

Thring never forgot those three years of misery ; and more than fifty years later, in a public address, he said : “ The most lasting lesson of my life was the failure of suspicion and severity to get inside the boy-world, however much it troubled our outsides.” And again : “ It was my memories of that school which first made me long to try if I could not make the life of small boys at school happier and brighter.”

Passing on to Eton in 1832 at the age of eleven, he found a very different school world, with a freedom from restraint which was at first almost embarrassing.

He went first for three years as an Oppidan to the house of Mr Chapman, afterwards Bishop of Colombo, who had married one of the famous Dr Keate’s daughters.

Thring always spoke of his housemaster as the kindest of men, and one who tried his best, in the almost impossible circumstances of the time, to do his duty by each boy who came under him ; and that being Thring’s own great aim and achievement when he became himself a schoolmaster, he always entertained for Chapman the greatest respect and affection.

In 1835 Thring entered College at Eton.

How often in later life have I heard him describe in vivid terms the rough-and-tumble life of “ long chamber,” an enormous dormitory into which “ seventy boys were locked, utterly without supervision, from 8 p.m. until next morning.” In one of his writings he speaks of “ the wild revelry and fun and the rollicking freedom of that land of misrule, with its strange code of traditional boy-law, which worked rather well, as long as the sixth form were well-disposed and sober. And oh ! the unearthly delight of the leaping matches at the end of each school time, when with all the mattresses spread on the hard oak floor to pitch on and one to take off from, the Collegers celebrated their Olympic Games.”

Certainly, as another of his contemporaries wrote : “ A boy who passed unscathed through the ordeal of a colleger’s life must have been gifted in no common degree with purity of mind and strength of will.” And this is exactly what we may safely say that Edward Thring possessed. A pure heart, strength of will, and tremendous energy and a courage which nothing could daunt, were his all through life, and from his earliest days. I believe there is no reason to doubt the story told of him when a small Etonian, that on a big boy threatening to turn him out of the fives court, of which he had obtained priority of possession in the legitimate manner, and asking how he was going to prevent it, he exclaimed, “ I’d die first,” whence the name of “ little die-first ” stuck to him for some time. His mother tells us that when, as a new boy at Eton, he was asked to give some evasive answer, he said, “ If you want a lie told you must tell it yourself, for I shan’t.” Though short in stature, he was strong, active and a quite first-rate fives player. He and another Etonian used regularly to play the pick of the school at Uppingham, until he was turned fifty, and generally beat us. I recall one occasion when he sent in a stinger which would have struck the back wall and landed in the pepper-box, but that his partner’s head received the ball. We looked for some commiseration, if not apology, but all we heard was : “ Why don’t you keep your head out of the light ? ”

After his three years as an Oppidan, and six at college, he went up to King’s in 1841, taking with him about £500, which remained after paying all the expenses of “ Montem,” the last but one ever held, and at which the salt-bearers, as they were called, had collected about £1,270.

The times were changing, and the advent of the Great Western Railway put an end to the streams of carriages which the boys used to stop and take toll from, on the roads into Eton.

The class lists held no names of King’s men in Thring’s time. They got their degree without any competition, an anomaly which he worked hard to abolish. But he carried off several college prizes, and had the distinction of winning, in 1845, the Porson prize for Greek Verse, open to the University, and in the same year the Gooke prize, awarded “ to those scholars who had deserved well by application to their studies and general orderly behaviour.” The idea conveyed in these grandiose terms he perpetuated when Headmaster at Uppingham, by instituting a silver leaving-medal for those in the sixth, inscribed, “ For good work and unblemished character.”

He tells us that he never enjoyed any time more in his life than the two Longs in which he read at Cambridge. In term time, too, he worked hard, and was soon known as a man of exceptional ability and force of character.

He stayed on at Cambridge three years after taking his degree, and came to the determination of taking Orders, and as he always threw himself heart and soul into everything he took up, he made his life-prayer at this time, and he kept it steadily before him through all his days : “ Work till the end of my life, and life till the end of my work.”

He now took Orders, and in 1847 obtained a curacy at Gloucester under Mr Hedley, a most exceptionally fine character, who had a powerful influence over him, and it is from this period at Gloucester that, as his biographer says, “ his intense religious convictions, the vivid conception of personal relation to God, and the consecration of all his powers to God’s service, which afterwards became the ruling motives of his life, seem to have become definitely formed and fixed.”

He always recommended the experience to be gained by a clergyman working a parish, as an excellent preparation for a schoolmaster ; and he made no secret of the fact that he learnt his teaching in the National School in his parish of St. James, Gloucester, where as curate he used to take a class.

He worked so hard that he had after a couple of years to take a spell of comparative idleness, and read with private pupils at Marlow, helping in church work there, and in his holidays touring with a brother and one or two friends all over Europe.

A couple of extracts from his diary of 1852 will show how keenly he enjoyed his visit to Italy.

Trieste

October 8th, 1852

Started at six o’clock for Venice by steamer, got in about two, after a beautiful passage. Stayed in Venice that night at Hotel Daniele, which is much abused. Walked about in the evening in the Piazza di San Marco, the most glorious scene imaginable, the Doge’s Palace and the sea, the Cathedral and the Piazza itself, filling one’s mind with a feeling of dreamy magnificence, more unearthly than anything I had ever felt, as I paced up and down by myself. I could well understand how a native might well feel a want in anything less gorgeous in climate or architecture, however beautiful it might be.

and again :

Assissi

Friday, November 19th

We afterwards went into the Upper Church and saw the works of Cimabue, such as remain. The building itself is very good, a cross with an apse at the end, the model of a church for our worship. After that, we were shown the refectories, a good Last Supper in the small one. The grace used at meals is the same used at King’s and some other colleges of Cambridge.

It was at this time of comparative inactivity that I first saw him. His younger brother Godfrey was a curate at Stratfield-Turgis, Hants, close to where the Duke of Wellington lived.

My father was curate at the neighbouring village of Hartley Wespall, where Dr and Mrs Keate and their un...