Inventing international citizenship: Badminton school and the progressive tradition between the wars

History of Education

Volumn 36, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 315-338

  Watkins, Christopher ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248136074     PISSN: 0046760X     EISSN: 14645130     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00467600500419810     Document Type: Article

References (105)

1. Hobsbawm, E. "Introduction: inventing traditions." In The Invention of Tradition, edited by E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
2. McCulloch, G. and C. McCaig. "Reinventing the Past: The Case of the English Tradition of Education." British Journal of Educational Studies, 50, no. 2 (2002): 241.
3. A 1934 publication titled The Modern Schools Handbook purported to be the 'first book in which the heads of a representative selection of modern schools have described their aims and practice'. The editor used the foreword to the Handbook, in which Badminton featured, to distinguish between the two progressive streams, stressing that whilst 'some rank as public schools, others are experimental'. Blewitt, T., ed. The Modern Schools Handbook. London: Gollancz, 1934: 1.
4. Stewart, W. A. C. Progressives and Radicals in English Education: 1750-1970. London: Macmillan, 1972:3.
5. Skidelsky, R. English Progressive Schools. London: Penguin, 1969.
6. Ibid., 34, 102. Skidelsky believed that at Abbotsholme, 'the whole school was so organised that every activity and object in it should furnish lessons about something' and this is no less true at a number of the progressive public schools. Badminton included.
7. Norwood, C. The English Tradition of Education. London: Murray, 1929: 107.
8. Miss Bartlett. Badminton House, Clifton, Bristol. Undated booklet.
9. Carr, C. The Spinning Wheel: City of Cardiff High School for Girls, 1895 1955. Cardiff: Western Mail and Echo, 1955: 12.
10. Women's Liberal Associations played a vocal role in Welsh support for women's suffrage, see Masson, U. '"Political Conditions in Wales Are Quite Different..." party politics and votes for women in Wales, 1912-15." Women's History Review 9, no. 2 (2000): 377.
11. Ibid., 11. Baker and Rendall embraced this pastime with enthusiasm, 'I remember my parents telling me that they decided to send us to Badminton because they "liked the look of those two young women (B.M.B. and L.J.R.) bicycling about'" wrote Ann Smith in At Badminton with B.M.B. by Those Who Were There edited by J. Storry. Bristol: Badminton, 1982: 10.
12. King, W. Towards The Light: The Story of the Cardiff High School for Boys 1898-1970. Llanharan: Pallas, 1992.
13. Interestingly, when the boys' school was founded, the board of governors (shared by the two schools) appointed an equally progressive head in J. J. Findlay, who was a regular visitor at the girls' school and whose rewriting of the school hymn book into Latin, French, Welsh and Esperanto anticipated Baker's internationalist symbolism at Badminton. Ibid., 36.
14. Royal Holloway Archives, Royal Holloway Student Register 1887-1921 (Ref: RHC AR/200/1).
15. "University Intelligence." The Times 24 December 1891: 8.
16. Iris Murdoch described her as 'Quakerish' in At Badminton with B.M.B. edited by J. Stony, 52-53.
17. Punshon, J. Portrait in Grey: A Short History of the Quakers. London: Quaker Home Service, 1984: 239.
18. Avery, G. The Best Type of Girl: A History of Girls' Independent Schools. London: Deutsch, 1991: 159.
19. Storry, J., ed. At Badminton with B.M.B., 6.
20. Everleigh, L. In At Badminton with B.M.B., edited by J. Storry, 2.
21. Miss Bartlett. Badminton House, Clifton, Bristol. Undated booklet.
22. Prospectus. "Badminton House, Clifton Bristol, 1918": 9.
23. Ibid.
24. Badminton School Magazine Autumn 1932 and Spring 1933: 6.
25. Bryant, M. '"Major, Edith Helen (1867-1951)." In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004;
26. and Speech Day Notes 7 July 1933. Edith Helen Major was a former President of the Association of Headmistresses who had been awarded the OBE for her services to Belgian Refugees in the Great War. Register noted in Conradi, P. J. Iris Murdoch: A Life. New York: Norton, 2001: 66.
27. Postcards various, Miscellaneous 1920s file, undated.
28. Cooper, J. Facing the Music: An Autobiography. London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1979: 7.
29. Pacificist rather than pacifist is used here in the sense that Martin Ceadel discusses in Pacifism in Britain, 1914-1945: the Defining of a Faith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Pacificism recognizes the need for military force in preventing war. The League of Nations was in this sense pacificist, not pacifist.
30. Ann Smith (Falk). In. At Badminton with B.M.B., edited by J. Storry, 9.
31. Evening World, 6 July 1933. Newspaper clipping describing the pageant celebrating the centenary of the abolition of slavery in British possessions.
32. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 157. Mitchison appears to have related particularly well to Baker, who urged her to send her daughter Lois straight on to Oxford in order to avoid the dangers of early marriage. Sheridan, D., ed. Among you Taking Notes: The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison 1939-1945. London: Phoenix Press, 2000: 165.
33. Badminton House, Clifton Bristol. Undated, Badminton Archives. Paton, J. Paton's List of Schools. London: 1934.
34. Blewitt, The Modern Schools Handbook, 222.
35. Margot Slade (Friedland). In At Badminton with B.M.B., edited by J. Storry, 16;
36. and Valery, A. The Edge of a Smile. London: P. Owen, 1997: 20.
37. White, F. "The School and the Nation." In Town and Country News April 1927.
38. Quoted in Stevenson, J. British Society 1914-1945. London: Penguin, 1984: 328.
39. "Preparing Youth for Citizenship." Times Educational Supplement 19 May 1934: 157.
40. Cole, G. D. H. The Intelligent Man's Guide through World Chaos. London: Gollancz, 1932.
41. Lindsay, A. D. Christianity and Economics. London: Macmillan, 1933: 17.
42. Salter, A. Recovery: The Second Effort. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1932: 347.
43. Murray, G. The Ordeal of this Generation. London: Allen & Unwin, 1929: 30.
44. Burns, D. Modern Civilisation on Trial. London: Allen & Unwin, 1931: 13.
45. Ibid., 179.
46. Ibid., 181.
47. Storry, J. In At Badminton with B.M.B., edited by J. Storry, recalling a conversation of 1941.
48. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 59:
49. and Valery, The Edge of a Smile, 24.
50. Badminton School Magazine Autumn 1935, 35. It should be noted that the school socialist party (led by Iris Murdoch) came a clear second.
51. Sarvapelli Radhakrishnan was a renowned Indian philosopher and held the King George V Chair of Mental and Moral Science in the University of Calcutta. He declared in his doctoral thesis that 'Religious feeling must establish itself as a rational way of living.... Religion must express itself in reasonable thought, fruitful action and right social institutions.' Quoted in http://www.cs.memphis.edu/~ramamurt/srk.j3hil.html; INTERNET.
52. Speech day notes 1935.
53. Ibid.
54. Notes of Address to the OBA, School Hall, Friday July Sixth, 1934.
55. "Prospectus 1930-39."
56. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 68.
57. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1928: 3; and Summer 1934: 31.
58. Everleigh, L. In At Badminton with B.M.B., edited by J. Storry, 5.
59. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1938: 25.
60. Prospectus. "Badminton House, Clifton Bristol": 6.
61. Bowling, Margaret Dawson (Skemp). At Badminton with B.M.B., edited by J. Storry, 8.
62. Storry, J. In At Badminton with B.M.B., edited by J. Storry, 7.
63. Valery, The Edge of a Smile, 37.
64. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1928: 14-19.
65. Ibid.
66. Storry, J. ed. At Badminton with B.M.B., 52-53.
67. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1931: 5.
68. Storry, J. ed. At Badminton with B.M.B., 25.
69. Bowling, Margaret Dawson (Skemp). In At Badminton with B.M.B., edited by J. Storry, 8.
70. Indira Nehru, later Indira Nehru Ghandi, Prime Minister of India, assassinated in 1984. Her experiences at Badminton are explored in Frank, K. Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi. London: HarperCollins, 2001.
71. "Peace posters. 'Striking posters, designed by Bristol school children for the League of Nations'." Evening World 23 November 1933. The peace poster competition was won by a Badminton student.
72. League of Nations Union flyer, dated Wednesday 16 October.
73. Burns, Modern Civilisation on Trial, 181.
74. Badminton School Magazine Autumn 1937: 14-16.
75. Badminton School Magazine Autumn 1933: 40.
76. Badminton School Magazine Spring 1937: 21.
77. For an example of the difficulties experienced in another school explicitly modelled on the puhlic school boarding tradition, see Emmeline Tanner's experience at Roedean in this period. Like Baker, Tanner was a vocal and articulate proponent of the LNU and its ideals but found that the establishment of an LNU branch there 'interested some [but was] ignored by many' and that Empire Day, with a formal march of all girls past the Union Jack, remained a defining school ceremony throughout the interwar years. See Major, S. Doors of Possibility: The Life of Emmeline Tanner 1876 1955. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1995: 283, 289.
78. Marion Finch of VIa in Badminton School Magazine Spring 1937: 13-25.
79. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1932: 22-36.
80. Ibid.
81. Storry, J. ed. At Badminton with B.M.B., 52-53.
82. Rupp, L. J. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997: 228.
83. Badminton School Magazine Spring 1936: 26.
84. Valery, The Edge of A Smile, 20.
85. Prospectus 1930s.
86. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1931: 30-34. Note the (incorrect) assumption that the working women in question are all unmarried.
87. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1932: 32-36.
88. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1935: 29.
89. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1935: 30.
90. Ibid.
91. Professor Ernest Barker, Speech Notes December 5 1931: 14.
92. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1936: 16.
93. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1934: 17.
94. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1938: 38.
95. Margot Slade (Friedland) in At Badminton with B.M.B., edited by J. Storry, 16.
96. "Badminton School Rules" Dated Summer 1933, 14 pages.
97. Blewitt, Modern Schools Handbook, 219.
98. Ibid., 220.
99. Badminton Softool Magazine Summer 1934: 17.
100. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life, 79.
101. Quoted in Rupp, Worlds of Women, 226. 'The development of an international spirit through the elimination of national hatreds and rivalries from texts, the teaching of world civilization and literature, training in foreign languages and an auxiliary "world" language; education in a comparative psychology of peoples, and an exchange of students and teachers across national borders.'
102. Badminton School Magazine Summer 1934: 17.
103. Rupp, Worlds of Women, 228.
104. Important work is currently being done on the introduction of pervasive internationalist traditions in other secondary schools within this period, and on the Association of Headmistresses' advocacy of the LNU's ideals. Mary Clarke's tenure at Manchester High School in particular appears to have been a site of significant innovation. I have seen no evidence of a girls' public boarding school of Badminton's stature embracing internationalism to anything like the degree evident at Badminton; but internationalism in the public school tradition is a field that has escaped thorough study and definitive statements cannot yet be made.
105. McCulloch and McCaig, "Reinventing the Past", 245.