The work of teachers and others in and around a Birmingham slum school 1891–1920

History of Education

Volumn 38, Issue 6, 2009, Pages 729-746

  Wright, Susannah ^a  

^a OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

elementary schools; local studies; slums; welfare

Indexed keywords

EID: 80052281479     PISSN: 0046760X     EISSN: 14645130     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00467600903305558     Document Type: Article

References (161)

1. Colin Brown, ‘Blair: Labour has Failed Children of Sink Estates’, Daily Telegraph, February 25, 2006.
2. HM Government, Every Child Matters. Change for Children (Nottingham: DfES, 2004).
3. W.B. Stephens, ed., A History of the County of Warwick. Volume 7: The City of Birmingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 4–25, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=22959 (accessed 1 August 2006).
4. Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum. Newspaper Representation in Three Cities 1870–1940 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), 6, 57–97.
5. C.L. Mowat, The Charity Organisation Society 1869–1913 (London: Methuen, 1961), 114– 44
6. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 281–314.
7. José Harris, ‘Political Thought and the Welfare State 1870–1940’, Past and Present 135 (1992): 116–41
8. Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government 1865– 1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 20.
9. Bernard Harris, The Origins of the British Welfare State. Social Welfare in England and Wales 1880–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 1–14 on historiography.
10. Jane Lewis, ‘Family Provision of Health and Welfare in the Mixed Economy of Care in the late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Social History of Medicine 8, no. 1 (1995): 1–16
11. Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 231–342.
12. Seth Koven, Slumming. Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004)
13. Jones, Outcast London; Mayne, The Imagined Slum; Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (London: Virago Press, 1992).
14. David Reeder, ‘Predicaments of City Children: Late Victorian and Edwardian Perspectives on Education and Urban Society’, in Urban Education in the Nineteenth Century, ed. David Reeder (London: Taylor & Francis, 1977), 75–94
15. Kevin Brehony, ‘A “Socially Civilising Influence”? Play and the Urban “Degenerate”’, Paedagogica Historica 39, nos 1/2 (2003): 87–106.
16. Anna Davin, Growing up Poor: London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996).
17. Pamela Horn, The Victorian Town Child (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 1997).
18. Pamela and Harold Silver, The Education of the Poor: The History of a National School 1824–1974 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 87–99.
19. William Marsden, Educating the Respectable: A Study of Fleet Road Board School, Hampstead, 1879–1903 (London: Woburn Press, 1991), 71–97.
20. John Burnett, Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1994).
21. Pamela Horn, The Victorian and Edwardian Schoolchild (Gloucester: Sutton, 1989).
22. Anna Brown and Kevin Myers, ‘“Mental Deficiency”: the Diagnosis and After-Care of Special School Leavers in Early Twentieth Century Birmingham (UK)’, Journal of Historical Sociology 18, nos 1/2 (2005): 72–98.
23. Ian Grosvenor, ‘“All the Names”: LEAs and the Making of Pupil and Community Identities’, Oxford Review of Education 28, nos 2/3 (2002): 299–310.
24. Ian Grosvenor and Kevin Myers, ‘Progressivism, Control and Correction: Local Education Authorities and Educational Policy in Twentieth Century England’, Paedagogica Historica 42, nos 1/2 (2006): 225–47.
25. Jones, Outcast London, 10–14.
26. Koven, Slumming.
27. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 15–39.
28. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 4.
29. Brehony, ‘A Socially Civilising Influence’, 88.
30. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, passim.
31. Koven, Slumming, 11.
32. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 199–203.
33. David Bebbington, The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics 1870–1914 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), 13–14.
34. Reeder, ‘Predicaments of City Children’.
35. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 6. Mark Freeman has shown that provincial social surveys often related local concerns explicitly to national data and debates.
36. Mark Freeman, ‘The Provincial Social Survey in Edwardian Britain’, Historical Research 75, no. 187 (2002): 73–89.
37. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 57–97.
38. H.B. Wilson and G.B. Wilson, Drawn unto Death: A Statement of Facts for the Citizens of Birmingham (Birmingham: Birmingham News and Printing, 1903), Birmingham Archives and Heritage Services (BAHS), 27, see also 6, 13, 18.
39. Jones, Outcast London, 327–31 notes these themes in debates about London.
40. Geoffrey Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971), for a full discussion of national efficiency.
41. Drawn unto Death, 13, 35.
42. Report of the Medical Officer of Health (MOH) on the Unhealthy Conditions in the Floodgate Street Area, October 1904, BAHS, 21–7.
43. Scenes in Slum-land: Pen-pictures of the Black Spots in Birmingham (Birmingham: Daily Gazette Co.Ltd, 1901), BAHS, passim.
44. Scenes in Slum-land (Second Series) (Birmingham: Daily Gazette Co. Ltd, 1901), BAHS , passim.
45. A.M. McBriar, An Edwardian Mixed Doubles: The Bosanquets versus the Webbs. A Study in British Social Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
46. Report of the MOH, 2–5, 8–10, 14–15. The MOH’s definition of the Floodgate Street area is used for this study. Drawn unto Death describes a slightly smaller area with a population of 6493. Drawn unto Death, 5.
47. Report of the MOH, 2, 18.
48. Children’s Emigration Homes (CEH) Admissions Register, Girls 1873–1914, BAHS, MS517/471, case no. 3383.
49. CEH Admissions Register, Boys 1914–54, BAHS, MS517/474, case no. 3496.
50. Middlemore Homes (MH) Application Book 3, October 1903–April 1914, BAHS, MS517/247, case no. 3366.
51. MH Application Book 4, April 1914– December 1937, BAHS, MS517/248, case no. 3572.
52. http:booth.lse.ac.uk/static/a/4.html (accessed January 5, 2009).
53. Koven, Slumming, 21.
54. For discussion of analogies between the ‘savagery’ of the urban poor and imperial subjects see John Marriott, The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
55. Walters’ series of newspaper articles was reprinted in booklet form. Scenes in Slum-land and Scenes in Slum-land (Second Series). Walters was leader writer and assistant editor for the Birmingham Daily Gazette when the series was published, and edited the Manchester Daily News 1906–1931.
56. Report of the MOH, 27.
57. Pamela Horn, ‘School Log Books’, in Short Guides to Records, Second Series, ed. K.M. Thompson (London: Historical Association, 1997), 104–8.
58. Susannah Wright, ‘Inside the Black Box? Log Books from Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century English Elementary Schools’, in The Black Box of Schooling: A Cultural History of the Classroom, 1700–2000, ed. Sjaak Braaster, Ian Grosvenor and Maria del Mar Pozo (Peter Lang: forthcoming).
59. Grosvenor and Myers, ‘Progressivism, Control and Correction’, 242.
60. Scenes in Slum-land, 7, 10, 18, 24, 30.
61. Scenes in Slum-land (Second Series), 5–6, 17–18.
62. Drawn unto Death, 3.
63. It is not stated who G.B. Wilson is, or if the authors were related. The actual distribution and readership of the pamphlet is unclear.
64. Peter Keating, ed., Into Unknown England 1866–1913 (London: Fontana, 1976).
65. Koven, Slumming, 7–8
66. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 1–3 argue that ‘empirical observation’ and sensationalism were often combined in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing about slums.
67. Report of the MOH, 1.
68. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 169–71.
69. Koven, Slumming, 181–227.
70. Drawn unto Death.
71. Report of the MOH.
72. Scenes in Slum-land.
73. Scenes in Slum-land (Second Series).
74. Report of the MOH, 12–14.
75. Scenes in Slum-land, 16–17.
76. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 3.
77. Sarah Wise, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (London: Bodley Head, 2008), 173–6.
78. Scenes in Slum-land, 11.
79. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 57–97 analyses the policy of Birmingham city authorities on housing in poor areas from 1875 to 1914.
80. Report of the MOH, 16, 24.
81. Scenes in Slum-land (Second Series), 19–20.
82. Ian Grosvenor, ‘Geographies of Risk: An Exploration of City Childhoods in Early Twentieth- Century Britain’, Paedagogica Historica 45, nos 1/2 (2009): 215–33, 228.
83. Floodgate Street School Log Book (FSSLB) 1891–1920, S68/2/1, December 11, 1896.
84. FSSLB, February 22, 1895.
85. FSSLB, March 18, 1892. March 9, 1894. February 15, 1895. February 22, 1895. March 15, 1895. October 30, 1896. December 11, 1896. February 5, 1897. March 15, 1900. January 22, 1901.
86. FSSLB, January 8, 1906.
87. FSSLB, January 31, 1901. December 3, 1901. March 8, 1907. January 24, 1908.
88. FSSLB, March 15, 1895. December 13, 1895. January 24, 1896. December 11, 1896. January 17, 1908. March 9, 1909. March 12, 1909. January 21, 1910. November 25, 1910. December 15, 1911. December 18, 1911.
89. FSSLB, September 2, 1892. June 29, 1905.
90. FSSLB, December 11, 1896. See also March 9, 1894.
91. FSSLB, February 22, 1895.
92. Interview with Mr Lance Tudor, November 5, 1986, Digbeth and Deritend Local History Project, MS1497/10/2.
93. For example, FSSLB, January 31, 1893. March 8, 1901. January 17, 1908. March 9, 1909.
94. FSSLB, March 8, 1901. March 11, 1901. February 1, 1907. January 19, 1909.
95. FSSLB, January 8, 1906. January 12, 1906. January 26, 1906. February 1, 1907.
96. Birmingham Education Committee, Reports of Medical Superintendent of Elementary Schools and Superintendent of Special Schools for the Year Ended 31 December 1910, 15.
97. Although the log book does not note this change, there are no references to charitable donations of food after 1910.
98. FSSLB, February 17, 1899.
99. Scenes in Slum-land, 16.
100. FSSLB, April 26, 1897. May 14, 1897. May 28, 1897. September 23, 1898. August 23, 1904.
101. FSSLB, July 18, 1913.
102. FSSLB, July 20, 1908. July 3, 1911. July 19, 1912. July 18, 1913.
103. FSSLB, June 17, 1898. June 28, 1895.
104. Susannah Wright, ‘The Struggle for Moral Education in English Elementary Schools 1879– 1918’ (PhD thesis, Oxford Brookes University, 2006), chapter 6.
105. Birmingham Education Committee, Reports of the Medical Superintendents 1910, 12.
106. Koven, Slumming, 9–10.
107. Wise, The Blackest Streets, 173–6.
108. Koven, Slumming, 47, 57
109. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 201.
110. Wise, The Blackest Streets, 96.
111. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 199–203.
112. Wise, The Blackest Streets, 67.
113. Report of the MOH, 7.
114. Drawn unto Death, 11.
115. Drawn unto Death, 28.
116. Report of the MOH, 7.
117. Scenes in Slum-land, 11, 17.
118. Drawn unto Death, 17.
119. Drawn unto Death, 15.
120. Scenes in Slum-land, 17
121. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 169–71 on the use of images of darkness and light in newspaper representations.
122. Koven, Slumming, 11–12 for a similar argument regarding writing about slums in London.
123. Interview with Mr Lance Tudor, November 5, 1986.
124. FSSLB, report received August 27, 1892.
125. March 4, 1892. The Wilsons also commented on population movement. Drawn unto Death, 6.
126. FSSLB, report received August 23, 1899. See also report received August 13, 1897.
127. FSSLB, report received August 22, 1896. See also report received July 24, 1916.
128. Brehony, ‘A Socially Civilising Influence’, 101–2.
129. C. Dyhouse, ‘Working-Class Mothers and Infant Mortality in England’, Journal of Social History 12, no. 2 (1978): 248–67.
130. Mayne, The Imagined Slum, 190–2, 199–203.
131. Drawn unto Death, 16–17, 20–2, 29–30 and Report of the MOH, 12–16 on these themes in local discussions.
132. Patricia Roberts-Pichette, ‘John Throgmorton Middlemore and his Child Emigration Scheme’, 2–4, http://www.bifhsgo.ca/home_children_emigration_scheme.htm (accessed November 21, 2008).
133. MH Application Book 3, case no. 3366. The average age for children in the 3rd Standard was 9 to 10.
134. CEH Admissions Register, Boys 1873–1914, MS517/472, case no. 2957.
135. MH Applications Book 3, case no. 2957. Pseudonyms are used for all children named.
136. CEH Admissions Register, Girls 1914–1954, MS517/473, case no. 3523.
137. MH Applications Book 4, case no. 3523. Admission to an Industrial School was commonly the consequence of criminal misdemeanour on the part of pupils or neglect at home.
138. For example, FSSLB, report received July 24, 1916.
139. Harry Ferguson, Protecting Children in Time (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 42.
140. FSSLB, October 14, 1892. May 13, 1898.
141. FSSLB, September 16, 1898.
142. FSSLB, April 8, 1892. September 9, 1892. November 11, 1892. November 17, 1893. December 1, 1893. March 22, 1895. September 9, 1898. September 16, 1898. September 9, 1904. March 17, 1908. May 13, 1909.
143. FSSLB, October 14, 1892. May 14, 1897. October 14, 1898.
144. CEH Admissions Register, Girls 1914–1954, case no. 3523. MH Applications Book 4, case no. 3523. CEH Admissions Register, Boys 1873–1914, case no. 2957. MH Applications Book 3, case no. 2957.
145. FSSLB, April 8, 1892. February 24, 1893. March 15, 1895. March 22, 1895.
146. Report of the Police Establishment and the State of Crime of the City of Birmingham for the Year Ending 31st December 1894, 15–16. See also successive annual reports of the Police Establishment 1895–1899.
147. FSSLB, October 14, 1892. May 14, 1897.
148. FSSLB, November 17, 1893. November 24, 1893. December 1, 1893.
149. Ferguson, Protecting Children in Time, 42.
150. Grosvenor, ‘All the Names’.
151. Grosvenor and Myers, ‘Progressivism, Control and Correction’.
152. Mayne, The Imagined Slum.
153. Paula Bartley, ‘Moral Regeneration, Women and the Civic Gospel in Birmingham, 1870– 1914’, Midland History 25 (2000): 143–61.
154. Grosvenor and Myers, ‘Progressivism, Control and Correction’, 245.
155. Helen Plant, ‘“Ye are all One in Christ Jesus”: Aspects of Unitarianism and Feminism in Birmingham, c.1869–90’, Women’s History Review 9, no. 4 (2000): 721–42.
156. Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971) for a classic ‘history from below’.
157. Brehony, ‘A Socially Civilising Influence’.
158. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)
159. Annemieke Van Drenth and Francisca de Haan, The Rise of Caring Power (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999).
160. Martin Lawn and Ian Grosvenor, ‘Imagining a Project: Networks, Discourses and Spaces – Towards a New Archaeology of Urban Education’, Paedagogica Historica 35, no. 2 (1999): 381–93, 381.
161. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1972).