Abstract
The Grocers’ Company School, later known as Hackney Downs Grammar School, was established as a middle-class day school for boys in 1876. “Grocers” was an imposing Gothic building wedged between two railway lines feeding into the commercial heart of the City. The scheme to build the school was proposed by Worshipful Company of Grocers, a City Livery Company, following the Endowed Schools Act of 1869.1 Boys between the ages of seven and eleven “of good character and of sufficient bodily health” were admitted, leaving at age fifteen.2 Places were gained by passing an examination: there was both an entrance fee and an annual fee. Scholarships were open to competition and depended on the Headmaster’s recommendation as well as the results of the entrance exam. The establishment of a middle-class school, a new kind of institution, stemmed partly from the widespread perception that Britain lagged behind its international rivals and competitors, and partly as a response to demands for secondary education from the tradesmen, minor professionals, and skilled workmen that made up a large proportion of the local population.
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Notes
Geoffrey Alderman, Hackney Downs, 1876–1995: The Life and Death of a School (London: The Clove Club, 2012), 5.
HMI, Report by HMI on London County Council Hackney Downs School, Hackney, London. Inspected on 29, 30, 31, May, 1951. Issued September 28, 1951 (London: HMSO, 1951).
The phrase, “English for all” invokes the spirit of R. H. Tawney’s seminal 1924 work, Secondary Education for All: A Policy for Labour (London: Hambledon, 1988). For a clear, engaged discussion of Tawney’s ideas, see Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958).
Guy Pocock, Grammar in a New Setting (London: J. M. Dent, 1928), 57.
See David Shayer, The Teaching of English in Secondary Schools (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 79–82.
An official position on the amount of grammar teaching is represented in a Department of Education and Science pamphlet of 1954, Language: Some Suggestions for Teachers of English and Others: one weekly lesson for about three years (in grammar schools) with more time in other secondary schools, and when this grammatical minimum has been mastered, the report recommends practice in continuous composition is more important than further elaboration. (Department of Education and Science, Language: Some Suggestions for Teachers of English and Others in Primary and Secondary Schools and Further Education, Education Pamphlet No 26, (London: HMSO, 1954), 45.
James Britton, “The Paper in English Language at Ordinary Level,” The Use of English 4(3) (Spring 1955): 2.
Guy Pocock, More English Exercises (London: J. M. Dent, 1934).
Barry Supple, Doors Open (Cambridge: Asher, 2008), 98.
Spencer Moody, “Mr James Ellis Medcalf” in The Review, the Magazine of the Hackney Downs School (1956): 11.
Harvey Monte email to Hardcastle. The poetry anthology was almost certainly, W. A. C. Wilkinson and N. H. Wilkinson, The Dragon Book of Verse, with illustrations by Gillian Alington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935).
David Ogilvie’s unpublished letters were made available to us by his widow, following his death in 2010. They are now available as a collection, David Ogilvie, Thanks for the Boblet: The Wartime Letters of David Ogilvie, ed. Glyndwer Watkins (Dinton: Twig Books, 2012).
See Patrick Kingwell and Peter Medway, “A Curriculum in Its Place: English Teaching in One School, 1946–1963,” History in Education 39 (6) (2010): 749–765.
F. R. Leavis complained about the frequent use of Poems of Today anthologies by teachers. See Frank Raymond Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, first published in 1932 (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1972), 51.
Joseph Brearley, Fortune’s Fool: A Life of Joe Brearley, ed. G. L. Watkins (Dinton: Twigg Books, 2008), 146.
Henry Grinberg, “Pinter at School,” in The Pinter Review: Collected Essays, 1999 and 2000, eds. Francis Gillen and Steven H. Gale (Tampa: University of Tampa Press, 2000), 3.
As Barry Supple remarks, “He [Brearley] is one of the few state secondary school teachers I know to have a website devoted to his role and life.” Supple, Doors Open, 100. See also Billington’s biography, Michael Billington, Harold Pinter (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 443–446. Pinter frequently acknowledged his debt to Brearley as, for example, in his acceptance speech for the David Cohen British Literature prize in 1995.
Derek Newton, “‘Drama’ in Studies in Education: The Arts and Current Tendencies in Education, ed. James Britton (London: Institute of Education, 1963), 102.
John Kemp, “Some Diverse Views on the Position and Function of the Artist and His Work in Society as Seen in the Literature of the Years 1880–1920.” (MA thesis, King’s College, London University, 1953), 1.
Denys Thompson, “Editorial,” The Use of English, 1(1) (Autumn 1949): 6.
Teaching about advertising did not start with Culture and Environment. Suggestions for work on adverts appear for example in James Britton, English on the Anvil: A Language and Composition Course for Secondary Schools (London: Foyles Educational Ltd, 1934).
Percival Gurrey, The Teaching of Written English (London: Longmans Green and Co, 1954), 224.
Kemp’s principle source is Gurrey. There are two reasons for suggesting this. First, The Teaching of Written English figures in an inventory of Kemp’s private book collection; and second, a topic for descriptive writing recommended by Gurrey, “A Busy Railway Station,” is among the writing tasks set for the same classes. See Gurrey, Written English 1954, 146–147.
Thomas Sharp, The Anatomy of the Village (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1946).
Cyril Poster, “Projects for the English Specialist,” The Use of English 5(1) (Autumn 1953): 20–22.
“The Brute” was from a school anthology, Joseph Conrad, Four Tales: A Selection from the Works of Joseph Conrad, eds. Emile Victor Rieu and Peter Wait for Methuen’s Modern Classics Series (London: Methuen, 1955). Tim Dowley recalled studying short stories including The Brute with Kemp for the O level examination: “We did The Secret Sharer and The Machine Stops, [and] The Demolitionists.” Dowley interview.
Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), and
John Holloway, The Story of the Night: Studies in Shakespeare’s Major Tragedies (London: Routledge, 1961).
John Kemp, The Last Thirty Years (Whittlebury: The Clove Club, 1996), iii.
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© 2014 Peter Medway, John Hardcastle, Georgina Brewis, and David Crook
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Medway, P., Hardcastle, J., Brewis, G., Crook, D. (2014). Hackney Downs. In: English Teachers in a Postwar Democracy. Secondary Education in a Changing World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137005144_3
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