Victorian School

 

Yes, another based on a B&W photo from the time. I have to be honest, I did look for a male teacher teaching boys, or both sexes, but I didn't find any that I liked half as much as the original this is based on.

The reason why I would have preferred a male teacher is this. I always thought that I was the first bloke in my family to become a teacher. My aunt was a teacher, but apart from her, that's it. Or so I thought. Quite a few years ago I researched my family history, and found that a 2x great grandfather on my mother's side was the headmaster of the village school in Fernhurst in Sussex for a few years in the 1880s. I don't think teaching was anything like as regulated then as it is now, and basically if you could read and write you could se yourself up as a teacher. It was only at the end of the Victorian era hat school became compulsory at all. 

Coming back to my great great grandfather George, he was the son of he village blacksmith in Chilton Foliat near Hungerford in Berkshire. How he was never apprenticed to his father John I don't know. Possibly he did well at a local ragged school - ragged schools were basically charitable organisations which provided rudimentary education for children of the poor. Whatever the case, George was married and working as a clerk in Paddington by 1871, and then started teaching within he next ten years. Not that he seems to have stuck at it for very long, as he was back clerking in Bromley by Bow by the 1890s. 

I look at the writing on the board behind the teacher and I think two things. The first is that I thank God that I began my career just a month or so after the UK banned corporal punishment in schools. Spare the rod and spoil the child indeed. However badly behaved they are I did not sign on the dotted line to hit kids. The other thing I think is that I remember that for my first few years all I had to work on was a blackboard like this one. 'Chalk and Talk' as it was known in the trade.