Quakers _ in the. Bud
A Sidcot Pageant. By Evelyn Roberts. (Dent. 3s. 6d.) "
AND what, you may ask, is Sidcot ? To the geographer it is a village fifteen miles or so south of Bristol on the Exeter road. To every Quaker, and to quite a fair number of educationists in general, it is the chief of the co-educational • boarding schools maintained by the Society of Friends. 'But co-educational is a term that has.ehanged its significance in Sidcot's 127 years of life. Today boys and girls are taught together by both masters and 'mistresses, walk about the country together and to a limited extent join in games -together. In the Sideot of 1808 segregation of the sexes was rigorous. Boys and girls occupied separate wings, but there was a passage in which they might occasionally meet ; in that case the boy was required to stand with his face to the wall while the girl hurried past. And even the committee that managed the school on behalf of Friends in Bristol and south-western England had at first a dual personality, the men's committee and the women's committee meeting Separately.
• All this and much more Miss Roberts has diligently har- vested from the school records, from the earliest days of Sideot down to about 1860. Those early days lay in fact far behind the foundation of the present school, for the first Sidcot dates back to the seventeenth century, one William Jenkins being appointed headmaster in 1698 or 1699 at an annual salary of MO. They had found a cheaper man at Taunton, adds Miss Roberts, but, in the admirably all- sufficient phrasing of the committee's minute, " Friends on enquiry doe think fitt to wave makeing use of him." On the chosen headmaster's retirement the school seems to have lapsed. It had a successor in 1784 and it was from this that the Sidcot of 1808 sprang.
Miss Roberts has marshalled her material in her own way. She first tells the story herself, then adds a selection of most instructive extracts from the Sidcot committee's minutes, and in a third part of her book weaves the out- standing incidents of the school's history into a pageant compiled with much skill and great fidelity to history. The Volume, with the excellent plates, plain and coloured, that embellish it, looks a highly uneconomic proposition at 3s. 6d.
It may be doubted whether the writer foresaw how excellent a piece of work she would be doing, or whether she fully realizes its excellence yet. Apparently written for the Very limited public already interested in Sidcot, the book deserves a respectable place among current best-sellers. Educationally it is of real value, for Friends were pioneers in certain forms of education, particularly co-education, as in some other fields, and as a mere excursion into an unfamiliar by-way of life a century or so ago it provides entertainment on every page.
But pioneer as Sidcot might be, there are episodes in its history to be more appropriately described as primitive than as. progressive. In 12th month 1825, for example, runs a committee minute, " Joseph Storrs Fry is requested to order 3 boxes of proper dimensions for the solitary confinement of refractory Boys."
Proper dimensions, it is explained elsewhere, meant 5 ft. 6 ins. by 20 ins. by 21 ins. The punishment-stall was, in fact, a kind of closed sentry-box, in which the refractory were sometimes confined for two days at a time. For the trifling misdemeanour of deficiencies in grammar a small log of wood known as the grammar log was fastened to the leg and worn both in schoolroom and playground for' a suitable period. Life at Sideot, it is evident, was austere, and it is a little startling (unless one remembers the long line of eminent Quaker brewers) to find that in 8th month, 1822 " the COm- mittee deeming it advisable to brew the Beer consumed in the Houses," requests Joseph Storrs Fry—so strongly did the Bristol influence predominate—to assist William Batt, then headmaster, in providing the necessary implements. The recognition of the existence of music argued a certain broadmindedness. It is true that it only came gradually. The aforementioned William Batt asked a cacophonous urchin pertinently " Does thou not know that whistling is the next door to swearing ? "—as indeed it very likely is—but almost contemporaneously a member of his staff imported a Jew's hatp, and generally speaking the committee was content
lamely to deprecate music as a whole on account of the time it takes and the noise it makes." There were, of course, neither terms nor half-years. Indeed, in 2nd month 1824 it was decided to abolish the present Annual Vacation because
experience has proved it to be injurious to the children s' . •
but to permit each child to return to its house once in twp years at the desire of its parents or guardians, expressed in writing.
But naturam expella3 furca—co-education had its eternal problems, and not among the children only. There was the sad case of Henry DymOnd,-an apprentice, or pupil teaches, regarding whom it was reported to the Committee in 9th month 1821 that he was in the habit of paying frequent visits to the Governess of the Girls' School ; whereupon the Committee called him before theist and " pointed out to hiM the impropriety of a Young Man of the Boys' School visiting the Girls' School and requested him to discontinue his visits there, they being contrary to good order." The recalcitrant Henry, it is lamentable to record, declined flatly to discontinue them and in the end (after a series of minutes) both he and the lady quitted Sidcot, the committee, perhaps in a moment of remorse, pouring on the amorous apprentice's head, if not coals Of fire, 30s. plus 2 suits of clothes, 2 hats, 6 shirts, 6 pairs of stockings, 6 neck and 6 pocket Handkerchiefs and 2 pairs 'of shoes, all of good and sufficient quality. And as final triumph of hubris the two delinquents returned thirty years later as man and wife in the capacity of headmaster and headmistress respectively.
Here quotation must be checked, though not without some effort. Any who feel encouraged to seek further diversion .in the study of this little human garden, both charming and
c,uaint, to discover what these small Quakers in the making ate art what they wore (the girls had inter alia poke bonnets and the boys pinbefores), what they played and what they learned, must turn for themselves. to Miss Roberts' own entertaining pages. Her book is real treasure-trove.