THE FELSTED TRUSTEES AND HEAD MASTER.
THE removal of the Head Master of Felsted School without a hearing, by a body of Trustees which had dwindled below what even the scheme regarded as an adequate number, and the Bishop of Rochester's very extraordinary action in endorsing the act of the Trustees, also without according a personal hearing to the Head Master, ought not to pass without a very warm protest from all who take the least interest in the secondary education of this country, nor, as we think, with- out careful investigation by the Charity Commissioners before any new Head Master is appointed. The case is not an ordinary one. As far as we can judge from the only statement we have before us, which is certainly an ex pane one, being the Head Master's own, both parties committed grave errors, though the Trustees appear to be far more blameworthy than the removed Head Master. As, however, we have no account of the matter by the Trustees to check that by the Head Master, all we say must be taken with the qualifications due to that con- sideration. But we must avow that we think the Trustees owed, and should before this have given to the public some account of, what seems to have been their very culpable and extraordinary conduct. However, it is clear on his own statement that Mr. Grignon, the Head Master, was also seriously in fault. It is true he had made the School what it is by a long career of very ill-remunerated in- dustry and unremitting fidelity to his work. It is true, also, that the duties discharged by him up to 1873, besides those properly belonging to the Head Master, had been so unusually onerous, that his health suffered from the labour, and that he probably committed errors of judgment and of taste in the course of his very unpleasant collisions with the Governing Body which a less worried and overburdened man would not have committed. It is maintained by those of his friends who addressed a letter to Tuesday's Times, that he did what in their opinion was his "simple duty" in advertising the parents of his scholars of the imperfect arrangements made by the Trustees, against his own protest, for their sons' health and welfare. That may be quite tree. It is not true that it was Mr. Grignon's "simple duty" to criticise contemptuously, as he publicly and more than once did, the conduct of his official superiors. There can be no more discipline in pub- lic life than there can be in a school, if the man whose duty it is to take instructions, inveighs against and ridi- cules his superior, while continuing to occupy his post. We do not deny that it was Mr. Grignon's duty to warn the parents of his pupils of the dangers to which the negligent management of the health department of Felsted school by the matron and house-steward gave rise. We do deny that it was right or in any degree seemly in him to publish his " contempt " for the Trustees, and to charge them in a letter with " colourable and insincere" conduct, while still occupying the post he did. In using such language as this, he put him- self manifestly in the wrong. We agree, however, that he was exceedingly badly treated, we might even say most unworthily treated, by the Trustees, in relation to the matter which called forth his expression of contempt. And we feel no doubt at all that the request for his opinion on the new arrangements for an infirmary, which Mr. Grignon described as "colourable and insincere," was not made with any serious intention of profiting by his advice,—otherwise the resolution would not have been taken first and Mr. Grignon's counsel asked afterwards,—that is, between the preliminary resolve and its final confirmation. But no one ought to know better than a successful disciplinarian such as Mr. Grignon, that remarks which may be very proper when made by independent critics, may be very improper indeed when made by the man whose permanent relations with his official superiors are affected by them. It is true enough that the British Government treated the Duke of Wellington after his first landing in Portugal most improperly and shabbily, but
he had expressed in public despatches his contempt for their character, and his belief that the pretexts they put forth were
colourable and insincere, he would not have done what he did, and would not even have had the opportunity of doing it. It is impossible to deny that Mr. Grignon has been intemperate and guilty of serious errors in his conduct of the controversy with the Governing Body. Still, th6' fact remains that the –.,„ Head Master who made the School what it is, who slaved ir
at his work with an energy seldom surpassed by any English schoolmaster for twenty years, who more than tripled and nearly quadrupled the number of his pupils, who had at the last the most loyal support from eight of his nine assistant-masters, and in whose collisions with the Trustees during the last two years of his residence the Trustees must themselves have been aware that they had been at least as seriously in fault as he was, was dismissed without even a hearing, without even being told that the question of his dismissal was to be discussed at the meeting at which the resolution to dismiss him was adopted, and was not informed of his dismissal for six days after the resolution to dismiss him had been formally carried. Such a case is we trust, simply unheard of in the history of our Public Schools. But bad as it is, the con- duct of the Bishop of Rochester, in whose discretion it lay to confirm or veto the dismissal, appears to us to have been even worse. If Mr. Grignon's statement of the case is accurate, Bishop Claughton never invited him to place his side of the dispute fully before him at all, nor even acknowledged the receipt of Mr. Grignon's preliminary statements, till at last he informed him, through his Secretaries, that he should confirm the decision of the Trustees. The Bishop never once accorded him a personal interview, still less a formal hearing such as Mr. Grignon had a right to demand. We must say that such a mode of exercising the responsible trust committed to him as final arbiter between the Governing Body and a most successful and conscientious Head Master of twenty years' standing, strikes us as highly reprehensible.
We have stated why we cannot hold Mr. Grignon, as some of his friends appear to do, free from blame. Nay, we regard his conduct as not only in several cases intemperate, but such as might well have seemed to an impartial observer to require his removal, had not his services been indefatigable and crowned with the amplest success during a period of eighteen years, in which, if Mr. Grignon's own memory be not at fault, no dis- sension had ever arisen between him and the Trustees. Never- theless, his services being what they were, and his fault only a certain intemperance of language under great provocation, and when dealing with a dwindled body of very inadequate and very inconsiderate Trustees whose knowledge and experience of school administration were far inferior to his own, we think it clear that an academical dignitary of the Bishop of Rochester's calibre ought to have seen the great difficulty of the case, and the high probability that under an amended scheme, and with Trustees more equal to their duty than these five gentlemen were, it might have been very possible to restore perfect harmony between Mr. Grignon and the Governing Body, and probably even to induce Mr. Grignon to offer such an apology to his official superiors as would have made their future intercourse smooth. The body of Trustees had been reduced to five, from its proper number, eleven. The scheme required that whenever the number sank below seven, immediate steps should be taken to restore the original number, the quorum itself being only five. Yet it was with this bare quorum of Trustees that the serious dispute of the Head Master practically arose, and when he was dismissed at last, only this bare quorum survived to dismiss him, no addi- tions having been made to the body. It was therefore doubly necessary that the Bishop should have inquired carefully into the provocation given by a body of less than half its full number, to a Head Master of so much experience and success as Mr. Grignon. Now, that provocation seems to us, we confess, to have been very great indeed, though we do not justify the language which it induced Mr. Grignon publicly to adopt. One of the Assistant-Masters we are told, who had a complaint against his chief, wrote to him in a published letter, accusing him, quite falsely of course, of having been brought home in a state of helpless intoxication from a cricket-match, and, as it is stated, added, in manuscript which the 'N printers refused to set up in type, additions to the printed charges "so foul," that Mr. Grignon declines even to specify them. The Trustees did not believe any of these charges, in any even the least degree. They did not even inves- tigate them. But according toMr. Grignon, instead of vindicating their Head Master by dismissing this subordinate with expres- sions of indignant censure, they appealed to Mr. Grignon to give this man a good testimonial, so as to get rid of him without injuring his prospects. And though they ultimately dismissed the Assistant-master in question, they first passed a resolution which was published by him, and which stated that as it was impossible for Mr. Grignon and his subordinate to work harmoniously together, and as, "whilst they do not entirely exonerate Mr. Grignon from blame, they do not con- sider that any case has been made out for his (Mr. Grignon's) removal," they were "under the painful necessity" of suggesting to the Under-Master in question the expediency of tendering his resignation." If Mr. Grignon really tells the public all he knows as to this matter, we can only say that he ought there and then to have insisted on an inquiry by the Bishop of Rochester, if any visitatorial power is given by the scheme to the Bishop, to justify his own conduct, and to take steps for the due completion of the number of a Governing Body which had given such incontestable proofs of injustice and incompetence. For Mr. Grignon to have gone on acting cordially with such a body appears to us impossible, but to go on co-operating with it without any respect or cordiality, and after publishing his disrespect and indignation against it to the world, was hardly more dignified than it would have been to have submitted without a word. However, any Bishop who understood his duty, when at length the Head Master was dismissed, would have examined carefully into the origin of the ill-feeling between Mr. Grignon and his official superiors, and sustained the party least in the wrong. That Mr. Grignon was the least in the wrong of the two, if his statement be not very seriously erroneous, no candid mind can doubt. There were, of course, other and later causes of dispute which arose after this. According to his own state- ment, for instance, as we have already mentioned, Mr. rignon warned the parents, very rightly, of the great sanitary dangers to which their children were exposed by the culpable care- lessness of subordinates no longer under his control, when scarlet-fever broke out in the school ; but, very wrongly, he used language, in writing to the Trustees, which was disre- spectful and irritating, though not unnatural.
To sum up,—here was a dwindled and incompetent body of Trustees, only just a quorum, who had given grave and just cause of resentment to their Head Master, and who were yet allowed to carry matters with a high hand over him after the dispute had arisen, and who finally dismissed him, without warning or hearing, on pleas that might have been adequate but for their own serious responsibility in arousing Mr. Grignon's just indignation ; and here is a Bishop, who ought to have instituted a serious judicial inquiry, to know whether or not he should confirm the resolution of the Trustees, and who never even gave the Head Master a per- sonal hearing. A graver miscarriage of justice can hardly be conceived, or a worse precedent for the administration of a class of public schools which are gaining in social weight and importance in the counties of England every year.
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