N o .126
T he T rusty S ervant
Winchester and the HMC
Tim Hands, himself Chairman 2013-14,
recounts Win Coll’s involvement:
No school has produced more Chairmen
of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’
Conference than Winchester. The
tradition started in December 1870,
when at the second HMC meeting it was
decided to set up a Committee, and that
the Chairman of the Committee should
be different to that of the Conference or
Annual Meeting.
Professor William Richardson, who is
about to retire as General Secretary
of HMC, was formerly an educational
historian, and has kindly been through
the HMC papers to work out the most
signal contributions made. He has sent
me an amount of material from the HMC
archive to be deposited in Winchester.
George Ridding (Headmaster 1867-84)
Ridding shows himself an assiduous
pursuer of scholarship. He wished
education to be determined by experts
within universities, rather than by
Government diktat.
The first business of the Committee
shows this principle in operation. Ridding
had been active in inviting the Latin
Professors at Oxford and Cambridge to
draw up a joint paper to secure uniformity
in any change contemplated in the
pronunciation of Latin. The Committee
also wanted to urge respectfully upon
the universities that entrance to the
universities should be by a single
matriculation examination, not by
different methods in different Colleges.
He very much wanted universities to
set up their own exam board (as indeed
did happen). He was less successful in
getting uniformity with the Cambridge
Professor of Latin, who wished differences
in the pronunciation of consonants with
a hard C and hard G, and the J and the V
pronounced as Y and W.
Ridding wanted to see the universities
promote the processional education of
‘upper and middle class schoolmasters’,
and to confer with the Council of the
British Association on the best modes of
advancing and improving the teaching
of science. Ridding began to publish
pamphlets to support his aims. A letter
to Edward Bowen, published by Wells in
Winchester, Parker & Co in Oxford and
Macmillan in Cambridge in 1872, sets out
his principles clearly: a period of growth and expansion. It
is our duty to preside over a period of
contraction, and contraction is much
more difficult to control and to humanise
than expansion. We believe we have
inherited, from those predecessors,
something of value for the nation; we
shall endeavour, in this day of storm, to
preserve it and to transmit it.’
‘The object in which I believe myself to
agree with you, and which has been the
sole motive of my action, is the freedom,
variety and completeness of school
education. The method you desire is
a Minister of Education; the method I
prefer to that is the coordination of the
schools and universities.’ Unsurprisingly, the Conference departed
from tradition, and Leeson was asked to
remain a Chair for another year. Other
than preparation and adaptation, caused
by war, Leeson’s chief concern was to spot
increasing difficulty of access to public
schools, and to try to negotiate with
Government for means by which schools
could give free places to those who could
not afford them.
Ridding expresses himself worried by ‘the
abruptness, crudeness and uncertainty
of changes in education, made by many
who have theories, feel they must do
something and have not much time to do
it, and who also have power to ordain a
universal change in a moment.’ He goes
on to explain ‘I believe that school ought
not only to teach boys how to learn, and
to learn thoroughly, but also to put into a
boy’s hands the ends of as many threads
of knowledge as he can hold, any one of
which he may then follow up afterwards.’
Ridding later advances the opinion that
the best tests of ability are Classics and
Maths. In 1874, Ridding was trying to set
up a scheme, whereby graduates desiring
to be trained in the work of schools could
be paired up with schools willing to train
them.
Spencer Leeson (Headmaster 1934-46)
Leeson was Chairman of HMC no less
than six times. He cuts a very different
note from Ridding – smooth, where
Ridding could be cantankerous, masterly
summariser, whereas Ridding would
more characteristically supply detail. In
1939, during the Conference held at
Shrewsbury, Leeson finished his address as
follows:
‘It was the duty of our predecessors, in
the nineteenth century, to preside over
2
In the 1940 Conference, held at
Haileybury, Leeson continued in the
same magisterial style, something which
he called offering a ‘panorama before
our eyes’. The Conference agreed
that it contained members of various
denominations of Christianity, but wished
to express its strong conviction ‘that the
Christian faith should be the basis and
inspiration of their work; and, while each
member remains loyal to its own church,
they pledged themselves to promote that
general object with all their power.’
In 1941, in a meeting held at New
College, Leeson announced the creation
of the Governing Bodies Association. He
also told the Conference in his speech,
‘If the Headmaster’s Conference stands
for one thing more than another, it is
educational independence. If we do not
fight for it, no one else will. …We are
liable to forget that it is the parents to
whom, under God, the boys and girls
actually belong, and not to the state,
and parents in all classes ought to be
allowed some say in the education of their
children.’
Leeson’s access campaign resulted in the
Fleming Report of 1944, which proposed
that one quarter of the places at public