The Educational World of Edward Thring

A Centenary Study

Donald Leinster-Mackay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000639469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book, first published in 1987, attempts to take fresh stock of a man who made a great impact on nineteenth-century English Secondary Education. A quasi psycho-biographical approach is adopted from the beginning so that Thring, the man, is examined from the perspective of his paradoxes, personality and the pervasive influences on him. Specia

1
Thring — A Hundred Years On

If any of this is ever published let it not be by any child of mine but by some good impartial man who will understand the general impression, without doing injustice by producing the crude and … the mistaken ideas that go to form that impression. Neither Nettleship [n]or Skrine must do it. From different reasons they do not understand.

Edward Thring, Diary, March 1858

Edward Thring: The Paradoxes

The centenary of Edward Thring who died on 22 October 1887 will no doubt be an occasion, both at Uppingham and beyond, for complacent celebration in recognition of Thring’s widely acclaimed pioneer educational work. He is fondly remembered as the ‘second founder’ of Uppingham who created a major Victorian public school from very humble beginnings. He is remembered, too, as an early exponent and leader of muscular Christianity that later epitomised the public school in its heyday, when its products ruled the empire according to an ethos acquired from the cricket field and rifle corps. Edward Thring’s rugged reputation rests also on his robust, enthusiastic and even inspiring teaching, and as a teacher who wrote books for teachers on how to teach.¹ Perhaps most of all, Thring’s stature in the history of education is based on his role as the founder of the powerful and exclusive Headmasters’ Conference (HMC),² which has long been the arbiter of what does and what does not constitute a public school.

As has become increasingly clear in the last few decades since the 1953 centenary of Thring’s arrival at Uppingham, a celebration of Edward Thring’s achievements based on the traditional view above, which held sway for eighty or more years, would be to a very large extent false. Thring abhorred the very institutions which he has been credited with recreating at Uppingham: it was never his intention to build Uppingham in the image of the ‘great schools’ of the Clarendon Report. Although Thring was indeed an acknowledged champion player of (Eton) fives and an enthusiastic supporter of school cricket which won Uppingham a national reputation, his private journals are full of misgivings about the exaggerated importance that sport had acquired in the school. He realised that the cult of philathleticism,³ which even more so after his death gripped the English public school, militated strongly against his own educational ideology: the well-balanced fostering of all facets of a boy’s abilities — the fostering of ‘true life’.⁴

Thring’s own teaching success was limited by the asperity he brought to his task. The success of his celebrated championing of the average boy according to his educational maxim, that every boy was good for something, was vitiated by the average boy’s natural fear and timidity in the presence of this bewhiskered martinet with the piercing eyes and exaggeratedly laconic style of speech. A close examination of some of the private writings of one of Thring’s students and members of staff who publicly idolised him reveals facets of the great man’s personality which greatly hindered his ability to communicate and therefore to educate. If the cornerstone of Edward Thring’s reputation is his official recognition as founder of the Headmasters’ Conference, it reveals some deep cracks: the HMC which Thring is justly honoured for being instrumental in creating was intended as a rallying point for schools against the influences of both the government and the Clarendon schools which were being held up as models to be imitated. Within Thring’s lifetime and against his wishes, that HMC became dominated by those very same Clarendon schools. The ‘gilded’ institutions were confirmed more than ever as the exemplars by the very same HMC that had been born in opposition to them.

Yet the theme of the centenary in 1987 should not be one of failure. Edward Thring’s contribution to English education is substantial and deserves to be honoured. A worthy aim for the centenary will be not complacent congratulation, nor the facile judgment of failure, but a fuller understanding and appreciation of the complex figure of Edward Thring.

The Rejoicings of 1953

If 1987 is seen to be a Thringian centenary, it is not so long ago that he was commemorated in a similar centenary celebration. It was in 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and the conquest of Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary and the late Sherpa Tenzing, that this earlier centenary was celebrated in the east Midland town of Uppingham. On that occasion, a host of old Uppinghamians⁵ converged on the small market town; a unique concert was held in which the music of William Sterndale Bennett (1816–1875) and Paul David⁶ was played; there was a moving chapel service and a sermon by the then Dean of Winchester, the Very Rev. E.G. Selwyn;⁷ and, the pièce de resistance, Mr J.F. Wolfenden, ex-headmaster of Uppingham (1934–1944) and Vice-Chancellor of Reading University,⁸ delivered what might be loosely called a commemorative oration. The cause of all this celebration was the centenary of Edward Thring’s coming to Uppingham on 10 September 1853 and his eventful headmastership of that school for the next thirty-four years. Cynics must be forgiven, however, if with hindsight it is observed that the author of the celebrated Report (1957) on Prostitution and Homosexuality should spearhead a celebration of Thring’s achievements during which the then Headmaster, Mr M. Lloyd, disavowed that the school was using the occasion and Thring’s name ‘as an excuse for raising money’.⁹ But the headmaster, despite the seeming prostitution involved, did have a point: the money was to be used to provide the ‘machinery’ and ‘tools’¹⁰ for the school, a cause so strongly espoused by Edward Thring. But the irony lies in the paradox that, in 1953, friends of the school gathered together to celebrate the achievements of Thring, the maker of a great English Public School. It was, however, to those who came after Thring, E.C. Selwyn et al., that such appreciation should have been expressed for turning Uppingham into a conventional great public school. For as we shall see many of Thring’s educational principles and ideas were swiftly overturned after his death. No doubt Thring would have turned over in his grave in Uppingham town churchyard had he read the opening words of the centenary issue of the school magazine:

We commemorate in this special number of the School Magazine the centenary of the beginning of the Reverend Edward Thring’s Headmastership during which Uppingham became one of the great independent Public Schools (my italics).

Thring: A Reassessment

This study of Edward Thring (1821–1887) is a modest contribution to the recognition of that other centenary: the death of the Uppingham School headmaster at the comparatively early age of 65. At the same time, it provides an opportunity for a reassessment or reinterpretation of Thring and his achievements. There is clearly a need for such a book on Edward Thring who, it can be argued, was the most significant headmaster of the Victorian age.¹¹ Despite his significance for English educational history no major study on Thring per se has been published for many years¹² and certainly none which sets out to examine Thring’s educational philosophy from his writings in toto. The absence of any recently published major study on Thring and his educational ideas is even more striking when it is recalled some studies have appeared in the last few years on several other significant public school figures.¹³

Despite the absence of any comprehensive published work on Thring’s educational practice and theory, three recent studies are immensely germane. First, Cormac Rigby’s brilliant Oxford DPhil 1968, The Life and Influence of Edward Thring, written almost twenty years ago which should have seen the light of published day by now, is by far the most comprehensive study to date. It is to be hoped that Thring’s centenary will encourage Cormac Rigby to publish. Secondly, Malcolm Tozer’s Physical Education at Thring’s Uppingham, 1976, an MEd study for Leicester University and later published as a book, convincingly emphasised the German influences at Uppingham. Thirdly, the very perceptiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Illustration
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Chapter One Thring — A Hundred Years On
• Chapter Two Dr Arnold and Mr Thring
• Chapter Three The Battles of Life
• Chapter Four Explication, Extension, Exodus
• Chapter Five Lord Lyttelton and the Dead Hand
• Chapter Six The Headmasters’ Conference: Defence League or Élite Club?
• Chapter Seven Was Not the Pen Mightier Than the Sward? True Life and Other Educational Ideals
• Chapter Eight Thring’s Influence and His Theory and Practice of Teaching
• Chapter Nine The Reckoning: Success or Failure?
• Bibliography
• Index