Neill of Summerhill (Routledge Revivals)

The Permanent Rebel

Jonathan Croall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135047306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A. S. Neill was arguably the most famous child educator of the twentieth century. He was certainly the most controversial. All over the world, countless parents and teachers have been shocked, delighted or inspired by his subversive ideas about education, or by a visit to 'that dreadful school' which continues to this day – Summerhill.

First published in 1983, this sympathetic but critical exploration of his iconoclastic ideas and personality is the result of interviews with two hundred ex-pupils, parents and teachers about life at Summerhill, and of the practicality of Neill's philosophy about child freedom. Jonathan Croall has also drawn on many unpublished letters and documents, which help to illuminate Neill's personal struggles, and his analysis and friendship with Homer Lane, Wilhelm Stekel and Wilhelm Reich. The result is a fascinating and revealing portrait of a remarkable man who, in his absolute determination to be 'on the side of the child', remained in permanent opposition to the adult world.

PART ONE

The Road to Summerhill

CHAPTER 1

The Problem Child

My father did not care for me when I was a boy.

Neill! Neill! Orange Peel!, 1972

George Neill was accustomed to handling children: he was the village school teacher — or ‘dominie’, as they were called in Scotland. It had not been an easy matter for him to reach a position of such relative respectability. The MacNeill clan came originally from the island of Barra. After George’s birth, in 1852, his family settled in Tranent, a village near Edinburgh, where both his father and his brothers worked down the mines. As a boy he was very fond of his mother, and was shattered when she died of cholera when he was 14. He cried for a fortnight, he later told his children, and her death nearly broke his heart. He went to live with an aunt, and was brought up with his cousins, who decided they would call him just Neill. He had a flair for learning, and though there were no grants then, and the family could ill afford the fees, he was sent to college to train as a teacher. At this time the professions were closed to working-class families, but schoolmastering, though less lucrative and of a lower status, was certainly an occupation that a bright village boy could aspire to. After qualifying, George Neill went to teach in a school in Edinburgh.

One of his fellow-teachers there was Mary Sutherland. For her, too, it had been a struggle to qualify. Her mother, Clunes Sinclair, came from a farming family in the Shetlands. Mary, born in 1854, was the only one of twenty children not to die of tuberculosis. Her mother became a servant girl after she left school, moving to Leith on the edge of Edinburgh, where she met and married Neil Sutherland, a worker in the local dockyards. One night he was found drowned, and his widow had to take in washing to support her family. Somehow, she managed to send her only daughter, Mary, to training college, holding out the possibility of her becoming an assistant in one of the local schools.

However, this idea soon had to be set aside. She met George Neill, and after a year’s courtship they decided to marry. No married women were allowed to teach in Scottish schools at this time; they had to hand in their resignation one month before their wedding. Although George Neill’s qualifications were no more than moderate — at college he received a third-class certificate — his career developed quite rapidly. At the age of 24, after working for a while as an assistant teacher in the village school at Inveriarty, in the county of Angus in Lowland Scotland, he took up the post of head teacher of the school in the nearby village of Kingsmuir in 1876. The village was two miles from the county town of Forfar, and in November 1880, just a fortnight before the birth of their first child, the Neills moved in to a seven-roomed top-storey flat in Forfar’s East High Street.

Until shortly before they came there, Forfar had remained much as one traveller described it in 1760, ‘a poor, ill-built town of small farmers, innkeepers and linen manufacturers’. Then jute came to Dundee from India, several local manufacturers made the switch from linen, and also made their fortunes. Forfar became prosperous, libraries and halls being built to cater for the growing population. Farming, though, still remained crucial to the town — whether it was dairy, cattle, arable or fruit farming. On Mondays the farmers would drive their cattle through the town; and on the Saturday market days they would arrive with their gigs and ponies to trade, hire labourers, and gossip. The drink flowed freely, ploughmen and their employers often being taken home in a stupor by their driverless gigs. Such occasions, with the attendant hobby horses, swing boats, boxing booths, sweet stalls and town bands, offered local children a rare chance for excitement.

No one took more delight in the chance of a day’s outing than the Neills’ third son, Alexander Sutherland. Born on 17 October 1883, he was in fact the fourth boy in the family; the second, Hamish, had died the year before, aged 2. Allie’s two brothers were Willie, four years his senior, and Neilie, some two and a half years older than him; and thirteen months after his birth, the Neills’ first girl, Clunes St Clair, was born. The two older boys became close companions, leaving Allie and Clunie to enjoy the market days together, and to become firm friends.* They would wander the streets together, searching the gutters for any treasure left by the departing farmers, or marching along behind the town band. Some of the farmers’ children had half a crown to spend for the day; the Neills, being poor, had no more than sixpence, and would try to increase it by looking after a farmer’s horse, then a popular way of making some extra pocket money. On a lucky day, they could pick up a few extra halfpennies, or a gift in kind, such as a piece of bread and jam.

However, such good fortune had to be kept from their mother, who had forbidden them to accept money or food from others under any circumstances. Punishment was swift if ever she caught them doing this, as Allie discovered: ‘One day when I proudly told Mother that I had refused such a tempting dainty, she smiled and told me I was a good boy. “Of course, you said you weren’t hungry, didn’t you?” “No,” I said with confidence, “just, ‘Thank you, but my ma says I mustn’t take it.’ ” And she slapped me hard.’ After that, he was careful to accept any gifts surreptitiously.

Mary Neill was a proud and ambitious woman, anxious that her children should ‘better’ themselves. Yet her husband’s salary of £120 a year tied her to a modest standard of living which made it difficult to keep up appearances. Her efforts to do this were made more difficult when, some time after Allie’s sixth birthday, the family moved yet again. A schoolhouse had been recently built across the road from the school in Kingsmuir, where George Neill had been the ‘dominie’ for some thirteen years. An attractively proportioned house with oriel and gabled windows in its high-sloping roof, it consisted of a parlour, a dining room, a kitchen and five bedrooms. There was no indoor lavatory, but simply an earth closet at the end of the garden, on to which the children could look out from their bedroom windows at the back of the house.

Kingsmuir in the last decade of the nineteenth century was no more than a hamlet, made up of a few houses built either side of the road running through the village from Forfar to Carnoustie, and a number of farms scattered about the parish. The residents were mostly farm workers and their families, together with a small number of craftsmen — a joiner, a blacksmith, a tailor. There was no church or pub, and only two small shops, which sold sweets and a few basic commodities. Milk and eggs could be had from the local farms; other provisions necessitated a two-mile walk along the lanes into Forfar, with only a slim chance of getting a ride from a farmer’s gig or a milkcart. Although bicycles were then just beginning to come into fashion, traffic through the village was almost non-existent: the children could play safely in the road, indulging in the latest crazes for marbles, hoops or tops, or using a tin can for a makeshift football game.

What communal life there was invariably took place in the schoolroom — an occasional concert, lantern-slide show or performance by an itinerant juggler or conjuror, the annual prize-giving ceremony, and a weekly prayer meeting. On Saturday nights the ploughmen would assemble at the bridge, to sit and gossip the time away, or throw insults at passers by. The villagers’ lives were also enlivened by the annual picnic, and by the occasional wedding or funeral. Some of the marriages were ‘forced’ ones between the ploughmen and the servant girls, a fact mostly accepted by working families, amongst whom illegitimate children were comparatively common. The farmers, some of them prosperous, or anyone else with aspirations to status or gentility, made sure of regular attendance at the church in Forfar. They treated Sundays as holy days, when only necessary work could be done, and no books other than the Bible or other ‘improving’ volumes could be read. Class divisions were marked out by language, dress and behaviour, and were particularly to be seen in attendance at the ‘kirk’. The traditional hierarchy of a Scottish village would find the dominie ranked below the ‘laird’, the minister and the doctor: in Kingsmuir, which lacked any of these, George Neill was ‘head mon’ of the village, and his wife made strenuous efforts to ensure that the family lived up to this position. ‘We didn’t keep up with the Joneses; we were the Joneses,’ Neill observed later.

Mary Neill was a small, plump and homely woman, who devoted her life to her family. She gave birth to thirteen children in all, of whom one was still-born, four died in infancy, and eight survived into adulthood. This was not untypical of a period in which, when a baby was born, people would sometimes ask: ‘Has it come to stay?’ Mary Neill was philosophical about her large family: ‘I took what my Maker gave me,’ she told her children later. Her life was almost entirely circumscribed by her domestic tasks. She had what amounted to an obsession about cleanliness, spending many hours at the washtub to get her linen white, or wielding a charcoal iron over the ironing board. She was proud to be the only woman in the village able to make her strawberry jam ‘firm’. She made all her own clothes, grew her own vegetables in the garden, and earned extra money by dyeing and curling the ostrich feathers then fashionable for hats and boas. Once she had set up house, she tried to keep both her own and her husband’s relatives at arm’s length — she found it particularly hard to tolerate her father-in-law’s dress and manner, which betrayed his humble origins.

She also kept her children on a tight rein, doing all she could to prevent them from mixing with the rough and ragged children of the local ploughmen and farm hands. She refused to let them join the other children in bringing in the potato harvest or gathering the strawberry crop; years later Neill still remembered vividly an occasion when he had not been allowed on a picnic with the others. She also, her daughter May recalls, made a distinction between her sons and daughters: ‘Ma treated the boys like gods, while the girls had to be the domestic servants, and clean, polish and wax our brothers’ shoes. It was most unfair: eventually I told Allie I would only go on doing his if he gave me sixpence — which of course he never had. So that was the last of the shoe cleaning.’ In summer, while other children ran about barefoot, the Neill children had to put up with the discomfort of stockings and boots; they were also forced to wear stiff collars throughout the week. And on Sunday their mother poured them into their best clothes for the two visits to church that day: Allie and the other boys in their well-brushed clothes, starched collars and cuffs, and oiled hair, the girls in their carefully ironed dresses. ‘She was a proud wee woman,’ Neill remembered. ‘She was a snob, and she made us snobs.’

Tall and thin, with a moustache that seemed to fit his military bearing, George Neill would lead the family group on the two-mile walk to Forfar, dressed in a chimney hat, frock coat and starched shirt — though more in deference to his wife’s wishes than to public opinion. Though he was as concerned as she was that their children should succeed in life, he neither shared her snobbery nor her preoccupation with outward form. He never bothered to say the traditional grace before a meal unless she was present, when a firm ‘Now George…’ would remind him of his duty. Once he expressed a desire to join in a game of quoits with other men in the village, but submitted to her injunction not to ‘lower himself’ in this fashion. Often he would give way to his wife simply for the sake of peace. Later Neill wrote with evident feeling: ‘It is the mother who makes the Scots home an uneasy place, in which one has to think three times before one speaks.’

To the inhabitants of Kingsmuir, George Neill seemed in all respects a model citizen. Conscientious and hard-working, he never had a day off school, except to assist at a funeral. He was generous with his time and knowledge, and the community invariably turned to him on matters both great and small. Most of the adults in the village had a bare minimum of education, and many looked to him for advice about their children’s future. In the evenings he gave extra tuition in French and Latin to those who wanted to study for the university or civil service — a traditional part of a village dominie’s role. He organised concerts in the schoolroom, and held services there on Sunday afternoons, delivering a short sermon without the need for notes. If there was a death in a family, he would ‘coffin’ the body — it was the custom for the deceased to be put in the coffin during rather than before the service. He also sat on the parish council, and was an elder in the church in Forfar.

Yet in his inner life he seems to have been less than happy. At one stage during his tenure of the Kingsmuir job he failed a medical because of being highly strung, though his own doctor gave him a certificate saying it was only ‘his nerves’. There is some evidence that he resented his wife’s insistence on maintaining a respectable image. Other dominies in the area would play bowls at the weekend, or go drinking together. According to some members of the family, George Neill did not drink, and was anyway too involved in looking after his children to join them. However, this is contradicted by Neill himself who, though never mentioning the matter in print, did later talk freely about the fact that his father was a ‘dipsomaniac’. Whether this drinking was covert, or known only within the Neill household, is not clear; but there is a memory in Kingsmuir that the dominie maltreated his wife. (Another memory, impossible now to verify, was that he ‘interfered’ with young girls.)

None of this darker side of his personality can now be substantiated. It is clear, though, that his life was a hard one, not least in the financial sphere. To their first four children the Neills added a further four: three girls, May, Ada and Hilda, and one boy, the youngest in the family, Percy. This large family had to be fed, clothed and looked after on an annual salary of £120, though this was occasionally supplemented by some small income from Mary Neill’s dyeing work. ‘My parents never went anywhere,’ remembers their daughter May, ‘they just sacrificed their lives for their family.’ Not surprisingly, George Neill became preoccupied with the fortunes of his children — and it was Allie who caused him the greatest distress.

The third of the Neill children was in many respects an unprepossessing boy. There was something amiss with Allie — he was big and soft,’ is how Fred McFarlane, a Kingsmuir man who knew the whole family, remembers him. With his turned-in feet, his sticking-out ears — which brought him the nickname ‘Saucers’ — and his clumsy manner, he came in for his share of bullying from other children. When they came to pick sides for a game of football, he was usually the last to be chosen. He received a similar humiliation at home, as he later recalled: ‘If there was a particularly hard and unappetising heel of a loaf, my father would cut it off with a flourish; with another flourish, he would toss it over the table in my direction, saying: “It’ll do for Allie.” ’ His father, as his sister May recalls, ‘acted the policeman about the house‘. It was Allie who tended to get the harshest treatment — a hard pinch on the cheek, or a painful squeeze on the arm. As an adult, Neill wrote: ‘My father did not care for me as a boy. Often he was cruel to me, and I acquired a definite fear of him.’

His fear of his father was reinforced by a natural timidity and gentleness, recalled later by his sister May, some six years his junior: ‘I would have done anything for him, because he was such a nice soul. He was very meek and mild, and everybody loved him. My grandmother thought there was nobody like him, and used to say to my mother, “He’ll be your best son, mark my words.” He never fell out with you, you never had a fight with him.’ Unlike Allie, May did speak out against their parents, although ‘I got hammered for it’. On the other hand Willie, the eldest son, full of energy and exceptionally bright, was able to escape punishment for all kinds of escapades. His academic ability brought him into favour with his father. The boy had a prodigious memory, and by the age of 2 was able to read parts of the Old Testament. He read everything he could lay hands on, needing no one to drive him to his books. At the age of 8 he was second in the arithmetic class in school, and only a year later entered for the St Andrews University Local Exams Prelims. To his father, as to many other parents in Scotland, advancement in life meant advancement in learning. There was never one moment’s doubt about Willie’s brilliance as a scholar, his capacity to shine in an educational system which put such emphasis on the retention and repetition of information. Clearly he was destined for academic distinction, and the social approval that would come in its wake.

Allie was a complete contrast. In temperament and interests he seemed closer to the village children destined to work on the land. His early heroes were the local ploughmen, whose rolling walk he imitated. He was deeply upset when his mother refused to make a pair of breeches for him in ploughman style — she said they were common, and considered the flies on male trousers indecent. Such carefree hours that he had were mostly spent well away from home or school. With other village children he went birds’ nesting; caught minnows in the streams around the village; plundered the dovecotes in the local farms; put farthings on the railway line, in the hope they would turn into pennies. There were occasional fights with the children from the nearby villages of Letham and Lunanhead. In the evenings, Allie and his friends dug for skeletons and treasure in the ruins of Restenneth Priory nearby. The Neill children became friendly with the Adam family, who owned Ladenford Farm just south of Kingsmuir: the farm became one of their favourite playgrounds, where they could climb on walls, or search for birds’ nests around the estate.

Maggie Adam, one of the children living there at the time, remembers the frequent visits of Allie and Clunie, and also Allie’s ‘devilment’. This quality, which was to be well in evidence in later life, ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• The Quest for Neill
• Part One The Road to Summerhill
• Part Two Summerhill
• Acknowledgments
• Sources
• Bibliography and Further Reading
• Index