I’d been casting around for something appropriate to this season of the year when I happened to glance at the regular ‘50 Years Ago’ feature in a copy of the Methodist Recorder. This particular one mentioned a portrait of William Wilberforce – the emancipator of slaves - having been unveiled in the Committee Room of Bible House. My mind then jumped to William’s third son, Samuel, to his date of birth in September and to it now being 201 years since he was born. So what did he do that was special?

Samuel was obviously an able lad, academically: after Oxford University he entered the Anglican Church, progressed quickly, and was made Bishop of Oxford by the time he had reached forty years of age. There he became celebrated for his organising and administrative gifts, so much so that his powers of persuasiveness earned him the nickname of ‘Soapy Sam’.

By the time he became bishop there was already a movement towards providing a regular supply of qualified teachers for the country’s fast-growing number of schools. Until 1870 education in England would be largely the self-assigned responsibility of the Christian churches. Within the Church of England the setting up of teacher training institutions became the responsibility of the dioceses with each one, generally, training its own students for posts in its own schools.

Sam found that the Oxford diocese already had such an establishment for schoolmasters, founded in 1840 at Summertown on the northern edge of the city – but which was already proving inadequate. (The one for schoolmistresses was at Reading.) Accordingly plans were put in hand for a new establishment, which was opened as Culham College in 1853. It stood back from the Abingdon-Dorchester Road, a couple of miles south east of Abingdon (and close to the River Thames), and had the convenience of a nearby station on the Great Western’s Oxford - Didcot line.

This, then, was the training college I was to enter in 1958. The building was in the Victorian Gothic style and passers-by were known to enquire if it was a monastery – although I must assure you that we did not lead an entirely monastic life!

It’s interesting to note that early students included sons of schoolmasters, farmers, labourers, gardeners, a tailor, a cooper, a publican, a rag man, a groom, a butcher, a servant, a porter at The Angel Hotel, Oxford, and a royal coachman. I suppose that we were an equally disparate lot! Not only were there people straight from school, some who’d tried a year at a university, about 60% of us who’d recently completed two years of National Service, but also a group of older men. The Armed Services were beginning to contract and this was a new avenue of employment some people were willing to explore – so we had Majors, Squadron Leaders, and a Chief Petty Officer among our fellows. Not only that but there were students from Nigeria, Aden, Somalia and Cyprus. Although it was an Anglican college it had a fair leavening of Nonconformists too – a deliberate policy of the Principal, I assume.

The students of the nineteenth century were expected to have the ability to ‘read English prose with propriety, to spell correctly from dictation, to write a good hand, to be well acquainted with the outlines of Scripture history, and to show considerable readiness in working fundamental rules of Arithmetic.’ In order to obtain his ‘parchment’ each would have to show competent ability in scripture, reading, English grammar and composition, writing, arithmetic, English history, geography, school management, and either algebra or geometry or mechanics or the elements of physical science. There were optional subjects too, and he also had to teach a class in the presence of an inspector.

My compatriots and I had to undergo much of what our Victorian counterparts had experienced. Mind you, we didn’t have to pump water from the well; sweep the classrooms, the toilets, the chapel and the corridors; neither did we have to clean the windows, nor have hot water for bathing only once a week!!

Comments made by the first Principal on some of the material he had to shape into schoolmasters make interesting reading:-

I wonder what Principal Venables’ comments were about us?!

(to be continued)