‘The first impression was, to say the least, striking. He was a tall, well-built man with a stern countenance; in contrast to the somewhat tattered gown and mortar-board to which we were used he wore a stiff and perfect gown, black velvet coat and waistcoat, and well-groomed, striped trousers.’
An Old Millhillian recalls his first impression of John McClure in 1891
It feels entirely appropriate in this centenary year that the Old Millhillians Club should commission and publish this tribute to Sir John David McClure, The Maker of Mill Hill. The Club was primarily responsible for providing the funding for McClure’s salary during the initial years of his tenure. Old Millhillians dominated the Court of Governors for most of his 31 years as Head. Old Millhillians shouldered the administrative and financial burdens of running the School, allowing him to devote his time to the educational and pastoral needs of the pupils. Wealthy Old Millhillians such as Herbert Marnham and Lord Winterstoke, inspired by McClure’s vision, helped finance the significant building programme that transformed and enlarged the estate so that it was able to accommodate 300 pupils, most of whom were boarders. With Arthur James Rooker Roberts, a man also of great vision, he made Belmont a reality.
Much has been written about McClure. His daughter, Kathleen Ousey, who married an Old Millhillian, wrote a special tribute ‘McClure of Mill Hill’. Other sources we have used include Roddy Braithwaite’s ‘History of Mill Hill, Strikingly Alive’, Gowen Bewsher’s ‘Nobis, the Story of the Old Millhillians Club’ and Norman Brett-James ‘History of Mill Hill 1807-1923’. The Club’s challenge in publishing this tribute has been to find an original approach to a well-documented story.
What we have set out to do is paint a holistic picture of McClure as portrayed by his interests and relationships. We didn’t want a single view of the great man but a range of perspectives, so we have cajoled specialist contributing authors to do the work: Kevin Kyle, current Director of Music at Mill Hill, has written on McClure and Music; former Chaplain the Reverend Dr Richard Warden on McClure and Religion; former Headmaster William Winfield and current Head Jane Sanchez on McClure as Leader, Head and Educationalist, and Ed Holland (McClure
2017-21) who is currently on the Officer Training programme at Sandhurst, has written on the impact of the Great War. John Hellinikakis (School 1976/ Murray 1977-81), Chair of the Old Millhillians Relations Committee, writes on McClure’s close and enduring relations with the Old Millhillian community, and I pored over 31 years of minutes of meetings of the Court of Governors! Clare Lewis (Ridgeway 1977-79) has worked as editorial consultant on the project, and Laura Turner has provided picture research assistance and vital administrative back-up. Thanks too to David Palmer for his design insights and patience.
The final bonus was discovering what we think is new (to us in any event) material. McClure contributed to the ‘Cambridge Essays in Education’, first published in 1917, edited by Arthur Christopher Benson and republished in 2015 by Creative Media Partners, Scholar’s Choice Edition. This work was selected by scholars ‘as being culturally important, and part of the knowledge base of civilisation as we know it’. We reproduce McClure’s chapter ‘Preparation for Practical Life’ in full as an Appendix.
This supplement has been a one-time opportunity for us all to take an in depth look at McClure’s talents, style, values and, above all, legacy. Each author, quite independently, has drawn uncannily similar conclusions about McClure as a person, and has found in McClure’s Mill Hill his relevance to and impact on the School we know and respect today. My thanks to all contributors for their endeavours and commitment.
Sir John McClure, Headmaster of Mill Hill School 1891-1922: .................................................................... page 7
An introduction by former Headmaster William Winfield
Life and Times: an historical timeline of Mill Hill School and McClure 1807-1971................................................ page 13
The Old Millhillians Club and McClure by Chair of the Old Millhillians Relations Committee, .......................... page 21 John Hellinikakis (School 1976/ Murray 1977-81)
The Court of Governors and McClure by Chair of the Old Millhillians Club, ................................................... page 27 Peter Wakeham (Burton Bank 1960-64)
Religion and McClure by former Mill Hill School Chaplain, the Reverend Dr Richard Warden ..................... page 43
Music and McClure by Mill Hill School Director of Music, Kevin Kyle............................................................... page 55
The War Years by Officer Cadet in Intermediate Term, Edward Holland (McClure 2017-21) ............................ page 65
Sports and McClure: a photographic album and sporting reminiscences from daughter Kathleen Ousey’s book ‘McClure of Mill Hill’ ............................................................................................. page 79
Education:
Walking the footsteps of a giant: William Winfield reflects on his Headmastership, McClure and Mill Hill School; A Living Legacy: current Head of Mill Hill School, Jane Sanchez shares her passion for Mill Hill School and the inspiration she finds in Sir John McClure ................................................................................................. page 83
Appendicies:
Appendix I: 1907 Centenary Appeal by John McClure.............................................................................. page 101
Appendix II: Essay on Education by John McClure....................................................................................page 105
NEWLY-APPOINTED HEADS TEND TO FACE ONE OF TWO CHALLENGES: SOMETIMES OUTGOING INCUMBENTS HAVE STEERED THEIR CRAFT WITH GREAT MASTERY BUT THE FUEL HAS BEGUN TO RUN OUT AND THE DIMINISHING BOW WAVE SUGGESTS THAT THERE IS LITTLE FORWARD MOMENTUM – SOME STOKING OF THE BOILER IS NEEDED. ALTERNATIVELY, AN UNFORESEEN STORM HAS FORCED THE SHIP ONTO THE ROCKS AND THE GOVERNORS HAVE TO PLACE ALL THEIR TRUST IN THE NEW APPOINTEE REPAIRING THE DAMAGE. IT WAS THIS LATTER KIND OF EXTREME CRISIS THAT JOHN Mc CLURE FACED WHEN HE ARRIVED AT MILL HILL IN 1891.
The second half of the 19th century was not an auspicious time for Mill Hill. A rapid turnover of four headmaster-clerics failed to keep the ship afloat between 1852 and 1868. It was difficult to recruit boys from a diminishing congregation of Protestant dissenters. Numbers had fallen steadily since Thomas Priestley (1834-52) had retired as Headmaster.
When only three boys arrived for the new school year in September 1868, the decision was taken to close the School. New capital was raised however and Mill Hill re-opened a year later with 34 entrants. The New Foundation introduced a crucial change: henceforth the School ‘shall be open to the sons of parents professing other religious tenets’. This relaxation of the Founders’ prime desire to educate sons of Congregationalists offered recruitment opportunities which the new Headmaster, Dr Weymouth (1869-86), happily exploited. Numbers rose to a peak of 70 in 1880, but then fell steadily again to just 15.
The most famous of Mill Hill’s teachers, James Murray (1873-1884 including his time as a lexicographer working in the Sciptorium) had been a crucial and ambitious player in Weymouth’s team.
When Murray left for Oxford to pursue his edit of a new English Dictionary (ultimately published in 1928 as ‘The Oxford English Dictionary’), Weymouth, now 64, collapsed under the strain and was quickly replaced by Charles Vince (1886-91), a Cambridge don who had briefly taught boys at Repton. That experience was to prove sadly insufficient and within five years the ship was again drifting dangerously off-course.
Vince’s disappointing tenure had the Governors wondering whether Mill Hill was viable and, if so, who precisely would be the man to convert the poisoned chalice into a precious vase offering a burgeoning school an undreamt-of golden era where young men would be instructed in the Faith and the Word and inspired to achieve outstanding academic success and sporting glory. The word ‘rollercoaster’ was too modern to appear in the Murray (Oxford) dictionary. Chambers however provides a helpful definition of the word’s figurative sense: ‘a series of unexpected changes of fortune or emotional swings’. ‘Rollercoaster’ neatly summarises the constant tension and excitement which have characterised much of Mill Hill’s history. The late-Victorian era was no exception, but McClure was destined to flatten those ‘Russian mountains’.
In making their new appointment, the Treasurer Thomas Urquhart Scrutton (School 1840-42) and other Governors of 1891 decided in extremis to throw caution to the wind. From the outset they made clear to everyone that the School would close ‘in the event of the utter falsification of their hopes’. Their choice of new Headmaster was bold. John David McClure was just 31 years old. He was born in Wigan, home of mills and coal mines, but also of a strong Nonconformist community which profoundly influenced his upbringing. His mother was from Kirkcudbrightshire and the McClure line went back to the Isle of Skye, suggesting Presbyterian roots. McClure spoke later of there being an element of Puritanism in his religious belief. He graduated with a London University BA in Intermediate Arts while holding an early teaching position at Hinckley Grammar School.
In 1882 he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Mathematics. Here much of his intellectual strength was honed. He was one who had ‘a strong reverence for fact’ and ‘laid more stress on reasoning than on style’.
He was also highly active in the Nonconformist Union where he was regularly invited to give papers covering topics as diverse as Church Music and Recreation for the Working Classes.
After Cambridge, McClure hesitated over career direction, then headed for the Inner Temple. To be called to the Bar however required an income of at least £150 pa. He did not have it. What was more, he was now married, so needed urgently to find financial stability. Postponing his ambition to become a barrister he took on examining and lecturing for the University of London; he had only recently been appointed Professor of Astronomy at Queen’s College when Mill Hill called. Of his intellectual depth and breadth there was little doubt. But lurking in the minds of the Governors must have been that grave concern that ‘their man’ had no experience of teaching beyond those four years at Hinckley Grammar. Nonetheless the reports from Cambridge suggested that here was someone highly talented academically whose nonconformist credentials were beyond doubt. He arrived at Mill Hill in September 1891, eager to meet the fresh challenge, but also understanding that he was very much ‘on trial’.
The Governors’ courage was fully vindicated. In the end, McClure stayed for 31 years. He fulfilled his first challenge effortlessly. He was exceptionally able in recruiting new boys, increasing the numbers fivefold to well above 300 by the time of the Great War. As a result, the School needed a constant supply of new buildings to provide the necessary domestic and academic facilities. Of these the major ones were the new boarding houses Collinson and Ridgeway, but he was also the inspiration for the building of the new Chapel (the old chapel being converted into the Large), the Marnham Block, the Winterstoke Library, the Fives Courts, the Music School and, lastly, the Gate of Honour. He extended and improved the grounds, upgrading many of the fields for sport. He actively promoted the opening of Belmont in 1912 as the Mill Hill Junior School.
The centennial celebration of 1907, including the notable presence of the Prime Minister Sir Henry CampbellBannerman as guest of honour at Foundation Day, marked the transformation of what had been a struggling minor school into a highachieving and nationally-recognised Public School.
Mill Hill was now able to hold up its head with the best. Forget Thring of Uppingham or Arnold of Rugby; this was the golden era of McClure of Mill Hill!
The more McClure extended his influence over the School, the easier the job seemed; he looked frequently for alternative challenges. He had kept on his original Cambridge and London University links for a few years in case Mill Hill did not work out; he returned frequently now as a guest lecturer. Although he insisted on continuing to teach his specialism, Mathematics, until late in his tenure, he became ever keener to develop his musical interests. At the time few schools recognised Music as an important part of the curriculum although the choral tradition had always been strong in public schools. McClure made music a key feature of boys’ education and contributed by example. As well as encouraging regular Chapel music, he conducted ‘The Messiah’ every Christmas – the Mill Hill Magazine dutifully reported that the Headmaster’s conducting was ‘perfect’. He also contributed by playing the double bass and became an enthusiastic composer. His style was more akin to that of Sir Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) than to such late-19th century choral composers as Elgar, Parry or Stanford. He encouraged boys to play in a newly-formed School orchestra for which he wrote a number of pieces,
starting in 1896 with a humorous overture ‘The Coster’s Saturday Night’. This was just the beginning. Twelve years later he was awarded an extra-mural Music Doctorate from Trinity College, London.
As the running of the School became more familiar, he devoted increasing amounts of time to outside interests. Prime among these was his work for Congregationalism. He was regularly invited to preach, became President of the Congregational Historical Society and eventually in 1919 Chairman of the Congregational Union. He also established what has since become the United Reformed Church in Mill Hill Broadway. His rising reputation as an educationalist brought him to top positions in national organisations, including the Headmasters’ Association and the Headmasters’ Conference. From the beginning he struck up a close rapport with the Old Millhillians. His speeches at the Annual Dinner were much anticipated and never failed to impress and inspire. He also had a family: a wife and three children. Of his intellectual ability to contribute at a parochial and national level there is no doubt. But where did he find the time and energy? His was indeed a life of peerless dedication to the service of others. Small wonder that in 1913 he was awarded a knighthood in recognition of his services to education. Henceforth he was Sir John.
An historical timeline of M c Clure and Mill Hill School 1807-1971
1808
22nd December: first public performance of Beethoven’s Opus 68 Symphony No. 6 Pastoral
1807
Mill Hill School is co-founded as a Grammar School for British Protestant Dissenters by Samuel Favell and Rev John Pye Smith.
1869 - 1886
Thomas Priestley
1834 October to
1852 December Thomas Priestley is Headmaster.
1860
Dr Richard Francis Weymouth is Head: MHS is ‘re-founded’. ‘The School shall be open to the sons of parents professing other religious tenets.’
1873
June: first edition of Mill Hill School Magazine. Henry Tucker, Master, suggested a formation of a society to keep former boys together and unite in support for the School. Gladstone commended it when he distributed prizes on Foundation Day 1879.
First Fives Courts built. Organ replaces harmonium in School chapel.
1874
Swimming bath built.
First Gymnasium built open to the air at the side of the playground.
1874
9th February: John David McClure was born in Wigan eldest son of John and Elizabeth (nèe Hyslop) McClure.
Educated at Holly Mount College, Bury, Lancashire.
1875
First House Burton Bank in Burtonhole Lane.
1876-77
Matriculated at London Unversity Entrance Exhibition to Owens College Manchester.
1877-78
Assistant Master Holly Mount College.
1878
15 Old Millhillians meet at Freemasons Tavern, London. Old Millhillians Club, Rugby Club and Cricket Club are formerly founded.
1878-82
Master, Hinckley Grammar School.
1878
Gained a BA in Intermediate Arts from London University.
1879
2nd October: first Annual Dinner of Old Millhillians Club.
1882
Won Goldsmith’s Scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge to read Mathematics.
Member of the Nonconformist Union at Cambridge Union presenting papers on church music and recreation for the working classes.
As Member of the Cambridge Undergraduate Preachers’ Society, McClure regularly preached in local Free Churches of Cambridge.
1885-90
Appointed Cambridge University Extension Lecturer.
1886
Graduated LLB Cambridge. Awarded Walker Prizeman at Trinity.
1887
17th December, 1887
Admitted at the Inner Temple.
1888
Graduated M.A. Cambridge.
Appointed Professor of Astronomy at Queen’s College, London.
1889
15th July 1889: Married to Mary Johnston at St Mary Church, in the Parish of Lewisham.
July/August 1889: Honeymoon in USA; returning to settle in Ladywell near Lewisham.
1894
School becomes centre for Oxbridge examinations for the first time.
1890
17th May 1890: Birth in Lewisham of Kathleen Mary Johnstone McClure, Author of ‘McClure of Mill Hill’.
November 17th, 1890 Called to the Bar.
1891
John McClure appointed Headmaster of Mill Hill School, aged 31.
1892
21st March 1892: Birth in Hendon of Keith Alister Johnstone McClure
1894
19th February 1894: Birth in Mill Hill of Lilian Christine Johnstone McClure.
1895
Mill Hill Chapel Devotional Services Book published.
1896
School Orchestra founded.
The newly established school orchestra played McClure’s overture ‘The Coster’s Saturday Night’.
11th September 1896: Death of Thomas Urquhart Scrutton, Treasurer of Mill Hill School 1863-1896
1898
The New Chapel consecrated on Foundation Day.
The Large opened.
Much needed levelling of Top Field is undertaken.
1899-1902
11th October 189931st May 1902: The Boer Wars.
1901
22nd January 1901: Death of Queen Victoria.
22nd July 1901: Taff Vale decision by House of Lords that Trade Unions were liable for loss of company profit as a result of strike action. Widely believed to be the spur for the formation and growth of the Labour Party.
1900
Tuck Shop opens.
1900
McClure becomes member of the Senate of London University.
1901
Resigned from Senate.
1902
A staggering five Oxbridge Scholarships awarded.
1902
Elected to Council of Mansfield College, Oxford.
1903 Scriptorium No. 2 and Collinson House open. Collinson was the first ‘Out-House’.
1903
Graduated music degree, London.
President of British Chautauqua, an adult education and social movement in USA.
1904
College, Oxford
Joint Hon Secretary Incorporated Association of Headmasters.
1905 Gymnasium No 2 opens.
Foundation of the Rifle Club.
1905/6: Classroom block opens, named after Herbert Marnham, a major Old Millhillian benefactor. Herbert Marnham
1906 Elected to Corporation of Trinity College of Music.
1907
Prime Minister, Sir Henry CampbellBannerman is guest of honour at centenary Foundation Day. Marking the transformation of a minor public school into a nationallyrecognised Public School.
1910
6 May 1910: Death of Edward VII; George V reign commences.
1908
Mussons, the School shop purchased and renovated to become ‘The Grove’.
Two new Eton Fives Courts built.
1909
Priestley and Weymouth formed.
1909
1907
Chairman of Congregational Hymnal Committee.
Graduated D Mus London.
Parks
1910 Purchase of Parks field.
1911 Officers Training Corps (CCF from1948) formed.
Ridgeway opens.
1911-12 Land acquired for ultimate use for ‘Fishing Net’, Buckland Pool and Car Park.
1910
Elected to Committee of Incorporated Association of Headmasters
Belmont Music School
1912 With McClure’s backing, Belmont opens as Junior School.
Portrait painted to commemorate his twenty-first year as Headmaster.
Music School opens.
1912
Formation of Teachers Registration Council.
McClure celebrates 21 years as Headmaster.
1913 MHS came 2nd in the ‘Schools of the Empire Competition’.
1913
3 June 1913: McClure is knighted – the first ‘Incorporated Association of Headmasters’ Headmaster to be honoured.
1914-18
28 July 1914 - 11 November 1918: The Great War.
By the war’s end a total of 1,118 pupils, OMs and masters had served in the forces. A total of 1,919 awards were given for service and valour. Trench digging, route marches, military lecture and physical training become part of the school day.
1923
April 1923: McClure Memorial edition of the Mill Hill School Magazine – the only one of its kind in the School’s history.
1924
New science block opened by Prince of Wales.
18th October 1924: Cecil Goyder made the first twoway radio communication between Britain and New Zealand from the Mill Hill School Science School
Winterstoke House opens.
1971
1920 Gate of Honour was inaugurated by General Lord Horne.
1914-15
President of the Incorporated Association of Headmasters.
1914
August: President of Mill Hill War Service Association
November: Chairman of the Education Sub Committee, Professional Classes War Relief Council.
1916 Publication of ‘Congregational History’.
1918
Vice Chairman of the Corporation of Trinity College of Music.
1919
At the invitation of George V, Sir John attends a Thanksgiving Service for the deliverance of the First World War held at St Paul’s Cathedral. A commemorative mural hangs in the Royal Exchange.
McClure chairs the committee behind the new Congregational Church Hymnal.
Treasurer of the Incorporated Association of Headmasters
1920
May 1920: As Chairman of the Congregational Union he delivers an address on the importance of public worship.
Chairman of the Corporation of Trinity College of Music.
Received the Freedom of the City of Wigan.
1922
McClure day boy house was opened.
18th February 1922: John McClure dies at MHS aged 62.
‘He seemed to me an enormously impressive presence, with full academicals clothing his large dignified figure... The new Head was of course very much on his trial in our eyes. Not many failings could have escaped our vigilance, but beyond finding a few tricks of expression to make matter of jesting, we failed to discover any serious delinquencies, even by the schoolboy’s exacting standard.’
If it hadn’t been for the Old Millhillians, Mill Hill School may well have closed in 1891. John Hellinikakis (School 1976/Murray 1977-81) reveals the role the Old Millhillians played in putting the young and inexperienced John M c Clure up for the role and therefore securing the School’s future
SIR JOHN Mc CLURE WAS APPROACHED TO BECOME HEADMASTER OF MILL HILL IN APRIL 1891 BY TWO OLD MILLHILLIANS FROM A SUB-COMMITTEE OF THE MILL HILL SCHOOL COURT OF GOVERNORS. THIS SUBCOMMITTEE WAS CHARGED BY THE COURT OF GOVERNORS TO FIND A HEADMASTER TO TURN AROUND THE SCHOOL’S FORTUNES. BUT WHAT MOTIVATED OLD MILLHILLIANS TO APPROACH Mc CLURE TO LEAD THE SCHOOL? M c CLURE WAS WITHOUT DOUBT A LARGER THAN LIFE CHARACTER, CHARISMATIC AND LEARNED. HOWEVER, AT THE TIME OF HIS APPOINTMENT HE WAS THE RELATIVELY YOUNG AGE OF 31 AND LACKED A TRACK RECORD OF ACHIEVEMENT AT A SENIOR POSITION IN A STRUCTURED EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT.
In a letter, featured in ‘McClure of Mill Hill’, a tribute biography written by his daughter, Kathleen Ousey, McClure writes that he was approached for the appointment of Headmaster by two Old Millhillians friends, Ernest Hampden Cook (187477) and Thomas Arnold Herbert (1878-81), whom he met while studying for a Masters at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1882-86. His relationship with these two Old Millhillians was to prove invaluable: a combination of sheer numbers of Old Millhillians on the Court of Governors and their continuous financial support meant Old Millhillians had effective control of the School and these friends were able to gain support for him across the Court. The offer to McClure of this prestigious headmastership, with hardly an explanation, dramatically changed his circumstances from being an irregular earner without a clear future elevating him to a prominent position with a regular income.
the School, on the point of closure as pupil numbers had fallen to an unviable level – a mere 61 pupils, needed a similarly dramatic turnaround in fortune.
After the comparative failure of McClure’s predecessor, Charles Vince (Headmaster 1886 - 1891) to increase pupil numbers, the Old Millhillians and Court were determined to revive the School’s fortunes. McClure knew that he was taking on a risk and might fail. Nevertheless, the Old Millhillians had rallied, found their man, and were determined to succeed.
However, having found a Headmaster, there was one further problem to contend with. Since the School was not a viable concern, it did not have the funds to secure McClure’s employment. In one of his last acts as Treasurer of the School/Court of Governors, Thomas Urquhart Scrutton (School 1840-42) wrote to the sub-committee tasked with finding a new Headmaster that additional funds needed to be raised or McClure could not be confirmed. A confidential letter was then circulated with an ambitious target of raising £2,500. The response from Old Millhillians was almost immediate and positive enabling McClure to be confirmed within days.
Once McClure’s position was confirmed by letter on 11 July 1891, Thomas Scrutton instructed McClure that his task was to improve the School’s fortunes by concentrating on the educational and pastoral needs of the boys while ‘providing the connecting link binding the Old Boys together’. He was specifically not required to concern himself with the administrative and financial aspects of the job which were to be shouldered by Old Millhillians: shortly after his appointment had been made, several Governors retired and the Old Millhillians Club nominated more Old Millhillians to the Court with the specific aim of strengthening practical support for what was considered a risky appointment, even if they and McClure shared the same vision for the School.
Other prominent Old Millhillians, who supported and had close personal relationships with McClure, were Herbert Marnham (School 1874-80), who was another old Cambridge friend of over ten years, and E H Mayo Gunn (School 1870-76) who in turn secured the interest of another eminent Old Millhillian,
William Wills (later Lord Winterstoke) (School 184247). In 1897, after the death of Scrutton (Treasurer of the School for 33 years between 1863 and 1896), Gunn took over the role and under his encouragement Marnham, Lord Winterstoke, Richard (Dickie) Buckland (School 1878-84), and Albert Spicer (189599), became huge financial benefactors to the School.
This financial support from old millhillians, who dominated the court of governors, heralded the commencement in 1905 of a major estate expansion programme starting with the new chapel and other important buildings still standing today: the Marnham Block, Winterstoke Library, the McClure Music school and close to McClure’s heart, the Cricket Pavilion.
A further measure of support McClure enjoyed from this group of old boys is encapsulated in an anecdote from a conversation between McClure and another newly appointed headmaster, also a friend. The new Headmaster complained that as a Master, he had only his Headmaster to report to, but now as a Headmaster, himself, he had 12 tyrants to answer to. McClure replied that he had 18 Governors and a Secretary to report to. The surprised friend said, ‘and you are alive to tell the tale?’ To which McClure replied, ‘Yes, because I have 19 friends and 19 coadjutors1.’
As instructed by Scrutton, McClure made efforts to maintain constant communication with Old Millhillians far and wide. Not only did he regularly attend the London annual dinners, where he gave 26 informative speeches during his tenure, he often attended the Northern, the Scottish, and the West of England functions, all held in Spring. Out a total of nine Cambridge dinners held in 14 years, he attended six. If staying at The Lion pub in Cambridge, he would often invite Old Boys to breakfast – occasions that were described as great fun. Indeed, as a result of the enthusiasm created by McClure’s new appointment, not only were new provincial dinners instituted including one in Leeds, but a Guarantee Fund was established to help insulate the School from an expected financial crisis.
By 1902, McClure was pleased to report at the Old Millhillians Club Annual Dinner that the school had achieved five University Scholarships, far higher than the share of peer schools.
One of the greatest shows of affection by the Old Millhillians for McClure was in 1912, when he celebrated his 21st year of Headmastership at an Old Millhillians Club dinner that followed celebrations at the School. The dinner was attended by many Old Millhillians from across the country, who made speeches in praise of McClure. When McClure rose to speak, in what the attending newspaper reporters termed: ‘Indescribable enthusiasm,’ the attendees chanted, ‘McClure is Mill Hill and Mill Hill is McClure!’
But if McClure’s successful tenure was built on the foundations of the support of rich, committed, and mature Old Millhillians already in service to the Club and School as Governors, he created a whole new generation of Old Millhillian supporters from the pupils during his time as Headmaster.
McClure was a complex character; a man of his time, but progressive; a polymath with multiple interests in mathematics, music, theology, and education. Pupils were a little in awe in his presence and he was not averse to a little sarcasm, but his most endearing traits, and why many pupils were so fond of him, were his paternal instinct, generosity, and kindness.
He took an interest in all his pupils during their time at Mill Hill and continued to do so when they left. Of the many letters between Old Millhillians and himself, which appear in his daughter’s biography, there is a particularly poignant example where he commiserates with an Old Millhillian, whose daughter has died. Obvious from the many letters is that old boys continued to communicate with McClure long after they left the School, often concerning very personal matters.
In another letter, McClure thanks an Old Millhillian for the gift of a cheque and acknowledges what the donor suspects, that McClure cannot accept it for himself, but he adds that there is a pupil of meagre resources, who has need of clothes for whom these funds will be useful. This letter not only exemplifies the esteem that McClure is held by an Old Millhillian, but also his attention to the needs to those within his charge.
Sadly, in his third decade at Mill Hill, the war broke out and McClure came to the terrible realisation that almost every Old Millhillian, who had fallen or was wounded during the conflict had been one of his pupils and he could name them all. McClure’s war is covered in another chapter The War Years 1914-1918 (see page 95), but it is apparent that McClure’s correspondence with old boys hit a whole new level of intensity, whether it was supporting a pupil’s decision to go to war, reassure an Old Millhillian or parent, or to commiserate for a loss of a son, husband, or brother.
The Old Millhillians Club took a risk that McClure was the man to turn around the fortunes of the School and they supported him unquestionably. Fortunately, McClure rose to that challenge and set the School on a trajectory, from which Mill Hill has never looked back.
This commemorative badge was awarded by the Old Millhillians Club to Annie Pearse Lady Resident or Matron of School House from 18991926 in celebration of her 21st anniversary at the School. Arguably, Annie was the first female Honorary Member of the Old Millhillians Club. Aside from being held with esteem and affection by Old Millhillians she was also a muchappreciated stalwart of the McClures so much so she accompanied Sir John’s widow to his funeral in 1922. Upon her retirement the Club presented her with a jewelled watch. She bequeathed the badge to Mary, Lady McClure, whose family in turn repatriated it to the Club. Each year the badge is presented to the incoming Vice President at the Old Millhillians Club Annual Dinner.
‘His reports to the Governors were never prolix and always informing, and he would often listen to a discussion for some time before giving his verdict. His eyes would blend vigilance and amusement, and then he would sum up the discussion with a clarity of judgement which illuminated the whole situation.’
A report from a Governor of the time
Peter Wakeham (Burton Bank 1960-64), Chair of the Old Millhillians Club, has trawled 31 years of copperplate Court of Governors’ committee meeting ledgers to understand how the financial and administrative support they provided allowed M c Clure and the School to flourish
I n S I r John Mc c lure’S era , the c ourt M et Monthly – More frequently than the current c ourt of G overnor S . the aG enda
I te MS dIS cu SS ed were recorded I n
G reat deta I l , typ Ically I n the Mo S t eleG ant, G ra MM at Ically perfect copperplate handwr I t I nG. the MI nute S probably took lonG er to wr I te than the M eet I nG took I t S elf!
The minutes also suggest that the Court was more engaged with operational matters than would be the case today. The Business Committee and Finance Committee in particular appear to be heavily involved in the management and reporting on day to day commercial matters. Sir John was left to ‘run the School’.
On 31st January 1922, the Governors met as usual at the Baptist Church House in Mill Hill.
The meeting opened at 4.45pm. The Right Honourable Sir Albert Spicer, Bart was in the Chair. His co-Governors at the meeting were Dr H Morley Fletcher, Messrs R W B Buckland, A W Pickard – Cambridge MA, F A Wright MA, T A Herbert KC, N Micklem KC, H Marnham, G W Knox, E S Curwen and F L Lapthorn.
Sir John and the Clerk attended and Dr H J W Martin was also in attendance.
The agenda was a full one but the items involved nothing atypical: the Headmaster’s Report; the Treasurer’s Statement; the Report of the Business Committee; the Report of the Medical Officer on School Meals; Board of Education negotiations on Belmont pensions; presentation of a silver salver and cheque to Dr Martin for long and honourable services to the School; discussion on the Board of Education’s views on the issue of notices to Local Education Authorities regarding the offer of places under the School Teachers’ Superannuation rules; report from the consulting Dentist on dental decay among pupils.
The Clerk was instructed to circulate a list of dates for the meetings of the Court in 1922. It was resolved to follow the same procedure as to days as in 1921, but to alter the hour of meeting to 4.30pm, and to provide tea at that hour.
Eighteen days later, Sir John McClure passed away, six days before the next meeting of the Court.
There is no hint in the January 1922 Court minutes of any health issues regarding McClure. It is ironic that the great man’s final Court meeting was so spectacularly normal, although, had one known it was his finale, there was still much to applaud in his Headmaster’s Report:
The Mill Hill pupil population was 282 compared to 61 when he was appointed. Boarders were 260 vs 42. There were a further 83 pupils at Belmont.
Oxbridge entrances were successful and Mill Hill had obtained its first ever mathematics scholarship at Hertford, Oxford, another at Corpus, and a Classics scholarship at Queens, Cambridge.
Two additional School Entrance Scholarships were recommended for approval.
Captain G J V Weigall, former Cambridge Cricket Blue and Kent CC XI and sports journalist for The Times, was to be appointed to take charge of cricket at the School.
The revision of the Service Book for the Chapel had been completed and was ready for printing.
Issues to be resolved had a familiar ring to them. Boarding accommodation was insufficient and the issue was referred to the Business Committee. Influenza was rife and Sir John recommended inoculation in a letter to parents:
Plus ça change!
Sir John McClure’s relationship with the Court of Governors evolved over a period of 30 years.
He inherited a financially fragile School with an indifferent reputation. By the time of his death, Mill Hill had been transformed and much of what he achieved remains as one of the cornerstones of the School’s value system and real estate.
It is hard to imagine what was on McClure’s mind when he met for a ‘conversation’ with Governors on 9th June 1891, having failed to attend the original meeting scheduled for the day before. He would have been aware that Charles Vince, the Headmaster since 1886 had resigned on 4th June 1891, the School having been placed in the hands of the Committee of Governors for over six months since 13 November 1890.
Mill Hill School was in serious financial difficulties. The Court was recruiting a new Headmaster. Mr Paton of Rugby, Mr Green of The Leys and Mr Jessop, senior maths master at Reading had all turned down the opportunity. McClure had no track record as a Headmaster or as a turn-around specialist. Yet on 24 April 1891, at a Life Governors meeting called by Special Notice from the Court of Governors, the Life Governors (all Old Millhillians) had presented a report recommending that Mr J D McClure be appointed as Headmaster, as explained in the chapter ‘McClure and the Old Millhillians Club’ (See page 22).
A Guarantee Fund was to be set up, comprising £700 from members of the Court, £500 from the Old Millhillians Club and further promises of £165 per annum for three years and 20 guineas for two years. McClure accepted the offer to become Headmaster on 11th July 1891.
The governors set him his initial task which was to strengthen the teaching staff. In the first meeting, on the 23 September 1891, he reported on new appointments. In December, he reported on the establishment of a Tuck Shop following complaints from pupils of prices at the local shop.
Initial progress was slow and the school’s finances remained fragile, with losses to the tune of £2,000 per annum and no increase in pupil numbers.
Capital expenditure (CapEx) was restricted, including postponement of the renovation of the gymnasium floor. In April 1892, a £5,000 loan secured against (the original) Burton Bank and the Sanitorium was borrowed at 5% from Mr Enoch Taylor.
In 1893, came the first real indicators of improvement. In January 1893, McClure reported a better revenue per pupil mix – 79 boys at the School of which 42 were boarders vs 37 in the prior term. By May, there were 95 and a further 4 entered in June. Entries at that time did not have the Autumn Term peak that Mill Hill sees today.
In July 1893, McClure published a new Prospectus which no longer referred to day pupils. The Court gave McClure discretion to admit day pupils, but the strategic direction was clear: Mill Hill was to be primarily a boys’ boarding school – and so it remained for a large part of the 20th century.
By September, there were 119 pupils at the School. The Treasurer, Mr Buckland, proposed that four hot baths be fixed at the Swimming Pool – at a maximum cost of £50. Things were looking up, so much so that in July 1894, McClure proposed raising the school fees for boys aged under 11. The Court postponed a decision on this – several times. Pupil number growth was the preferred driver of revenue growth – and it was successful. By January 1895, the pupil population was 160.
William Henry Wills (School 1842-47), later 1st Baron Winterstoke, was a member of the wealthy Wills family and worked for the family tobacco firm from an early age. In 1858 he went into partnership with two of his cousins to take over WD and HO Wills which later became the Imperial Tobacco Company and is today Imperial Brands plc. He was a Governor and subsequently Chairman of the Court.
By 1895, McClure clearly had the confidence of the Court and Sir William. He had doubled pupil numbers in four years while patiently accepting the financial constraints he had inherited. Moreover, he had also found the time to compile a Book of Services for use in the chapel. But the time had now come to invest in fixing the estate which had so long been neglected.
The Court approved a number of CapEx projects in quick succession; a project to provide heating in the chapel along with a budget of £20 for repairing the organ; an extension to the kitchen and construction of a new pantry; a hot water system for School House.
At the 19 November 1895 Court meeting, the Governors congratulated McClure on his election to the Headmaster’s Conference and approved a budget of £100 for advertisements to promote the School.
At the 21 January 1896 Court meeting there was much to celebrate. Pupil numbers were up to 168 and the School had made a surplus of £850.
Sir William offered to lend a sum to build a new dwelling house for the McClure family. A Special Committee of the Court resolved to meet with a local landlord to discuss the possibility of leasing a new building and to meet with Sir William regarding the possibility of him contributing to the construction of a new chapel – the one we all know and admire today.
At the meeting of 30 March 1896, Sir William Henry Wills was elected as the first Chairman of the Court and so began a period of unprecedented expansion of the school estate.
A Finance Committee and Buildings Committee were established to review a number of important projects for repair, to maintain the estate and outline plans for a dwelling house for McClure and the new School chapel. Sir William agreed to lend up to £4,000 at 5% over seven years so that the School could meet sundry creditors and pay off a few small loans on the Balance Sheet. By April, plans for the new chapel were approved and a tender process was initiated. In June, Sir William advised the Court that he had purchased land adjacent to the School and offered to present a piece of it to provide a dwelling house for McClure.
Compared to the relative calmness of his first four years as Headmaster, McClure’s feet never seemed to touch the ground during the Wills era. The pace of change was rapid by any standards.
July 1896: Tender for new chapel approved at maximum cost of £4,200. McClure confirms £3,000 donations already committed. Sir William offers a further £500.
October 1896: chapel stone laid by Sir William
November 1896: Sir William purchases a cricket field for lease back to the School.
July 1897: Sir William pays for heating of chapel and swimming bath.
February 1899: McClure is elected to the Parliamentary Committee of the Headmasters Association.
June 1899: Sir William offers to donate £1,000 to enable Chemical Laboratories to be built and Music Rooms to be upgraded.
February 1900: approval for new Tuck Shop (completed September 1900).
October 1900: new Boarding House proposed; new library building completed.
December 1900: new laboratories completed; fit-out of library completed.
But rapid expansion came at a cost. In November 1900, Sir William declined to advance any more to the School and recommended that existing debts be reduced. Despite a pupil population in excess of 200, the Finance Committee decided to freeze 1901 CapEx and undertook a detailed review of the School’s cost structure, including the sale of cows on the School farm to Friern Barnet Dairy Farm! The pressures to contain costs lasted until April 1902.
Rapid expansion also took a toll on McClure personally: in October 1901 he resigned as Headmaster of Mill Hill on grounds of ill health.
Uncharacteristically, he handled his resignation in a very clumsy way. He made his intentions known to staff before advising the Governors – for which he was reprimanded and subsequently highly apologetic. Unsurprisingly the Court intervened and succeeded in persuading him to change his mind. At a special
Court Meeting on 5 November 1901, the Court accepted his withdrawal of his resignation.
In April 1902, the Court set up a Special Committee to consider and report on a Scheme of Enlargement of the School. In July, the Committee recommended building a new boarding house to accommodate 40 pupils. In October, the Court sanctioned the purchase of two plots of land to give significant additional frontage to the School.
At the Court Meeting of 25 March 1903, the principles of the House system were laid in a report from the Treasurer. Finance was as much a factor as the boarding environment. A school of 300 boys was envisioned – 100 in School House (reduced from 123) and the remaining 200 accommodated in houses each designed to take about 40 boys. The question arose as to whether the houses should be Hostels or Boarding Houses. In the former, the Housemaster received a fixed salary and his duties were magisterial. He had nothing to do with the boarding of the boys and got no profit from it. A Matron was in charge of all domestic arrangements and the fees were paid to the Treasurer. The Boarding House system was more entrepreneurial, whereby the masters undertook the risk of building and furnishing the houses at their own expense. Tuition fees were paid to the Treasurer and Boarding Fees to the Housemaster. This business model evolved whereby ‘the Governors owned the house and rented it to the master, who would pay the tuition fees and earn a profit out of fees charged to parents’. Food for thought!
The Governors decided to run the two systems concurrently and, following input from other Headmasters (including Rugby, Charterhouse, Repton and Marlborough), drew up a set of rules for a Boarding House system. The Headmaster was to have absolute discretion as to which House a boy was allocated, and School House was the priority to fill. No switching between houses was permitted.
The Housemaster was responsible to the Headmaster for the regulation and good management of the house. Collinson House was the first new house in 1903 Mr Hallifax was offered the tenancy at £400 per annum with a guarantee of 40 boys at a boarding fee the same as School House – 22 guineas per term – and hence an income of about £2,700 per annum (£334,000 in 2021 money).
Expansion of the School estate continued with the opening ceremony of the Murray Scriptorium taking place on 17 December 1903. In March 1904, the Sub Committee of the Finance Committee submitted a scheme for a special appeal in connection with the centenary of the School in 1907. The appeal would fund a plan to enlarge the School to accommodate 300 boys, creating essentially the fabric of the Quad that was still in place in the 1960s. New additions included: the Large for assemblies; 15 classrooms; heating for new buildings; School House and a swimming bath. The plan was approved at a meeting of the Court on 22 February 1905.
The 1906 spring holiday was a busy one for McClure. He took his leisure time to prepare three significant papers for the Court. In anticipation of legislation that would require all schools to be inspected, McClure formally proposed that Mill Hill should aim to be inspected by the Joint Board of the Oxford and Cambridge universities. He further proposed that exams should be undertaken in July instead of December and that the system of School Certificates should replace current examinations. His third paper proposed a system of annual salary reviews for masters. The Finance Committee considered in depth and approved this proposal finally in February 1908, with the proviso that it was a matter of School policy but not a contractual commitment to the teaching staff.
In 1906, the Governors adopted a rule that no boy would be admitted as a pupil of Mill Hill School unless he was vaccinated against small pox. In July 1906, McClure and the Court received what is a now a familiar letter from a prospective parent, Oswald Earp. In the letter he stated that he would not send his boys to Mill Hill since he considered compulsory vaccination to be ‘a violation of elementary human rights’ and a totally unproven and even dangerous medical intervention. Plus ça change.
The 1907 Centenary celebrations went ahead as planned and Mill Hill was honoured by the Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman, attending the event and giving the prizes.
In October 1907, a Sub Committee was set up to consider the future constitution of the Court recommended that it was desirable that the Court
of Governors include ‘personas of experience of other schools or persons of special educational eminence provided that the full predominance of Old Millhillians remains assured’.
The expansion of the School estate remained on track. Sir William made a gift to the School of £10,000 which facilitated the building of the Winterstoke Library. However, in January 1908, the Court rejected as undesirable a proposal to lease Bittacy House as a Junior preparatory school – presumably as a result of concerns that Mill Hill pupil numbers would be cannibalised by a focused prep school. This concern was subsequently proved unfounded when this idea returned a few years later in the guise of Belmont.
There was a change of pace in 1909: at the 31 March Court meeting, the Governors decided to reduce the unsecured loans of Lord Winterstoke. CapEx was confined to urgent priorities. However, in April the following year,
Lord Winterstoke offered to sell a plot of his land for a new House to accommodate 45 pupils. The transaction completed a month later and in December 1910 Lord Winterstoke loaned £10,000 at 3% secured against Collinson to build the new House.
On 29th January 1911, Lord Winterstoke died, aged 80, without heirs, leaving £2.5 million – the equivalent today of close to £310 million. The Court of Governors are said to have assumed that his will would include a clause writing off his loans and mortgages with regard to the School. However, that was not to be: the executors of the Lord Winterstoke’s estate recommended to the Court the institution of a sinking fund under which all the mortgages – approximately £40,000 (£4.9 million in 2021 money) – could be paid off over 30 years. If that proposal was approved by the Court, the Winterstoke estate would agree to lend a further £3,000 to fund the purchase of two fields in Hammers Lane opposite the West Grove Estate – ten acres of land adjoining the School.
On 1 February 1912, the Court approved the sinking fund, acknowledging that, for at least another 10 years, CapEx would be strictly limited and there was to be ‘great economy in the general management’.
Meanwhile the Court approved a proposal from the Old Millhillians Club to present a portrait of McClure and build a Music School to celebrate his 21 years as Headmaster.
For this £3,000 needed to be raised, most of which had already been committed and donated by Old Millhillians.
In June 2012, arrangements were concluded between the Court and Rooker Roberts regarding the establishment of Belmont. Rooker Roberts drove a hard bargain. Belmont was to be licenced for 10 and ultimately 30 pupils. All boys entering Mill Hill under the age of 13 had to be sent to Belmont until they reached the age of 13. Belmont would be regarded as one of the School houses with equivalent regulations and privileges and paying same fees, for as long as Rooker Roberts remained a master at Mill Hill School.
The pace of change again took its toll on McClure’s health. In November 1912, the Court unanimously agreed to ‘grant Dr J D McClure prolonged leave of absence in accordance with the recommendations of the Medical Officers’. Dr Arthur S Way was appointed as temporary Headmaster to hold the fort for two terms.
On 16 July 1913, the Court of Governors met at 6pm in Common Room 12 of the House of Commons. In the Chair was Sir Albert Spicer, Bart MP. The Chairman moved and the Vice Chairman seconded: ‘that the Court of Governors Offers its hearty congratulations to the Headmaster upon the honour recently conferred upon him by His Majesty, and desire to express its contuniued appreciation of the services tendered by Sir John McClure to Mill Hill School and to the education throughout the country’.
This was carried unanimously.
Sir John McClure was to be one of only six Headmasters of Headmaster Conference schools to be knighted. At the 2 October 1913 meeting of the Court, the Governors reiterated their congratulations to Sir John personally and welcomed him back from his sabbatical.
What is striking about the business of the Court during World War I is the normality of the agenda. Sir John continued to report on matters in a similar vein to pre-war meetings remaining sharply focused on maintaining the pupil population at pre-war levels, School and University entrance scholarships, teaching staff remuneration and the implementation of a Masters Retirement Fund. He always commented on the health of the School in his report and from time to time there was a report on dental hygiene and the percentage of pupils with tooth decay.
In fact, the size of the pupil population was remarkably unaffected by the war, despite pupils being forced to leave school prematurely due to call up for military duties. Nevertheless, McClure expressed his concern to the Court that pupils were leaving ‘earlier than desirable for their selfdevelopment’ and that he was appointing less able and mature prefects and monitors.
In October 2015, three Belgian boys entered the school following a request from the War Refugees Committee. The Court then
authorised Sir John to admit a maximum of 10 sons of Belgian refugees as day boys, free of charges, provided they had access to acceptable guardians.
The number of pupils actually grew in the latter war years and there were a record number of entries in Spring 1919.
Maintaining the quality of teaching staff became an ever-increasing challenge as masters were called up for the forces and difficult to replace. In February 1916, all masters holding commissions in the Officers Training Corps (OTC) were asked to sign a document whereby they accepted liability to serve in any place outside the United Kingdom.
Sir John reported to the Court that the War Office made repeated demands to the Headmaster’s Conference that only those officers should be spared whose goings ‘would impair the efficiency of the school both military and scholastic’.
Subsequently McClure was authorised by the Court to appeal for the total exemption of Housemasters who were of military age. For the most part, this appeal only delayed the inevitable call-up.
In 1916, the Court requested that the names of the fallen Old Millhillians serving with Colours be added to the report with details of any distinctions gained. These names were not recorded in the Court minutes but comprehensive records were kept, as current pupils will know from the Gate of Honour and the reading out by incumbent Heads during the Remembrance Day Service in chapel of the names of the fallen – just as Sir John did during Sunday chapel services at that time.
The 15 June meeting minutes refer to the death in battle of R A Lloyd, Scholar of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, holder of one of the Wills scholarships but perhaps surprisingly, there is little hint in the minutes of the emotional trauma that the Headmaster must have suffered as he learned of the deaths in battle of former pupils he had
known and taught. Scholarships to the school and to universities remained an important focus for Governors and the Headmaster.
McClure saw fit to initiate discussion with the Court on the future of the curriculum. Greek was compulsory for entrance into Oxford and Cambridge at this time but ‘Modern’ subjects –Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Botany – were increasingly important in newly created local Secondary schools and Germany was already sowing the seeds of its now formidable apprentice system through Vocational and Technical schools. McClure saw the need to place more emphasis on ‘the Modern Side’ but was equally concerned that such pupils ‘failed to show an intelligent interest in History, Literature and the great Ethical and Cultural questions’.
As with all matters affecting education, he took the emerging importance of Science very seriously. He instigated in 1916, and subsequently in 1919, various options for the creation of what we now refer to as the Crick Building (aka the Science Block). He sought and got Court approval in October 1918 for him to join the League for the Promotion of Science in Education.
McClure routinely reported to the Court on the health of the School and the occasional incidences of rubella, measles, chicken pox and even one case of small pox, which was traced to a source in Finchley. In mid-July 1918, there was an outbreak of what turned out to be Spanish Flu that affected over half the School – 145 pupils in total. Isolation measures were put in place and ‘healthy’ boys sent home. Exams were abandoned. A subsequent wave returned in February 1919 – familiar territory!!
War ended on the 11 November 1918 and the Court met on 27 November. The Agenda was business as usual. The 1919 pupil numbers, including a record 45 at Belmont, were 314. On 7 November 1919, the Governors received the following report from the Inspector of the Board of Education:
‘Dr Cookson, the Chief Inspector, stated that the work that Sir John McClure had done – not only at Mill Hill but for education as a whole was very well known. The Governors were to be congratulated on possessing a
Head so eminent in his profession, a man of such wide culture, and of so genial a character, with all of his physical and intellectual activities still unimpaired’
1920 was a busy year. In addition to the routine agenda items, there was considerable time spent on dealing with policy initiatives affecting the future development of the School. The nomination of Representative Governors was approved. Pupils on scholarships were not to exceed 5% of the roll. Day pupils should not exceed 20% of the roll. The Old Millhillians Club made representations to the Court via Sir John regarding the appointment of a curator for the Winterstoke Library and for profits from the Tuck Shop to be used for improving sports facilities at the School. The Club recommended investment in athletics, the appointment of a Games Master and increased salaries for the athletics and cricket coaches and the Groundsman. Sir Ernest Shackleton visited the school in June and gave a short lecture on his Antarctic Expedition.
The War Memorial Fund finally totalled £19,421 and the Gate of Honour was opened by Lord Horne on 30th October 1920.
The King had been asked but the Court was advised by Lord Bryce that the King could not accept an invitation of this kind. The inauguration ceremonies were both religious and military in character.
The challenges of recruiting high-calibre teaching staff persisted in 1921. Four sons of Old Millhillians killed in the war were granted scholarships funded by the Old Millhillians Club Scholarship Fund – set up in 1915 for this purpose – and topped up by the War Memorial Fund. Lord Sumner presented the prizes and gave an address at Foundation Day. Sir Albert Spicer resigned as Chair of the Court in July 1921, a position he had ‘occupied with conspicuous success’ since the death of Lord Winterstoke. His reason was disarmingly candid – ‘deafness’. He was no longer able to keep track of Court discussions. Nathaniel Micklem was elected to replace Sir Albert as Chair of the Court. In September 1921, a Salaries Committee was established to confer with a deputation of Assistant Masters who made recommendations on behalf of the staff for what one
might term a coherent salary structure that took into account; degree and other qualifications; experience and style of work to be performed.
The Court referred the report to the Committee which returned in October with comprehensive recommendations including an increase in masters’ salaries. There are no minutes recording McClure’s response to the deputation or to the report or to the final recommendations. N G Brett James, Housemaster Ridgeway, represented the staff in follow-on communications with the Clerk. He raised the point that Army experience should be taken in to account along with extra duties such as athletics or military.
In October 1921, McClure advised the Court of the sad news of the death of Edward Cunningham, a Burton Bank Monitor, from hypertrophy of the heart. The Coroner held the inquest in the school sanitorium, at which the boy’s father was present.
Sir John McClure was Headmaster of Mill Hill for over 30 years, a tenure far longer than any Head would expect to last today, or indeed in the past 215 years – as the chart opposite shows. There are good reasons why Mill Hill has Houses today named Priestley, Weymouth as well as McClure.
The continuity and stability implied by this length of time on the job almost certainly explains McClure’s enduring impact on the fabric and values of Mill Hill School.
He is often referred to as the ‘Maker of Mill Hill’ and for good reasons. He rescued the school from financial disaster, transformed the estate, and increased the boarding pupil population by 600%.
He could never have achieved what he did without the strong support from the Court of Governors and, as noted elsewhere in this publication, the Old Millhillian community. That support was forthcoming over so many years because McClure delivered on his promises, adored the school and was worshipped by pupil and parent alike. His relationship with the Court was pivotal.
‘He was easy of access, essentially human, and possessed of a very kind heart. His purse was often opened to help boys whose parents were not well-off. The boys were proud of their Headmaster: listening with pleasure to his witty conversation, admiring his remarkable memory and valuing the many striking sermons in which he appealed to them to lead a manly life‘.
The verdict of a Governor of the time
Former School ChaplAin, the Reverend DR Richard Warden reflects on how Mc Clure’s Nonconformist Christian faith and principles guided his approach to education and the development of the school and the pupils’ moral and spiritual compass
On leaving Cambridge, as a young man with a deep Christian faith, McClure had at least one offer to become a Pastor within the Congregational Church, the Nonconformist denomination of which he was a lifelong member. However, he decided his vocation was to education and as a layman in the church, rather than as an ordained minister.
When he was offered the position of Headmaster of Mill Hill in 1891, he understood it as a calling by God, partly because he had not formally aplied for the position, but rather it had been offered to him.
As he said in his Mill Hill centenary speech: ‘I felt that I had received what used to be known as “a call from the Lord” not, like some calls from the Lord, to a larger salary, but to larger service; to greater emoluments, but to greater responsibility.’
Mill Hill was the perfect fit for him, having been founded 84 years earlier in 1807 by a union of three Nonconformist denominations – Congregational, Presbyterian and Baptist – originally as the Protestant Dissenters Grammar School. Although an accurate description, he later explained his dislike of the negative connotation associated with dissent, preferring the more positive aspects of Nonconformism, not least that it was unique among the country’s boarding schools in being non-denominational and ‘devoted to freedom in theology and religion.’
Following one memorable Old Millhillians Annual Dinner in 1912 after 21 years of Headship, he said:
McClure’s Christian faith was at the heart of his vision of true education and, ‘the development of moral and spiritual power was... something to be much thought about and much prayed about.’
The School did not have a Chaplain at that time, but as Headmaster he carried out many of the Chapel roles now associated with chaplaincy, as well as offering spiritual and pastoral care to boys and their families. He also presided at many Old Millhillians’ weddings and any subsequent baptisms, and sadly at too many funerals. In many ways, we might say that the School became his Congregation. Indeed, in his final speech at the end of his year as Chairman to the Congregational Union he said as much: ‘I too, though not a minister in the stricter sense, have a “cure of souls’; so I speak to my fellow-ministers as a brother and a friend.’
Academic achievement was a priority, but for McClure, the development of moral and spiritual power in the boys was an even higher priority as he expressed in his first speech to parents following his appointment. ‘To see a boy morally and spiritually strong, full of reverence for all that was really great and good, and loved by his fellows on account of these things, was to realise what true education meant and was of infinitely greater importance than prizewinning, prizes being after all, but the whips by which boys are goaded to activity.’
Few would detract from that conclusion either during his lifetime, or when reflecting on his contribution to Mill Hill 100 years later.
To understand Mill Hill, and the origins of McClure’s Nonconformist Christian faith, we must briefly go back to 1662. At this pivotal time in British church history, Protestant dissenters rejected Parliament’s 1662 Act of Uniformity that required clergy to give unconditional assent to use only the services found in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, together with a requirement to take an Oath of Canonical Obedience to the Church of England Bishops. In that year, over 2,000 clergy refused to ‘conform’ to this Act, an act of ‘dissent’ which led to them losing their livings. This exodus of clergy came to be known as ‘The Great Ejection’ and signalled the birth of the Nonconformist Christian denominations.
‘I think I may truthfully say without any boasting that I have tried always to live up to the ideals of our first founders, and to carry out, both in letter and in spirit, the wide and Christian spirit in which they laid the foundations of Mill Hill.’
It is fitting that Sir John McClure’s ashes and later those of his wife Lady Mary McClure are laid to rest in the School Chapel, as he was largely responsible for its existence. In his early days as Head, he described himself as being ‘brazen’in his ambition for a new Chapel to be built, which was to be the third in the School’s history. This was to replace the second Chapel which we now know as The Large, because it was too cold and too small to accommodate the School’s growing numbers. He set up a Chapel Fund for this vision to be realised and it was opened on Foundation Day 1898. For 24 years in this beloved Chapel he led School worship, prayed, preached, played music and sang, and those of us who follow him are forever grateful that his ambition became a reality. He would be delighted that ‘his’ Chapel is still at the very heart of the Mill Hill pupil experience.
His final resting place in the Chapel walls near the Head’s stall lies under the Isaac window, which was dedicated to him on Old Boys’ Day in 1922. Overhead, above the window there is a mosaic of angels, together with McClure’s initials and the dates of his tenure at Mill Hill. On the outside of the Chapel, the place is memorialised with a large stone tablet inscribed in Latin which includes the words;
‘In loving memory of John David McClure M.A.; LL.D.; D.Mus... the beloved Headmaster of this School upon whose interest he lavished his every purpose, endeavour and physical power, until he raised it from a humble position to greater prominence.’
As a mark of respect, it became a long-standing school tradition that when boys passed this place on their way to Chapel every day, they removed their hands from their pockets and kept a respectful silence.
In 1912, McClure was invited to give a speech commemorating the 250th anniversary of this event. Apparently, his words caused some controversy, but they give us an insight into his broad and generous understanding of Christian faith. To the consternation of some, he refused to condemn the existence of the established Church of England. Rather he sought to find ways of building bridges of reconciliation, making a plea to ‘bury bitterness and recrimination.’
This approach was to characterise McClure’s attitude to Christian faith while at Mill Hill. Even though he was a committed member of the Nonconformist Congregational denomination, he did not believe it was the duty of the School to espouse a particular version of Nonconformist Christianity. Rather, the essence of Nonconformism was to resist any Christian faith that required unthinking conformity; hence the reason why Nonconformist churches came to be called the Free Churches. He believed that the founders of Mill Hill, ‘wished only that the atmosphere should be absent which puts a premium on conformity.’
He was certainly against proselytising and trying to convert people to a particular faith, for that would go against the spirit of freedom of thought that is at the heart of Nonconformism. It was not the business of the School to train boys to be Nonconformists although he was passionate that the boys grew up to exemplify the faith and values of Christianity, both in word and deed.
The Mill Hill of McClure’s era was made up of pupils from different Christian denominations, largely from the Nonconformist Free Churches and the Anglican Church of England and he saw this as one of the strengths of Mill Hill: ‘this
inter-denominational character is not the least of many advantages of the School. The intelligent understanding of another’s faith might surely lead to the strengthening and development of one’s own.’
To further emphasise his interdenominational approach to faith, comically he once said:
‘I admire that man who on being asked whether he was a Papist or a Baptist replied that he was neither, being a dentist.’
Indeed, he rightly argued there was not sufficient time in school to focus on the differences between Christian denominations. Rather amusingly he points out that: ‘The body of Truth on which Protestant scholars are agreed is so great, and the ignorance of boys so vast and appalling, that I have never had either time or inclination to discuss with them, or present to them, those points in which substantial differences exist.’ Hence, McClure sought to teach and preach the common core of the Christian faith and to find the shared ground between different expressions of Christianity. ‘We seek here to teach that which is characteristic of all Christian faith, but specially distinctive of none.’ Therefore ‘the School Chapel is extra-diocesan and extra-parochial, and in consequence Ministers of many denominations preach to the boys…’
McClure understood the importance of family background for Christian faith and honoured each pupil’s faith inheritance. ‘Religious belief is and ought to be with all of us largely a matter of heredity. It is part of the manifold inheritance which a man receives from his fathers. His birth determines his religious education, the examples of religious life which are set before him for his admiration; the attitude in which he regards the great problems of life; the forms of worship in which he expresses the deep things of the soul. No one who is worthy of the name of Man will lightly value that heredity, or lightly leave the faith of his fathers.’
Delightfully, he encouraged his teachers to adopt what we might call a version of the Golden Rule, by urging them to consider how they would like their own children to be treated at school.
This was, ‘to abstain from anything that may injure the feelings or insidiously change the peculiar denominational opinions of any of his Christian pupils… and must do to the children of others as he would that others should do to a child of his.’ He emphasised that the teaching at Mill Hill ‘was interdenominational in that it aims at helping a boy to live up to the best that is in him, and to realise the higher possibilities of his parents’ form of Faith.’
While not jettisoning his unshakeable Christian belief, one suspects that his broad acceptance of different Christian faith perspectives would have led to his embracing the Mill Hill culture of today, which is enriched by the presence of pupils from many different world faiths and religious traditions. There are strong indications of this. As a young man and undergraduate, he was a founding member and elected President of the Religious Equality Society, and it is said that: ‘He loved the best minds and spirits of all ages and of all faiths, and his wide love of literature was an indication of his desire to have fellowship with the spirit of man in all its noblest creative endeavours.’
This embrace of a wider spiritual understanding was also found in later life. In the aftermath of the First World War, in 1921, the year before he died, McClure wrote to a Professor in Liverpool: ‘I share to the full your belief that a spiritual brotherhood of the human races is the only solution for our difficulties, and the only hope for the world… We shall never realise the ideal in our day, but at least we can help the cause, and bring the happy time a little nearer by our efforts.’ He would be proud of Mill Hill today, which 100 years on, shares this vision and works towards the same end.
McClure believed in social justice as an expression of Christian faith and conscience. Although fully biblical, this emphasis may partially result from his own origins in Wigan, where as a child he witnessed first-hand the hardships of a Lancastrian coal-mining community. Additionally, he would have been acutely aware of the social injustice that Nonconformists had only been allowed full entry to Oxbridge since 1871, just 11 years before he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. Whilst an undergraduate at Cambridge, he actively supported the local churches operating in the poorer slum areas of the city. He joined the Undergraduate Preachers’ Society, regularly preaching in the surrounding Free Churches of Cambridge. Even at that early age, McClure was a gifted and popular speaker, and he was constantly asked to return.
Before Cambridge when teaching in Leicester, McClure was heavily involved in a Working Men’s Institute at Castle End and this too had an impact on his religious commitment to equality. He believed in a Christianity that reached out to others, a later expression of this was that he helped to establish the first Union Church on Mill Hill Broadway in 1908. Indeed, this emphasis on social justice was evident in very many ways while he was at Mill Hill.
He encouraged boys to join the missionary work of the church overseas and was proud that there were more volunteers from Mill Hill for such work than from any other similar-sized school in the country.
He also supported missionary work at home, most notably the famous London Missionary Society.
A very telling example of his belief in Christian social justice came in 1903 when an Old Millhillian was murdered near St Pancras, ironically on Peace Night.
McClure spoke of the School obtaining ‘Christian revenge’ for his murder, by which he meant becoming even more involved in helping to solve the social problems in that part of London.
I suspect he would be full of pride that an Old Millhillian now gives his name to one of the most important and prestigious buildings in that part of London, and indeed the world – the Francis Crick Institute, adjacent to St Pancras Station.
He lamented those boys who did not seek to reach out to help others. For him, noblesse oblige, the Christian duty of Millhillians to help those less fortunate than themselves, was non-negotiable. There is no doubt that he would be fully supportive of Mill Hill’s current ‘A Better Chance’ bursary scheme launched in 2009.
He never lost sight of the fact that many other children in the country had their early lives disfigured by poverty and ignorance and did not have the benefits of a Mill Hill education. On one occasion he lamented: ‘Many of our boys fail to make much of their lives because they never realise any call to personal service.’
Such was his desire that the pupils at Mill Hill would respond to the needs of others with Christian acts of charity, he once had these famous words by the Quaker missionary Stephen Grellet printed on cards and distributed amongst all the boys in School:
‘I shall pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.’
Furthermore, McClure had a grander vision that Mill Hill would truly be a national institution that the country would be the poorer without, not simply for the education that its pupils received, but for the values that it sought to inculcate. This vision has received renewed focus in recent years with the School’s confident interpretation of its Latin motto ‘Instilling values, inspiring minds.’ For McClure, these were the values of Christian Puritans, the spiritual ancestors of the Nonconformists from two centuries earlier. He thought that, ‘Mill Hill existed in order that all that was best in the old Puritan spirit might be embodied in the life of today.’
Today we often refer to Puritanism in a derogatory manner, but McClure thought that the future strength of England depended upon the positive Puritan moral values being taught and lived out by individuals in society. He once told his daughter that pre-eminent among these virtues was: ‘Righteousness, not Love… because Righteousness implies both Truth and Love, whereas Love (looked upon by most people as the virtue par excellence) was apt to degenerate into mere sentimentalism unless wedded to Truth.’
Typically, this theme of compassion for others, demonstrated throughout his life, repeated itself in the very last sermon he preached. He made a plea for his hearers to care for the unhappy and forlorn, suggesting that on our journey through life, we should: ‘dig wells of comfort and strengthening there for those who should travel the same uncertain path.’
For above all else, McClure believed that the School should produce boys with nobility of character.
For him, education was not simply about classroom instruction or imbibing facts. He wanted the embodiment of a righteous, truthful and loving Christian to be synonymous with being an Old Millhillian.
‘O Lord, our heavenly Father, by whose Spirit mankind is taught knowledge, who givest wisdom to all them that ask thee, we beseech thee to prosper all colleges and schools of sound learning; and especially to bless all who serve thee here, whether as teachers or learners.
~
Help us to labour diligently and faithfully, not with eyeservice but in singleness of heart, remembering that without thee we can do nothing and that in thy fear is the beginning of wisdom.
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Open our eyes to know thy marvellous works and enlighten our minds that we may understand the wondrous things of thy law. Enable us ever to set thy holy will before us, so that our fellows, now and in the days to come, may be the better for our studies here.
~
Finally, we pray for all those who have gone forth from this School, that they may be so guided and strengthened by thy Spirit, that being true disciples of Jesus Christ, they may live blameless and faithful lives to the glory of thy holy name. Amen.’
He believed that boys who left the School had a duty to live out these Christian moral values, which in turn would enhance the reputation of the nation’s foremost Nonconformist school. Hence, McClure’s beautiful School Prayer contains petitions for those who had left the School, as well as for those who were still part of it.
The saying was very often heard that: ‘McClure was greatest in the School Chapel.’ and, ‘Chapel was, after all, where most boys remember him.’ He steadfastly believed in the importance of public worship, and delivered a magisterial conference address on this subject in May 1919, during his year of office as Chairman of the Congregational Union. He understood that public worship was indispensable as it is, ‘a seeking not only of communion with God but also of communion with our fellow men [and women], and neither communion can be fully realised without the other.’ Drawing on his experience of leading services for the boys at Mill Hill, he confidently told the Conference that, although public worship has its limitations, ‘One can feel reasonably sure that there is not a single portion of any service of public worship which fails to appeal with special force to someone present and bring to him comfort, strength, peace, or inspiration.’ Such assured words encourage those who are still tasked with leading Chapel services at Mill Hill.
Although other translations of The Bible may contain the same meaning, and its power ultimately lies in its ability to transform lives, McClure acknowledged and revered the clarity and beauty of what we now call the King James Bible. He thought that, ‘The English Bible is the best example of a very rare occurrence – a translation which far exceeds much of its original in literary beauty… and to it almost all great writers of English prose owe an incalculable debt.’
It is said that his reading of The Bible aloud in Chapel was memorable, such was the tone of his voice and the power of his intelligent reading. His secretary, Miss Grace Hill said of him, ‘I think no one who ever heard him read The Bible aloud could easily forget it; the solemnity of his voice, the clear enunciation of the majestic phrases brought home deepest meaning of the words alike to the heart and mind of the reader.’
Copies of this Bible translation still reside in our Chapel, but of course, today the King James Bible is heard far less frequently, something that he would have lamented. However, he may have approved that for many years, it has been the standard text for our beloved Carol Services – providing a link with the past and enabling its listeners to be touched by its exceptional beauty.
McClure was a man of prayer and it is said of him that, ‘one always felt that he “dwelt deep”.’ He always knelt when he prayed, and he was known for his beautiful phrasing when leading extemporary and spontaneous prayer during the Chapel services, which normally took place between two hymns. His favourite invocation at evening service was, ‘O God who dwellest in light immeasurable in whom there is no darkness.’
He also used stillness
to great effect when taking prayers and spoke quietly in such a way as to uplift the spirits of those he was leading.
He did not so much address the congregation, but rather, ‘He seemed to speak straight upward and the words lifted the mind as on wings.’
Despite believing in the power of prayer, McClure was not particularly keen on pupil prayer meetings, largely because he was wary of emotional and sentimental religion that could be a feature of such gatherings. ‘His dislike of emotional religion seemed remarkable in a man who could move boys so deeply, but it is noticeable that he always approached religion by the intellect than by the feelings.’ There had been a pupil prayer meeting at the School for 40 years
before his arrival, and although he would not forbid it to take place, he did not approve of it and so it died a natural death without him having to intervene.
McClure also knew the importance of silence in worship and thought there should be more of it because, just as much deep communication can take place between individuals without words, so it is true of mankind’s relationship with the Divine, for, ‘in the highest communion between man and his Maker words have no place.’
Hence, he did not believe in silence in Chapel for its own sake, but for a deeper purpose: ‘I do not refer merely to the suppression of those unseemly whisperings and even audible conversations which are, alas! all too frequent in many of our churches, but to the definite provision in our services of intervals of silence for such private prayers and aspirations.’
As a Congregational Church Lay Preacher and one-time President of the Lay Preachers’ Union, he was in much demand as a preacher beyond Mill Hill in Nonconformist church strongholds, such as the City Temple in Holborn and the Union Chapel in Islington, both of which are still thriving inclusive Christian churches today. He also accepted invitations to preach in other churches around the country, including those of Old Millhillians who had gone on to become ministers, although he always prioritised his time at Mill Hill.
McClure had a reverence for truth and logical reasoning, and his sermons sought to win the mind as a means of engaging the spirit. This is to be expected of a New Testament Greek scholar, a mathematician and a scientist who for the first three years of being Headmaster until 1894 also held the post of Professor of Astronomy at Queen’s College, London University. Indeed, ‘His abiding love of the heavens, in a scientific as well as a religious sense, was the source of countless lectures to the school and facilitated rather than weakened his faith.’ He was well-placed to help the boys rise to the intellectual challenges to religious faith at the turn of the 19th century as Christianity
adjusted to the post-Darwinian world. To put this in context, after Mill Hill was founded in 1807 it would be another 52 years before Darwin published his theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species in 1859 just 32 years before he became Head Master.
McClure had a clear understanding of what could be proven and what could not. As a young man, he was wary of false certainties. In offering humorous advice to his friend Charles in 1879, he said, ‘Until you are five and twenty don’t develop a very decided bias of any kind… because one doesn’t understand what a belief or a conviction is until one’s wisdom teeth are of some years standing.’ Later in life, a friend who went on to be Head of Shrewsbury School once remarked, ‘He did not think that he or anyone else had discovered all there was to know of truth.’ McClure’s search for truth, combined with intellectual humility, particularly with respect to religious faith, seems even more relevant in the 21st century, an era that is apt to encourage the premature polarisation of simplistic fixed beliefs.
Although an intellectual, he was renowned for not talking down to the boys and they found his sermons enthralling.
One pupil said that they felt no shame in discussing his sermons afterwards, ‘and that is the highest tribute I can pay them.’ He was known for his extensive repertoire of illustrative stories to engage the listener. He also focused on the New Testament and the life of Jesus as a way of understanding our own lives. Because of his knowledge of Greek, the original language of the text, he was able to convey the deeper meaning of the text.
Further demonstrating his commitment to interdenominational understanding, his sermons about leaders of the Christian faith were not drawn solely from a Nonconformist perspective. He was as likely to draw on the insights of the Catholic St Ignatius Loyola as well as the Protestant Martin Luther.
As a skilful orator, he also knew when to deploy dry humour. More than one pupil remembers his aphorism, ‘Better a swelled head than a shrivelled heart!’ and on one memorable occasion when speaking to the Middle School he leaned over the
pulpit and teased, ‘God must have been very fond of stupid people, seeing He made so many.’
One might have expected to find more of his sermons in print, but there are two possible reasons for their scarcity. First, although his sermons were very carefully prepared they were not always fully written out, as he was able to preach from a few detailed notes. Either way, frequently he destroyed his sermon notes as soon as he got back to his seat in chapel. Why was this? Perhaps it was because, as many preachers understand, that sermons are written to be heard by a particular congregation at a particular time, and once they are delivered, then, God willing, they have done their job.
Second, a clue is found in his answer to a separate question as to why he had not written any books for posterity about his time at Mill Hill. He replied that, ‘My writings are happily more lasting and they are round about me.’ In other words, the pupils. This suggests that he was invested more in the positive impact that his words had on his hearers, rather than in the written words themselves. His sermons were a means to that greater end and not an end in themselves, and in this there is a glimpse of his modesty and a sense of a greater purpose.
McClure never forgot that friendship was one of the greatest blessings that Mill Hill can bestow upon its pupils.
Our David window in McClure’s chapel is a constant reminder of the gift of friendship that generations of Millhillians have experienced. Drawing on the Old Testament example of the abiding friendship between King David and Jonathan, McClure exhorts us to give thanks for the ways in which Mill Hill gives birth to deep friendships. It was his ‘fervent prayer’ that Mill Hill might ‘ever be the tender Mother of noble friendships!’ and that many young lives would be, ‘knit together in the indissoluble bond, as the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David.’ Generations of Millhillians can testify that McClure’s prayers have been answered.
McClure takes the theme of friendship still further and desires that Millhillians would find an even more
joyous companionship in the founder of the Christian faith whose friendship can last a lifetime. ‘Above all, as friends walk together in loving intercourse, may they seek the companionship of that invisible, yet ever present ‘great Friend of all the sons of men’, and find, as they follow Him in all obedience and loyalty, a more abiding joy and deeper inspiration than even the best human friendship can yield.’
Those of us who have been fortunate to be part of Mill Hill, either as pupils or staff, will acknowledge that despite its imperfections, it leaves its imprint on us, usually for the good. McClure acknowledged this is in declaring that Mill Hill has, ‘laid its hand upon us all – a hand of blessing, a hand of inspiration; and yet I feel that we must all realise that the end is not yet, and that the best is yet to be.’
This sense of spiritual realism is heartening. He puts into words what we all know; no school can be perfect, yet while seeking to improve, Mill Hill can bestow its ‘blessing’ on us as we engage with its life. He reminds us that we all have our part to play in bringing about this better ‘end’. Using biblical imagery, he thought of himself as laying a firm foundation upon which others could build, those who would take the School further than he had been able to himself. ‘On my fidelity will depend the work of someone else who will carry the School to heights that I have only dreamed of, or seen “but dimly from afar”.’ In this task he led the way both in word and by example.
McClure’s inspiring vison and prayer for Mill Hill – as being a school not only to educate, but also to build moral and spiritual Christian character – was encapsulated in his majestic 1907 centenary Foundation Day address delivered in the presence of the guest of honour, the Liberal Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. He concluded his address with our precious and beloved Latin School motto, which he would be pleased to know still guides Mill Hill 115 years later, and fittingly is found in numerous places around the Chapel that he built and where he is laid to rest. ‘It is in this hope, this faith that we begin the second century of the school’s existence, and with the prayer that she may in the future realise more and more the ideal set forth in the School Motto: Et virtutem et musas.’
‘Perhaps the picture which I cherish most is that of him standing beside his double-bass in the School orchestra, bending over it fondly, intently, scanning his music a little short-sightedly, now pursing his lips as he fingered the notes, now silently counting the bars. Watching him, you could not but see how he loved both his instrument and the music; and that made you love the music too, and taught you more about it than a hundred lectures.’
An Old Boy relates a memory of McClure’s music making
Mill Hill School’s Director of Musical Performance, Kevin Kyle, investigates
M c Clure’s personal musical journey to discover how he put music centre stage of school life and how his approach is as relevant and effective today as it was 100 years ago
The original score of McClure’s Hymn
IN AUGUST 1891 Mc CLURE WROTE TO HIS UNCLE, MR JOHN HYSLOP, IN NEW YORK WITH LIFE-CHANGING NEWS: HIS EXCITEMENT ABOUT TAKING ON THE CHALLENGE AND RESPONSIBILITY OF THE ROLE OF HEADMASTER AT MILL HILL SCHOOL. AS A LIFE-LONG LOVER OF MUSIC, A MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST, AND AN EXPERIENCED CONDUCTOR, M c CLURE BEGAN HIS TENURE AT MILL HILL WITH AN ALMOST UNIQUE KNOWLEDGE OF THE GENRE AND STANDARD OF MUSIC THAT CAN BE ACHIEVED IN A SCHOOL SETTING.
In 1879, at the age of 18 whilst working as Assistant Master at Hinckley Grammar School, he wrote to Charles, an old Holly Mount College friend, saying: ‘Music, my dear boy, is fated either to make or to ruin me. I cannot regard it as a pastime; it appears to me in a much more important light than that.’ At the time the study of music outside the church was regarded as a non-essential pastime and according to his daughter, Kathleen Ousey in her biography ‘McClure of Mill Hill’, few schoolmasters regarded it as a valuable area of study.
‘Previous to his time, public school music had been somewhat neglected if not actually looked down upon; certainly, it was not placed on the same favourable footing as other subjects of general education.’
Dr McClure did his utmost to alter this unsatisfactory state of things, by strongly urging at the meetings of Headmasters and elsewhere, the necessity for making music count as a constituent item of the ordinary Public School curriculum.’ Dr CW Pearce, Director of Studies at Trinity College of Music.
In his first few years as Headmaster, McClure also took on the role of Director of Music creating a new musical culture and tradition at the School, with a mere 61 pupils, McClure had a huge task ahead of him. McClure is well documented for his huge
successes as a Headmaster, educator, colleague and family man but for me, his enduring achievements in Music are the jewel in Mill Hill’s crown.
At School McClure was known as a competent academic, a keen and capable but not prolific sportsman, with a love of cricket and an unremarkable musician. There is evidence that he took piano lessons for about a year while a pupil at Holly Mount College (c.1874) but it wasn’t until aged 14 when he became good friends with a boy called James Johnstone, that his musicality really came alive. The Johnstone family had different interests to the McClure’s and the only common ground they shared was music: the entire family – there was a brood of siblings all close in age –were all musically well-schooled.
For two years, this is where ‘Johnny’ appeared to spend much of his free time playing the piano – he didn’t consider himself a singer at the time –convincing James, also a reluctant singer, to learn songs with him and perform them in school concerts. The Johnstones’ home, as well as his own, was a constant backdrop during McClure’s childhood and for many years into his adulthood.
The time McClure spent with the Johnstones essentially learning and playing music by ear outside the classroom is, I believe, key to his musical development.
McClure’s schoolboy reputation as more of a nascent musician at this early stage of his life is what interests me in his musicianship: did the apparent lack of formal study fuel his life-long desire to learn about music? While a motivated student in a formal lesson situation can quickly pick up the rudiments of musical theory, learn to relate to their chosen instrument – for example, the keys on a piano – and develop an understanding of the principles of a sound physical technique, many musicians would agree that a love for music is best nurtured away from a classroom.
In my opinion one of the most exciting parts of anyone’s early musical journey is when they discover that friends have similar musical passions and interests: devoting hours, days, weeks, and years of
one’s free time to making music with good friends leads to an explosion in knowledge and ability. Friends learn from each other far faster than they would in a traditional teacher/pupil set up.
You learn to play each other’s instruments, synchronise musical tastes, push each other technically and theoretically, help each other through failure and weaknesses, and learn the principles of ensemble playing, all while having a jolly good laugh, falling out occasionally along the way, and turning these experiences into life-long friendships.
McClure’s early musical knowledge forged through self-discovery associated predominantly with pleasure rather than achievement leads me to conclude that this musical seed and positive childhood experiences explain why Millhillians past and present have flourished musically.
In 1891, McClure took charge of 61 pupils and six members of the common room staff. From the date of his appointment, the qualities of his that stand out are his enthusiasm and his indefatigable desire to make things as good as they could be. McClure doesn’t strike me as an individual who strives to be the one, the only, or the best. His tacit goal appears is to achieve the best version of himself, his colleagues, and most importantly, his pupils.
McClure as an individual was full of charisma and charm and, from many points of view, an almost magical person. In the Music School today we have an expression about certain individuals whom we informally label ‘room warmers’ – people that have an inexplicable ability to metaphorically warm a room. For musicians (and performers in general) this is a hugely important quality that, although mostly unquantifiable, needs to be studied, analysed, and developed. McClure undoubtedly had this quality in abundance and used it unselfishly to help people make the most of themselves. His ability and desire to learn every pupil’s name and other personal information is well documented, as well as his ability to memorise large swathes of information. As a teacher he made every subject interesting ‘even mathematics’ and his desire for the School to flourish in sport was also well-known. Pupils and staff commented on his caring attitude
As a fine musician, McClure knew only too well the importance of good hymnody, not only to teach the Christian faith but also to lift the heart and soul in communion with God. ‘There are times when even rhythmic speech does not suffice us, but moves us – again quite naturally – to seek the help of measured music, that we may find in singing what neither speech nor music alone could supply. Thus on Armistice Day we could not be content with cheers, even prayers left something unexpressed, until we sang with one accord our deep thanksgiving, ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow.’
In his life, he played a significant role in compiling the Congregational Church Hymnal – a task made difficult because he thought there was a dearth of good hymns, possibly ‘no more than three hundred.’ When asked subsequently why he thought he had been given his Knighthood he self-deprecatingly teased that it must have been for his five years as chairman of this Hymnal Committee!
He brought all his expertise into the compilation of the Mill Hill Chapel Devotional Services Book in 1895 that contained 10 different Orders of Service and beautiful prayers for daily use, including the School Prayer. As with our new 2019 Mill Hill hymnbook, he had the school crest and the Latin motto embossed on the front cover. Included in his service book, McClure chose a further 88 ‘Supplementary Hymns’ to accompany the Congregational Church Hymnal. In the School’s archives, we are fortunate to have a leather-bound copy of this Devotional Services book that belonged to his wife Lady McClure. She has inscribed in the front in beautiful handwriting: ‘From “the School” to me on the Head Master’s Birthday, together with a copy of the same to himself – February 9th 1915 – gifts we prize very highly. M McClure.’
and his displays of kindness. This is McClure the leader and the individual but what about the musician?
In his first year, the School possessed only four pianos and had very few pupils who were capable of performing as a soloist. The choirmaster, Mr Peppin, had only just been appointed and, if music were to be built up at Mill Hill, there was a lot to do. In the early years, there was so little material for concerts that staff, including Mr Peppin and McClure, had to perform solos and duets alongside their pupils. From the outset McClure worked to create a new musical culture at the School.
As expressed by his daughter in her book: he didn’t deliberately set out to raise the standard or improve musical taste, rather, his primary goal was to make music a thing of joy.
She goes on to compare her father to a boy who has loved engines for years suddenly finding himself in an engine room.
From my perspective, McClure’s approach to building music was perfect and it is still the approach we take today. Pupils come together, giving up their (very limited) free time, to make music, but they don’t do it for qualifications or recognition, they do it for pleasure. While as teachers we try to create conditions under which joyful experiences can be a regular occurrence – whether they be in concert, on trips, in rehearsal, or in personal study – joy and pleasure in music-making are the fuel that keeps young musicians learning. The by-product is often excellent music and, once in a while, exquisite music!
In such a small and musically inexperienced school, McClure wasn’t able to be a musical director in the way we understand the role today.
At first, he led a small group of fledgling musicians playing alongside their masters, but during these early years, he built small instrumental ensembles and founded the school’s first orchestra.
As a musical scaffold for these novice ensembles, he learned to play every orchestral instrument. After only four years, with the school rapidly growing numbers and the choir in Mr Peppin’s capable hands, McClure was able to conduct the School choir and orchestra performing Handel’s ‘Messiah’.
As the music department grew, Mr Peppin took on conducting duties while tackling a more ambitious repertoire and introducing Sunday concerts. In 1896, Mr Laurence A Cane was appointed to replace Mr Peppin, who left to take up a similar position at Clifton College, and music continued to develop apace. In only six years, McClure was able to take a bit more of a back seat but continued to play an active role in school concerts and would frequently be seen playing his double bass in the orchestra.
To my mind, McClure’s love for music, his own unconventional musical development and the joy, enthusiasm, and excitement he found in it informed his approach a musical education. These qualities were to him essential ingredients in musical development.
From everything I have read, humour also played a part in McClure’s approach to learning. McClure is quoted as saying he wanted ‘all lessons to be fun, even mathematics’.
Humour played a big part in the musical life at Mill Hill and was, I suspect, sanctioned and heavily encouraged by McClure.
McClure thought that hymns ought to strive ‘after the sublime and the beautiful’ and conversely, he had a dislike of sentimental hymns with words that merely played to the emotions, or with tunes that did not stir the soul. He thought Christians were in danger of ‘suffering from a slothful tolerance of a poor second best.’ He was a controversial critic of the popular Christian hymn, ‘Fight the good fight’ that did not meet his exacting standards, either in words or music, and which he witheringly called ‘pitiable doggerel’. I think we can conclude from this that he would have disapproved that this hymn recently found its way into our new hymnbook.
Nevertheless, I like to think that he would be delighted with our hymnbook that also contains a selection of devotional readings and prayers – including his School Prayer from his service book. Our bespoke hymnbook was made possible with the help of donations and dedications from the wider Mill Hill community, thus supporting our long tradition of hymn singing in the School. The success of this project once again demonstrated McClure’s insight when he commented that the School, ‘though not rich in foundation, had a large endowment of goodwill and energy displayed by Old Millhillians.’
In particular, I think he would be pleased that the whole School still sings the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ with such fervent enthusiasm – one of the very few hymns that appears both in his service book and in ours. He liked it not just for its music, but for its clarion call to build Jerusalem – the Kingdom of God – in our land today, a kingdom characterised by the ‘Christian graces of faithfulness, truth, honour, love, patience, kindness, justice, self-denial.’
In one sermon McClure says, ‘There are many in our midst today, thank God, who are inspired by this same holy purpose of ‘building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.’ Although he acknowledges that this moral and spiritual work is not something that can be ever be finally accomplished even in many generations, nevertheless, ‘its completion is, or ought to be an aim of every English Christian.’
The Reverend Dr Richard Warden, former chaplain at Mill Hill School (2010-21)
I am delighted that modern-day Mill Hill still celebrates humour through music, whether musical productions, performances of Tom Lehrer’s music or our current Head performing a Mozartian arrangement of ‘chopsticks’ for an online audience.
McClure’s love for combining humour and popular tunes of the day with strict musical form was undoubtedly influenced by Gilbert & Sullivan, whose music was the phenomenon of the time.
may be plainly seen in his style: He took infinite pains to clothe a musical joke in a strictly correct garment, and enjoyed to the utmost a combination of beautiful themes with humorous words.
‘The Coster’s Saturday Night’ by E Duno Wahriar; but although the Head played what was becoming his customary instrument, the double-bass, and Mr Peppin conducted, the secret of the composer soon leaked out and his nom de plume was identified as the popular song, ‘E dunno w’ere ‘e are’. The performance started with due solemnity, but very soon it was noticed that the professionals in the orchestra were shaking with laughter, and indeed at one point the wood-wind became too convulsed to play.’ It is my experience that while music can bring forth the most divine beauty and elicit powerful emotions from rage to adoration, it can also make you belly-laugh, sing until you are hoarse, and then sing some more.
While contemporary standards might, at best, judge the works of Gilbert & Sullivan old-fashioned and, at worst, weak composition, I would argue that the political commentary is as relevant today as it was in the 1890s. I think Arthur Sullivan, an outstanding musician in his own right, was a master of musical pastiche and his musical choices entirely align with the libretto for which he was composing. In fact, Gilbert & Sullivan’s compositions were so successful that versions of their most celebrated works were being performed, unlicensed, in venues all over the United Kingdom and the United States of America (their career predated the establishment of an international copyright code). As a musician, an academic, and someone who spent time in political circles, McClure knew intimately just how clever and able musicians Gilbert & Sullivan were.
If one wishes to take pleasure in music-making, introducing new listeners to an array of well-written music, top-level orchestrations and arrangements, clever libretti, and making one’s audience laugh out loud, there is nothing better than to put on a production by Gilbert & Sullivan (a modern-day equivalent might be ‘Blackadder’ or ‘Upstart Crow’, only with the addition of a first-rate operatic score). I like to imagine all of the pupils, staff, invited professional musicians, and parents thoroughly enjoying singing, playing, or listening to some of these
great works. McClure’s enthusiasm for their work is still in evidence at the School: if you pop into the Piper Library you can see the full array of vocal scores, libretti, conductor scores, orchestral parts, and accompanying literature all devoted to Gilbert & Sullivan. When looking to enthuse pupils and colleagues musically, McClure’s choice to explore their repertoire was a stroke of genius.
McClure performed the unofficial role of Director of Music for the first few years of his headmastership to accentuate the importance of music in the curriculum and create the infrastructure for his school-wide musical vision before handing over the role.
His compositions were well crafted and displayed a sound musical understanding, and a passion for writing and arranging music
Unfortunately, much of the written work is lost; however, we were able to perform a setting of one of his hymns (Psalm CXXXIX. 18 with text by Harriet Beecher Stowe) at Foundation Day.
As the Music Department became more self-sufficient, McClure was able to step back and allow his musical focus to become more personal. ‘The work was done chiefly at night; after taking Schoolhouse prayers he would shut himself up in his little study at home and work till midnight at his beloved counterpoint.’
McClure’s daughter writes that as he grew older, he developed a deeper love and understanding of musical theory. When asked by a colleague how he relieved the pressure of work, he replied by saying that, in both musical counterpoint and mathematical definite integrals he found a sense of order that gave him relaxation. Kathleen Ousey goes on to say that over time, music became a more absorbing pastime than mathematics and the more McClure studied, the more it revived an earlier desire to take a degree in music, which he started at the Trinity College of Music around 1900. He made a strong impression as detailed by the Director of Studies, Dr C W Pearce who, after assessing him for his Doctoral Viva Voce, wrote a detailed report on how he and a colleague were so impressed by his answers, the session went on for much longer than scheduled. They also noted how McClure lit up the room with his presence
McClure was an exceptional musician, passionate about every possible aspect of music, who devoted himself to self-improvement and continued to study right up to his death. His musical ethos and ideals endure to this day in our purpose-built Music School and well beyond its doors through local concerts and foreign tours, and his picture takes pride of place at the front of our Recital Hall with a plaque dedicated to him. A question that I have been frequently asked is whether McClure was good enough to have been a professional musician. My response, having looked through various examples of McClure’s compositions, is undoubtedly yes: his deep understanding of music would grace any professional project. However, the very nature of McClure’s role at Mill Hill meant that, however much he worked on his music, he could only ever have the status of an amateur. What I would like to ask is: would the School’s music programme and ethos have been cultivated so successfully without McClure’s amateur status even though the definition can imply a lack of ability or rigour?
Old Millhillian and primary editor of the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ Sir James Murray (who coincidently was married to a school music teacher) was in charge when the first edition was published in which amateur is defined as:
1. ‘One who loves or is fond of. One who has a taste for anything.
2. One who cultivates anything as a pastime, as distinguished from one who prosecutes it professionally; hence sometimes used disparagingly, as a dabbler, or superficial student worker.’
Modern interpretations are even less flattering: ‘a person who is incompetent or inept at a particular activity: “that bunch of stumbling amateurs”.’ Looking into the etymology of the word, however, gives us: ‘late 18th century from French, from Italian amatore, from Latin amator “lover”, from amare “love’’’ which to my mind reflects McClure’s musical interests and approach much more accurately.
Prior to taking on my current role at Mill Hill, I performed as a professional opera singer during which time I was lucky enough to work closely with some of the musical titans of my generation. I made my living from performing at the highest level, became well-travelled, and considered myself, in every way, a professional musician. I now regularly see ex-professional musicians being recruited into teaching to bring their professional experience to a school’s musical vision. Some are a great success, and some leave the profession earlier than expected. My professional experience brings something different to school music but is it better?
There is no doubt professional experience can bring an understanding of the expectations of a paying audience but it is an exceptionally stressful environment where the focus is on not getting something wrong, praying that you don’t get ill, focusing entirely on yourself in order to be at your best for the 7.30pm curtain-up while hoping for an outstanding review. All performers have had extensive training at the highest level, practice and study for hours a day, and have devoted decades to their understanding of their art form. A bad day for a professional often goes completely unnoticed by the audience, colleagues and directors because even a sub-par performance is still of an excellent standard. What I reflect on with a hint of sadness is that rarely have I seen a performer in the wings enthuse about their ‘love’ of the execution of their art. More often than not, colleagues questioned how much they were required to rehearse, how much personal preparation it involved, that they couldn’t find suitable touring digs, the money wasn’t sufficient, or they couldn’t get along with their dressing-room partner. Many detested the musical director, and complained their agent wasn’t working hard enough for them.
There are many complexities associated with the professional music world which you don’t find in the amateur one.
Old Millhillian Oliver Brignall (Murray, 2004) a current singing teacher at Mill Hill, sums it up rather neatly: ‘I went into the profession because I loved making music at school but while studying and working, your relationship to music changes. It becomes an obsession, and the obsession fuels the work, the work becomes about achieving the highest possible standard, not letting yourself and others down, it becomes competitive and your focus becomes about getting more work. Somewhere along the line, you forget that you love the music.’
McClure’s genuine love of music and his knowledge of its profound effect on others was the driving force in the creation of the school’s musical culture.
Where professional musicians have a habit of focusing solely on their specific musical task or journey and performing their music to the best of their ability McClure’s particular focus was to plant musical seeds and help them grow.
By creating joyful musical experiences for his pupils, he started a 130-year tradition that continues today and will, I am sure, continue to flourish into the future.
Just as they did in McClure’s heyday, our pupils turn up to orchestra practice, some with pencils and some without, they play in glorious concerts both small and large scale, the choir still leads singing in chapel, and we still perform an excellent ‘Messiah!’ All of our musicians have a wealth of opportunity to learn and perform: some of them use to it help them pass entrance auditions to music conservatoires and national ensembles, while some pupils just enjoy turning up every week and performing in the end of term concerts.
Music is still for everyone at Mill Hill and it is still learned, rehearsed, and performed in the traditions that McClure instilled in the buildings that he built or inspired.
‘He aroused our admiration at once by a kind of discipline both in his classes and outside of them, which was new in our experience. We had been used to masters whom we could rag... But the strange thing about the new Head was that we had not the least inclination to rag him. It was not that we were frightened of him. He was exceedingly sociable though very careful not to let us waste his time... We found him a splendid friend and he gave us much of his companionship.’
Respected and admired, Sir John M c Clure had a uniquely personal relationship with the School and its pupils.
Edward Holland (M c Clure 2017-21) extols his extraordinary leadership, commitment and steadfastness through THE FIRST WORLD WAR but discovers it came at great personal cost
The Officer Training Corps on Camp
‘IN GOD’S NAME, GO’, THIS IS NOT A CALL TO ARMS FROM A KING TO HIS SUBJECTS OR A POPE TO A CRUSADER, BUT INSTEAD A QUOTE FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY A HEADMASTER TO A FORMER PUPIL.
Mc CLURE, A RIGHTEOUS MAN STEADFAST IN HIS BELIEF OF GOOD OVER EVIL REINFORCED BY HIS UNWAVERING FAITH IN GOD, HAD NO RESERVATIONS ABOUT THE NECESSITY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND HIS PUPILS PLAYING THEIR PART.
Although he deplored the arms trade and jingoism combating German militarism was essential as expressed in a letter to an Old Millhillian, written in 1915: ‘I hold that we had absolutely no alternative in August last year, and nothing that has happened since has in any way changed my opinion.’
The First World War (1914-1918) highlights McClure’s uniquely personal relationship with the School and its pupils. In fact, the war brought many Old Millhillians
back in contact with McClure communicating through face-to-face meetings or letters, many of which were sent from the Western Front.
It was not just their former Headmaster who took solace from these letters but also the authors themselves. During their darkest hour, writing by dim candlelight from some sodden and wretched trench, they found comfort thinking of their School and its Headmaster.
The education each pupil received during McClure’s tenure extended far beyond academia. An emphasis on developing moral principles and individual thought were at the forefront during his decades as Headmaster.
In a speech, talking about the fallen to the first gathering of Old Millhillians after the war, McClure stresses the importance of the bond and identity gained from being members of the School; ‘They have been in the same places as we; they have followed the same traditions; they have been inspired by the same ideals; they have felt the same love and loyalty.’ McClure fostered an education with an
An Old Boys photographic album showing the Officer Training Corps undertaking various tasks in 1918
emphasis on the character of each pupil. A character based around the common ideals pupils gained through their time at Mill Hill, with him as the driving force. As McClure says in the same speech: ‘They went forth simply and naturally to do their duty, without thinking very much about it, except that it was their duty.’
It was not the curriculum that instilled this sense of duty, but the leadership specifically extolled by McClure.
In the case of the war, although his sense of duty and support for it was unwavering, he was first and foremost tolerant and liberal which shone through even in these dark days. His stance when faced by a recently arrived day boy Kingsley Martin (1914-16) who was a conscientious objector, was a case in point. McClure showed himself to be ‘wonderfully tolerant of my eccentric attitude to the war’ and noting Martin’s stand promoted him to a Prefect. Following this he enlisted in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. McClure’s values were not obscured by the crisis of war or the unpopularity of Martin’s views.
Although the First World War did not change McClure’s passion, ideals and commitment, there’s no doubt its effects on the school were enormous.
1905 saw the formation of the Rifle Club – of which the trophies and achievement boards can still be seen in the CCF buildings and shooting range respectively. In January 1911, the Bursar Lieutenant Colonel Gluenicke founded the Mill Hill School Officer Training Corps (OTC). Although these ‘clubs’ were not strictly speaking to prepare for war but instead to emulate other Public Schools of the time, by 1913, despite initial low numbers, the OTC began to gather momentum and Mill Hill won second place in the ‘Schools of the Empire Competition’.
The start of war in 1914 brought about massive change although unlike the Second World War, pupils weren’t evacuated and neither were the grounds commandeered for Ministry of Defence use. Instead, the school became a sort of rear echelon. Daily School life was very much the same, lessons on literature, trigonometry and astronomy persisted and guest lecturers continued to attend, with the likes of William Watson presenting,
‘The history of the Mill Hill flora.’ Sporting life in particular flourished with perhaps one of the all-time best seasons for Mill Hill rugby: the School’s undefeated side beat Merchant Taylors with a resounding 15-5 win, a feat rarely seen during the School’s modern history. Concerts continued with an eclectic mix on the programme ranging from orchestral works by Purcell to Mendelssohn’s choral collections. Nevertheless, small nods to the war crept in. Along with their usual fixtures, the rugby team also played the Royal Naval College; the School magazine began to feature ‘Letters From The Front’; and the aforementioned concert programme signed off with ‘God Save The King’.
Over time, a strange juxtaposition of military training and normal school activities became evident.
The most overt signs came in the form of the OTC and the large chunks, up to 10 hours a week, of the timetable being given over to military activity. In 1914, the OTC numbered 223 rising to 257 the following year.
Prep and sports time were taken up with trench digging, route marches, military lectures, physical training, even bayonet fighting and schools that Mill Hill traditionally thought of as sporting rivals – UCS, Highgate and Aldenham – now became friend and foe in joint field exercises. Despite the front being hundreds of miles away, the war felt very close to home.
Over 80 per cent of pupils and Old Millhillians who fought in the First World War were volunteers:
a testament perhaps to the education of ideals and character that McClure fostered during his tenure instilling a strong sense of duty.
Of the 120 pupils to sign up in 1915, 80 sought to commission as officers. In-keeping with the military thinking at the time, Britain’s Public Schools were to provide officers for the front. Pupils sought the Headmaster’s advice on leadership, and his recommendations were in keeping with the traditions of the school.
AE Voysey and FH Morrell in MHS rugby Blazers
Harvesting in uniform
In 1916, he advised a recently commissioned pupil the following wise words: ‘Touch elbows every day with the rank and file… Your education has fitted you, I hope, to be a leader as far as education can do so.’ At a time when the ‘officer class’ and ‘rank and file’ felt very much ‘them and us’, McClure’s advice was Nonconformist and progressive. ‘Touching elbows’ – looking out for the welfare of the troops – is a fundamental aspect of modern military leadership but was lacking during the First World War. The enlightened style of leadership exemplified by McClure added to his popularity with pupils and staff.
Prior to the war there was a perceived pacifist tendency originating from the Nonconformist, liberal foundations of the School. The publisher Ivor Nicholson wrote in 1909: ‘There is no cadet corps at Mill Hill, one could almost say with a tolerable amount of certainty there never will be.’ In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
At the war’s end, a total of 1,118 pupils, Old Millhillians and masters served in the forces, amounting to 59 per cent of total pupils who attended between 1883 and 1914.
During McClure’s tenure however, from 1896 onwards, this figure soared to 83 per cent. For a Headmaster whose passion and commitment to the School and each pupil was immense, seeing the young men he had known so well enlist was traumatic.
Fitting the Nonconformist and forward-thinking traditions exemplified by Mill Hill, a staggering 120 Old Millhillians enlisted in the newly established Royal Flying Corps (later becoming the RAF). These Old Millhillians became the ‘first of the future few’ with many seeing the potential of air power. Mill Hill produced many decorated pilots, including, Lt Taunton Viney Distinguished Serving Order (DSO) (house /1906-09) and Capt Cyril Marconi Crowe (School
1907-11) Military Cross (MC), Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC). However, it was not just the ‘flyboys’ that distinguished themselves.
Millhillians that served accumulated an outstanding number of awards for service and valour.
A total of 191 awards including 107 MC’s, 21 Distinguished Service Orders, 9 DFC’s, 2 Air Force
Crosses and 1 Military Medal. Old Millhillians were collectively awarded 24 national service awards from the UK and abroad. Among them were the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George, Members of the British Empire (MBE), Knights of the British Empire (KBE), the French Legions d’honneur, the Italian Assiego medal and the Egyptian Order of the Nile.
Many medals were awarded posthumously, for Mill Hill tragically paid a heavy price during the war. Of the 1,118 Old Millhillians who served, 194 paid the ultimate sacrifice, from the first death of William Somerville (School 1883-88) on 25th September 1914 to the last, Geoffrey Lamont (School 1912-17) on 6th November 1918. The bloodiest year for the School, 1917, saw 56 dead. More than one per Sunday Chapel. Each death was noted in the Mill Hill Magazine and read in chapel by McClure, who wrote to each parent of the dead. None bore the brunt of the sorrow more than he.
With each death, he lost a pupil, one that he had nurtured and seen develop.
Writing to the parents of Charles Batty, (School 190914) killed in action 19 January 1916 at Ypres he says: ‘Words are powerless in the face of such sorrow; but many tears were shed this morning when the sad news came… I thank God humbly and heartily that it was my privilege to teach and train such boys.’ All but six of the 194 who perished had been McClure’s pupils, he mourned each and every one.
The School was elated in 1918, when the end of the war came: scenes of utter jubilation followed the leaflet announcing the Armistice. Edward Higham (House 1915-19) writes: ‘The whole school went literally mad, there were processions round the village, everyone equipped with anything that would make noise.’ Inglis Gundry (House 1918-23) writes about McClure: ‘with his white hair billowing in the wind, personally ringing the school bell.’ Boys were seen pushing a captured German field gun into the sheepdip by Belmont. After the immediate hysteria faded the reality of the previous four years set in. Roland Wade (School 1918-23) recalls: ‘McClure seemed a rather remote figure… there was a clear reluctance to go inside for normal classes.’
At the chapel service given to Old Millhillians after the war, his sorrow and loss is clear. McClure notes in his address: ‘Never has this Chapel been used for a worthier purpose than that which brings us here today.’ Some of McClure’s most important contributions came in these sorrowful post war years.
The First World War dominated the second half of John McClure’s headship Some suggest that his relatively early death in 1922 was partly due to the personal toll that war took upon him. ‘It is believed… that his own death was precipitated by the presence of death amongst his charges.’ He would have known personally most of the 195 Millhillians who lost their lives in that war. In 1921, just a year before his death, one old boy recalls McClure ‘sobbing’ in the Scriptorium while looking at photographs of now deceased Old Boys. ‘He walked from group to group pointing to each face – ‘dead-dead-wounded-all right-dead-I don’t know…’
There is no doubt that McClure’s Christian faith enabled him to be a source of such strength and hope for all in the school community who had had to endure its terrors. For one Old Boy who was in turmoil about going to fight in the war, McClure’s reply was filled with moral certainty and spiritual justification. Together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom he refers, he saw that the War was no less than a Christian duty – fighting against tyranny and for the Kingdom of God. This was not jingoism – something that he detested – or easy religious rhetoric and justification. Rather he held that there was ‘absolutely no alternative’ but to go to war. ‘This being so, I can say with [Archbishop] William Temple that I believe that those who are fighting at the present time are truly fighting for the Kingdom of God. I say therefore (if I may be permitted to do so), with all sincerity and gravity, in God’s name, go.’ Knowing the horrors that were unfolding, such words would not have been written lightly, but undoubtedly they would have given the boy much-needed courage.
McClure received many letters from Old Boys at the Front. They were full of affectionate memories of him, recalling how he had been such a positive influence on their lives in happier times; thus exemplifying that none of us knows how far our influence extends or when our words and deeds will be needed as source of strength to others. It is said that nobody would forget his sermon in Chapel on the last Sunday evening of July 1915 as he reviewed the first year of the War. He referred to a school trip he had taken to Italy in April 1914 recalling that only two of the eight boys on that trip had survived the first year of the war. Many of his hearers on that night in Chapel were to meet with the same tragic fate.
As Headmaster, he was in touch with every family who had suffered bereavement, and his letters of empathetic condolence are inspired by Christian faith and imagery. They gave spiritual and moral strength to so many. To the parents of one boy whom he had taken to Italy he wrote: ‘Words are powerless in the face of such sorrow; but many tears were shed this morning when the sad news came, and many prayers sent up on high for you and yours.… May God give to you, his parents, and to all his dear ones, the richest consolations of his Grace.’
His tone quickly moved from happiness to remembrance, telling pupils, ‘We must not rejoice.’ This remembrance came in many forms and, by the end of 1918, McClure had instigated three major projects. First, scholarships for the sons of Old Millhillians killed. Second, owing to the great importance of science during the war, greater facilities for its study would be built, leading to the creation of the Science Building in 1924. Finally, McClure was adamant that there be a ‘memorial of artistic beauty’. The latter project became a top priority for the War Memorial Fund and in 1920,
The Gate of Honour, designed in the classical style, was opened by General Horne and attended by the whole School. Inscribed inside the arch were all the names of the dead.
A pupil recalled: ‘I watched from one of the School House common rooms. When the names had been carved, men came and painted gold leaf into the letters. When it was windy, we often saw bits of gold leaf being blown away.’ McClure’s aim of the gate was twofold. As he put it: ‘Partly as a symbol of our thanksgiving for our brethren, partly as a solemn warning.’
There is no doubt that the war altered the day-to-day running of the School in what has been described as a strange and troubling mix of ‘normal’ adolescent school life and brutal military training. However, what did remain a constant was the unrelenting composure of the Headmaster.
He guided Mill Hill through the war by his commitment to the education of ideals, morals and character and his inspirational leadership.
Millhillians of all ages looked to him for advice, bound by a sense of duty he had instilled in them. His daughter writes in ‘McClure of Mill Hill’ that the war brought many Old Millhillians back into contact with their former Headmaster, evidence of the personal relationship McClure had with the pupils and the School. He suffered greatly with so many of ‘his boys’ dead. Despite his acceptance of the War, he despised its consequences and mourned every loss. Sir John died four years after the end of the war at Mill Hill on 18th February 1922, shortly after his 62nd birthday.
To other grieving parents he said: ‘Few of our Old Boys will be missed as much as he; Heaven itself will be the brighter for his smile and the happier for his presence.’ He continued, ‘Like his parents, I cherished hopes and visions of what he would be; that God has decreed otherwise, is hard to bear… but so brave and pure a Christian soldier must have awakened in others some of the faith and enthusiasm which inspired his own beautiful life.’
Reflecting theologically and spiritually on the sadness of early death and drawing on the example of Christ who died a young man, he gave hope to others by emphasising that the importance of a life was found not in its longevity but in its quality. ‘Let us rather think of its quality than of its quantity, of its ideals and purposes rather than its achievements.’
None of us knows how long our journey will be and McClure wisely reminds the bereaved that we cannot judge a life – or indeed the goodness of God – simply by the number of years we have lived. Whether or not we live until a ‘ripe old age’ or are ‘called away in the middle of life’ or our lives are taken at the ‘very beginning of manhood’s great work’ as happened with so many Old Millhillians – a life can be valued if it is ‘directed to the right end and right purpose.’ Going further, in a bold statement of faith, McClure asserts that if we have lived a life according to God’s will then we may claim the words of Christ for ourselves, who said: ‘I have glorified them by accomplishing not what I intended, or I should have desired, but by accomplishing the work Thou gavest me to do. Father, into thy hand I yield my spirit.’
After the War, he gave a powerful sermon in Chapel to commemorate the war dead saying that, ‘Never has this Chapel been used for a worthier purpose than that which brings us here today.’
I believe he would be immensely proud of the way Mill Hill still honours its war dead by our annual Act of Remembrance in front of the Gate of Honour, and in his beloved Chapel, both of which were built because of his leadership. In particular, I think he would be moved, as we all are, by our recent tradition of displaying the photographs of these Old Millhillians in the Chapel as we remember each of them by name. As we do so, McClure’s words speak to us. ‘We are poorer by the loss of so many brave and gallant men, but richer – incomparably richer – by the inspiration of their example, and the precious memory of their life.’
He also spoke profoundly about the inadequacy of words and importance of silence in the face of such loss. His insights provide a deeper meaning for the two-minute silence that we continue to keep. ‘Words, however sincere, seem almost sacrilege; only by silence can we truly express our sorrow and joy, our pride and humility, as we think of those whom we seek to honour the deepest morning, yet with reverent thanksgiving.’
Given his pastoral care, together with the moral and spiritual support that he had given to the Mill Hill community during this time, it seemed fitting that he was present at the national service of thanksgiving held after the war at St Paul’s Cathedral, 6 July 1919. He was invited in his capacity as Chairman of the Congregational Union, the highest honour in the Congregational Church to which one can be elected. By the King’s command, a portrait was painted of the moment of blessing after the service given by the Archbishop of Canterbury outside the cathedral. This painting now hangs in the Royal Exchange and McClure can be seen among the leaders of the Free Churches, standing behind the Royal party.
WARDEN(School 1899-1902) was born in Surrey in 1886. After school, he worked as a broker’s clerk for the Baltic Exchange – a company specialising in maritime finance – before being commissioned into the 24th (The Queens) London Regiment in August 1914. The regiment landed in Le Havre in March 1915. During the Battle of Festurbert in May 1915, Figg was awarded both the French Legion d‘honneur and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO). He rose to a Lieutenant Colonel and fought many successful battles but on 5 March 1917, at Cléry-sur-Somme, died from a single sniper bullet. He is buried at Hem Farm Military Cemetery.
Citation for his DSO
‘For conspicuous and continuous gallantry on the night of May 25th-26th, 1915, and following day, at Givenchy, when after taking part in an assault on a trench, he led repeated rushes with bombs into a German work, and when most of the bombers were killed continued the attack single-handed. His extraordinary bravery and disregard of danger enabled the dangerous flank he commanded to hold its own against constant assaults by the German bombers and riflemen. On May 26th, when his line was enfiladed by rifle and very heavy shell fire, his determination held his men to their ground until relieved four hours later. For seventeen hours his conduct was a brilliant example to the hard-pressed men around him, and more than anyone in the battalion he contributed to the successful retention of the position won.’
(Burton Bank 1904-1906) was born in Liverpool in 1988. After leaving Mill Hill he returned home to be an architect. At the outbreak of the war, he enlisted as a Private into the King’s Regiment (Liverpool) and was with them when they landed in Le Havre in August 1914. He was selected for commission and became a Lieutenant in the 14th Royal Welsh Fusiliers when they deployed to France in December 1915. He was awarded the Military Cross (MC) on 30 January 1916. Venmore continued to serve until he was killed in action at Mametz Wood during the Battle of the Somme on 10 July 1916.
Citation for his MC
‘On the night of January 30th Lieut. Venmore was on duty as patrol officer in front of the British trenches in France, when a sentry in the firing trench reported that three men in an advanced listening post had been wounded. Two of these men were just able to crawl back to the British lines over the barbed wire, but the third man was too seriously wounded to follow, being shot through both legs. Lieut. Venmore volunteered to go to his assistance and took with him a non-commissioned officer (Corporal William Williams, a Carnarvon man), who is also awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. They went out under heavy fire over the parapet, and after great difficulty successfully brought the man over the wire and two ditches. This brave action was succeeded by a further gallant act on the following morning, when a message was received that a man had had his arm blown off at another listening post, practically unapproachable by daylight. Lieut. Venmore again undertook to go to his aid, once more taking with him Corporal Williams. They crawled across the open ground in the face of heavy machine-gun fire. The sufferer was reached, His wounds attended to, and he was subsequently brought to safety.’
(School 1907-1912) was born in Redcar, North Yorkshire, in 1894. A diligent and popular student he was made a Monitor in his final year. Crowe missed out on the formation of the Officer Training Corps (OTC) but was commissioned in October 1914 into the Royal Flying Corps. Quickly promoted to Captain, Crowe had a sterling career in France, serving in many squadrons including the legendary No 56 Squadron with other fighter aces such as Albert Ball VC, taking command of No 60 Squadron in July 1918. A few weeks later, he was involved in a tragic car accident which left fellow Millhillian and fighter ace Owen Scholte dead. On 16 September 1918, Crowe shot down his 15th and final aircraft in the war, finishing as a Major. He was awarded the Military Cross and Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC).
After the First World War, Crowe married in Argentina in 1929 and had four children. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he enlisted into the RAF Volunteer Reserve and rose to Wing Commander. He relinquished his commission in 1947 but continued to serve in the RAF Reserves until 1954. Crowe died peacefully on 31 May 1974 at his home in Swindon, Wiltshire.
Citation for his MC and DFC
‘For conspicuous gallantry and skill as a leader of offensive patrols, many times attacking hostile formations single-handed, and descending to low altitudes under heavy anti-aircraft fire. He has been responsible for the destruction of several enemy machines.’ MC
‘This officer has been engaged on active operations over the lines for over twelve months, and has accounted for ten enemy aeroplanes. He is a most successful leader, distinguished for skill and bravery. On a recent occasion he, accompanied by two other machines, attacked an enemy formation consisting of four biplanes and one triplane. Having destroyed a biplane he engaged the triplane at close range and destroyed that also.’ DFC
Leslie Allen
Kenneth Amies
James Anderson
Frank Anderton
Kenneth Aplin
Keyser Atkin
Graham Barber
Hartley Barkby
Gerald Barnett
Maurice Basden
Charles Batty
William Beeby
William Bentall
Clarence Bentley
Noel Bishop
Alec Boardman
Philip Booth
William Boydell
Henry Brice
Harold Bright
Benjamin Burnand
Percy Burnand
Stanley Buszard
Ralph Butcher
Richard Butcher
Arthur Byles
Islay Campbell
Ronald Carnley
Eric Clark
Donald Clarke
John Cocks
Major Martin Collins
John Compston
Charles Cooke
John Cooper
William Crick
Josiah Croggon
William Cullen
Arthur Damsell
Vernon Daniell
Hugh Darke
Harold Davies
Arthur Davis
Benedix Hallenstein de Beer
Aubrey Denham
Paxton Dent
Alfred Dixon
Thomas Dixon
Newman Dobell
Aubrey Down
Arthur Dyer
Gordon East
Frederick Eberlin
Arthur Edmett
Cyril Edmondson
Arthur Edwards
Cedric Edwards
John Egerton
Francis Ellwood
Eric Farrow
Donald Figg
Douglas Forbes
Charles Forth
Hugh Francis
Hugh Gamble
Ernest Gardiner
Robert Gardner
Peter Garvie
Walter Gilman
Samuel Glover
Stanley Gould
Geoffrey Hall
Gilbert Hall
Reginald Hall
Harold Hawkins
Frederick Haydon
Charles Haynes
George Heaven
Cecil Henningsen
Thomas Hewitt
William Horner
Eric Horton
Ronald Hubbard
Stephen Hunt
William James
George Jones
Leslie Jones
Eric Keiller
Geoffrey Lamont
Owen Lapthorn
Evan Leigh
Horace Link
Ernest Livermore
Robert Lloyd
David Lloyd-Williams
Reginald Lord
Rowland Lord
Perceval Lucas
William Lyle
Ian Macfarlane
Andrew Macgregor
John Maitland
Wilfrid Marler
Hugh Marnham
Philip Marsden
Thomas McGeorge
Douglas McNaught
Stanley Meredith-Thomas
Edward Milner-Barry
Thomas Minshall
Edward Moore
Gerald Morris
Philip Morris
William Morrison
Frank Murphy
Cecil Newton
Geoffrey Nicholson
William Norton
Alfred Oates
George Oldham
Ifor Owen
Iorwerth Owen
William Parkyn
Septimus Parsons
Alister Pearse
Norman Pidduck
Christopher Pigott
Cyril Pile
Eric Pinkerton
Beric Pocock
Sidney Pocock
Alec Porter
Bernard Pullin
Frederick Pusch
James Pyman
John Redding
Edwyn Ridge
Alfred Rieu
Herbert Riley
Alexander Ritchie
George Robinson
Stewart Rose
Frederick Royle
Alfred Ryan
William Saint
Cedric Sargood
Reginald Scarr
Owen Scholte
James Scott
Sydney Skelton
Arthur Smith
Bernard Smith
Clement Smith
Donald Smith
Harold Smith
Harold Heyworth Smith
Wansey Smith
Christopher Snell
William Sommerville
Cecil Spicer
Maurice Spicer
Frederick Stafford
Nevill Stanger
John Stead
John Steel
Robert Steel
Leonard Store
Herbert Strickland
Alec Tait-Knight
Ralph Taylor
Thomas Taylor
Somerville Telfer
Charles Thackrah
Reginald Theobald
Llewellyn Thomas
Alexander Todd
Charles Town
John Trenchard
Frederick Turner
William Underhill
James Venmore
Taunton Viney
Albert Vinson
Cyril Walker
Herbert Ward
Eustace Whitby
Maurice Wilcock
William Williams
David Womersley
John Womersley
Harold Wright
David Young
Frederic Young
In his Autobiography, ‘Father Figures’, published in 1966, pacifist and conscientious objector, Kingsley Martin writes warmly about his relationship with M c CLURE, despite their fundamentally different views about the war. His peer group was often less tolerant.
‘My parents had moved to London in my absence and I finished my education at Mill Hill, a Nonconformist public school then presided over by Sir John McClure. I learnt a lot about the English language from him. We wrote him an essay every week; he made caustic but highly relevant comments on our compositions. The Bird, as he was universally known, had a sense of humour all his own. He would explain a point to a blank-faced youth and then add, ‘You say you understand? Well, in that case I would sue my face for libel if I were you.’
‘He used to tell a story about a Cambridge scholar who said that Paradise Lost “contained a great deal of assertion with very little proof”. He was persistently good to me and wonderfully tolerant of my eccentric attitude to the war.’
‘But I was scarcely more happy at Mill Hill than I had been in Hereford. In some ways worse, because I had been very quick and tricky at soccer; at Mill Hill we played rugger, which I never learnt to enjoy. I became good at long-distance running and won what we called the Six Mile, and also loved the very fast school game of single-handed hockey, played on asphalt. But these athletic achievements came too late and I was kicked about as I deserved to be. The odd thing is that it never seemed to do me any good.’
‘After that, my main object was to be “in” things. The notion of going to prison which was a likely result of my refusal to fight, was terrible to me. Yet obviously I was going to be a conscientious objector. I appeared before a tribunal while I was still at school. This had its unpleasant side. I was turned out of the study which I shared with other prefects, and the boys would get round me and hit me on one cheek and ask whether I would offer the other. This mild persecution rather flattered my vanity. Hitherto, I had always been kicked about because I was nobody. I was not good at games; I was a prig of the first order, conceited and insufferable. Now I was being ragged because I was somebody, an enemy of the crowd. I won a lot of self-respect, and even, for the first time, some respect from others. I had thought the business out much more than they had. I could argue about it. As far as argument went, I came off, with colours aloft.’
‘I wrote a defence for a school magazine, which was refused because it was thought to reflect badly on the school’s reputation. It was passed round, and some of the older boys read it and treated me with a kind of deference. One simple-minded athlete looked at me with genuine contempt. Why argue? I was just a funk. Since then I have often asked myself whether he was right, whether the men who became C.O.s were really those who were, consciously or sub-consciously, more afraid of a bayonet in their guts than other people.’
(Kingsley Martin went on to become Editor of the New Statesman from 1931-60 during which period its circulation grew from 14,000 to 80,000)
A keen cricketer, M c Clure recognised the crucial value sports played in a boy’s education. M c Clure actively promoted the development of the school’s sports facilities by overseeing the building of the fives courts, a gym and outdoor pool. He saw to the levelling of Top Field and the purchase of ‘Park’ for cricket. All of this raised the school’s profile as a major public school. Not a noted sportsman himself, he was an enthusiastic cricket and rugby coach and in other sports showed his support from the touchline
‘I cannot recall him refereeing in any football matches but he was always on the ground and a keen critic of the game; but in cricket he personally coached the Second and Third Elevens, encouraged the First at the nets and wrote their characters in the Magazine for the 1892 season. When the cricket ground was being levelled he permitted ‘impots’ to be substituted by work on the ground. I was often down for hours of ‘clay-shifting’.’
‘One of the charms to us about the new Head was the lively interest he took in the games. He played cricket with us, coached us in batting, bowled to us at the nets, and was enthusiastic about all that concerned the great game. Cricket at Mill Hill had just then fallen on dark days. All our heroes were of the Rugger field. The Head taught us to feel that if we despised cricket we were ourselves despicable.’
‘He took a great interest in athletics. Often in the early days he played single handed hockey with us in the playground and his appearance struck us as something like a great eagle hopping about and flapping his wings. This produced the original designation of him as ‘the ‘Vulture’ but it was considered disrespectful and was replaced by ‘The Bird’.’
‘At the beginning of the year the First XV came out with a record never beaten and only once approached; the same set of boys ran all three main branches of athletics during the year; the enthusiasm of the School it was something to be remembered and the devotion lavished on the heroes remained throughout the years. It was rumoured that some of the masters thought twice about tackling some of them, and that one or two were beyond control of the Head, Masters or Seniors; rumours only, but they indicated a School ideal.’
New sports facilities 1891-1922
‘Yes, yes, my boy, you tell the examiners in your next exam that you play for the 1st XV and perhaps they will let you through.’McClure posing with sports team
EVERY HEADMASTER APPOINTED TO MILL HILL OVER THE PAST 100 YEARS HAS HAD TO FOLLOW IN JOHN DAVID Mc CLURE’S SHADOW. NO ONE IMPRINTED THEIR LEGACY ON THE SCHOOL MORE THAN HE. HIS PERSONALITY, HIS FAITH, HIS INTELLECT, AND HIS PUBLIC REPUTATION HAVE NEVER BEEN EQUALLED. THOSE WHO FOLLOWED FULFILLED THEIR DUTY BY SUSTAINING THE SCHOOL AND THE VALUES THAT Mc CLURE LEFT BEHIND.
Halfway through the summer term of 1970, a vacancy arose in the Modern Languages department. A teaching post which I had hoped for in Bordeaux had proved illusory. I applied on the off-chance for the position at Mill Hill. My subsequent visit to the School on a sunny May afternoon when the estate was looking its glorious best, to meet Michael Hart (Head 1967-74) and Michael Brown (Head of Modern Languages and House Master, Ridgeway 1948-75) proved enjoyable. They must have been in agreement because I received a letter of appointment a day or two later. This set out the usual terms and conditions: as an assistant master I was to teach French and German, be a visiting tutor and be accommodated in a nearby house called St Bees, which was then a hostel for the Chaplain and his family and two bachelor masters.
And so, early in September, I arrived with my suitcase for what I thought would be a temporary hiatus before I found something better in France. On the doorstep,
I was welcomed by Bob Armstrong (a massive icehockey pro and teacher from Lakefield, Ontario, on exchange with Reverend Henry Starkey, (Chaplain 1957-80) who helped me to my rooms. These were a small study on the first floor, and a bedroom among the many attics, two of which were occupied by the other master, Tim Jackson, a Chemist and musician whom I had already met by chance at a concert at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Waves of Mahler blazed full volume from his beloved Quad valve amplifier. I already felt very much at home.
The new school year started in the heat of an Indian summer. St Bees was a natural haven surrounded by glorious lawns, mature trees and shrubs overlooking Top Field. The Neoclassical portico seemed to pull me into its embrace. I would not question my good fortune, I decided. My thoughts focused instead on the there and then: getting to know my new colleagues and the boys in my classes and in School House; learning the geography and everyday routines; meeting my head of department’s expectations of preparation and marking. I accepted Mill Hill as a given and I don’t think I was very interested to research its history. About one thing I was however curious – why the name ‘St Bees’? I soon learned that the name harked back to a school in Cumbria where Mill Hill had been happily evacuated in 1939 for the duration of the Second World War. For the moment, that was enough.
What I failed to discover at that point was that the large, detached house had been built in the 1890s as the Headmaster’s private lodging for himself and his family. Their traditional accommodation in School House was urgently required to house the growing roll of boarders. As I pushed open the heavy front door in September 1970, and walked up the wide staircase to my rooms,
I little realised that I was literally following in the footsteps of the legendary Dr McClure who had lived in this same house for more than 20 years.
He must have trodden the same staircase thousands of times. It was my first unwitting physical contact with Mill Hill’s most distinguished headmaster. His shadow was to hover over me for the next 37 years, and indeed for much longer.
With hindsight, I know today that the ghost of the great man was much more evident in the Mill Hill of 1970 than I was aware at the time.
McClure would in fact have had little difficulty in recognising and accepting the School nearly half a century after his death.
The place I grew to know with such affection was not so very different from the institution he had left in 1922. First, much of the estate itself would have been immediately familiar. True, the Science and Art blocks, the Buckland pool, Winterstoke and Burton Bank had been built in those intervening years. Fishing Net and Memorial Field had been levelled and drained. But, otherwise, the physical site had scarcely changed – not just the buildings but also the row of swaying elm trees along Collinson path, the giant cedar of Lebanon in School House garden and the gnarled sweet chestnut outside St Bees were as McClure would have seen them from his sitting room. Mill Hill was still in 1970, just as in 1891, a delightful rural oasis, a London village with its church, war memorial, pond, post office, confectioner’s, butcher’s and a handy public house. The bus struggled up Bittacy Hill and Hammers Lane then, just as carters must have cursed the gradient 50 or more years before. The views over Totteridge were unchanged with sheep and cows grazing in the succession of fields running down into the valley; from behind Rosebank Farm on the Ridgeway there still emanated the pungent odour of a piggery.
As for the School community itself, it was still, under Michael Hart, a smallish, predominantly boarding school for senior boys (albeit 450 compared to McClure’s 320) from varying towns and faiths up and down the country; only a handful came from abroad. They lived their lives in close proximity, in classrooms, in house common rooms and in dormitories without curtains or carpet, places which had scarcely changed over the years. They were taught by masters, mostly traditional Oxbridge types, who brought to the Common Room something of the atmosphere of a college senior combination room including, of course, the ritual sherry taken before lunch. Just as in the recesses of McClure’s masters’ minds there lurked the experience of the Boer War and (later) the Great War, so too in 1970 nearly all Hart’s housemasters and senior staff were still indelibly marked by their active Second World War service. They brought to the School a level of unspoken moral and physical courage that sometimes conflicted with the more aggressively liberal values that emerged in the late 60s and which the much younger Headmaster and his more recent appointments were keen to endorse. McClure would have recognised that tension, I am sure.
The Nonconformist tradition was still strong – the last headmaster-cleric, Dr Whale, had stood down in 1951 but a succession of United Reformed Church chaplains supported the lay headmasters who were appointed thereafter.
McClure might have blanched somewhat at what passed for worship in Chapel each day but he would have perceived the conviction of faith.
As it was in his day, what happened on the games field was still of paramount importance in the lives of both boys and masters. Monitors and prefects ran their houses undisturbed by their housemasters. Fagging continued, re-named ‘house duties’. Colours tests were a traditional part of a new boy’s welcome. Exeats, half and full, were given every three weeks, but otherwise bounds were to be kept by boys at the rare times when they might have a free moment.
Uniform remained formal and boys still coveted the award of their house tie or scarf; boaters and colours blazers were still to be seen on occasion when the cricketers set off for an away match.
None of this would have struck McClure as unusual.
He would have applauded too academic success marked by the number of Oxbridge scholarships gained each year although the mathematics syllabus had definitely changed since his day. There were still no national league tables to worry about in the Seventies and he would have approved of Sixth
Form teaching which encouraged wide-ranging intellectual enquiry rather than the narrow, overly structured curriculum that masquerades as ‘learning’ today.
Gradually in that autumn term of 1970, I found my feet, began to accept the challenge, felt emboldened both by the support I received from my colleagues and by what struck me as the favourable welcome of the boys in my classes. Yes, the bottom Remove French set was a handful, but with time we got to know each other better. I like to think that the young Mr McClure (as he then was) found his way into his new school in similar fashion. He appointed a number of new staff with whom he must have worked hard to build a trusting relationship. His priority however was to bring in more new boys, lots of them; I imagine that he shared both their excitement and anxiety. Many people who knew him spoke of how he ‘understood’ boys, how easily he was able to mould their minds and character.
To attend Mill Hill in whatever guise is to join a fellowship, to be a valued part of a warm, busy and tolerant community.
It was this that so impressed me in my first weeks and months. Masters and boys lived their lives together. I took lunch with colleagues and boys in the Dining Hall where portraits of the Victorian great and the good looked down sternly upon us. I would teach in the Marnham and attend assembly in the Large – at the time I had no knowledge that the Large was once the School Chapel where McClure preached his first sermons. Several times a week I would take my violin to the Music School and join in orchestral rehearsals, hardly bothering to read the Latin plaque that informed that this was McClure’s Music School, a gift to mark the 21st anniversary of his headship. I didn’t know then that McClure was a gifted composer and performer who often enjoyed making music with his boys in those same rooms.
I attended services in the Chapel (more McClure lengthy sermons) and I helped supervise the Winterstoke Library. I would often pass the Fives Courts and watch pairs in action. Regularly one would hear the happy tones of splashing and shouting from the indoor pool (antediluvian, in fact the first ever to be built, it was said). One evening a week, I would be on visiting tutor duty in
School House, reporting to the Housemaster, John Wait, in his study or sitting room (the same rooms McClure and his family had occupied prior to moving to St Bees). Occasionally I would be called to Michael Hart’s study in the Octagon to discuss some matter, only vaguely aware that this room with its beautiful Victorian book-laden cabinets was where all Mill Hill’s headmasters from McClure onwards had sat, thought, and acted. Did I hear then the echoes from the past?
My memories of my earliest days at Mill Hill have inevitably coalesced into a more general impression, one of enjoyment of my new professional life and congenial environment. One moment in my first autumn term however stands out more distinctly in my mind – Remembrance Sunday. Standing with the Mill Hill community (Old Millhillians, parents and local residents were numerous in joining the masters and boys) at the Gate of Honour, listening to the Headmaster read from ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ followed by the Silence and the Last Post, and then processing through the Gate to Chapel left me with a powerful impression of the deep sincerity with which the School wished to remember those 319 of its own who had fed from Mill Hill’s arcadian pastures to lay down their lives for their country in foreign fields. The larger proportion of those 319 recorded were the 194 from the Great War, the first names carved into the Purbeck stone of the Gate which had been dedicated in the presence of the then visibly ailing Sir John McClure in October 1920. Their names were also recorded on the Roll of Honour concealed inside the main lectern in Chapel. McClure’s ashes were to be interred only a few feet away, just behind the traditional Headmaster’s stall.
I have often heard it said that McClure’s early death was hastened by the literal and metaphoric ravages of the Great War upon his heart. Those 194 were ‘his boys’. He had spent hours during the War keeping in touch with many of those serving on the various fronts, doubtless reminding them of happier days and assuring them that they were constantly in everyone’s minds. He had written with his condolences to their parents each time the School was informed of those missing or killed in action. How often must he have stood in Assembly in those four years to announce with increasing sadness the loss of another Millhillian life. Who could not be surprised if McClure despaired as he witnessed the generations of young men he had painstakingly nurtured cut to shreds?
In my years at Mill Hill we were, sadly, sometimes faced as a community with death – occasionally a pupil, or a member of a pupil’s family, sometimes a colleague, or a former colleague, or a notable Old Millhillian. We mourned, paid our respects and remembered. It was fortunately only on one occasion that I experienced something of that relentless grief brought about by war that McClure had had to face over four years. In May 1982, I was shocked to learn that a boy I had taught only a few years previously had been killed in action in Falkland Sound. David Tinker (Murray 1970-75) had also been an occasional boarder in School House where I was a tutor, I had taught him French, and he had been in one of the Rouen exchange groups I had accompanied. He had been a popular, always cheerful Sixth Former, a keen member of the CCF and captain of the Shooting VI. He joined the Navy after university and was serving on HMS Glamorgan when she was hit by an Exocet missile three days before the end of the Falklands War. He and 12 other ratings were killed instantly. Poignantly, he left behind a series of moving poems written about his life at Mill Hill, which his father published. I used to read one or two of the best at each Valedictory Service I took when Headmaster.
I felt that it was a way of passing on his legacy beyond the bare name engraved on the Gate of Honour. I trust McClure would have approved.
Looking back, I am increasingly aware how much we were all – unsuspectingly – in thrall to Dr McClure.
When I became Headmaster and found myself for the first time alone in ‘his’ study, I felt the full weight of responsibility for everyone and everything in the Foundation and I questioned whether I could meet the challenges of my new role.
I think I shared an anticipation and apprehension he would have felt 104 years previously. We were both on trial. McClure was faced with a much more Herculean task, of course, but there were parallels in our careers, particularly that urgent need to renew confidence and ensure that we each led the School into a centennial celebration with pride in the past and genuine optimism for the future. That McClure met those challenges, and famously achieved so much more on a national scale, illuminates for us his visionary greatness. I understand better now the inescapable influence that he stamped on the School, guiding and preparing young people for life, instilling in them the values of tolerance, of moral and physical courage which they receive to this day as their inheritance.
While acknowledging all this, however, for a long time I carried a profound regret: that I could never meet and know at first hand this distinguished servant of Mill Hill. Reading the School histories and the biographies, looking again at the portraits and the photographs – all this helped to bring him closer to me, but not close enough. Clearly, the clock could not be turned back, but in 1995 when I stepped more prominently into his shadow, I wondered how I could discover some more tangible link with the man himself.
It happened, quite by chance, one afternoon in the summer term of 1996. I was in discussion with a colleague in my study when my PA buzzed through to ask if I would have a spare moment to see a visitor who had brought the School a gift. She didn’t normally disturb me, so I thought it must be important. I excused myself and went to meet an elderly lady in the waiting room. She introduced herself as Mary, the daughter of Dudley Tennet (Day Pupil 1913-17). She explained that her father had been at the School many years ago, but that he was now rather frail and wished to donate
some of his most precious effects. She handed me a tattered box inside which were four items – a school cap and three rugby colours caps. Recognising them immediately, I thanked her and asked whether her father would be well enough to come back and visit his School. ‘He hoped that you might invite him…,’ she began. We arranged a date. The name Dudley Tennet was unknown to me. I looked him up in the Register. Dudley Tennet was born with the century; he was a McClure boy! I was excited beyond measure at the prospect of meeting him, hearing him talk of his schooldays. Here at last was the living link with Dr McClure that I had been seeking.
Dudley Tennet returned on a fine afternoon, and we sat together on a bench on Top Terrace and chatted for an hour. For a man in his mid-nineties he was remarkably spry and alert. As he looked out over Top Field, the memories came crowding back. He spoke with great affection of his years at the School, although professed himself less than academic. His passion was rugby. When I thanked him for his caps and assured him that they would be well taken care of, he explained how it was that he had caps for three XVs, all from the same year, his last at the School. In his final season he had started in the Thirds, but boys were regularly leaving the School to join up and the higher XVs needed to fill the gaps from the lower teams. With each promotion, he was awarded his colours. His performance with the Firsts in just the last few matches of the season was strong enough for him to be offered the ultimate accolade, 1st XV colours. He told me that he had lived with his parents in Hendon and had attended Mill Hill as one of a handful of day boys but thought he had been treated no differently from the boarders. He remembered taking a horse-drawn carriage to the bottom of Hammers Lane early each morning and then walking up Cinder Path, rain or shine, to join the boarders at breakfast. His most vivid memory was of the time a Zeppelin airship on a bombing raid over London floated slowly over Top Field in flames, eventually to crash in a field just beyond the School. Of course, I asked what he remembered of Dr McClure. He looked anxiously over his shoulder as though to check that his Headmaster had not emerged from his house to eavesdrop (St Bees was close by). Dudley clearly held McClure in great reverence. He said that the Headmaster’s importance made him seem rather distant from the boys, but he felt that everyone knew that he had their interests at heart, that his advice was eagerly sought and that being presented with his 1st XV cap had been a moment never forgotten.
The closer I get to John McClure, the more I sense that some essential part of him lives on, an ever-formative and inspirational part of the human, moral and physical fabric of Mill Hill. But as I write these words to mark the centenary of his passing, I have also to accept that his life and achievement cannot be seen other than within the sharp perspective of history.
Born in 1860, McClure had been a subject of Queen Victoria for over 40 years before she died. In terms of his early upbringing, personality, appearance, outlook, he was more attuned to the ‘stiff upper lip’ of her colonial age than to the relaxed, more evident selfindulgence of the Edwardian period which followed. He would surely have welcomed the return to the more austere era of George V when he stepped forward to receive his knighthood.
1860: Charles Dickens was writing ‘Great Expectations’; the Light Brigade had charged at Balaclava only six years previously; Gladstone replaced Disraeli as Prime Minister when the boy was just eight; Bismarck defeated France in the FrancoPrussian War when he was ten; he became Headmaster at the age of 31, 131 years ago. It’s all history…
And yet… There are some qualities of a favoured institution that transcend the passing years. They are the virtues which link countless generations who have shared the joy and fulfilment of a common experience. Mill Hill has known many faithful and diligent servants. John David McClure was one such. Had he failed in his task, Mill Hill would have disappeared to become a brief footnote in history. But he succeeded – and beyond all expectation. As a result of a lifetime’s devotion to the institution which meant everything to him, he wrote a different page, one which re-positioned the School on the sturdiest of human foundations and ensured the continuity of that essential message Et virtutem et musas.
‘His relations with the masters were uniformly easy and also – most important –entirely uniform, and if he had any favourites amongst them, he never showed it. He was always prepared to discuss and advise, and he made all his masters feel that they were real colleagues.’
From ‘The History of Mill Hill School 1807-1923’ by Norman Brett-James
Head of Mill Hill School, Jane Sanchez, finds M c Clure’s spirit lives on and continueS to inspire
I MUST ADMIT THAT Mc CLURE IS SOMETHING OF A HERO OF MINE, AND IN RECENT MONTHS I HAVE BEEN RESEARCHING HIS LIFE AS WE MARK HIS CENTENARY. THERE ARE DAILY REMINDERS IN MY STUDY OF THE SCHOOL’S HISTORY, IN THE FORM OF ARTEFACTS, FURNITURE AND OTHER MEMORABILIA: BLAZERS AND CAPS FROM A BYGONE AGE; A PAIR OF FINELYMADE CHAIRS BEARING THE SCHOOL CREST, AND SHELVES OF LEATHER-BOUND VOLUMES TOWERING UP TO THE CEILING.
History can intimidate but for me, in the case of McClure, it inspires. Looking back at his remarkable 31-year tenure, I see familiar shadows, hear echoes of the School I know and have come to love in my 19th year here. For me, as Head, his spirit very much lives on, not least when taking a book from the shelves in my office and reading minutes from meetings recorded in his own hand.
While these artefacts, along with many of our school buildings, provide a material presence, of most significance to me is McClure’s tireless quest towards the betterment of the School both in his time and for the future. As he said himself: ‘I trust that the foundation which is now being laid may be one upon which my successors may build a nobler edifice than it has been given to me to do.’ McClure’s legacy remains very much alive: the work goes on.
It was characteristically self-effacing of McClure to project any praise into the future when there was so much tangible progress in his own time as Head. Just one year into office, the Mill Hill Magazine records the following, relating to McClure’s Foundation Day speech in June 1893: ‘Mr McClure went on to speak of the School, remarking that whereas at the beginning of the year our numbers were 79, now there were 99 boys in the School, and that we hoped very soon to reach the 100. ‘We were told by Mr Gladstone,’ he said, ‘that we could hardly consider ourselves a public school until we numbered 200 boys, and although at present we are far from that, nevertheless we hope in the not very distant future to qualify.’ Two years later, from a base of just 61 boys, numbers had leapt to 171, and by the turn of the century to 205 after a period of sustained growth.
It might be said that for a new Head appointed at 31 years of age, McClure worked miracles. As a man of deep Christian faith the metaphor certainly resonates. On his death, while still in post, the roll was approaching 300, and the future of the School was secure. For the time being at least. The Mill Hill of McClure’s day was a very different one in many ways from today’s, with boys only – the majority of whom were boarding. However, there are some key similarities, including an appetite for growth, with numbers rising over the past six years from 650 to 885. As a Foundation, without an endowment, we are ever-mindful of the need to manage our finances carefully, and to build healthy numbers, enabling us to generate a surplus to be invested in buildings and bursaries. It is exciting to be leading the School in such a dynamic phase.
The same magazine article continued: ‘After this, a reference was made to the Cambridge Local Examinations. Last year we could only record two in honours and seven in the ordinary class. This year we could point to eight in honours and seven in the ordinary class. Mr McClure next noticed the Oxford and Cambridge Schools Examinations, saying that this year for the first time in the history of the School, Mill Hill would become a centre for these Examinations.’
Elsewhere it is recorded that, ‘between 1891 and 1898, three scholarships and exhibitions were won; during the next 10 years the number increased to 30, the total number gained before 1922 being over 80.’ As with the success he achieved in increasing the size of the roll, McClure made great strides in building the
academic reputation of the School over the next three decades, and forged links with the great universities, as well as establishing himself as an educational figure of national significance. In 1900, he became a member of the Senate of London University, and rose quickly through the ranks to become President of the Incorporated Association of Headmasters. He was also elected to the committee of the exclusive Head Masters’ Conference and was awarded a Knighthood for services to education in June 1913.
Although measures of academic achievement have evolved and diversified over the past century, in an increasingly competitive market it remains vital for Independent Schools to be seen to be doing the best for their pupils through public examination results and the destination of their leavers. While Oxbridge is still a metric, and we have our successes there, many other universities both in the UK and abroad have built their reputations and developed specialisms to reflect a rapidly changing jobs market, and UK universities’ fortunes have been transformed by the rise in their international student numbers in the past two decades.
With the use of baseline data, the emphasis has also shifted to consider ‘added value’ rather than simply GCSE or A Level results per se, and here we perform particularly well. I have long been a believer that a Mill Hill education is best characterised as offering breadth and balance, encouraging pupils to find their passions, and this is reflected in the diversity of courses that our pupils embark on when they leave
the Sixth Form: around 60 per cent at Russell Group universities, with many others finding their niche in conservatoires, overseas universities or in pioneering programmes such as that offered by The Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology.
The co-curricular plays a vital part in the building of breadth and balance, and in this area, like many others, I feel a kindred spirit in John McClure.
‘In 1902, the Head was able to announce at an Old Millhillians Dinner that the School had gained that year five University Scholarships, which for their numbers was considerably more than their share among other schools. These results, he went on, were not achieved by boys whose brows were “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” but by strong, energetic, healthy boys. They were a living proof, he said, that there was no incompatibility between really fine brain-work and really fine work on the cricket or football field.’
Much has been done in recent years to build on our longstanding tradition of co-curricular provision including Drama, Music and Sport along with the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) and the Duke of Edinburgh programme.
we now offer pupils the opportunity to access over 200 Clubs and Societies each week. Complementing the ‘brain-work’ of their academic studies, I fervently believe that these aspects of what comprises a Mill Hill education are key to building character, developing confidence, and nurturing well-rounded individuals: et virtutem et musas.
We also encourage our pupils to feel part of a community to which they can contribute and from which they can benefit, whether through our formal partnership with our neighbours at Copthall School, or our long-standing Overseas Partnerships with Sri Jayendra School in Tamil Nadu or links with the Tag Rugby Trust in Zambia and Zimbabwe or the many other partnerships which we continue to forge.
As a former Head of PE and Director of Sport, I can also associate with McClure’s enthusiasm for the principle of healthy minds going hand-in-hand with healthy bodies. As his daughter Kathleen Ousey recounts in her biography, ‘McClure of Mill Hill’, quoting a former pupil: ‘He took great interest in athletics. Often in early days he played single-handed hockey with us in the playground and his appearance struck us as something like a great eagle hopping about and flapping his wings. This produced the original designation of him as The Vulture, but it was considered disrespectful and was replaced by The Bird.’
As in this vignette, what emerges is a picture of a Head with a sense of humour who liked nothing more than to engage with his pupils, whether in the classroom, the corridor, the Chapel or the playground. He was described by friends as, ‘a big, cheerful, strenuous man, with unusual ability and freshness of thought, who was also an ardent musician, a telling speaker abounding in racy humour, and emphatically a convinced and broad-minded Christian.’
He was a Northerner, brought up in Wigan in Lancashire, and there was a practicality, directness and vigour which endeared him to staff and pupils alike. Reading of the ‘rich, mellifluous Lancastrian tones’ in which his speeches and sermons were delivered, I cannot help but think of the allusion I
always make in Open Morning presentations to my Black Country twang – still aware of being from ‘out of town’ after all these years.
The impact of McClure’s influence on his pupils resonated long after they had left school, and one such paid tribute to the Head’s guiding principle of seeing the best in them and giving a second chance: ‘He never despaired of the worst of us; he made us believe in ourselves because he believed in us, and many a boy who was going wrong has regained his grip on himself because the Head never let go his hold of him.’ Again I find myself concurring on this forgiving philosophy, and ‘going above and beyond’ for pupils is a favourite phrase of mine. Time and again the challenging pupil, whose behaviour may stem from difficult personal circumstances or simply adolescent turmoil, turns out to be the uplifting success story.
In my 15 years as Deputy Head (Pastoral), and more recently as Head, so many such stories spring to mind. At an OM dinner in Los Angeles two years ago, I was greeted with particular enthusiasm by former pupil Misha Crosby (Weymouth, 2000-05) who recalled sitting outside my office on more than one occasion to explain his latest ‘pushing at the boundaries’. I was heartened to reflect that he still appreciated the fact that he had been given a second chance, and to see how his creative streak has driven him on to build a highly
successful career as an actor, director and producer with leading credits in film and television in the UK and the USA. Misha put it well when he spoke of ‘valuing the opportunity to fail in a safe space’, which echoes so closely McClure’s self-professed inclination to see the best in his pupils, avoiding draconian measures in all but the most extreme of cases.
Researching school life in McClure’s day, it is interesting to find parallels with the present; his abolition of the practice of reading at meals, for example, to encourage conversation, and our own ‘invisibility policy’ regarding mobile phones in the Dining Hall, which has the same aim. The importance of interacting with those around us in the school community has been thrown into stark relief as we rediscover the art of being together after 18 months of on-and-off lockdowns, isolation and remote provision during the pandemic, which continues to rage on globally and at home. Although we are approaching the end of an unbroken Autumn Term, uncertainty remains; we continue to report on Covid cases in my weekly letter to parents and are required to have contingency plans in place in case public examinations are cancelled for a third year. I have been struck by the fact that everyone in the school community is having to rebuild those interpersonal skills, and I do not underestimate the lasting effect on the wellbeing of all. It is hard to express the elation I felt at the recent Inter-House Drama Festival final, as I saw the stage in The Large once again thronging with talent, movement, energy, passion, conviction, humour and life. That McClure made it through to the finals seemed fitting; and Sir John would have approved of the wit and outlandishness of the winners, Weymouth.
McClure never lost sight of the vital role the Old Millhillians Club played, acknowledging that the School’s very survival had, at times, depended on their support, financially and in governance. The link between McClure and Old Millhillians was never more intensely felt than in the years of the Great War, when every Old Millhillian lost in service was another name for him to read out in Chapel, another heartfelt letter home and another pang of personal grief. As has been recorded elsewhere in these gathered essays, these were the pupils he had taught, counselled and played music and sport with during their time at School. Though buoyed by his Christian faith, the fact that he survived this burden of office (which doubtless took its toll on his health) gives the measure of the man. He was a great attender of the Club’s events, notably the dinners
which took place both in London and the provinces. I also look forward to attending them in the coming centenary year, after many months of restricted travel resulting from the ongoing pandemic.
As noted in Ousey’s ‘McClure of Mill Hill’ regarding Old Millhillian dinners: ‘The greatest of these occasions for him was in 1912, when the Club commemorated the 21st year of his Head-mastership in a special toast coming after that of the School. The more formal celebrations – the unveiling of his portrait in the Dining Hall, the presentation of the School’s gifts of silver-plate, the opening of the McClure Music School – were to come the next day; but the real welcome from the Old Boys was given at the Dinner.’
McClure spoke with feeling about the debt he owed to the whole School community, not least the Old Millhillians, for the support they had given him over these two monumental decades in the School’s history: ‘I think that
I may truthfully say the feeling that all around you were eagerly watching, not to criticise, but rather to see where and how you could give a friendly hand – that attitude has done more for the success of Mill Hill than any work that I have been able to accomplish, because it has made one feel that one was only a part of a great body of men all of whom had the same object in view and were working towards the same end.’
To the modern reader, crediting ‘that great body of men’ for their support in what he had accomplished over the previous 21 years as Head may somehow jar, not least given the unwavering support of his wife,
Mary, through the years. As Roderick Braithwaite puts it in ‘Strikingly Alive, a history of Mill Hill School from 1807 to 2007’: ‘If anyone can be said to have established a yardstick by which the role of all later First Ladies of the School might be judged, it would be Lady McClure. She quietly backed her husband in everything – publicly and privately, in peace and war, in sickness and health – at the School and Belmont.’ The same speech goes on to acknowledge this: ‘And I hope that you will forgive me on an occasion like this, gentlemen, for saying that there is a sixth element, and I regard it as perhaps the greatest element of all – far greater than the Headmaster – and that is the Headmaster’s wife. What she has meant to me… words can never tell.’
It appears that McClure’s perspective was, in many ways, Victorian; unsurprising given that the last ten years of the Queen’s reign coincided with the first ten of his Headship, and he was, after all, running a school for boys taught, for the most part, by men. However,
I sense that McClure was above all a humanist whose ‘genial wisdom’, as his daughter puts it, would have embraced the Mill Hill School of today for its inclusion of girls, its moving with the times to switch from being predominantly boarding to one which is 87% day, and the fact that over 30 nationalities are represented among our boarders
Doubtless, too, he would be impressed by Mill Hill’s expansion to incorporate five Schools, the two most recent being Mill Hill International on the site of what was The Mount School and Cobham Hall in Kent. Similarly,
I have no doubt that McClure would embrace the non-denominational nature of today’s Chapel Services, knowing, as close friend the Reverend T H Darlow puts it: ‘That the things which unite us utterly outweigh the things which divide us.’
Our recently licensed Chaplain, the Reverend Antony Wilson, has made one of his first Chapel Service themes ‘faith’, questioning the notion of ‘all Faiths and none’ to validate the concept of faith beyond religious denomination, encouraging pupils to consider the importance of trust and of conviction.
Three years into my own Headship, I know exactly what McClure meant by the ‘friendly hand’, recognising not only the support I too have received from these same quarters, but also the inspiration which I have felt in the background from my predecessors –notably Sir John David McClure and another of his admirers, William Winfield, who put his faith in me by appointing me as Deputy Head almost 20 years ago. The strong link between the Old Millhillians and the Court of Governors continues too, both through the commitment of the Life Guardians and the Old Millhillians Club, and there is a powerful sense of a single thread of faith running from the School’s foundation up to the present day.
Like William Winfield, who writes so eloquently of his own experience in this publication, I share a sense of the life-affirming, all-consuming significance of Mill Hill School, and the immense privilege of being handed the baton as Head. As McClure puts it: ‘I feel in some way that I cannot express the influence of the School upon my life… That School, I say, has laid its hand upon us all.’
Additional Editorial Content: Tony Binns, Assistant Head (External Relations)
An Old Boy makes a rueful comment:
‘He used to set impossible subjects for an essay like Is Civilization a Failure? And he could always tell what books I had been reading and if anyone else had helped me. He never stinted encouragement where deserved, nor if necessary sarcasm. His sarcasm was what we dreaded most. How it made one squirm! I have known boys come back from his Study crying and saying they wished they had been caned instead of talked to.’
‘Those of us who had the chance of sitting near (McClure) in Hall were kept constantly amused and improved by his fund of stories and information. One of his reforms was to abolish the practice of reading at meals, but he taught us how to converse over our food. It was in these meal-time conversations that we first began to learn to marvel at his prodigious feats of memory, for we found he could give full accounts of all the important cricket matches that had ever been played, with the exact scores made by each man, his manner of getting out and every other thrilling detail.’
In 1907 Mill Hill launched a Centenary Appeal for £50,000 - equivalent to £6.4 million in 2022 money values - as part of a plan to create ‘The Big School’ by doubling number of pupils from 150 to 300.
In the appeal McClure makes the case for his vision for Mill and for private and state education
In 1907 Mill Hill launched a Centenary Appeal, much as was created for the bi-centenary in 2007.
In 1907, the School raised £50,000 - equivalent to £6.4 million in 2022 money values, as part of a plan to create “The Big School” by doubling number of pupils from 150 to 300.
£25,000 was required to upgrade the estate and sports facilities, of which £10,000 was donated by Herbert Marnham to provide new classrooms - The Marnham Block.
£25,000 was required to fund ten Exhibitions and also Entrance Scholarships averaging about £450 per annum.
John McClure makes the following case for the fund-raising appeal with the following statement of his vision for Mill Hill and for Private and State education in general.
‘Our hopes for the future must needs be founded on the experience of the past.
(1.) The fact that for the last fifteen years there has been a steady and continuous growth in the numbers attending the School shews that the School supplies a distinct want; and that there is a large and increasing circle of parents who are in sympathy with the character of the Foundation, the aims it embodies, and the ideals for which it exists.
(2.) I believe that the same period has witnessed also a steady growth in the efficiency of the School and in the development of that esprit de corps, that enthusiasm which every good school invariably and inevitably inspires. It has been made clear, at any rate that masters and boys trained
under widely different conditions and belonging to different churches, can and do live in mutual helpfulness and respect united by the strongest of ties -a common loyalty and a common faith.
(3.) Nor does this spirit cease to operate nor do the ties become less strong when boys leave school for the wider interests and duties of professional, business, or University life. Each of the two older Universities is training a small band of Old Millhillians who are certainly not amongst the least distinguished, the least honored, or the least worthy of their sons. It has been said by one well-known Oxonian (not himself an Old Millhillian) that Mill Hill boys at Oxford live up to their School motto, “Et virtutem et musas” (Character and scholarship) and independent testimony from Cambridge is equally emphatic.
These facts and others of which they are typical are the things we see “which justify the hope of and belief in the greater things yet to be” that are to grow from them. As one considers the future, the number and magnitude of its requirements and the many ways in which improvement and progress ought to be and must be made, would make one well nigh despair were it not for the consciousness of the solid achievements of the past under conditions much less favorable than those now prevailing. It is well, however, to consider carefully the signs of the times. In a few years, at most, the Secondary Schools of the Kingdom will be of two types, (1) those supported wholly or in part from the public funds; (2) those which rely entirely upon their own endowments and fees. The State will doubtless exercise some control over all schools, but over the first kind its power (whether exercised directly through the Board of Education or indirectly through local Authorities) will be practically absolute.
Into this category will fall the great majority of the Secondary Schools. The other class will consist chiefly, if not entirely, of the great Public Schools, and over these the control of the Local Authority will be virtually nonexistent, while the power of the State will be limited to the settlement of Schemes. The authorities of such schools may safely be trusted to manage their own finances, arrange their curricula, and generally conduct the education of their pupils in a far more satisfactory fashion than if working under State regulation and supervision. There cannot be the least doubt as to which class Mill Hill must belong; yet the position she may rightfully claim can only be permanently secured by the possession of such support, financial as well as moral, as shall render her efficiency indisputable and free her from the need of assistance from public funds. To accept such aid would be not only to place the School under State control but to destroy her very raison d’etre. For Mill Hill is, in truth, a great religious foundation; great, not in the magnitude of endowment nor in the numbers gathered within her walls, but great in the work she is called upon to do, and in the principles of which she is the living embodiment. To support such an institution is not merely an act of loyalty to a beloved alma mater but an act of loyalty to cherished convictions - an act of faith in a great principle. To invite or to accept aid from the State, which is (or ought to be) neutral in matters of religion, would be tantamount to a confession of failure, a recantation, or a denial of the faith once professed. That this should ever take place is inconceivable to anyone who knows the nature of past and present Millhillians, whose loyalty and love are, after all. the great foundation upon which rests the hopes of the future. The School begins its second century of existence under happy auspices. Never has the equipment been so good; never have the numbers
been so great; never has the school spirit been so strong; never has the faith in the future been so firm ; never has the ideal which Mill Hill imperfectly realises been so clear in the minds and hearts of her sons. We claim that in the past the School has stood for unity and comprehensiveness, and bas shewn the only way by which that unity can be (or ought to be) attained. In the future it must be our aim that Mill Hill continue not as an Undenominational (for she exists not for negations, but for the assertion of a positive truth) but rather as an Inter-denominational School, second to none in equipment, character, and teaching.
Such a school cannot be great in numbers, but it ought to be great in the consciousness that it is the pioneer in the path in which others must sooner or later inevitably follow. Boys thus educated under the influence of such ideals, learning sympathy from differences, unity of spirit through diversities of training, must needs grow into large-hearted, generous, tolerant, yet earnest Christian manhood and form no unworthy part of that true aristocracy of character which constitutes the real wealth of every nation.’
McClure’s words were followed by the following concluding paragraph, probably written by Dickie Buckland, Treasurer of the School:
‘To some who do not know the School and its Head Master, these words may almost seem to relate to visionary things. The answer to such a criticism is that a century ago the idea of Mill Hill was a dream in the minds of the few men who founded it. That idea has for generations been restricted in its growth by the lack of means to nourish it, and by the rigidity of the forms in which it has hitherto been expressed. It is for this generation to find for it a freshened energy and to give to it a wider significance.’
‘Lecturing to our class in the Large, he walked up and down between the dais and the front row of desks, with his hands behind his back and his gown cockled up in them. He was a good lecturer, easy to listen to and always surprising us with some turn of phrase which made things stick...’
A school boy’s observation on the Headmaster
M c Clure contributed to the ‘Cambridge Essays in Education’, first published in 1917, edited by Arthur Christopher Benson and republished in 2015 by Creative Media Partners, Scholar’s Choice Edition. This work was selected by scholars ‘as being culturally important, and part of the knowledge base of civilisation as we know it’. We reproduce in full M c CLURE’s chapter ‘Preparation for Practical Life’
It is, perhaps, the chief glory of the Ideal Commonwealth that each and every member thereof is found in his right place. His profession is also his vocation; in it is his pride; through it he attains to the joie de vivre; by it he makes his contribution to the happiness of his fellows and to the welfare and progress of the State. The contemplation of the Ideal, however, would seem to be nature’s anodyne for experience of the Actual. In practical life, all attempts to realise this ideal, however earnest and continuous, are frustrated by one or more of many difficulties; and though the Millennium follows hard upon Armageddon, we cannot assume that in the period vaguely known as ‘after the war’ these difficulties will be fewer in number or less in magnitude. Some of the more obvious may be briefly considered. In theory, every child is ‘good for something’; in practice, all efforts to discover for what some children are good prove unavailing. The napkin may be shaken never so vigorously, but the talent remains hidden. In every school there are many honest fellows who seem to have no decided bent in any direction, and who would probably do equally well, or equally badly, in any one of half-a-dozen different employments. Some of these boys are steady, reliable, not unduly averse from labour, willing – even anxious – to be guided and to carry out instructions, yet are quite unable to manifest a preference for any one kind of work. Others, again, show real enthusiasm for a business or profession, but do not possess those qualities which are essential to success therein; yet they are allowed to follow their supposed bent, and spend the priceless years of adolescence in the achievement of costly failure. Many a promising mechanic has been spoiled by the ill-considered attempts to make a passable engineer; and the annals of every profession abound in parallel instances of misdirected zeal. In saying this, however, one would not wish to undervalue enthusiasm, nor to deny that it sometimes reveals or develops latent and unsuspected talents. The lifework of many is determined largely, if not entirely, by what may be termed family considerations. There is room for a boy in the business of his father or some other relative. The fitness of the boy for the particular employment is not, as a rule, seriously considered; it is held, perhaps, to be sufficiently proved by the fact that he is his father’s son. He is more likely to be called upon to recognise the special dispensations of
a beneficent Providence on his behalf. It is natural that a man should wish the fruits of his labour to benefit his family in the first instance, at any rate; and the desire to set his children well on the road of life’s journey seems entirely laudable. It is easy to hold what others have won, to build on foundations which others have laid, and to do this with all their experience and goodwill to aid him. Hence when the father retires, he has the solid satisfaction of knowing that Resigned unto the Heavenly Will, his son keeps on the business still. It cannot be denied that this policy is often successful; but it is equally undeniable that it is directly responsible for the presence of many incompetent men in positions which none but the most competent should occupy. There are many long-established firms haste into decay because even they are not strong enough to withstand the disastrous consequences of successive infusions of new (and young) blood.
Many, too, are deterred from undertaking congenial work by reason of the inadequate income to be derived therefrom, and the unsatisfactory prospects which it presents. Let it suffice to mention the teaching profession, which fails to attract in any considerable numbers the right kind of men and women. A large proportion of its members did not become teachers from deliberate choice, but having failed in their attempt to secure other employment, were forced to betake themselves to the ever-open portals of the great Refuge for the Destitute, and become teachers (or, at least, become classified as such). True there are a few ‘prizes’ in the profession, and to some of the rude donati, the Church holds out a helping hand; but the lay members cannot look forward even to the ‘congenial gloom of a Colonial Bishopric’.
Others, again, are attracted to employments (for which they may have no special aptitude) by the large salaries or profits which are to be earned therein, often with but little trouble or previous training – or so, at least, they believe. The idea of vocation is quite obscured, and a man’s occupation is in effect the shortest distance from poverty which he cannot endure, to wealth and leisure which he may not know how to use.
It frequently happens, too, that a young man is unable to afford either the time or the expense necessary to
qualify for the profession which he desires to enter, and for which he is well adapted by his talents and temperament. Not a few prefer in such circumstances to ‘play for safety’, and secure a post in the Civil Service.
It is plain from such considerations as these that all attempts to realise the Utopian ideal must needs be, for the present at least, but very partially successful. Politics are not the only sphere in which ‘action is one long second-best’. Even if it were possible at the present time to train each youth for that calling which his own gifts and temperament, or the reasoned judgment of his parents, selected as his life-work, it is very far from certain that he would ultimately find himself engaged therein. English institutions are largely based on the doctrine of individual liberty, and those statutes which establish or safeguard individual rights are not unjustly regarded as the ‘bulwarks of the Constitution’. But the inalienable right of a father to choose a profession for his son, or of the son to choose one for himself, is often exercised without any real inquiry into the conditions of success in the profession selected. Hence the frequent complaints about the ‘overcrowding of the professions’ either in certain localities or in the country at large. The Bar affords a glaring example. ‘There be many which are bred unto the law, yet is the law not bread unto them.’ The number of recruits which any one branch of industry requires in a single year is not constant, and, in some cases, is subject to great fluctuations; yet there are few or no statistics available for the guidance of those who are specially concerned with that branch, or who are considering the desirability of entering it. The establishment of Employment Exchanges is a tacit admission of the need of such statistics, and –though less certainly – of the duty of the Government to provide them. Yet even if they were provided it seems beyond dispute that, in the absence of strong pressure or compulsion from the State, the choice of individuals would not always be in accordance with the national needs. The entry to certain professions – for instance that of medicine – is most properly safeguarded by regulations and restrictions imposed by bodies to which the State has delegated certain powers and duties. It may happen that in one of these professions the number of members is greatly in excess or falls far short of the national requirements. Yet neither State nor Professional Council has power to refuse admission to any duly qualified candidate, or to compel certain selected people to undergo the training necessary for qualification. It is quite conceivable, however, that circumstances might arise which would render such action not merely desirable
but essential to the national well-being. Indeed it is at least arguable that such circumstances have already arisen. The popular doctrine of the early Victorian era, that the welfare of the community could best be secured by allowing every man to seek his own interests in the way chosen by himself, has been greatly modified or wholly abandoned. So far are we from believing that national efficiency is to be attained by individual liberty that some are in real danger of regarding the two as essentially antagonistic. The nation as a whole supported the Legislature in the establishment of compulsory military service; it did so without enthusiasm and only because of the general conviction that such a policy was demanded by the magnitude of the issues at stake. Britons have always been ready, even eager, to give their lives for their country but, even now, most of them prefer that the obligation to do so should be a moral, rather than a legal one. The doctrine of individual liberty implies the minimum of State interference. Hence there is no country in the world where so much has been left to individual initiative and voluntary effort as in England; and, though of late the number of Government officials has greatly increased, it remains true that an enormous amount of important work, of a kind which is elsewhere done by salaried servants of the State, is in the hands of voluntary associations or of men who, though appointed or recognised by the State, receive no salary for their services. Nor can it be denied that the work has been, on the whole, well done. A traditional practice of such a kind cannot be (and ought not to be) abandoned at once or without careful consideration; yet the changed conditions of domestic and international politics render some modification necessary.
If the Legislature has protected the purchaser – in spite of the doctrine of caveat emptor – by enactments against adulteration of food, and has in addition, created machinery to enforce those enactments, are not we justified in asking that it shall also protect us against incompetence? Especially in cases where the effects, though not so obvious, are even more harmful to the community than those which spring from impure food. The prevention of overcrowding in occupations would seem to be the business of the State quite as much as is the prevention of overcrowding in dwelling-houses and factories. The best interests of the nation demand that the entrance to the teaching profession – to take one example out of many -– should be safeguarded at least as carefully as the entrance to medicine or law. The supreme importance of the functions exercised by teachers is
far from being generally realised, even by teachers themselves; yet upon the effective realisation of that importance the future welfare of the nation largely depends. Doubtless most of us would prefer that the supply of teachers should be maintained by voluntary enlistment, and that their training should be undertaken, like that of medical students, by institutions which owe their origin to private or public beneficence rather than to the State. Nevertheless, the obligation to secure adequate numbers of suitable candidates and to provide for their professional training rests ultimately on the State. The obligation has been partially recognised as far as elementary education is concerned, but it is by no means confined to that branch.
It is well to realise at this point that the efficient discharge of the duty thus imposed will of necessity involve a much greater degree of compulsion on both teachers and pupils than has hitherto been employed. The terrible spectacle of the unutilised resources of humanity, which everywhere confronts us in the larger relations of our national life, has been responsible for certain tentatives which have either failed altogether to achieve their object, or have been but partially successful. Much has been heard of the educational ladder – incidentally it may be noted that the educational sieve is equally necessary, though not equally popular – and some attempts have been made to enable a boy or girl of parts to climb from the elementary school to the university without excessive difficulty.
To supplement the glaring deficiencies of elementary education a few – ridiculously few – continuation schools have been established. That these and similar measures have failed of success is largely due to the fact that the State has been content to provide facilities, but has refrained from exercising that degree of compulsion which alone could ensure that they would be utilised by those for whose benefit they were created. ‘Such continuation schools as England possesses,’ says a German critic, ‘are without the indispensable condition of compulsion.’ The reforms recently outlined by the President of the Board of Education show that he, at any rate, admits the criticism to be well grounded. A system which compels a child to attend school until he is 14 and then leaves him to his own resources can do little to create, and less to satisfy, a thirst for knowledge. During the most critical years of his life – 14 to 18 – he is left without guidance, without discipline, without ideals, often without even the desire of remembering or using the
little he knows. He is led, as it were, to the threshold of the temple, but the fast-closed door forbids him to enter and behold the glories of the interior. Year by year there is an appalling waste of good human material; and thousands of those whom nature intended to be captains of industry are relegated, in consequence of undeveloped or imperfectly trained capacity, to the ranks, or become hewers of wood and drawers of water. Many drift with other groups of human wastage to the unemployed, thence to the unemployable, and so to the gutter and the grave. The poor we have always with us; but the wastrel – like the pauper – ‘is a work of art, the creation of wasteful sympathy and legislative inefficiency.’
We must be careful, however, in speaking of ‘the State’ to avoid the error of supposing that it is a divinely appointed entity, endowed with power and wisdom from on high. It is, in short, the nation in miniature. Even if the Legislature were composed exclusively of the highest wisdom, the most enlightened patriotism in the country, its enactments must needs fall short of its own standards, and be but little in advance of those of the average of the nation. It must still acknowledge with Solon. ‘These are not the best laws I could make, but they are the best which my nation is fitted to receive.’ We cannot blame the State without, in fact, condemning ourselves. The absence of any widespread enthusiasm for education, or appreciation of its possibilities; the claims of vested interests; the exigencies of Party Government; and, above all, the murderous tenacity of individual rights have proved well-nigh insuperable obstacles in the path of true educational reform. On the whole we have received as good laws as we have deserved. The changed conditions due to the war, and the changed temper of the nation afford a unique opportunity for wiser counsels, and – to some extent -– guarantee that they shall receive careful and sympathetic consideration.
It may be objected, however, that in taking the teaching profession to exemplify the duty of the State to assume responsibility for both individual and community, we have chosen a case which is exceptional rather than typical; that many, perhaps most, of the other vocations may be safely left to themselves or at least left to develop along their own lines with the minimum of State interference. It cannot be denied that there is force in these objections. It should suffice, however, to remark that if the duty of the State to secure the efficiency of its members in their several callings be admitted, the question of the extent to which, and the manner in which control is exercised
is one of detail rather than of principle and may therefore be settled by the common sense and practical experience of the parties chiefly concerned.
A much more difficult problem is sure to arise, sooner or later, in connection with the utilisation of efficients. Some few years ago, the present Prime Minister called attention to the waste of power involved in the training of the rich. They receive, he said, the best that money can buy. Their bodies and brains are disciplined and then ‘they devote themselves to a life of idleness’. It is ‘a stupid waste of first-class material’. Instead of contributing to the work of the world, they ‘kill their time by tearing along roads at perilous speed, or do nothing at enormous expense’. It has needed the bloodiest war in history to reveal the splendid heroism latent in young men of this class. Who can withhold from them gratitude, honour, nay even reverence? But the problem remains: how are the priceless qualities, which have been so freely devoted to the national welfare on the battlefield, to be utilised for the greater works of peace which await us? Are we to recognise the right to be idle as well as the right to work? Is there to be a kind of second Thellusson Act, directed against accumulations of leisure? Or are we to attempt the discovery of some great principle of Conservation of Spiritual Energy, by the application of which these men may make a contribution worthy of themselves to the national life and character? Who can answer?
But though it is freely admitted on all hands that some check upon aggressive individualism is imperatively necessary, and that it is no longer possible to rely entirely upon voluntary organisations however useful, there are not a few of our countrymen who view with grave concern any increase in the power and authority of the State. They point out that such increase tends inevitably towards the despotism of an oligarchy, and that such a despotism, however benevolent in its inception, ruthlessly sacrifices individual interests and liberty to the real or supposed good of the State; that even where constitutional forms remain the spirit which animated them has departed; that officialism and bureaucracy with their attendant evils become supreme, and that the national character steadily deteriorates. They warn us that we may pay too high a price even for organisation and efficiency; and, though it is natural that we should admire certain qualities which we do not possess, we ought not to overlook the fact that those methods which have produced the most perfect national organisation in the history of the world are also responsible for
orgies of brutality without parallel among civilised peoples. That such warnings are needful cannot be doubted; but may it not be urged that they indicate dangers incident to a course of action rather than the inevitable consequences thereof? In adapting ourselves to new conditions we must needs take risks. No British Government could stamp out voluntaryism even if it wished to do so; and none has yet manifested any such desire. The nation does not want that kind of national unity of which Germany is so proud, and which seems so admirably adapted to her needs; for the English character and genius rest upon a conception of freedom which renders such a unity foreign and even repulsive to its temper. Whatever be the changes which lie before us, the worship of the State is the one form of idolatry into which the British people are least likely to fall.
The recent adaptation of factories and workshops to the production of war material is only typical of what goes on year by year in peace time, though, of course, to a less degree and in less dramatic fashion. Not only are men constantly adapting themselves and their machinery to changed conditions of production, but they are applying the experience and skill gained in the pursuit of one occupation to the problems of another for which it has been exchanged. The comparative ease with which this is done is evidence of the widespread existence of that gift which our enemies call the power of ‘muddling through’, but which has been termed – without wholly sacrificing truth to politeness – the ‘concurrent adaptability to environment’. The British sailor as ‘handy man’ has few equals and no superiors, and he is, in some sort, typical of the nation. The testimony of Thucydides to Themistocles (Greek: kratistos dê oytos aytoschediazein ta deonta egeneto) might with equal or even greater truth be applied to many Englishmen today. As this power (Greek: aytoschediazein ta deonta) in the present war saved the Allies from defeat at the outset, so we hope and believe it will carry them on to victory at the last. Yet it becomes a snare if it leads its possessor to neglect preparation or despise organisation, for neither of which can it ever be an entirely satisfactory substitute, albeit a very costly one. At the same time, we should recognise that any system of training which seriously impairs this power tends to deprive us of one of the most valuable of our national assets. It follows that, for the majority at least, exclusive or excessive specialisation in training – vocational or otherwise – so far from being an advantage, is a positive drawback; for, as we have seen, a large proportion of our youth manifest no marked
bent in any particular direction, and of those who do but a small proportion are capable of that hypertrophy which the highest specialisation demands.
It is important to remember that, though school life is a preparation for practical life, vocational education ought not to begin until a comparatively late stage in a boy’s career, if indeed it begins at all while he remains at school. On this it seems all professional bodies agree; for the entrance examinations, which they have accepted or established are all framed to test a boy’s general education and not his knowledge of the special subjects to which he will afterwards devote himself. The evils of premature specialisation are too well known to require even enumeration, and they are increased rather than diminished if that premature specialisation is vocational. The importance of technical training as the means whereby a man is enabled rightly to use the hours of work can hardly be exaggerated; but the value of his work, his worth to his fellows, and his rank in the scale of manhood depend, to at least an equal degree, upon the way in which he uses the hours of leisure. It is one of the greatest of the many functions of a good school to train its members to a wise use of leisure; and though this is not always achieved by direct means, the result is nonetheless valuable. In every calling there must needs be much of what can only be to all save its most enthusiastic devotees – and, at times, even to them – dull routine and drudgery. A man cannot do his best, or be his best, unless he is able to overcome the paralysing influences thus brought to bear upon him by securing mental and spiritual freshness and stimulus. In other words his ‘inward man must be renewed day by day’. There are many agencies which may contribute to such a result but school memories, school friendships, school ‘interests’ take a foremost place among them. Many boys by the time they leave school have developed an interest or hobby – literary, scientific or practical – and the hobby has an ethical, as well as an economic value. Nor is this all. Excessive devotion to ‘Bread Studies,‘ whether voluntary or compulsory, tends to make a man’s vocation the prison of his soul. Professor Eucken recently told his countrymen that the greater their perfection in work grew, the smaller grew their souls. Any rational interest, therefore, which helps a man to shake off his fetters, helps also to preserve his humanity and to keep him in touch with his fellows. Dr AC Benson tells of a distinguished Frenchman who remarked to him, ‘In France, a boy goes to school or college, and perhaps does his best. But he does not get the sort of passion for the honour and prosperity of his school or college which you English seem to feel.’ It is this wondrous faculty of inspiring unselfish devotion
that makes our schools the spiritual powerhouses of the nation. This love for an abstraction, which even the dullest boys feel, is the beginning of much that makes English life sweet and pure. It is the same spirit which, in later years, moves men to do such splendid voluntary work for their church, their town, their country, and even in some cases leads them ‘to take the whole world for their parish’.
However much we may strive to reach the beautiful Montessori ideal, the fact remains that there must be some lessons, some duties, which the pupil heartily dislikes and would gladly avoid if he could but they must be done promptly and satisfactorily, and if not cheerfully at least without audible murmuring. Eventually he may, and often does, come to like them. At any rate he realises that they are not set before him in order to irritate or punish, but as part of his school training. It will be agreed that the acquirement of a habit of doing distasteful things, even under compulsion, because they are part of one’s duty is no bad preparation for a life in which most days bring their quota of unpleasant duties which cannot be avoided, delegated, or postponed.
At the present time, however, there is a real danger –in some quarters at least – of unduly emphasising the specifically vocational, or ‘practical’ side of education. The man of affairs knows little or nothing of young minds and their limitations, of the conditions under which teaching is done, or of the educational values of the various studies in a school curriculum. He is prone to choose subjects chiefly or solely because of their immediate practical utility. Thus, in his view the chief reason for learning a modern language is that business communications will thereby be facilitated. One could wish that he would be content to indicate the end which he has in view, and which he sees clearly, and leave the means of obtaining it to the judgment and experience of the teacher; for in education, as in other spheres of action, the obvious way is rarely the right way, and very often the way of disaster. Yet it is a distinct gain to have the practical man brought into the administration of educational affairs; for teachers are, as a rule, too little in contact with the world of commerce to know much of the needs and ideas of businessmen. The Board of Education has already established a Consultative Committee of Educationists. Why should not a similar standing Committee, consisting of representatives of the Chambers of Commerce of the country be also appointed? Such a Committee could render, as could no other body, invaluable service to the cause of education.
From a recent article by Professor Leacock, we learn that some 20 years ago there was a considerable change in the Canadian schools and universities. ‘The railroad magnate, the corporation manager, the promoter, the multiform director, and all the rest of the group known as captains of industry, began to besiege the universities clamouring for practical training for their sons.’ Mr Leacock tells of a ‘great and famous Canadian public school’, which he attended, at which practical banking was taught so resolutely that they had wire gratings and little wickets, books labelled with the utmost correctness, and all manner of real-looking things. It all came to an end, and now it appears that in Canada they are beginning to find that the great thing is to give a schoolboy a mind that will do anything; when the time comes ‘you will train your banker in a bank’. It may be that everybody has not recognised this, and that the railroad magnates and the rest of them are not yet fully convinced but Mr Leacock declares that the most successful schools of commerce will not now attempt to teach the mechanism of business, because ‘the solid, orthodox studies of the university programme, taken in suitable, selective groups, offer the most practical training in regard to intellectual equipment, that the world has yet devised.’ To the same purport is the evidence given by Mr HA Roberts, Secretary of the Cambridge Appointments Board (see ‘Minutes of Evidence taken before the Royal Commission on the Civil Service, 22nd November 1912-13th December 1912’, pp 66-73). The whole of this testimony deserves careful study.
For some few years past, the heads of the great business firms, in this country and abroad, have applied in ever increasing numbers to Cambridge (and to Oxford also, though in this case statistics do not appear to be available) for men to take charge of departments and agencies; to become, in fact, ‘captains of industry’. In the year before the war (1913-14), about 135 men were transferred from Cambridge University to commercial posts through the agency of the Board [1]. One might naturally suppose that the majority of these were science men. On the contrary, owing no doubt to the greater number of other posts open to them, they were fewer than might have been expected. Graduates from every Tripos are found in the 135 in numbers roughly proportional to the numbers in the various Tripos lists. Shortly before the war, an advertisement of an important managership of some works – in South America, if I remember rightly – ended with the intimation that, other things being equal,
preference would be given to a man who had taken a good degree in Classical Honours.
That most of such men are successful in their occupations might be deemed to be proved by the steady increase in the number of applications made for their services. There is, however, more definite evidence available. A member of one of the largest business firms in the country testified to the same Royal Commission that of the 46 Cambridge men who had been taken into his employment during the previous seven years, 43 had done excellently well, two had left before their probationary period was ended to take up other work; and one only had proved unsatisfactory. This evidence could easily be supplemented did space permit. It is clear, then, that in many callings what is wanted – to begin with, at any rate – is not so much technical knowledge as trained intelligence.
Another reason for thus choosing university men is not difficult to discover. When Mr WL Hichens (Chairman of Cammell, Laird and Co) addressed the Incorporated Association of Headmasters in January last, he declared that in choosing university graduates for business, he looked out for the man who might have got a First in Greats or History, if he had worked – a man who had other interests as well, who was President of the Common Room, who had been pleasant in the Common Room, or on the river, or rowed in his college Eight, or had done something else which showed that he could get on with his fellow men. In business getting on means getting on with men.
The experience of Mr Hichens is so valuable that I cannot do better than quote further: ‘A big industrial organisation such as my firm, has, or should have three main sub-divisions – the manufacturing branch, the commercial branch, and the research or laboratory branch… I will not deal with the rank and file, but with the better educated apprentices, who expect to rise to positions of responsibility. On the workshop side, we prefer that the lads should come to us between 16 and 17, and, if possible (after serving an apprenticeship in the shops and drawing office), that they should then go to a university and take an engineering course.
‘On the commercial side also, we prefer to get the boys between 16 and 17. We have recently, however, reserved a limited number of vacancies for university men. The research department also is, in the main, recruited from university men. But there is this difference, that, whereas the research men should have received a scientific training at the university, we require no specialised education in the case of university men joining the commercial side. Specialised education at school is of no practical value. There is ample time after a boy has started business to acquire all the technical knowledge that his brain is capable of assimilating. What we want when we take a boy is to assure ourselves that he has ability and moral strength of character, and I submit that the true function of education is to teach him how to learn and how to live – not how to make a living. We are interested naturally to know that a boy has an aptitude for languages or mathematics, but it is immaterial to us whether he has acquired his aptitude, say for learning languages, through learning Latin and Greek or French and German. The educational value is paramount, the vocational negligible. If, therefore, modern languages are taught because they will be useful in later life, while Latin and Greek are omitted because they have no practical use, although their educational value may be greater, you will be bartering away the boy’s rightful heritage of knowledge for a mess of pottage.’
There are doubtless many different opinions as to the best way of training boys to become engineers, and in giving the results of his experience Mr Hichens does not claim that he is voicing the unanimous and wellconsidered judgments of the whole profession. His statement that ‘specialised education at school is of no practical value to us’ would certainly be challenged by those schools which possess a strong, well-organised engineering side for their elder boys. But there would be substantial unanimity – begotten of long and often bitter experience – in favour of his plea that a sound general education up to the age of 16 or 17 at any rate, is an indispensable condition of satisfactory vocational training. ‘I venture to think,’ says Mr Hichens, ‘that the tendency of modern education is often in the wrong direction – that too little attention is given to the foundations which lie buried out of sight, below the ground, and too much to a showy superstructure. We pay too much heed to the parents who want an immediate return in kind on their money and forget that education consists in tilling the ground and sowing the seed – forget, too, that the seed must grow of itself.’
It would appear from what has already been said that though the necessity for vocational training exists in most, if not in all cases, the time in a boy’s life at which such training ought to begin is far from being the same for all callings. Even where there is general agreement as to the normal age, exceptional circumstances or exceptional ability may justify the postponement of vocational instruction to a much later period than would usually be desirable. Thus, the fact that two of the most distinguished members of the medical profession graduated as Senior Wrangler and Senior Classic respectively, will not justify the average medical student in waiting until he is twentythree before commencing his professional training. If it be true that in some quarters ‘specialised education’ has been demanded for young boys, it is equally true that many youths pass through school and enter the university without any clear idea of whither they are tending. This uncertainty may be due to a belief that ‘something is sure to turn up’, to the magnitude of their allowances and the ease of their circumstances, occasionally, perhaps, to excessive timidity or underestimation of their powers. From whatever cause it springs, such an attitude of mind is deplorable in itself, and fraught with grave moral dangers. It ought to be possible in the case of a boy of 16 or 17 to say with some approach to certainty, what employments he is quite unsuitable, and to indicate the general direction, at least, in which he should seek his lifework. The onus of choice is too often laid upon the boy himself; and the form in which the question is put – What would you like to be? – makes him the judge not only of his own desires and abilities, but also of the conditions of callings with which he can, at best, be but imperfectly acquainted. There is here fine scope for the cooperation of parents and teachers not only with each other but with the various professional and business organisations. It is generally supposed to be the duty of a Head Master to observe and study the boys committed to his care. It is equally important that he should extend that study and observation to their parents – as an act of justice to the boys, if for no other reason. But there are other reasons. There is knowledge to be gotten from every parent – or at least from every father – about his profession, or business, knowledge which, as a rule, he is quite willing to impart. If, in addition, a Head Master avails himself of the opportunities of getting in touch with men of affairs, leaders of commerce, professional men of all kinds, his advice to parents as to suitable careers for their sons becomes enormously valuable. At the very least, he may save them from some of the more flagrant forms of error. For instance, he may
convince them that there are other and more valuable indications of fitness for engineering than the ability to take a bicycle to pieces, and a desire ‘to see the wheels go round’; and that a boy who is ‘good at sums’ will not, of necessity, make a good accountant. In short, he may prevent them from mistaking a hobby for a vocation.
It ought to be clearly stated that in writing of schools I have had in mind those which are usually known as public schools. In the general preparation for practical life, the public school boy enjoys many advantages which do not fall to the lot of his less-favoured brother in the elementary school. Not only does his education continue for some years longer, but it is conducted along broader lines, and gives him a greater variety of knowledge and a wider outlook. He comes, too, as a rule, from those classes of the community in which there are long standing traditions of discipline, culture, and what may be called the spirit of noblesse oblige. These traditions do not, of themselves, keep him from folly, idleness, or even vice; but they do help him to endure hardship, to submit to authority, to cultivate the corporate spirit, to maintain certain standards of schoolboy honour, and as he himself would say: ‘to play the game’. Though in the classroom it may be that appeals are largely made to individualism and selfishness, yet on the playing fields he learns something of the value of cooperation and the virtue of unselfishness. From the very first he begins to develop a sense of civic and collective responsibility, and in his later years at school, he finds that as a prefect or monitor he has a direct share in the government of the community of which he is a member, and a direct responsibility for its welfare. Nor does this sense of corporate life die out when he leaves, for then the Old Boys’ Association claims him, and adds a new interest to the past, while maintaining the old inspiration for the future.
With the elementary schoolboy it is not so. To him, as to his parents, the primal curse is painfully real: work is the sole and not always effectual means of warding off starvation. He realises that as soon as the law permits, he is to be ‘turned into money’ and must needs become a wage earner. As a contributor to the family exchequer, he claims a voice in his own government, and resists all the attempts of parents, masters, or the State itself to encroach upon his liberty. He begins work with both mind and body immature and ill- trained. There has been little to teach him esprit de corps; he has never felt the sobering influence of responsibility; the
only discipline he has experienced is that of the classroom, for the OTC and organised games are to him unknown. When he leaves there is very rarely any Association of Old Boys to keep him in touch with his fellows or the school. Here and there, voluntary organisations such as the Boy Scouts have done something – though little – to improve his lot; but, in the main the evils are untouched. To find the remedy for them is not the least of the many great problems of the future.
The improvement of any one branch of industry ultimately means the improvement of those engaged therein. Scientific agriculture, for example, is hardly possible until we have scientific agriculturists. In like manner, real success in practical life depends on the temper and character of the practitioner even more than upon his technical equipment. There are, however, three great obstacles to the progress of the nation, obstacles which can only be removed gradually and by the continuous action of many moral forces. We are far too little concerned with intellectual interests. ‘No nation, I imagine,’ says Mr Temple, ‘has ever gone so far as England in its neglect of and contempt for the intellect. If goodness of character means the capacity to serve our nation as useful citizens, it is unobtainable by anyone who is content to let his mind slumber.’ Then again we suffer from the low ideal which leads us to worship success. From his earliest years, a boy learns from his surroundings, if not by actual precept, to strive not so much to be something as somebody.
The love of power rather than fame may be the ‘last infirmity of noble minds’, but it is probably the first infirmity of many ignoble ones. Herein lies the justification of the criticism of a friendly alien. ‘You pride yourselves on your incorruptibility, and quite rightly; for in England there is probably less actual bribery by means of money than in any other country. But you can all be bribed by power.’ Lastly (to quote Mr Hichens yet once more): ‘Strong pressure is being brought to bear to commercialise our education, to make it a paying proposition, to make it subservient to the God of Wealth and thus convert us into a moneymaking mob. Ruskin has said that, “no nation can last that has made a mob of itself.” Above all, a nation cannot last as a money-making mob. It cannot with impunity – it cannot with existence – go on despising literature, despising science, despising art, despising nature, despising compassion, and concentrating its soul on pence.’
‘I can picture the Head in various situations – in the Large, walking through the corridors, opening the new buildings; in fact he seems to preside, as it were, over all my school memories.
I do not mean he is in every picture, but he is always “there” – just off the canvas perhaps –but an unavoidable and indispensable presence. He and Mill Hill are one.’
A moving tribute from an Old Boy speaking shortly after McClure died in 1922
