George Landow has asked us in the Ruskin community to recall the moment when we first encountered the man and the moment when he became an influence upon our lives. For myself, I can recall the setting and the circumstances with absolute clarity. I was about fifteen or sixteen years old and enrolled at a school called Abbotsholme in Derbyshire. According to routine, we gathered each morning in the school chapel, a chamber built in about 1900 in a degraded collegiate Gothic and decorated with nine carved corbels showing portraits of a most improbably miscellaneous group of men who were the lauded heroes of Abbotsholme’s founder, Dr Cecil Reddie. One particular morning, the school’s deputy head-master and an inspirational history teacher Giles Heron, introduced to us the individuals represented. Something of the idiosyncratic nature of Reddie’s mind, as well as his alienation from the hierarchic establishment, emerged. The presence of Goethe demonstrated Reddie’s admiration for all things German; Shakespeare and Dante were perhaps predictable, while William Blake further confirmed Reddie as someone with a lingering adherence to Pre-Raphaelitism; Nelson and Oliver Cromwell represented martial virtues, with the presence of the latter announcing that the school which Reddie had founded was not seeking Royal patronage (making it ironic that two second generation of schools which sprang from Reddie’s progressive theories of education, Salem in Germany and Gordonstoun in Scotland, should have had the Duke of Edinburgh and his sons amongst their intake). Also among those portrayed on the chapel corbels was the obscure figure of Edward Maitland – a man who had abandoned an intention to be ordained so that instead he might prospect for gold in California and then Australia, and who subsequently devoted himself to theosophy. Heron dealt with each of these figures in turn, revealing to us his own enthusiasm for those who showed subversive or non-conformist traits, and leaving until last the two most remarkable luminaries represented, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, two men whose ideas and influence imbued Abbotsholme at the time of its foundation, and whose presence was still felt in the 1960s.
Left: Cecil Reddie. Right: Abbotsholme. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Cecil Reddie, who was born in 1858 and educated at Fettes College and Edinburgh University (where he studied medicine and later physics, chemistry and mathematics in the period 1878-82), never met Ruskin. Probably the person who led him to Ruskin’s ideas about education was the socialist poet Edward Carpenter, with whom Reddie had a close friendship for a year or so from 1888, when he stayed at Carpenter’s intended model community at Millthorpe near Sheffield, and by whom Reddie a year later was lent money to establish what was to be called ‘The New School’. This was to operate as an experiment in practical socialism and as an attempt to allow boys to develop intellectually and spiritually and as individuals in an atmosphere free from the competition and conformity of the great public schools.
School band celebrating the return from hay-making
At Abbotsholme (which name seems gradually to have replaced ‘The New School’) in its early days, a holistic approach to education was taken. Mornings were given over to classroom studies but with a focus on sciences and modern languages rather than ancient history and languages. Afternoons were occupied with a variety of manual tasks, all regarded by Reddie as more beneficial for body and soul than competitive sports. Evenings at Abbotsholme were devoted to activities intended to give a sense of comradeship – in the winter months, debating and discussion, and recitals of poetry and music; in the summer, fishing for trout in the River Dove and naked swimming in one of the river’s stretches of deep water.
The location for this attempt at educational reform was a Victorian country house on the Derbyshire/Staffordshire border. The school farm was central to the enterprise, with a dairy herd, chickens and pigs. The kitchens were supplied with butter and milk, as well as vegetables, from the farm. Hedging and ditching were regarded as primary skills, as well as animal husbandry and the maintenance of tools and machinery. The fertility of the soil depended on the transportation of manure from the earth closets used by staff and boys alike, hauled by the cartload by teams of boys and the school horse. Farming and gardening activities were conducted by the boys under the supervision of the estate manager, and the great festivals in the school calendar were connected with hay-making and potato picking. Only once, according to record, was there an objection on the part of the boys to being treated as forced labour, which was when Norman Wilkinson (later an artist, illustrator and theatre designer of stage and costumes) led a strike and provoked a furious row with Reddie, who despite his socialist allegiance did not welcome nascent unionism in the school. Other skills which Reddie believed that the young in his care should master, and pupils were enrolled from Britain and abroad, were carpentry and metal-working, bee-keeping, boot and sandal-making, tailoring, cookery and butter-making.
Every detail in the way the school was run was devised by the obsessive headmaster. For himself, Reddie favoured a style of dress which was practical and informal; a Norfolk coat with capacious pockets over britches and comfortable long socks, and the school uniform followed a similar pattern. Younger boys were permitted to wear woollen underwear but older Abbotsholmians were expected to do without undergarments, an arrangement which Reddie considered healthier. Berets were worn, although this was an afterthought, and replaced a miscellany of headwear, from boaters to bowlers, with which the first intake of pupils had arrived. Stout boots were to be worn, adaptable to work on the farm or in the classroom. All garments were to be marked with a nametape, stitched into a particular seam as specified by Reddie. Diktats were issued on every aspect of life, from the need for careful mastication, to how to position oneself in preparation for sleep, through to the careful prescription of spelling and punctuation and the elimination of capital letters.
Reddie’s own undoubted homosexuality seems to have been sublimated by his leadership of this entirely masculine community. A written interdiction forbidding intimacy between the boys, drafted by Reddie himself, was printed, framed and mounted prominently on the walls of each of the dormitories. A single exception to his otherwise absolute rule that all the teaching staff should be male and that the female presence in the school should be kept to an absolute minimum (at least until the time of the outbreak of the First World War) allowed the master who taught biology to be married. It is said that Abbotsholme was the first of any school in Britain where sex education was part of the curriculum (although perhaps given in a somewhat distorted form).
Reddie believed that young people should be encouraged to find beauty in well-made furniture and pieces of craftwork, and wanted the school to be ornamented with objects that would give aesthetic pleasure. He met C.R. Ashbee when he was staying with Carpenter at Millthorpe in 1888, and an agreement was made that the Guild of Handicraft should establish a branch at the school from the time of its first opening. Ashbee encouraged one of the joiners working with the Guild, H. Phillips, to stay at Abbotsholme and to make furniture for the school. Pieces that I remember as still in use in the 1960s (but which I am told have subsequently have been mislaid or stolen) include an oak cabinet with doors painted with sprays of laurel interspersed with lines from Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’, tables and desks. After the First World War, a life-size marble sculpture based on Blake’s ‘Radiant Lover’ was placed in the chapel as a memorial to Abbotsholmians of all nationalities who had died in the war. In the prudish 1960s the conspicuous nudity of the male figure was hidden behind a blue velvet curtain. The appreciation of art was always important, and once again I clearly remember Giles Heron showing us, and welcoming our responses, to wonderful abstract paintings by his brother Patrick. Emphasis was given to the importance of finding beauty in the surrounding landscape. At the turn of the twentieth century the River Dove, which in my memory of how it was more than half a century ago still sparkles like a ribbon of reflected evening light, with its alternating passages of scintillating rapids and still, dark depths, must have been a lovely setting. The countryside, in 1889 and in the 1960s, was verdant and lush, and with the promise of hill country – Staffordshire’s Weaver Hills were in view and Dovedale and the Derbyshire Peak District – beckoned from the north. In the village of Rocester, walking distance from Abbotsholme, was a fine brick cotton mill built by Richard Arkwright in 1781, while towards the end of my schooldays a huge factory for the manufacture of mechanical excavators was constructed in the valley bottom.
Reddie rejected all the conventions of Anglicanism, and devised his own pattern of religious observation which was entirely non-sectarian. The tradition of discussing themes and texts chosen by the boys at daily assemblies originated with the school’s first foundation. A calendar of specially devised services, such as ‘The Flower Service’, was devised, and which give a clue to the pantheistic pattern of Reddie’s philosophy, and most particularly his love of nature and landscape. Many of these ideas, crazy as they must have seemed to those who saw the admission of their sons to private schools as an expensive investment which they hoped might equip their progeny to conform and succeed in adult life, were enlightened and hugely refreshing when understood in the context of the cruelly regimented regimes that operated in the ancient public schools and their counterparts founded in the nineteenth century. Abbotsholme under Reddie was eventually a failure (with only two boys remaining when the founder of ‘The New School’ was forced into retirement in 1927), but a legion of other progressive schools founded by inspirational figures such as John Badley (Reddie’s deputy who founded Bedales) and Kurt Hahn (who visited Abbotsholme after a chance encounter with two boys from the school while they were hiking in Germany, and who created Salem and Gordonstoun), and with a wider influence on schools of every type. Abbotsholme itself went into a time warp, with so many of the traditions and customs that Reddie had established living on, so that in the 1960s it remained an extraordinarily isolated and (to outside perceptions) eccentric community. My own experience was quite typical; on my arrival there, I was taken aside by the headmaster, Robin Hodgkin – one of the most remarkable and truly Christian men I have ever known – to be told that it was my particular task to clean and care for the school’s gardening tools, by removing earth and by painting oil on each spade, hoe and fork, to prevent rust. This was to occupy me for half an hour each morning after breakfast, and upon the successful completion of which task, he insisted, the whole smooth-running of the place depended. I hope I did my best, for Robin’s sake. A year or two later, I was entrusted with responsibility for the school pig – a highly intelligent but bad-tempered sow who lived in a sty proudly emblazoned with the initials ‘TNS [for ‘The New School’] 1889’, the year of its foundation. It was my pleasure to take the pig on a halter, accompanied by her piglets, around the school grounds. Hay-making, Reddie’s favourite festival, had been abandoned, presumably because we weren’t to be trusted with mechanised scythes etc, but the potato harvest continued, exactly as the founder had insisted it should, with all teaching interrupted until the fields were cleared, and with a festive supper laid on and consisting of, inevitably, potatoes. Milk still came from the school’s cows, and was offered to us in its unpasteurised and fatty state, with wasps and flies lying on its surface, in churns brought straight from the milking parlour. Only the earth closets had been dispensed with.
Clearly, Reddie himself, and the school that he created, was a mass of contradictions and confusions, and it may well be wondered what kind of parent would feel that the money paid by way of fees (which were high) was well spent. Notwithstanding his self-avowed socialism and disdain for anything fashionable, Reddie wanted to persuade people of influence to send their sons to Abbotsholme. Lady Strachey met Reddie through the introduction of Charles Kegan Paul when considering how her son Lytton should be educated, and so he was enrolled there in September 1893 (although he was only to withstand the hardships and discomforts of the place for two terms).
I think that Ruskin – had he been able or inclined to visit the school in the last decade of his life – would have loved it and would have recognised how much it all owed to his principles.
Last modified 27 January 2022