The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Rose Jonathan

Author:Rose, Jonathan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300088861
Publisher: Yale University Press

The same undeferential determination to educate their tutors was displayed by the students in A. D. Lindsay’s class on Plato’s Republic: “We often attacked him as though he had written it himself,” recalled Lavena Saltonstall. A don lecturing on conservatism came in for even rougher treatment: “We turned up in full force and endeavoured to crush him but he seemed no worse for his adventure, and no doubt enjoyed himself as much as we did.”30

The atmosphere of those early summer schools appears to have been a mixture of confrontation and good humor, sharp dissent and mutual respect. Albert Mansbridge might describe it in treacly language (“the peer’s son rejoices in the fellowship of the miner’s son, and the casual labourer in the friendship of the don”)31 but it happened to be the truth: Lavena Saltonstall’s favorite tutor was Gerald Collier, the son of Lord Monkhouse (“I never thought a lord’s son could be so sensible or charming”). The essential point is that, in the same breath, Miss Saltonstall denounced the housing conditions of the servants and laborers who maintained Oxford (“one is reminded very forcibly of the pictures one sees in Dickens’ books”).32 Much as she revered the old universities, they did not blunt her militancy. Briefly stranded by the 1911 railway strike, she remembered well that “All is not so serene as this old-world garden of Trinity would suggest. Outside … man has been fighting man with batons and bars and cudgels, and the end of the struggle is not yet in sight even if the strike is settled.”33

“We do feel that we belong to the University,” testified Oxford summer school student Sophie Green. “We have been really attached to some of the historic personages we have learned about and have walked with reverent steps over the ground they must have traversed years before in Oxford.” Her class sponsored an entertainment that raised £23 for the Lady Margaret Hall Fellowship Fund: “We did it partly as a compliment to our tutor who was at Oxford University & partly to show we belonged.” Yet that identification with Oxford went hand in hand with a surge of labor activism: she was elected to the Board of Guardians, while a classmate became a garment workers’ union official. “After a visit to the summer school a group of our girls practically organised the Trade Union in our factory,” Sophie Green boasted. The foremen were at once unsettled and impressed by the new intellectual climate at the works. “I admit this set of girls cultivate the social side of life a bit too much for my peace sometimes,” said one, “but I don’t like to be too severe as they talk sense, and you never see them bringing rubbishy literature into the place.” One girl won two guineas for an essay submitted to the Nation, and two or three others published prize articles in a Co-operative magazine. Sophie Green organized two village classes in Victorian literature, while her classmates pushed back the frontiers of

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