The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins
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was not only inevitable but necessary. He told the boys at Harrow in December 1940 that ‘after the war the advantages of the public schools must be extended on a far broader basis’. Early in 1941 the Sunday Dispatch reported him as arguing that they should return to their long-forgotten original purpose of providing education for poor scholars, and David Chuter Ede, the Labour minister and education specialist who was Butler’s number two, recorded in his diary in February 1942:
The PM was glad to know that public schools were receiving our attention. He wanted 60 to 70 per cent of the places to be filled by bursaries – not by examination alone but on the recommendation of the counties and the great cities. We must reinforce the ruling class – though he disliked the word ‘class’. We must not choose by the mere accident of birth and wealth but by the accident – for it was equally an accident – of ability. The great cities would be proud to search for able youths to send to Haileybury, to Harrow and to Eton.41
Butler’s own attitude to public schools is defined by his biographer, Anthony Howard, as ‘agnostic’. In early 1942 he told Chuter Ede both that ‘he would not exclude a child because his parents could afford to pay but he would not admit a child who had fallen on his head while out hunting with the Quorn [the prestigious Leicestershire hunt]’. But he equally noted that the Conservative Party would be ‘up in arms unless a boy could get into a public school on payment’. In April 1943 in a letter to his own son’s housemaster at Eton, he said: ‘I do not personally think that the whole of the public school system is necessarily the best form of education, particularly when there is too much worship of games and the herd spirit.’42
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Labour and every educational body on the left firmly wanted the public schools either brought into the national system43 or simply abolished. So too did the local government officials who ran education. The Association of Directors and Secretaries of Education produced A Plan for the Future in 1942 that gave considerable prominence to the need to merge public and private education into one system. They sought ‘a common system of education national in scope … free, compulsory and universal’.
Other forces were also at work. If The Times had gone pink, the Times Educational Supplement had gone almost revolutionary. Harold Dent, a former Leicester schoolmaster, had just become editor. During ‘those war- torn years’, the TES recorded in its 75th anniversary supplement,’… H. C. Dent drove himself on all cylinders to take a lead in policy-making using a reinvigorated educational supplement as his vehicle … the TES became not just a forum for discussion of the nascent 1944 Act but a new kind of educational journal campaigning for a reform thorough enough to last beyond post-war euphoria.’44
Dent enunciated the principle of equality of opportunity in a series of powerful leading articles that coincided with both Butler’s and Beveridge’s appointments. What was needed was ‘total reform based on a new conception of the place, status and function of education in a democratic State, not a patching and padding of the present system’. An opportunity was present ‘which may not recur for centuries – if ever’. The present system, he said, ‘has been a most effective safeguard of the social stratification we all in our heart of hearts bow down to and worship’. There would be ‘the strongest and bitterest opposition’ to change and those seeking it would need to be resolute – ‘ruthless if need be’. He was to argue elsewhere, ‘we can look for no permanent new order in society unless we have a new order in education.’45 And in the final leader of the series, he declared, ‘the full working out of the principle of equality of opportunity will involve changes in the social order extending far outside the field of education’.46
These changes were being born in the war, and Dent was far from unrepresentative. On 21 December 1940, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and the Moderator of the Free Church Federal Council wrote to The Times stating that the churches jointly sought, among other aims as ‘the Foundations for Peace’, the abolition of extreme inequalities of wealth and possessions, but also that every child, regardless of race or class, should have equal opportunities of education suitable for development of their particular capacities.
Meanwhile, the Board of Education’s officials had not been idle. In November 1940, the board’s permanent secretary Sir Maurice Holmes set up a planning group of senior officials, minuting that: ‘It is clear from references in the press that other persons and bodies have ideas on post-war educational reconstruction and I think this is a matter in which the Board should lead rather than follow.’47 With the approval of Herwald Ramsbotham, Butler’s predecessor, who was eager to introduce reform, the officials (many of them evacuated to the Durley Dean Hotel in Bournemouth for the duration of war) drew up what became known from its cover as the ‘Green Book’. It was meant to form the basis of preliminary talks with interested parties on a possible post-war educational settlement and was compiled under the direction of R. S. Wood, the board’s deputy secretary. In January 1941 he minuted: ‘we may assume that responsibility for the direction of the nation’s effort in the immediate post-war years will remain in the hands of a National Government prepared to face radical changes in our social and economic system and contemplating not merely restoration or a return to normality, but reconstruction in a very real sense … while policies will have to command the support of the main elements in all parties, it is clear that the war is moving us more and more in the direction of Labour’s ideas and ideals.’48
By June 1941 the Green Book was being distributed. It had the rubric ‘highly confidential’ stamped on its cover, but as one academic later observed, it was put about ‘in such a blaze of secrecy that it achieved an unusual degree of publicity’.49 One of Butler’s early acts was to publish a summary of its contents and to disclose that an inquiry into a secondary school curriculum suitable for education up to fifteen was under way under Sir Cyril Norwood.
The man who at this point took over education was to become not only one of the dominant figures in post-war Conservative politics, but one of those who in the 1940s steered the Tories into the post-war Middle Way consensus. Already chairman of the Conservative Committee on Post-War Problems, R. A. Butler was thirty-nine at the time of his appointment. A man of urbane charm mixed with fierce intelligence and a certain telling asperity, he was the product of Marlborough and Cambridge. His father was Sir Monty Butler, an Indian civil servant from a long line of scholar-administrators who became Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge (Rab himself later becoming Master of Trinity). The family included a string of Cambridge dons, two headmasters of Harrow, a tradition of high-minded reformism and links across the breadth of British life. Butler’s father-in-law, for example, was Samuel Courtauld, the reforming industrialist who had signed the National Policy for Industry produced just before the Beveridge report. Paul Addison judges that Butler ‘understood the domestic consequences of the war better than any other Conservative minister’.50
His early meetings with the churches took place because they remained the great stumbling block to reform. Since the turn of the century the Church of England’s role in education had declined, largely because of its need to match support from the rates with voluntary efforts. The number of schools it ran was down by a quarter to 9000, and the proportion of pupils it was educating had fallen by half to 20 per cent as local authorities built up the state schools. These, however, were concentrated in the more populous urban areas; many of the C of E schools were in villages where the local parson provided religious instruction and the local Tory squirearchy raised much of the funding. Often they were the only schools in such areas, causing resentment among Nonconformists and Catholics who were forced to subject their children to the firmly Anglican bent of much of the education.
The proportion of Nonconformist schools had also declined, but the Roman Catholic influence, by contrast, had strengthened. Their school total had risen by 200 to 1200 over the same period and they were educating, at primary or elementary level, 8 per cent of the children. Between them in 1939 the churches still ran more than half the schools in England and Wales, though catering for well under half the pupils. In almost every way, however, the 1,250,000 children in these voluntary schools were getting a worse deal than the 3,000,000 in state schools. ‘Their buildings were older, their classrooms more antiquated, their amenities