The Five Giants [New Edition]: A Biography of the Welfare State. Nicholas Timmins
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they gel or clash, matter in politics.
What tipped Temple to his side, according to Butler, was a meeting at the Board of Education’s Kingsway headquarters in the summer of 1942, not long after the Archbishop’s appointment, ‘one hot morning in the conference room, its windows blitzed out and covered with cardboard, no air in the room’.68 Butler described to Temple the Board of Education’s ‘Black List’, the list of physically seriously substandard schools to which Chuter Ede had drawn his attention.69 Of the 731 on the list, 543 of them were church schools – perhaps not surprising when more than 90 per cent of the church schools were over forty years old and the churches alone were responsible for capital spending. Butler records that Temple was moved by the figures and ‘said he had not realized what a bad state the church schools were in’.70
In essence, Butler put it to him that the Church of England could continue to maintain its schools only at the expense of the children within them.71 The Archbishop agreed to back Butler’s subtle but effective scheme for solving the issue, which appeared to offer the church schools a choice. They could become either ‘controlled’ or ‘aided’. If controlled, the local education authority would take over all the schools’ costs, appoint almost all teachers and have a majority of managers or governors, while undertaking to use the ‘agreed’ religious syllabus. If aided, the LEA would provide running costs, but the church managers would be responsible (with a 50 per cent government grant) for bringing buildings up to standard. The managers would then retain the right to appoint teachers, control religious instruction and have a majority on the managing or governing body. Controlled status met the objections of the Free Churches over denominational teaching while reassuring Anglicans – or at least low church Anglicans – about the continuing Christian nature of the teaching. Butler’s own judgement was that ‘for the plan to succeed Anglican schools would have to opt for controlled status in large numbers.’72
Temple argued publicly for the plan, using the scale of the financial challenge facing the church to help win round the Church Assembly. The church school societies and the Catholics had yet to be brought into line, however, the Catholics arguing that the 50 per cent grant was not enough. Butler put his considerable personality to work in a series of formal and informal meetings to settle the issue; at one point he went to stay at Leicester with Sir Robert Martin, a key figure in the National Society, where he ‘sat with him at The Brand [a public house] until a late hour’ persuading him of the viability of his proposals. The Roman Catholics proved a tougher nut to crack, despite what Butler called his ‘wanderings’ – repeated private visits to their homes and cathedrals. He complained in his autobiography that one of the chief problems was that they had ‘no special leader; those at the summit were very old and it was difficult to establish any personal contact’. He later blamed himself for his failure to find ‘one man of dignity and reliability with whom one can perpetually be in touch on a personal basis’.73
This was not all Butler’s fault. While the other churches would meet him jointly, the Catholics would not. Butler recalled meeting Archbishop Amigo of Southwark in November 1942:
After much sounding of the bell, a sad looking, rather blue faced Chaplain let me in and we climbed a massive palace stair to the first floor where the Archbishop was sitting, fully robed, in a small room overlooking the ruins of Southwark Cathedral. His window was wide open on his left hand so that he could at once take in the tragic picture of the ruins and inhale the chilly morning air.
The Archbishop asked immediately we had sat down what I had come to see him for. I obliged by informing him; but it was not an auspicious beginning. He said that a 50 per cent grant was not sufficient and that he saw no chance of agreement with politicians …
This interview indicated the nature of the head-on collision with the Roman Catholic Church.74
From time to time, according to Butler, various Catholic bishops would back his plan in private. ‘But in the event none of them attempted to control their own supporters, believing that their anxieties justified them in encouraging a fuss.’75 Indeed, they went to public war in letters to The Times and elsewhere. Churchill eyed the row with a mixture of delight and real concern. When Cardinal Hinsley wrote to The Times on 2 November 1942 insisting on the independence of Catholic education, and declaring that ‘no political party will seek to be able to, or be able to set at naught the respect of the British people for minorities’, Churchill cut it out and sent it round to Butler pasted to a piece of cardboard with the message, ‘There you are, fixed, old cock.’76 Butler also described Churchill ringing him up to complain that ‘you are landing me in the biggest political row of the generation’.77 He was to record acidly in his memoirs that Churchill’s interest in education was ‘slight, intermittent and decidedly idiosyncratic’.78
Butler continued preparing his Bill regardless, but the Cardinal’s letter scotched any hope of a commitment to legislation in that autumn’s King’s Speech.79 Butler’s dedication to education, however, was demonstrated at this point when he turned down the post of Viceroy of India, just as Chuter Ede, who is something of an unsung hero of the Education Act both as an able and immensely knowledgeable deputy to Butler and as the key conduit to Labour MPs, had turned down a move from Education in the February of the same year. In part what saved Butler was the Beveridge report, published exactly a month after the Cardinal’s letter. Beveridge in his grandiloquent aside had sought the destruction of the giant Ignorance. The report may have had enemies in high places, but the sense that some measures must be taken grew. Education proved to be the card the Conservatives could play, if not to divert the pro-Beveridge forces, at least to appease them. Butler had already found encouragement from Sir Kingsley Wood, the Chancellor, who had told him in September that he ‘would rather give money for education than throw it down the sink with Sir William Beveridge’.80
If the churches had to be tackled, the public school issue too had to be settled. Butler started off talking to their Governing Bodies Association, undertaking direct negotiations with them as he did with the churches. Quite how far he was prepared to go remains unclear even now, and in his autobiography he is surprisingly coy on the subject. Whatever happened, in Anthony Howard’s judgement, ‘politically at some point his nerve failed him’ and in June 1942 he kicked for touch, setting up an independent inquiry under the Scottish judge Lord Fleming, a move that Butler said ‘temporarily removed the fuse’ from the issue.81 Quite why he did so has to be the subject of speculation. But Churchill’s original note forbidding an education Bill in September 1941 had expressed alarm that stirring up a public school issue which Butler himself had said would cause controversy would be ‘a great mistake’. Butler knew the religious issue, though not central to education per se, had to be settled to get secondary education for all; and some in the Church of England whom Butler desperately needed as allies were themselves strong proponents of the public schools, including Dr Geoffrey Fisher, Bishop of London, like Temple a former head of Repton and the man who was to succeed him as Archbishop of Canterbury. In early 1942, in Anthony Howard’s phrase, he had produced ‘ominous rumblings’ on the preservation of the public schools. For Butler, settling the churches was plainly more central than settling the public schools.
At any rate, Fleming was appointed in June along with twenty members and three Board of Education assessors, with relatively lily-livered terms of reference ‘to consider means whereby the association between the public schools and the general educational system of the country could be developed and extended’. In the Commons, Butler was even vaguer, saying the inquiry would investigate ‘how the facilities of a boarding school education might [my italics] be extended to those who desired to profit by them, irrespective of their means’. Press reaction was mixed, the Manchester Guardian declaring it would be ‘disastrous if it confined itself to schemes for providing free places in boarding school’, adding that ‘the nation is ready for daring and imaginative treatment of its problems’.82 The Daily Express, however, plainly believed real action was planned, announcing that a ‘public school revolution’ was under way.83
The committee’s membership was a distinctly mixed bag including Robert Birley, headmaster of Charterhouse and a future