(From several accounts and reminiscences which we have received, we are pleased to print the following account by Dr. A. E. DUNSTAN of his time at the Royal Grammar School. It will be noticed that he came to the School four years earlier than Professor Turnbull whose reminiscences formed the basis of the article in the March Magazine. Dr. Dunstan was fourth in First Class Honours in the 1895 College of Preceptors' Examination which won him his scholarship. While at school he also had distinguished successes in London University and Science and Art Department examinations and won a Corporation Scholarship to Firth College (as Sheffield University was then called). After leaving school he was assistant master at Rotherham Grammar School for a short time and then studied at the Royal College of Science, London, obtaining his B.Sc. in 1900. After a period as Science Master at Owens School, Islington, he became Head of the Chemical Department of East Ham Technical College. Having meanwhile obtained the London D.Sc. in 1915, he joined the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and established their research organisation, becoming Chief Research Chemist in 1917 and Chief Chemist in 1926. He has been a prominent member of many chemical technical societies, a leading expert in petroleum technology and an able editor of several publications. He retired at the end of 1946 and has recently gone to live at Cambridge. He still maintains a lively interest in his old school.)
I ENTERED the S.R.G.S. in September, 1890 as a Close Foundation Scholar from Sharrow Lane Board School. It is rather remarkable to think in that distant year only three boys were admitted from the Elementary Schools of Sheffield. I was lucky in having been a pupil of Mr. Yoxall, later knighted-a Member of Parliament and Secretary of the National Union of Teachers. Also in the same school was Mr. Willis Eadon, known to many Sheffielders as an artist of some eminence.
The Grammar School had not long been in possession of the Collegiate Crescent premises. Five years before, the 1885 school in St. George's Square had been evacuated, and turned over to the Sheffield Technical School, later the Technical Department of the University (the present Mappin Hall is just above the site of the old school-room), but some of the old benches, desks and furniture were still in use in 1890. These, with their oak tops, carved with multitudinous names, and with heavy iron standards, were eventually banished into the school yard near the fives court.
The accompanying print, reproduced by courtesy of Mr. Lea of the Hunter Archaeological Society, shows the Collegiate buildings in 1844. The house alongside Ecclesall Road was the Head Master's residence, and it still stands. The School building has been elevated by an extra storey, but the old Big School, now the library of the Training College, still exists intact, except that the Honours Boards are now placed in the building we used to call "Wesley College," and now of course K.E.S. In 1890 the School was almost out in the country. A pleasant walk took one to Hunter's Bar; Endcliffe Woods were not then, I think, converted into a public park; certainly Whiteley Woods were very much au naturel, and I seem to remember grinding wheels or "hulls" all along the Porter valley. Broomhall Park was built over with very good class houses, and all the way up to Glossop Road was much as it is today.
| THE COLLEGIATE SCHOOL IN 1844 |
Hugh Thompson, June 11th, 1844
|
When I entered, the School had about 160 boys. The Head Master was the Rev. E. Senior, and to him in particular all the scholars of my period owe an immense debt of gratitude. He knew personally every one of us-a great advantage of being a member of a small society. He was a notable mathematician, and the results of his teaching were seen in the constant stream of honours and distinctions in public examinations. He believed in the mens sana in corpore sane, and I can distinctly see him now, playing in scratch sixes, cricket and fives.
My first term was occupied in finding my feet in Form I. As it was the Xmas term, we, who came from the town end, very often had to fight our way in snow-time through myriads of the urchins of St. Matthias' School, assailed and pursued by howls of "College Bugs!" My first Form Master was J. H. Hodgetts, who had just joined the School. He later became Senior Master, and I last saw and talked with him after the amalgamation. He was an urgent type of teacher and very cunning at suddenly projecting a heavy and chalky blackboard duster at offending pupils. He never missed.
My second term was a joyful one. Jack Latham (later Dr. J. Latham), was Form Master and also our professor of music. There are possibly still alive, contemporaries who will remember the Friday afternoon singing lessons. Jack sat at the piano with his back to the class, a somewhat unfortunate position, the class sang as it liked and the noise was terrific.
But opposite Latham's class-room was the place in which I chiefly delighted; it was a mixture-partly Third Form room and partly the Chemical Laboratory. At the East end was a demonstration bench on which was a big pneumatic trough, the water of which was contemporaneous with the School, and into which, if one sat in front, one could drop little lumps of putty. The time-honoured acid in the trough generated gas from the putty which then rose like a small balloon, discharged its gas and sank again. Such a performance would entertain the front row for a whole sultry summer afternoon. There were six rows of forms at which Form III functioned, but all round the room were ordinary laboratory benches and the practical chemistry of those days consisted of the identification of half-a-dozen or so metals and four acid radicals that might be present in a simple salt or mixture. Our Science Master was the Rev. T. J. Thorburn, long since dead, and of whom I have the most delightful memories. He was commonly called Johnny Globule because of the case with which he could conjure globules of lead on a charcoal block.
Big School stands out in memory. It was a well designed and shapely hall with fine North and South windows and an open timbered roof which was adorned by multitudinous arrows made out of penholders with the names of the senders duly flagged thereon. Rumour said that every boy in the old Collegiate had his arrow there, and great were the efforts made to add one's own to the collection. At the South end was the Head Master's throne, opposite was the high desk of the Second Master, and at the two middle entrances were four smaller desks apportioned to the magisterial rank and file.
Altogether there were eight on the staff. The second master, afterwards Read, was the Rev. A. B. Haslam, who died a few years ago, having reached a ripe old age. He was a classical scholar of eminence, and during his life at the School there was a regular procession of boys who had won distinctions at Oxford and Cambridge as a result of his brilliant teaching. Of these I might mention G. Norwood, now Professor of Classics in the University of California, and K. E. Kirk, now Bishop of Oxford. The Third Master was the Rev. C. H. Maggs, who left the school to assume the perpetual curacy at the Parish Church, now the Cathedral-known in those days, irreverently as “T'owd Church.”
The Preparatory School was accommodated in the Head Master's house, and here Mr. E. Pode held sway, a fine sportsman, a good cricketer, and withal a sound schoolmaster.
Life in the Upper School was considerably more urgent. There was the shadow of examinations in front of us-those of the Cambridge Locals and the Science and Art Department. Mr. Maggs reigned over the Fourth Form, and here Mathematics and Latin were the important subjects. Less English, Geography, History and French fell to our lot, and I seem to remember interminable hours spent with C. Julius Caesar. We learned French in a “new classroom” built on the north-east side of Big School, a dark and gloomy habitation. My first French Master was Curt Hennig, but later there appeared the genial, white-haired Dr. Bulau, of whom all old boys must have retained the happiest and kindliest recollections.
In 1892 I arrived at Form V and thereafter sat at the feet of Haslam. We were now initiated into Greek, and hence-forward Classics took up an increasing slice of our school life. Our Latin broadened from Caesar to Livy and to Virgil, Ovid and Horace and innumerable " unseens." And although all my life after my schooldays has been devoted to pure and applied Science, I still feel, and am most assured, that my early Classical training at a school most appropriately named " Grammar School" has been of lasting benefit. And apart from the strictly educational aspect of Classics, the mental discipline and so forth, it is not at all a bad thing for a boy to make the acquaintance (sometimes painfully) of Xenophon, Achilles, Ulysses, and even of Jove and Venus. Such interesting and forceful characters are not often met with in our modern literature.
At this time other interests arose. S. A. Moor, who followed Thorburn, as Science Master, was an expert naturalist. He directed our bubbling enthusiasms to the domains of botany, geology and biology. He founded our first Science Society or Natural History Club. He set up a museum and stocked it with specimens collected by his disciples over the hills and valleys of Derbyshire. We began to explore our native country. We spent arduous half-holidays in Wyming Brook, Grindleford, Hathersage, Ringinglow, and in the Rivelin, Cordwell and Loxley valleys. We acquired limestone fossils, beetles, butterflies, moths et hoc genus omne. We read papers, we made lantern slides and we even produced the S.R.G.S. Science Magazine, painfully and smudgedly on a jellygraph. These were great days-do youthful exhilaration and exuberance and enthusiasm still exist?
These were great days too, in the scholastic world of school. The V and VI Forms carried off a remarkable number of honours and distinctions for so small a body. The School Lists for 1892 contain the following successes of old boys Lister, 1st Class Lit. Hum., Oxford; Barraclough, 1st Class Nat. Sci. Tripos, Cambridge; Slater, 1st Class Theological Tripos, Cambridge; Senior. English Verse Prize, Marlborough College; Buckler, Abbot Science Scholarship, Oxford; Whittington, College of Preceptors Scholarship; and of course distinctions in many subjects at the Cambridge Locals. At this Prize Day came the redoubtable effort of the VI Form to produce a Greek play. We, or perhaps Haslam, chose a scene from Aristophanes' The Birds. All I remember after more than fifty years, is that Otto Glauert played the part of the goat, and was for ever after referred to as the Goat, and that I myself, for the first and only time officiated as the Priest. After all these years I can still remember my part.
So we grew in stature, and, I trust, in wisdom. Some of us took part in the Homeric duels with Wesley College on our respective playing fields. Usually, I believe, these occasions were truly disastrous for the S.R.G.S. A little later, ` Houses ' were established, Town, Park, Hallam and Sharrow. This scheme certainly broadened the basis of school sport, and I am glad to see it is still perpetuated.
By 1895 new faces appeared in the school staff. The Science Master was F. L. Overend; B. Caudwell and J. H. Young were in the Lower School, but the perennial Sergt. Lound still officiated at detention-our only form of physical training, chiefly associated in my mind with unpleasantly cold dumb-bells at 4 o'clock on the Terrace.
By the end of the Summer Term of 1895, I had followed Whittington's example and had gained the College of Preceptors Scholarship for intending teachers, and for the next two years I was a split personality, practising teaching in the Prep. while continuing my student life at Firth College. Meanwhile the list of school successes grew. Middleton, with whom I had shared forms almost from the beginning, carried all before him in the Senior Locals, O. Glauert, Pate, Kirk, Turnbull (who wrote about the School in a recent magazine), A. E. Barnes, till recently Professor of Medicine at the University of Sheffield, E. K. Chatterton, who died a year or so ago and was a rather famous writer on nautical matters-all these names are written in the archives of 1896. On the Staff were S. J. and D. L. Chapman, both happily still with us. S. J. is now Sir Sidney, recently retired from the Board of Trade, and D. L. till a year or so ago a don at Jesus College, Oxford, F.R.S. and a notable physical chemist.
My time at the S.R.G.S. came to an end in 1897. Looking back, after all these long years, one feels a degree of affection for the old School that would have surprised the boy who went through it, perhaps carelessly accepting all the good things, the fellowship, the queer idiosyncrasies of masters, and withal the unspoken feeling that one formed a link in time between those unknown boys of 1604 and those who still have to pass on the torch to the unborn boys of the future.