William Tyler
Education and Health: A Story of Progress

​​William Tyler - Education and Health: A Story of Progress

- This is my last lecture in the series on the Victorian era, and my last talk to Lockdown University until Monday the 4th of September. And I think many of you know I don’t work in August, but I happen actually to be on holiday next week. So I shall see you all, I hope, again, God willing, on the 4th of September. But for now, I’ve got the last talk to do, and I shall end up with a sort of bookend to the course, if you understand me, by saying something about the end of Victorian Britain in about five minutes, 10 minutes, at the end of this talk. Now, a word I tended to use continuously during this course and to describe the Victorian age and, indeed, a word that Victorians themselves would’ve used about their own society is the word progress. Now, David Cannadine in his book “The Victorious Century”, which I’ve mentioned before, and people ask me, which one book should I read? Well, I always find that a very difficult question, but if you want something serious to read, then David Cannadine’s “Victorious Century” in paperback is an excellent read, but it’s not light reading. It’s a sort of reading where you read a chapter, maybe even read it a second time. I’m a great fan of David Cannadine. Now, David Cannadine also uses this concept of progress, but he uses three words. Cannadine calls it progress, improvement and modernization. Those are three good words to describe the Victorian age progress, improvement, modernization. This, I would simply add to that, that this was a time of national self-confidence in Britain, rather like the self-confidence of the United States up to the end of the Cold War. It’s a distinguishing feature from our society today where we are, I’m talking about Britain, but I think I’m probably also talking about the states. I’m sure I’ll be talking about Canada, New Zealand, Australia.

I think today we live in a society with much less national self-confidence. We have doubt today, we have doubt about progress. The most recent example is about artificial intelligence. Is it all good? Well, in our experience of life since the Victorian age, we may be doubtful about that. It’s like the discovery of the atom. Everything that is positive appears to us today to have a negative side, let alone worrying about the environment. So, perhaps, we are less confident as a nation or as Western democracies than we were in the Victorian age, where they genuinely believed that progress was unstoppable, that progress meant improvement. And all of that added up to the word that Cannadine used, modernization. By the second half of the 19th century, such ideas of progress had filtered down to the working class. And Cannadine writes this, very shortly, “Transformation in working class politics "from agitation to accommodation.” I would say from the thought that we might have revolution to a thought that we might obtain change through peaceful means. And that’s the basis of the Labour party in Britain, to eschew violence and to embrace the political system as it was. And so, by the second half of the 19th century, we see less of this rioting that we’d seen earlier, in the earlier part of the century and in the 18th century. Now, of course, we have strikes, but we do not have revolutionary rioting in the way that we had done. Instead, we have an increased focus on change being achieved through parliamentary democratic means. Of progress as a whole, this is what Cannadine writes.

He writes this. “It was not only the aristocracy, "bankers, businessmen and intelligentsia "who had never had it so good. "As the mid-Victorian economy expanded at a rate "to keep pace with continued population growth, "more jobs were created in the industrial sector.” And he lists what those are. “By the late 1860s, the number of engine makers, "shipwrights, railway workers and printers doubled. "And the trend in real wages was emphatically upward "from the early 1850s to the 1860s.” But he adds a word of warning, but he says, “The quality of life in many of the industrial towns "and cities remained dreadful "with continued overcrowding and environmental degradation "while malnutrition remained ripe and life expectancy low.” Now, you heard me say before in this course, when we’ve come to social issues in particular, although I’m talking about Britain, the same basic principles apply to wherever you’re listening from. And that’s one of the problems about Victorian progress. They believed in progress, but it didn’t necessarily reach down right the way through society, particularly not in the first half of the 19th century, but things began to change in the second half. And they change in the second half because governments begin to see that they have a role in not only setting up regulations and orders for how things are conducted in society, but actually involving themselves into issues in society and running it either through national or through local government. So there is a change of emphasis away from voluntary action towards governmental action.

Of course, that does not mean that voluntary action disappears. Of course, it doesn’t, but it does mean that the government become more concerned to fill in the gaps, if you like, of voluntary provision, but also to regulate voluntary provision and to ensure that people are getting the best that they possibly can do. And this is a big change that Victorian society, oh, we all think, see, that is the norm today, but it was not the norm before the 19th century. Now, the two areas I’m going to speak about today are absolutely ripe for progress and for improvement and for modernization. And they’re the two areas of health and education. Both these topics benefited from this increased government involvement to pass and implement what I think we can very easily call progressive legislation. Government, however, didn’t necessarily do it because they thought it was the morally right thing to do. They did it because they became subject to pressure groups. Pressure groups had been mounted ever since the campaign against the slave trade and against slavery. So now the pressure groups are campaigning for things like better sanitation, schools for everyone. There are new ideas that are circulating amongst the society that’s becoming more literate and reading about those ideas. And because the vote is being extended not to women, but to men, in the national picture, at least, because more people are involved in voting, then the government has to take account of their views too. So there’s pressure from outside on the government to do the right thing, as well as, of course, and I don’t deny that, there were members of parliament, even members of government who were totally committed to improving society. If we turn to public health, we can begin with the 1848, 1848, 11 years after Victoria came to the throne, the 1848 Public Health Act.

This was championed by a reformer, a social reformer, Sir Edwin Chadwick, and he is a good example of a Victorian reformer who pushed through, with support from the general public, for change, and it became the Public Health Act 1848, was the very first act of parliament in Britain that affected not just a group of people, but the whole of the population. It established a general board of health, and, alongside that, it established an inspectorate to make sure that the act’s provisions were properly implemented. What it was concerned about primarily was sanitation. This had become a major problem as the cities expanded during the industrial revolution, and sanitation was appalling in a city like Manchester or a city like London. I mean, sewage was a major problem. How do you get rid of sewage? How do you bring drinking water in? And how do you keep the sewage in the drinking water separate? The 1848 was concerned with providing clean, good water and to providing good sewage systems. Six years after the passing of the act, that is to say in 1854, a London doctor called John Snow was investigating why cholera had broken out in the Broad Street area of Central London. He conducted experimental work, if you like. Cholera was a terrible disease for which there appeared to be no cure. It had first reached Britain from continental Europe and it had reached continental Europe from Asia. It reached Britain in 1831, and we had terrible outbreak of cholera in 1831. Again in 1853/54, when John Snow was so concerned in London. And, finally, in 1865/6. Snow discovered that the cause of the spread of cholera in the district of London he was looking at, was sewage getting into the water supply. The old theory of disease, which we touched upon last week when we talked about Florence Nightingale, was the theory of miasma.

The disease was passed through the air. Now, I’m using a book, don’t laugh, this is a book produced for teenage children taking examinations called GCSE. GCSE is an exam that children here in Britain take. “Medicine in Britain”. It’s an extraordinarily good book, and it has a lot of useful shortcuts for me in giving a talk, which only has to last an hour, and I’m stuck with time. First of all, it says this, is a definition of miasma theory. “The miasma theory is the idea that bad air or miasma "causes disease when someone breathes it in. "This bad air may come from human refuse, "from abattoirs or dead bodies.” Anything that creates a bad smell. It smells of past disease. Now, this was being challenged, of course, at the time. Now, you remember Florence Nightingale always accepted that theory. But it wasn’t discredited in scientific circles until the 1860s when a new theory, the germ theory, became the scientific explanation pioneered by the Frenchman Louis Pasteur in 1857 and published by him in 1867. And if I read the piece here very quickly. “The French chemist, Louis Pasteur, "was employed in 1857 to find the explanation "for the souring of sugar beet "used in fermenting industrial alcohol. "His answer was to blame germs.” And from that, modern medicine developed. Snow’s research in London in 1854, his empirical research on the causes of this cholera was an amazing step forward here in Britain. “When cholera broke out”, I read, “in the Broad Street area of London in 1854, "Snow set out to test his theory. "He interviewed people living in Broad Street "and made a map of the area showing "where cases of the disease of cholera had been. "In 1855, in his report "on the mode of communication of cholera”, we read this, this is Snow himself. “There were only 10 deaths in houses "situated decidedly nearer to another street pump. "In five of these cases, "the families of the deceased persons informed me "that they always sent to the pump in Broad Street "as they prefer the water.” So there’s no water sanitation in the houses.

You go to a pump. Now, in a village, the pump is fed by a spring or well or whatever. In cities, it could be a bit dodgy. And what he felt was happening was that somehow other, the Broad Street pump was being polluted, polluted by sewage. And that’s what he proved. He proved that it wasn’t in the air because other people living nearby using different pumps were fine. The people that he, his mapping of the area and of the disease show had drawn their water from this pump in Broad Street, and that pump was the one that had had sewage put in. So he clearly saw that cholera was spread through the sewage. “Snow’s investigations”, let me read, “showed that all the victims of cholera in the area "used the same water pump. "He convinced the local council to remove the handle.” In other words, if they take the handle away, you can’t get the water out. “This brought the cholera outbreak to an end.” It was an extraordinary piece of practical scientific theory. The theory was right. The practise, he proved. It was an incredible step forward. Now, the next important piece of health legislation was the Public Health Act of 1875. Perhaps, the most important of all. Now, I must say as a preamble to this, in 1867, Disraeli had introduced a second reform act, the first one in 1832, which we’ve spoken of before. This is the second one in 1867. And this, when it passed, gave an additional one million men, sorry, only men, one million men the vote. And many of this one million men were workers. And as such, their views had to be taken into account for the very first time working class men or a proportion of working class men could have their voices heard. And let me just read you this. “Now that they had the vote, "workers could put pressure on the government "to listen to concerns about health. "For the first time, "politicians had to address workers concerns "in order to stay in power.” Because if they don’t, then they will vote for the other party.

So this is a big moment in terms of democracy and in terms of government intervention in social issues, the 1875 Public Health Act. In 1871/2, the government divided Britain into sanitary areas administered by local officers of public health. Well, the 1875 Act, imposed specific duties of officers of public health. And this made all the difference. Now, public health was a national concern, and let me just read you this. “They appointed health inspectors and sanitary inspectors "who made sure that laws on things like water supplies "and hygiene were being followed. "They maintained sewage systems "to prevent further cholera outbreaks, "and they were ordered to keep the towns "in which they were public health officers clean.” Now, if you live in Britain, you know full well that at the moment there’s huge rows about the water companies dumping sewage in rivers, dumping sewage in the sea. I, at the moment, am in dispute with my local water company in the south of Britain for dumping sewage directly into the sea from a Victorian pipe that is broken. And I think I’m in the sixth week of trying to get them to do something. So the Victorians were doing things. Incidentally, why Britain specifically has problems at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century is that Victorian sanitary engineers were so good that nobody bothered to keep anything sort of monitored and up together, so that they all began to break at a certain point. Interestingly, I was in a taxi in London, oh, this was 1990s, early 2000s, and no, 1990s. And I was in a taxi, and the taxi drivers are well known to take you a longer way round. And I think they thought I was some novice from the provinces. And I said, “Hang on a moment.”

I said, “This isn’t the direct way.” “No,” he said. “I can’t go the direct way because the road has been closed. "I’ve got to go this way.” So I said, “Well, where is your road closed?” And they said, “Well, they’ve given out that "that it’s because of threatened terrorism.” And this was at the time of the IRA. And he said, “It isn’t true.” I said, ‘What do you mean it isn’t true?“ He said, "Oh, no, the main sewer has broken "and they don’t want people to know about it. "So they’ve closed the roads around it, "and the story being given out is it’s been closed "because of potential terrorist acts.” It’s not good. And that’s a problem that we have suffered. I’m not sure that any of you listening from outside of Britain has suffered from similar, but I suspect that some of you may have done so. Other acts followed the 1875 Health Act. For example, in the same year, Artisans’ Dwelling Act was passed, which local councils could buy up slum housing and build new housing. But if they built new housing, they had to build it according to national government guidelines and standards, because poor housing was very much a cause of ill health, early deaths and so on. A year later in 1876, the government passed the River Pollution Prevention Act, which prohibited the dumping of sewage and industrial waste into rivers. That is the one that currently is being ignored here in Britain, 1876, that legislation was passed. So if you’re a Victorian, if there’s a Victorian out there at a 100 and goodness knows what years of age, listening to this talk, you can see why those of us living in the 21st century are more sceptical about the idea of progress than you were in the 19th century. Now, in addition to legislation, to set standards for national and local government and make provisions for inspection, there were advances in the science of medicine beyond the germ theory, which I’ve already mentioned, notably in the field of anaesthetics and antiseptics.

In 1799, Humphry Davy, the creator of the miners lamp, had identified nitrous oxide, which perhaps we know better as laughing gas, as a possible anaesthetic. In Britain, it was Professor Simpson of the University of Edinburgh who began to use chloroform to assist in childbirth. He did so in 1847. Six years later, Queen Victoria was giving birth to her last and eighth child, Princess Beatrice. And she hated the whole process of childbirth, and she demanded to be given chloroform. She was, and this made it socially acceptable because prior to Victoria saying, okay, give it to me, please, the men, conservative small C men, but in particular the clergy and the church, thought this was interfering with God’s own creation. And chloroform should not be used. Once the Queen had used it, middle class women got to use it, and it became acceptable to use it. I’ve written here, in terms of chess, queen trumps bishop. Anaesthetics allowed longer, more complex operations to be performed. But, initially, it led to a higher death rate. Why a higher death rate? Well, because the surgeons still did not have a firm understanding of the role of hygiene. They would wear the same gowns for numerous operations covered with blood and, well, you can imagine. The place of operation was not sterilised. They often operated in people’s own homes. There may be some people listening here who had an operation, for example, for appendicitis in their own homes. Certainly, I’ve known people in my life who had home operations on the kitchen table, and they also used unsterilized, unwashed surgical instruments. Indeed, the period between 1846 and 1870 became known in Britain as a black period, the black period of surgery. This, of course, was finally dealt with when antiseptics became another major scientific breakthrough and solved the problem, well, largely solved the problem of infection or certainly infection due to poor hygiene practise.

And the name we associated Britain with that is Joseph Lister, whose name is associated with the use of carbolic acid, which he had seen in use in sewage farms. And Lister began his practical research in the late 1860s. And I’ve got one short piece to read here, if I may. “The use of antiseptics immediately reduced death rates "from as high as 50% in 1864/66 to around 15% "by the beginning of the 1870s.” It was a tremendous improvement. The Victorians believe in progress. We will go on and on and on and on improving. And, in many ways, in terms of medicine, we have, but we’ve also had problems of antibiotics, which have become, we’ve become immune to the effects of many antibiotics. So again, we are more concerned about progress being 100% wonderful than the Victorians. I’ve got on my notes here, it says, stop, check your time. Is it 5:30? Yes, it is about, which allows me to move from those brief words about education, to a brief word about education, the education of the children of the nation. And again, it’s legislation in the Victorian period that takes centre stage. The key piece of legislation was the 1870 Education Act, sometimes called the Forster Act after the minister responsible for pushing it through parliament. But there had been advances before 1870. For example, in 1844 in the Factory Act 1844, the government had said that there should be time set aside in factories for young children to receive education. Not all factories complied with that, but it was a start. But, of course, before the Victorian nature, there was private education from elite, what in Britain we call public schools like Eaton and Winchester and Westminster, there was private education. There was also private education right at the other end of the social spectrum in what were called dame schools. The dame being a middle aged, very often elderly lady or elderly dame who ran a school, really wasn’t a school at all. Many of them were actually illiterate. So how could they run a school?

It was merely a sort of grandiose form, if you like, of childminding. Some of them were better than that, and some of them were literate and did teach basics of reading and spelling and writing. But the majority of dame schools were appalling. Gradually, as we come out of the 18th and into the 19th century, the churches were involved. Both the non-conformist churches and the, sorry, both the non-conformist churches and the Anglican church, the Church of England, were involved. And I know, of course, many of you are British who are listening to me, and many of you are British listening to me, are also Jewish. And you’ll know that the Jewish Free School in London, which began in 1817, continued not only through the Victorian period, but continues through to today. By 1822, the Jewish Free School in London was offering quote “a religious, moral”, and I love this, “useful education”. Religious, moral and useful education. Well, I thought moral and religious wasn’t particularly useful, I don’t know. I just love that definition. It originally had 600 Jewish boys and 300, very interestingly, Jewish girls. Girls were not favoured for educational opportunities in late 18th, early 19th-century Britain. The Jewish free school was very much an exception to that. We know that at its height, it had, by the end of the century, something like 4,000 children attending. And the claim is that this was probably the largest school in the world, 4,000 children. So that’s another example of a religious and voluntary project. The government began to intervene, and it intervened first by the Factory Act, worried about children in factories, but it also gave grants to the church schools. By the 1860s, it was giving a grant of 800,000 pounds. Well, grants, grants plural of 800,000 pounds a year to church voluntary schools. I suggest now that the Jewish Free School was an exception in educating girls. It wouldn’t necessarily have been the same curriculum, but they were educating women. Let me read you what one historian has written here.

“There were many doctors who believed "that if women studied too much education, "it would stunt their ability to reproduce. "Therefore, when universities opened their doors to women, "a lot of families did not want to send their daughters "for fear no one would want to marry them afterwards.” Wow. I think we should have to ask lockdown to find a female historian to talk to everyone about the slow progress to achieve the equality of women in Western societies was from the 18th to the 21st century. I mean, that just strikes us as extraordinarily odd, but that’s what it was. So the 1870 Act, what did it do? They still charge fees, now, only a matter of pennies, but the very poor couldn’t pay them. And the 1878 Act, 1870 Act, only applied to children between five and 12 years of age and it wasn’t mandatory. You didn’t have to go. So if you were working class and you couldn’t afford it, but not only that, but you could not afford the loss of income that a child of, say, 10 was bringing into the family, then the children still didn’t go. But it was a step in the right direction. The government had, for the first time, realised they must be public in the sense of government-provided education at primary school level. And in order to make sure that it was running efficiently, they employed school inspectors to go round. Free education, free government schooling did not arrive for another two decades until 1891, but then it was indeed free. The voluntary schools, the church schools, the Jewish schools continued and have continued since. It’s a complicated story of how many of those voluntary schools were incorporated within the state system. Britain has, I’ve said countless times in my life, my worst nightmare would be to be invited to another country, shall I say, in this states, Canada or America, and to explain the British educational system. I think it can’t be explained. It is so weird and odd and really, it does not make sense.

As the Irishman once said, “If I was going there, I wouldn’t start from here.” And our system is crazy. Now, the really good thing about the 1870 legislation was how they set it up. They set up school boards. The whole of the country was divided into areas, and their school board was set up. Local people could vote for who was on the school board. Women could vote for the first time in such an election, and women could stand. And you will remember from an earlier talk that Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had more votes than any man or indeed any other woman, any man who stood for a school board when she was elected to the school board at Marylebone in London. So that is direct democracy. There was, however, a lot of objection from the churches, and they didn’t like the idea that there would not be religion at all. That is to say, Christianity. In the end, the government compromised. There would be religious education, Christian education, but it would not be denominational. And so, that is how we land up still with very odd rules, to my mind, about religious education in schools. By 1880, 10 years after the act was passed, there were three to 4,000 of the so-called board schools because they were run by school boards. It also led and developed the professionalisation of teachers, teacher training, if you like. And so the 1870 Act in Britain, and is mirrored in other countries around the same sort of date, gives us a professional educational service run by a government, in our case, by national government through school boards, directly elected. Now, that was introduced, by the way, by a liberal government in Britain. In 1902, one year after Victoria’s death, there was a conservative government and they repealed the Education Act 1870. It’s called the 1902 Education Act or the Balfour Education Act after the man who introduced it.

And they replaced school boards in the local authorities, which had been established in the 1880s, county councils and so on. They gave education to the local authorities, to local government. In Britain, we call them local education authorities. That was simply their heading. I work for Warwickshire County Council. I work for Warwickshire Education Committee, but Warwickshire Education Committee is simply called Warwickshire LEA. It is part of local government, part of Warwickshire County Council’s government locally in the county of Warwickshire. And its education provision is called Warwickshire LEA, that local education authority, that’s in the 1902 act. But the importance here is no longer are people elected directly by local people onto local school boards, but the education is run by representative democracy, by the councillors you’ve elected. And in a county like Warwickshire, the south of the county was very rural, very conservative with a big C. The north of the county was industrial with a big L for labour. And if you were an officer in the county, as I was for adult education, I was the head of adult education Warwickshire way back in time in the 1970s, then you had to be aware that if you were arguing for something to be provided in the south, you also have to argue for something to be provided in the north, or other words, the politicians in the north, labour, would vote against the politicians in the south, conservative, or vice versa. Now, this, in my view, not necessarily in the view of anyone listening to it, but in my view, this was detrimental to education because we’ve gone away from direct democracy on the local school board in 1870 to representative democracy in 1902. That’s not a good thing in my view. By 1902, there were 5,700 of these primary schools educating something of over two and a half million children in Britain. Then you’ve got all the other schools as well.

Now, the old board schools had decided that some children who were very bright, should be supported into what we would now call secondary education, post 12. No one stopped them. And so, they set up classes. So I’m in a classroom here, there’s classrooms all around me, but this one is for 12-year-olds plus. In 1902, the government said, no, no, no, you can’t do that anymore. The local education authorities, if you want to educate secondary-aged children, you don’t have to, but if you do, you have to set up separate schools. Well, that’s a further downside of the 1902 legislation. Would I be going too far as to say the progress of the 1870 Act, Victorian legislation, is being pulled back post the Victorian age in 1902 by the 1902 Education Act? I wouldn’t want to argue that too strongly, but you get my message that the 20th century, and certainly later in the 20th century, sees progress in a different way. In fact, we don’t get secondary education here in Britain for every child until we reach 1944 Education Act, the so-called Butler Act of 1944. Interestingly, I’m a great fan of Butler, who was the education secretary, later home secretary, and, perhaps, arguably the greatest politician we had in the 20th century, never became Prime Minister. Butler is very interesting. He wrote most of this education act himself at the end of the war in 1944. And the story goes that he brought the draught to Churchill. Churchill was in bed, which he often was in the mornings, and Butler had to present it, and Butler had sent copies to Churchill and expected to be grilled by the great man over various sections. Instead, Churchill asked one question, “Do you agree with this?” Well, given that Butler had personally written a lot of it, he said, “Well, yes, prime minister, I do.” Right, so Churchill went, “That’s good enough for me.”

And there was no discussion at all, but there was a lovely story. I don’t think it was on this occasion, that with Butler, Butler was again seeing Churchill when Churchill’s in bed. And Churchill had his pets around him, and one of them was a Budgerigar that was allowed to fly free in his bedroom, and it landed on Butler’s head and did what Budgerigars could do. And Butler had to mop his head with his handkerchief to get rid of the bird poo that’s on his head. And he is reportedly, the things I do for There was further education progress made in Victorian Britain that I’ve not spoken about. Compulsory education, which was subsequently brought in in the 1880s, 1890s. So children had to go to school. They also introduced it for blind and deaf children in the 19th century. The year that they introduced the act was, I’ve got to look at the date, I can’t remember it, 1893. And they also established special schools for children who were physically impaired. So they had schools that are specific for blind children, for deaf children, and for physically-impaired children. All of that in legislation passed in the 1890s. And you say, well, okay, what’s so grand about that? What’s grand about that is that in Britain today, such provision is horrendously underfunded. And it’s very difficult as a parent of a child who’s been diagnosed with a particular issue or problem for them to receive specialist help. In particular, we went through and are going through a phase where we closed down special schools for deaf children and blind children to integrate them into ordinary schools, but forgetting that they needed additional support. So, sorry, I wear this as a chip on my shoulder because as principal city lit in London, which had the largest deaf education centre in Europe for adults, I’m only too well aware of how we are still failing deaf children in Britain today.

Now, you might say, how different were these schools from today? Well, they are and were very different in Victorian age the school you go in today. The schools that my grandchildren are going to, bear almost no resemblance to Victorian schools, but they bear considerable relevance to the school that I attended in the 1950s. For example, why? Well, Victorians had punishments with the cane or the scrap. When I was at school, caning was done by the headmaster every Monday break time and children lined up to be caned. Some schools used a leather strap, particularly here in Britain, in Scotland, the tours. And I know I had a Scottish teacher on one occasion who attempted to use it, and this was when I was in my teens, and we were very pleased to tell him that he couldn’t, because he was in England and he wasn’t able to use the tours in England. Victorian children had to wear a dunce’s cap with a big D on it and stand in the corner. Well, we didn’t wear dunce’s hats, but we certainly stood in the corner or we were asked to stand outside of the classroom. Now, I never understood that. If you stand outside the classroom, what chance of education do you ever have? We also had writing of lines. I’m sure lots of you had to write lines. That’s all Victorian. All of that, I am very pleased to say, has now gone. Victorian schools had great, big, high ceilings, and the windows were so high up that you couldn’t see out of them. In fact, I’ll tell you a story. I had an adult education centre in Warwickshire, which met in a Victorian school in a village, and I was going down to inspect a yoga class as the inspector. And I got there and I wasn’t in a happy mood because I was missing a European football match on the television.

But I duly went down and I tried the door, it was locked, and I thought, this is ridiculous. There’s a class here. I couldn’t get in. And then I thought, there isn’t any light, there aren’t any lights on. I thought that’s very strange. And I couldn’t look through a window because they’re so high. So I had to keep jumping up and down to peer through the window. I couldn’t see anything. So in the end, I gave up, even angrier than I was to begin with and went home. First thing in the morning, the area principal in whose patch this village was, phoned me up to say, “William, I’ve got a problem, "a rather unusual problem. "I’ve had a complaint from this village "that their yoga class, they had a peeping Tom jumping up "at the window looking in.” He said they were, at the time, they didn’t have any lights on because they were in their meditation phase. I never let on that I was the peeping Tom. I merely said, “These things tend not to happen "a second time. "I shouldn’t worry about if I was you.” But it was the cause of these high Victorian windows. Teaching was not as exciting as it is today. Teaching was rather boring. Teaching consisted of writing things on blackboards that children copied usually, sometimes in a book, the writing book, very often on a slate. I remember copying things down from the board and being punished if I copied something incorrectly. The main subjects, reading, writing, and arithmetic, the so-called three R’s. The rooms were very poorly equipped, certainly my one. No exciting things on the walls. You were lucky if you had a map of the world. That was what most English schools had. In France, interestingly, in the end, the 19th century, they had maps of Alsace because the Germans had taken Alsace in 1871 at the end of the Franco-Prussian War.

And if you go into a French school museum, I went to one in Carcassonne and it’s 19th century and there you can see the map of Alsace. So if you’re in France and you visit a museum of schooling, look for the map of Alsace. So education wasn’t as exciting, was brutal as well. But at least we had a system and a system that was developing. And the Victorians were the first to see that governments had to intervene both in fields like health and in education. Now, that was going to be the end of my talk. And when I was reading it all through and thinking, okay, that seems all right, I then had panic, and I thought, I’ve been too positive. Now, you don’t need to be a Marxist historian to agree with the description of Manchester given by Friedrich Engels. This is Simon Heffer’s book, “High Minds”, which we’ve used, which I’ve used before, and is on the blog at an earlier, I think the very first book list I put up on Victorian Britain. And Simon Heffer writes, “Urban Manchester and that horrified Engels. "He described the working class accommodation "in those towns as quote, "cattle sheds for human beings. "In 1843 in Parliament Street, "380 people shared a single privy.” One toilet amongst 380 people. “The hovels had been erected to make money "for speculative builders and expense had been spared. "The inhabitants matched their surroundings. "Engels wrote, a hoard of ragged women and children "swarm about here as filthy as the swine "that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles. "It was a hateful and repulsive spectacle.

"In such dwellings, only a physically degenerate race, "robbed of all humanity, "degraded, reduced morally and physically to bestiality "could feel comfortable and at home.” “Engels noted, disgusted at the hypocrisy "that caused those same people to have a health commissioner "appointed to inspect the quote, "unwholesome dwellings of the poor. "Not to protect the poor, "but to protect the bourgeoisie.” Now, okay, he puts that Marxist spin on it, to protect the bourgeoisie and not the poor. Now, I don’t necessarily agree with that, but his description of Manchester itself is absolutely accurate. It was appalling and it went on being appalling until post World War II. But the Victorians will remind us with their famous phrase, “the poor are always with us”. That whichever country you’re listening to this in, there is a subclass, an underclass in our societies in the 21st century, a class of people who’ve been left behind, being left behind by housing, being left behind by education, being left behind by jobs, unemployment, poor education, poor housing. In Britain today, the phrase of the government is we must level up. It’s also the phrase of the opposition. Levelling up is the answer. And we’ve struggled with this since the Victorian age. We’ve struggled with this, and they were figures released last week of how many people had been in hospital caused by lack of food in Britain in the 21st century. If the Victorians believed in progress, and we don’t, we have to do something about the under classes in all our Western societies. And bluntly, the volunteer efforts that were put in by the Victorians are not so obviously put in today. Obviously, clearly, we’ve got voluntary bodies, but again, we need voluntary bodies and individuals to press governments to act on these things. I found that a quite depressing way to end in a sense. But I believe it is important because we like to think we’re so much better than people before.

So much superior in every way. And we clearly are not. Now, I can’t end there, obviously. I’ve got to end the course as it is on the Victorian era. And this was quite difficult to be honest. I didn’t quite know how to, and my fallback position is always to look for a good quotation. And I couldn’t, and I thought, hang on. I think this is a bit dark. So first of all, if in dire straits as William, he turns to poetry and in very dire straits to Kipling. Now, Victoria died in January, 1901, but her world died on the 4th of August, 1914, as Britain goes to war with Germany for the first time in the 20th century. 10 years after Victoria’s death, that is 1911, therefore, three years before Britain is at war with Germany. And the world changes when the Victorian age disappears over the horizon. 10 years after Victoria’s death, three years before the war, Kipling wrote a poem. Now, I’ve often quoted Kipling’s poems. I have never ever quoted this one. And it’s not a very famous one. It’s called “The Bells and Queen Victoria”. And he’s looking back a decade to when Victoria was alive. And he writes this. “For we were hers as she was ours. "And she was ours. "And she was ours. "And she was ours as we even, we were hers. "As we were hers.” It’s almost a statement, I think. It’s not an easy poem to interpret, but it’s a statement that she epitomised the age, an age when we were, whatever our difference is, we had more in common with each other than we had differences. This was an age of progress when all primary-aged children went to school. This was an age where everyone had clean water. That’s what he’s saying. That’s what he’s saying in that poem.

That there was a different England in the 19th century, even to that in 1911. And then war comes in 1914, and everybody who fought in that war was a Victorian. And they believed all the things that the Victorians as a whole believe. And instead, they were thrown in. We hadn’t really fought a war since 1815 in the war against Napoleon, and even that, a limited number of people were involved. This war involved everyone, civilians at home, attacks from the sea and from the air on Britain itself, and a volunteer army that died on the song in 1916. And Wilfred Owen, the great poet of the First World War, wrote this poem. Well, he wrote the first draught in 1917. It was published after the end of the war. And he himself was killed in action in 1918, simply a week only before the armistice of the 11th, November, 1918, he was killed. So the Victorian age, which I’ve shared some, hopefully, interesting thoughts about, challenging thoughts about, you don’t have to agree ever, opening up that Victorian world for you to look at more, comes to a shattering hold in the trenches of northern France. And Owen who fought in those trenches and gave his life a week before the armistice in his famous poem, “Dulce et Decorum est”. It is sweet and honourable to die for one’s country. A very Victorian thing. And he says, that’s a lie. It’s not sweet and honourable to die for your country. It’s horrendous in the mud and the blood and the filth at Flanders. And the last stanza of his poem reads like this. “If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace "Behind the waggon that we flung him in, "And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, "His jangling face, like a devil’s sick of sin. "If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood "Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, "Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud "Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues. "My friend, you would not tell with such high zest "To children ardent for some desperate glory, "The old lie, Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. So the poem ends. So Victorian beliefs in progress end. So the Victorian end, the young men born at the end of the Victorian era dies. Thank you very much for listening and I will see you all, hopefully, on Monday the 4th of September. And I really do hope to see lots of you there. I’ve got some questions and probably comments.

Q&A and Comments:

Oh, That’s nice of you all. Surely, the Elizabethan corn laws, says Vivian, was an example of government legislation, though hardly charitable. Yeah, I’ll accept the point. There are differences, but I’m not going to argue them now.

You make a perfectly valid point, Dennis says, John Snow was also the man who made the newfangled thing called anaesthesia popular except, well, by ministering chloroform to Queen Victoria for well It was nicknamed chloroform ala rain. I didn’t know that Snow did that, Dennis. Thank you so much for that. I did not know that.

Alan writes, tragically, cholera claimed the lives of over 40 people from the capital city of the most industrialised country in Africa, Pretoria, which has an outbreak of cholera disease so easily eradicated, given responsible authorities to question marks. Well, that again says everything about the 21st century when we know an answer, but we don’t follow. Thank you, Myra.

Val says, I’m a retired health a profession began in the 1868 take health information for women in their own homes, which developed into a home visiting service to every woman with children starting after the birth of a baby. Splendid, Val. That’s very well-made point.

Judith, the environmental acts in the late 1900s permitted the principle of dilute and disperse. That is why the Clean Air Act from the 1950s in Britain permitted the use of taller chimneys to emit pollutants into the upper atmosphere. As far as sewage was concerned, disposals permitted on a similar principle. That’s why the disposal in the sea is permitted. However, disposable in the river’s watercourses was rigidly prevented. But there was a get-out clause in a period where rainfall exceeded a limit. In unusual circumstances, the overflow into river’s watercourses was and still is permitted. Sewage works were designed for a specific inflow of untreated sewage. So if the inbook flow was higher than the design capacity, then the excess had to be discharged into rivers, et cetera. And so it is today and it is in Britain. I assume by that Judith, you’re British. Then in Britain that is a national disgrace. It is really a disgrace. And on this side of the channel, we can’t swim. I couldn’t swim a few weeks ago because of sewage. Whereas across the channel in France, in the French Coast, you could. Sorry, don’t get me on sewage. I’m so angry about it.

Pamela, my mother in the ‘50s used to often pose the question to me, "Who will marry you?” Someone did, surprisingly. Oh, I love that. It’s like my mother saying to my wife, who was then my fiance, when we told her we were getting married and she said, “You’re welcome to him.” Mothers can sometimes say the most horrendous things.

Q: Ina, can you please include, type the book for teenager you were reading from?

A: Oh yes, certainly. It’s called “Medicine in Britain”. “Medicine in Britain”. And it’s GCSE, GCSE, capital letters, history. GCSE History Medicine in Britain. But I think it has questions for kids to do, but I’m keeping my copy for my eldest grandson who’s off to secondary school in September 'cause I think in two years time he’ll be using it.

Ruth, when I was doing my PhD in the early '80s, I was told no one will want to marry me, God almighty, the 1980s, a 100 years after the Victorians.

Sorry, Monty. Yes. I shouldn’t have said Jewish free school. I should have said Jude’s Free School. I do apologise. You’ll have to forgive me for that error. And yeah, it was not me misspeaking.

It was me getting it wrong, Myrna. Oh, you were making the same point.

Hannah. Yeah, Hannah makes the same point. Oh dear, I’m going to get, odd thing, I’m so glad I make mistakes otherwise people think you know everything and I certainly don’t. It’s what my wife says. You don’t know, you think you know everything, but you don’t, and I don’t.

Q: Are you saying it’s free to send your child to a Jewish school in Britain?

A: No, I’m not. No, I’m not. No, I’m not, I’m not saying that at all. Some Jewish schools are within the state sector, so you don’t. When I was in Manchester, there’s a very good secondary school, Jewish school called King David’s, which is free. But there are, of course, schools which are, there was a public school, which I think I’m right in saying no longer exists, Cartnell College, which you paid. So, no, it’s all mixed up in the appalling non-system of education in Britain. And it’s nothing to do with being Jewish. The same applies to Christian schools. It’s all a wonderful mess. Well, not so wonderful.

Judith says, I had the leather strap by the junior school headmaster in Manchester in the 1960s. Wow. The form teacher used to throw a wooden board rubber. Oh yes, they did that as well. Yeah, they certainly did. And that’s 1960s, that’s a decade after me.

Hindi says still the same in Ontario, Canada. So prohibited. Quebec, Manitoba have some subsidies. I’m not quite sure, Hindi, what you’re referring to. Now, Val. Another, no, no, no, no. I’m pleased to do it. Alan says, we did indeed have caning in our schools in South Africa called flats, remember it well. Our schooling system was, yeah, a model very close to yours in the UK as were Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

In South Africa, we had, says Joni, if I pronounce your name correctly, we had caning at school and also writing lines, standing outside or being sent to the principal. Exactly as me, I did. Diane, we had a pull the girls’ bra straps on the back in South Africa. We should have sent him to be caned. I mean, today he’d be booked behind prison for sexual offences. How extraordinary.

Stuart, during the Victorian era, what types of training did teachers have? Well, no, they weren’t required to have degrees. They had teacher training, which was, I suppose you would say basic. I’m not a fan of teacher training, to be honest, not in the way it’s done in Britain. Maybe other people do it better. No, you didn’t have to be a graduate and they certainly weren’t.

Barbara, many thanks. Oh, well, thanks. Well, oh, why do I think the British education system is weird and inexplicable? Well, the easy answer is because the British are weird and inexplicable, I suppose. No, because it’s been messed about by politicians and one crude explanation is once we lost an empire, the only thing that politicians mess around with was things like health and education. And they continuously messed around with it. And now, as we enter probably a year before the next year or so, before the next general election, we have the opposition saying exactly the same things as all of you. We will change it and make it better.

Oh, for goodness sake, just listen to the professionals and don’t keep changing things in medicine or in education. Listen to those people who know.

Abigail, yes, the poor are always with us. That is why the Tory legislates how to assist the poor amongst us. And, indeed, that is what Christianity also teaches.

Q: Oh, and Abigail said, feels they fallow for the poor and other measures. Yeah, the poor are always with this. What does this mean?

A: Well, basically, well, there are two reasons, two answers. One is that there’s always going to be people at the bottom of society who are poor compared to those at the top. And although those at the bottom of society today may be richer and better off than in the Victorian period, they’re definitely poor. It’s comparative poverty. But there’s also poverty, which is not comparative. And that is so today in Britain, and I’m sure in all western democracy. We have children going to school who have not eaten a breakfast. We have children and adults going to hospital because they haven’t eaten. I mean, that is at a basic level. We have people in Britain today, because of the failure of the National Health Service in dentistry, we have people taking their own teeth out with pliers. Man, that is really desperate. And so, comparative poverty is difficult to deal with. And if you say the answer is communism, well, it clearly isn’t. But the real problem to me and you, I’m sure there are sociologists listening who will have a different view, it’s the poverty which isn’t comparative, but absolute poverty that we should be focused upon. Janet, my mother, born in 1907, went to school in Bermondsey. For those not British, that’s in London, and a poor part of London, and left school age 13. She worked as a cleaner at Peek Freans, which is a biscuit factory, and went on to do nothing higher than being a live-in housekeeper. However, I remember her as being an avid reader. And when I emigrated to Canada, I looked forward to receiving her letters, which were always well-written, grammatically correct, and often very amusing. And she says, I should add that my mother’s first husband died age 25 from tuberculosis. They couldn’t afford the cost of going to a sanatorium. Well, I’m afraid that story is only too common. We would like to hope that bright children, bright girls like your mother clearly was, would be able to receive a good education to go to school and university or college beyond the age of 13 and to work at a level that she was capable of working at. Now, some of the arguments today is that some children, I’m talking about Britain, but it applies elsewhere, are in such dire circumstances at home that they don’t have those chances.

Thanks, Rita. Yes, Jenny, we also had been sent to detention having to stay after school. Absolutely. Thank you, Susan.

Q: Shelly, the population in almost all of York more than doubled from the beginning to the end of 19, would you attribute that to the scientific health legislation advancements?

A: Yes, yes, that’s true. Because they had to do something. You don’t have to take a Marxist interpretation of history to understand that, in the 19th century, they also felt they were on the edge of a precipice. French Revolution, 1848, year of revolution, 1917 Russian Revolution. They feel that if they don’t do something, the underclass will rise up. That’s true. But they also felt in 19th century Britain through a resurgence of religious belief, which was very practical in terms of Christianity now practical Christianity, that you had to do something for those who were less well off. Those of you who are Jewish have already commented upon the Jews’ commitment to that. And that is, as it were, a given.

Esther says, are you aware the ultra orthodox schools in New York, we have them here, they don’t teach any youth. No.

Now that’s the, and Carol says that’s the same in Israel, but it’s the same in Britain. The ultra-orthodox schools are, yeah, that’s, I’m not getting involved in that, but that is an issue about freedom of religion, freedom of expression. If we take a non-Jewish, non-Christian example, in Islam, in Afghanistan, women who were at university have been sent away by the Taliban. And education of women and of girls has basically stopped in Afghanistan and it’s horrendous. And these are difficult moral questions. I have a view, and I guess you probably know what it might be, but there is an end to toleration is what I want to say. Intellectually, there has to be an end to toleration. I can’t tolerate one of you believing that murdering people with red hair is a good thing. And I mean, how can you tolerate that? You say, well, it’s my view, right? That’s the religion I follow. Well, we have to say, I’m sorry, that is unacceptable in our society. When I did racist training in the 1980s, we were told, you must stop when you see or hear racism and say, as a teacher or as an educator, I’m sorry that is not allowed in this college. If you’re going to say that, you must leave now. So there are limits to it.

Farewell to everyone.

• I hope to see you later. And, William, many thanks and thanks to all of you.