Hardwicke rawnsley biography samples

Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley: an extraordinary life, 1851–1920 by Michael Allen and Rosalind Rawnsley, Essendon, New Beaver Press, 2023, xxxvii + 436 pp., footnotes, bibliography, index, illustrations, £35.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-7392-1940-6; £20.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-17392-1941-3 Malcolm Tozer Published online: 09 Mar 2023 https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2023.2184504 Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley is best known today as one of the three founders of the National Trust – alongside Octavia Hill and Robert Hunter – and for his protection of the Lake District from unregulated despoliation by railway lines, industrial works and the closing of footpaths and bridleways. These notable achievements are but two that would have been cited at the time of his death a century ago, from a long list that then would have included Church of England canon and royal chaplain, social reformer and activist for public health, tireless campaigner for good causes, countryman and conservationist, author of 40 books and hundreds of sonnets, historian and archaeologist, and enlightened educationist. It is the last that will be reviewed here. Allen and Rawnsley (Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley’s great-granddaughter) have produced the first extended biography of their subject since his widow’s memoir of 1923, making full use of family resources and archive records never explored before. What do we learn? Edward Thring, England’s most celebrated headmaster since Thomas Arnold, had been a neighbour of the Rawnsleys in Oxfordshire before his appointment in 1853 to Uppingham Grammar School. The Rawnsley boys were among his first few pupils. Thring was also Hardwicke’s godfather so it was natural that the boy should come under his direct care as a boarder in School House. His eight years there, from 1862 to 1870, witnessed Uppingham’s transformation from local grammar school to well-known public school and saw what the headmaster called ‘the great educational experiment’ in full swing. This forms the content of the first chapter. Rawnsley was remembered best by his school contemporaries for his power in answering divinity questions in Thring’s classroom; his intellect was such that he won a scholarship in 1865. On the games field and in the gymnasium, he was plucky rather than talented: an older brother had been school champion but Hardwicke, despite enormous endeavours, had to be content with runner-up. A love of nature was absorbed from his years of roaming the Rutland countryside and through his collection of stuffed birds and animals. School House boys, however, would complain at the perpetual smell of animal skins escaping from his study. Thring taught Rawnsley to use his eyes in the countryside and made him see beauty in all God’s creatures; back at school these impressions were knocked into rough verse. Rawnsley imbibed Thring’s love of Wordsworth’s poetry, winning the school’s prize for English verse in 1869. He completed his Uppingham career as captain of School House, surely an exemplary position, and in 1870 he left for Balliol College, Oxford. In April 1869, the Revd John Foy of the Additional Curates’ Society gave a lecture at Uppingham on the need for more missionary curates to assist vicars in the rapidly expanding slum parishes skirting England’s cities. Foy so impressed his audience that a deputation of boys asked Thring if they might raise funds to help. The outcome in 1870 was the creation of a mission to the poor in North Woolwich, a sprawling Thameside parish east of London. This became the first mission founded by a school, and 15 years before a university equivalent, Toynbee Hall (see Malcolm Tozer, ed., Early Public School Missions to the Poor, Truro, Sunnyrest Books, forthcoming, for the history of 22 such missions). The 17-year-old Rawnsley would have attended Foy’s lecture. Whether or not he was a member of the deputation is unknown, but the mission idea left its mark. He served for a year as a lay chaplain in London’s Soho on graduation from Oxford, and he assisted at a refuge for the homeless and destitute. Rawnsley had fallen under the spell of John Ruskin in his Oxford years, including volunteering as a Hinksey digger; now he was introduced to Octavia Hill. Both Ruskin and Hill would play major roles in Rawnsley’s subsequent career as a social reformer. Rawnsley was ordained a deacon at the close of his year in London, and then early in 1876 he was appointed by John Percival, headmaster of Clifton College, to establish the school’s mission, one of the earliest to follow Uppingham’s lead. This was in a dockland parish on the outskirts of Bristol where some rooms in a cottage and the upper floor of a carpenter’s shed became the mission’s base. Rawnsley arrived to find muck heaps and farm refuse, jerry-built shacks as housing, lanes flooded at high tide, and public houses of the worst sort. He spent two hard years there and his achievements are traced in the second chapter: a night school was started; various clubs and activities were inaugurated; games and swimming were eagerly followed; and there were weekend expeditions to the surrounding countryside. After his ordination as a priest in December 1877, Rawnsley accepted the living at Wray to begin a long association with the Lake District. The steady population drift to industrial Lancashire prompted his concern for the conservation of the rural environment and the protection of craft skills. His response was the creation of the Keswick School of Industrial Arts in 1884, described in the sixth chapter. Beginning with metalwork and wood carving, classes later broadened to include spinning and weaving. Support came from Holman Hunt and George Watts, and commissions for ecclesiastical furnishings were won for many northern churches. The eleventh chapter covers further educational initiatives. Charlotte Mason arrived in 1892 as Rawnsley’s near neighbour and for the next 28 years he was an active supporter of her Parents’ National Educational Union (PNEU). He contributed to its journal, The Parents’ Review, including the ‘Educational Value of Observing Nature’. Rawnsley saw her as a true guardian of Thring’s theory and practice of teaching, and she had extended his reach to include children aged up to seven years. Rawnsley was also an early enthusiast for coeducation, serving from 1895 as Chairman of Governors of the new secondary school in Keswick. Boys and girls took their lessons together and mingled freely at play. Cricket and hockey were enjoyed by both sexes, but football was for boys only. In 1886, Rawnsley proposed to the Wordsworth Society that a reading room should be built as a permanent memorial to the Lake poets; then, on his initiative, Wordsworth’s first home, Dove Cottage in Grasmere, was bought by public subscription and adapted as a Wordsworth museum. In 1900 Beatrix Potter, another neighbour, was having difficulty in convincing publishers of the merits of her illustrated The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Rawnsley joined the attack, encouraging her to print it privately; he even turned the whole story into verse in case that was more attractive. It was not, and eventually Frederick Warne published the original. These topics are covered in the twelfth and thirteenth chapters. The authors’ research is immense and Rawnsley at last gets the comprehensive biography he has long deserved. Educational matters may have only played a small role in his armoury for social change but whether missions to the poor, craft education, coeducation, the teaching of infants, the Lake poets or Peter Rabbit, each was innovative in its time and permanent in their collective legacy. The book will be of special interest to educational historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.