KILMARNOCK ACADEMY 1886-1891
By William Boyd
I have spoken before of my going to the Grammar School as an entry into a new life. The transfer to the Academy at 12 meant another new life, different and over all better. At this time the number of teachers in a school like the Academy was limited to three or four, not as now a horde of people. That meant that when the small number of teachers was good, their influence was correspondingly greater. And by my good chance, the four men who were to teach me in the following five years were all men of outstanding personality and character. I suppose there are still such men in the schools, men who count as they did in the community at large and are widely esteemed. But probably with fewer openings for scholarly men in these times, the standard may have been higher. I don't know. Hugh Dickie I have told about already and how my recent studies have given me a greater appreciation of him. At the time he was rather remote - he never smiled or showed any special interest in the individual pupils, though, as I had cause to know later from my experience, the interest was there. That he was basically kindly is evident from the fact that there was no corporal punishment in the secondary classes (12 and upwards), a very rare thing then or now in Scotland. Curiously enough, my first expectation was rather that he was a hard man. I remember that a month or two before I became a pupil, there was a letter in the Kilmarnock Standard, objecting to the Rector calling the son of one of the ministers in the town ‘a big Hibernian gorilla'. That, as it turned out, was only a single flash of anger, nothing more. In the five years I knew him I can only remember one episode of the kind when with one or two boys who had been making a row in a classroom before he came in, I got put out to mix with the cattle who were bellowing outside! David Murray, who taught Maths and Science, and at need everything else, was a very outstanding man in every way: a graduate in Arts and Science, who had worked in Lord Kelvin's laboratory (the first of the kind in Britain) and won his approval for his handwork. He was lame from some childish illnesss otherwise, as he once said to me at a later time, he would have gone to Canada - and he added quizzically, “by this time I might be Governor General of one of the Provinces.” And he had the ability and the force of character that would certainly have. taken him far if he had not found its work in teaching. He was the kind of man for whom you just had to work you could not help it, you had to. One of my contemporaries, who had become headmaster of a big Edinburgh school, once told me that as a young teacher he used to ask himself in any difficulty, “What would Murray do?” He was as personal as Dickie was impersonal. If a pupil had any special ability - or even if not - Murray encouraged him to make the best of it. With his help I got further in Maths than any other scholar of my time, because he had detected some special capacity (which I did not know I had) and helped me on. He was the kind of teacher to whom one like myself went back for a visit in his home in after years. Well I remember the talks I had with him in my student days. Also I remember with pleasure taking Isa to see him after our marriage. (Mum has her own connection with him. She delights to tell of the occasion when, as a girl of 10 or 11 in the Academy she went to him on some school business and he laid his hand kindly on her shoulder, and she had the sense of a benediction.) When I told him about writing Plato's Republic, he said at once, “if you need money to get it published, come to me.” I didn't, but I appreciated his offer. He died untimely a year or two after becoming rector of the Academy, and the people of Kilmarnock lined the streets to do him honour on the funeral day. The third teacher in the Academy, whose business it was to teach the traditional subjects of a commercial course - writing, book-keeping, shorthand etc. - was Davie Lang, a real original, who delighted to talk and was most entertaining in his talk. I remember the Scripture lessons he taught, on the Genesis stories, which he adorned with an up-to-date commentary, little Benjamin pulling away the stool from big Simon ...He had rather a reputation for conviviality and sometimes went a bit far - only a slight bit. When I left for the University, I was invited to his house with another student, and we had an entertaining night, in which we were shown some naughty pictures (not-really very naughty) and treated as men of the world. Years after, when I went to address the Adult School in Kilmarnock, I found him among the adults. He told me then that he had turned over a new leaf: ‘it would have been better for me if I had done so sooner'. I don't know that it would have made much difference in the liveliness of his teaching. One of his talents was decorative writing. He could make a beautiful job of Memorial and such like cards. When Hugh Dickie got his Ll.D. from Glasgow in my last year at school, the scholars presented him with such a letter of congratulation written by Davie Lang in his best style with WILLIAM BOYD's name at the .top of the short list of scholars' signatures. In the year I went to the Academy a fourth teacher was added to the small staff to devote himself to the teaching of English and the Classics. This was William Williams, Big Wullie as we called him, because he was full six feet and a brick as the first report of him went - and bulky in proportion. He was a graduate of Aberdeen, as quite a number of Classics teachers in Ayrshire were, and a very decent, kindly, big fellow he was. Too decent perhaps, for some of the younger classes and not sufficiently forceful to get pupils to work till they were old enough to appreciate how well he knew his stuff. What I remember best is his marking of our Latin proses. Aberdeen was always noted for its devotion to Latin prose. This counted for more than anything else in the Bursary Competition at the entrance to the Arts course in that University. When our proses came back they were liberally covered with corrections in red ink (which, as one boy said, was just redinkulous): mistakes were marked 4 for a maxy (that is, a very bad howler) and so down to one for a trivial error. I grieve to confess that I never paid much attention to the corrections, and it was a useful thing for me to remember, when later I came to correct exercises and exam papers. I guessed that my pupils would pay no more attention to my markings than I had done to Big Wullie's and so I saved myself the trouble of much correction. Like the other teachers, Williams took his part in town activities. His special contribution was to the work of the Glenfield Ramblers Society, a very popular society, begun for working people, but drawing in people of all classes to its lectures and its rambles. His special interest was in botany, which I learned later, he had got from an old weaver botanist up in Aberdeen. One of the prizes I got in the Academy was a book on John Duncan, Weaver and Botanist. This John Duncan had been Big Wullie's botanical tutor! And having mentioned the Glenfield Ramblers, let me say that it was from their lectures and rambles I got my first impulse to Geology.
And one final note here. I have said that corporal punishment had no part in the life of Kilmarnock Academy. I have just recalled two occasions when I saw an informal punishment of the kind, both, as it happens, with the same victim. This was Habbie (i.e. Herbert) Whitelaw, son of the U.P. minister of the town. On one occasion, he told a lie to Murray, and Murray was scornfully indignant and gave him a whack over the leg with the walking stick which he carried with him because of his lameness. The other occasion was when the small group of us who got Latin the last year had met in the Rector's room for a Latin lesson. Dickie had not yet appeared - he was always on the run, having to combine school supervision and teaching. His tall hat was on a peg near the door, and as Hebbie passed it, he stopped to pIay a tune on it; unfortunately for him, the rector suddenly came in and seeing him so engaged, he just lifted his foot and gave him a good kick on the behind; and Hebbie cleared out of the room for the day.
Kilmarnock Academy - twelve to seventeen years
When I arrived at Kilmarnock Academy in 1886, the school was at a most interesting stage in its development though of that, of course, I knew nothing at the time. As a mixed kind of Academy that was part parish school under the church and part town school getting voluntary support from the Town Council, it had fared rather badly. The buildings were poor and the teachers were in a depressed condition. When it was taken over by the School Board in 1873, it had all to be re-made, a new school to be built, a new rector to be got, a new goal set for it. The bother, as always before, was finance. The new Education Department only have grants for elementary schools, and it made all sorts of difficulties for the Academy. It was treated, in fact, as an elementary school and was forbidden to charge more than thirty shillings a year for fees for any pupils, since that was the maximum fee for elementary schools anywhere in Scotland.
Hugh Dickie, the rector appointed in 1876, tackled this problem in a way that gave the school a special character. He looked about for grants outside the elementary school system, after making sure that the most that could be got under that system was being got. One way of adding to the grants under the system was through teaching what were called specific subjects. I got some of these in my first years. For example, I got lessons in Astronomy - a short superficial course, but sufficient to give a boy like me the elementary facts about sun, moon and planets, also, I think, constellations, served up in a sixpenny textbook, and taught for a few weeks before examination, with each pass worth four shillings to the school. Another, subject' of the kind was Physiology which, besides a very elementary teaching about the body functions, included a knowledge of all the bones of the body. (I remember counting them up and finding that the little primer was short of. the number by two bones. I reported to the teacher, but seeing he knew no more about Physiology than what he found in the sixpenny book he could not do anything about these bones.)
The most useful source of extra money was found in the grants made by the Science and Art Department for schools throughout Britain. One of my first prizes was a box of paints from that source, for passing an exam in Practical Geometry within a few months of' my entry. (In the same year, by the way, I sat an exam in ‘Coriolanus' and ,got Pope's ‘Poetry' in a beautifu1 volume' I have still. This was given by some local society. The Academy grabbed hold of aIl these opportunities and as it happened I profited because I was always willing to do any extra work and could pass exams easily even at this time.)
The most important addition to the ordinary grind in Latin, Greek, Mathematics, etc was the grants the school could earn in all the common sciences. According to the Scottish Education Department, the school had to be elementary for two hours per session. Well, it was arranged that from nine o'clock to ten o'clock there should ‘be instruction in the sciences and that the ordinary school should begin at ten o'clock. Once again there was the small textbook and twenty weeks cramming at a subject one morning a week ending up with an exam that was being sat at the same hour all over the kingdom. You could pass or you could pass First Class. The teachers - not the Board - got so much for every pass and the pupils who got First Class were awarded a gorgeous certificate in a red roll box. It bore on it a picture of Atlas with his world on his shoulder and the very, very true words: ‘In Nature's Infinite Book of Secrecy, a little I can read.' A little, a very little. For those who got the First Class, the school, which in this case meant the teacher (Dickie), gave a prize and in some cases the Science and Art Department added books from a list. I got Thomson and Tait's ‘Natural Philosophy' but could not understand it. Now, I am telling all this story because for me these sciences carried on year by year were one of the outstanding parts of my Academy education. In later years the educators were all very scornful of this cramming of science from a textbook. When the time came for science to be a regular part of the secondary school curriculum over Scotland, laboratories were set up so that boys and girls might learn by actual doing. Somewhere in the background of the change was the idea that these pupils were to find out things for themselves and not merely be told about them by book or teacher. All I can say is that I learned several sciences in this way and accumulated those imposing red boxes, and that later, when I became a teacher of science myself, I had to direct the lab sort of teaching. ‘My opinion to this day is that I got a great deal more out of my school science than my pupils got from me. It was really quite an encyclopaedic job. We began with Phsiography and Chemistry. (I still remember the first day in Chemistry when the rector, who taught the elementary stages, carried through a series of magical experiments in which there were coloured precipitates when certain chemicals were poured into test tubes and the grand finale was a gentle explosion when a mixture of sugar and saltpetre was touched off with a red hot poker. It convinced us all that science was really worth learning.) In successive years, we studied Sound, Light and Heat, Magnetism and Electricity, Geology and Botany. We continued some of these studies to an advanced stage when Phisiography (Earth Knowledge, Erdkunde) passed into Astronomy and the descriptive sciences gave way to Dynamics and Physics, smatterings, of course, but very blessed smatterings that set me on the: road to real science. Even at the time I, and presumably others like me, began to collect and name plants and fossils. I remember a rich dump of fossil-carrying stuff which I got in the quarries just below the Craigie farm of my grandfather. It yielded quite a number of shells and ferns (Carboniferous fossils). I started to label them and arrange them in boxes. The flower gathering appealed to me much less. I am afraid that I regarded it as cissy business. The advanced classes, by the way, were conducted by David Murray and, as proof of the goodness of the teaching, I remember some of the things he told us to this day. I remember, for example, that when he was talking about the metals, he mentioned the fact that aluminium was one of the commonest and might be one of the most useful if only somebody could find out how to extract it from clay. That was before the development of the present electrolytic methods.
One thing that helped to make this science a living study was that round about this time (was it 1884?) there had been established in connection with the Glenfield Works a Ramblers' Society (to which my father went) in which many townspeople including our teachers took part. I was taken to these rambles and lectures by my father and have still a vivid memory of some of the things I saw and heard then. The great virtue of all this was that it opened up a wonderful new world for a boy like me with an active mind. It served as an orientation course, and was most stimulating. Mind, this was something quite exceptional. I don't think that there were very many schools, if any, in Scotland like Kilmarnock Academy. While some of them were wakening up with the coming of' the new national system, the ordinary Burgh school, like the Academy in Ayr, was still essentially a language school. Kilmarnock Academy was the first Ayrshire school to have a chemistry laboratory. In fact, it was in this laboratory, when it was opened near the end of my time, that I did my first test-tubing.
The Science and Art Department of South Kensington (which owed its inception to .the Great Exhibition of 1861) did me another service. As I have told you before, I went into the Academy on a bursary of £12 for two years, open to all the local schools. At the end of that time, I sat for the Ballochmyle Bursary open to Academy pupils. This was a bursary which had to have money provided for it by some local person or group and then it would get a supplement from South Kensington. . The interesting thing is that this was given by Sir Claud Alexander of Ballochmyle, to whom-, the stained glass windows in our Mauchline Church were a memorial. This paid my way for the next three years; £9 for the first year, £12 for the second and £15 for the last. The winning of this bursary was my first big achievement. I came out TOP.
The three pre-university Years at Kilmarnock Academy
The fact that. I had come out top in the Ballochmyle Bursary at the end of my second Academy year and had made a quite good all-round show in school work made it clear that I was the kind of pupil able to go on to the University, and from that point onwards everybody took that for granted, including my father and mother who began to save up to make it possible. This meant a concentration of effort on the studies required to ensure success in the University Bursary examination; which meant, in effect, in those days English, Latin, Greek and Mathematics. The modern languages were still outside the University ambit and, as a matter of fact, most of those who taught them were poorly qualified. I got a year or two of French but the woman, who taught it, could not speak it and my own pronunciation has never recovered. German I never took: An unemployed German clerk called Herr Grieser came in for a few hours a week and seems to have been quite good. Spanish was introduced at the instance of Kilmarnock's M.P. who had made his money in trade with South America and wanted to help the school to offer Spanish as a subject. For some reason or other I was one of the few who came forward to take Spanish, taught by another more dubious person, whose breath generally, smelled of alcohol in the few months the class went on. All I carried away from the study (apart from a Spanish textbook which I still have) was the proverb he used in teaching pronunciation, to the effect: ‘No hai pacheros in los nidos de antiquous', and I don't think that would have taken me very far if I had ever gone to Spain or South America, even in pursuit .of ‘pacheros' (birds).
There was no art or music; just the stock subjects. These were reasonably well taught, and, one way and another, we covered quite a lot of ground in Xenophon, both Anabasis and Memorabilia Socratous, Herodotus, both Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, a play of Euripides and one of Aeschylus, as well as Luke's Gospel. The latter was read along with the Memorabilia by the boys who were going in for Medical Entrance. The rector himself did most of this higher work using, as I once discovered when he left his own text about by accident, a book that had Greek on the one page and English on the other - which was really quite legitimate for a teacher who had to profess the very extensive range of different subjects he undertook. That he managed things quite intelligently and was not too hidebound is proved by the fact that on one occasion he offered a prize for a verse translation of one of Horace's Odes. This I still remember because got the prize for a poem beginning ‘Oh sweet font of Bandusian grove.......' in Scottish psalm metre. Latin prose was reckoned important but at this time the schoolboys were not expected to profess Greek prose, and actually I never acquired any proficiency in it. Even at this stage, I had begun to study for myself and read beyond school requirements. With a view to the all-important Bursary exam which was to provide the necessary funds for going to the University, I read quite a lot of Caesar and Xenophon on my own. Altogether I was well qualified by the standards of those days for the University. In Mathematics, indeed, I was far ahead of them. The first Six Books of Euclid were then the extent of geometrical knowledge required, and for me that was elementary stuff.
At this time, schools like Kilmarnock were not allowed to go in for the Leaving Certificate exams - that was reserved for higher class schools and, as I have said before, Kilmarnock Academy was theoretically only a kind of elementary school which managed to add on a number of the secondary school subjects. To meet this situation, Dr. Dickie linked up with the Glasgow University Local System and the result was most salutary because it widened the field of interest. Among the extra subjects from which I profited were Scripture and Logic. For the Scripture exams, I read in the first year an interesting textbook based on the text of Luke's Gospel, and to this day, Luke's Gospel has been a special interest for me, on its merits. In the final year, the prescribed book was Joshua, which was really not very inspiring. I remember cramming up some of the details. I was ready, if required, to reel off the names of the thirty kings of Canaan. The important thing for me was that there was a special prize of £20 offered for this particular paper, and as I was the most devoted scriptural student in the West of Scotland I got the money. (I was also, the highest scoring boy in the final exam as a whole. There was one hussy from some other school with a higher mark, but as the bursaries only went to the boys (girls were not admitted into the Universities in 1891), I got that bursary and she did not.) From this special study, I got a new idea of the Bible, as calling for an understanding of the circumstances under which the books were written and the general purport of them - as opposed to the detached verse kind of knowledge which was all that came from church and Sunday School teaching.
Even more important was the Logic, which apart from the Local Examinations would never have got into the school curriculum. The textbook used was Jevons ‘Elementary Logic'. (Incidentally, it was bought in Glasgow when my father took me into some exhibition in that city. I mislaid it somewhere, in the exhibition, but to our great relief it had been handed into the Police Office in the exhibition. “That is hard stuff for a young head” was the comment of the officer who handed it back to me.) Logic was a great discovery for me. I had wondered what Logic was and the answer I got was that it taught you how to reason. Well, there was a deal about reasoning: in particular about the syllogism and its various figures. I read all that with great delight. I learned that when you had a statement with an If, you affirmed the antecedent and you denied the consequent. (If you run up a hill, you will be out of breath - this illustration comes to me after a walk from church where I have had a long, long hill to ascend: Yes, I ran up the hill - then I must be out of breath. No, you are not out of breath, therefore you have not been running up a hill.) The background of, all this analysis of the process of thought was a discussion I came to know as philosophical - about ideas and definitions and fallacies with theories about them. I knew that I had found the subject I wanted to study and I went up to the University in due course, determined to make a special study of Logic. And Logic was the first class in which I had an outstanding success. I came out top in my group, the Junior Section who were eighteen years old and under. To this day, I have kept my interest in Logic, and I still from time to time find myself remembering some passage in Jevons' ‘Logic'. The book still stands on my shelves. |
