'IBE HISTORY OF THE SYDNEY MECHANICS' SCHOOL OF TS FROM ITS FOUNDATION IN 1833 TO THE 1880'S
Thesis submitted to the School of General Studies Australian National University
for the Degree of Master of Arts in History
15th April 1967
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTIO
PART I--Background and Origins Chapter !--British Origins Chapter 2w~Colonial Background Chapter 3--Foundation in Sydney
P
r
rr~~l833 to 1851PART III~-1851 to 1883
Chapter 1-~Background Developments Chapter 2w•The School of Arts
Chapter 3-wThe College
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX r~MThe Puzzle of the Initial Step
APPENDIX II~- s.M.S.Ao Technical College•• Courses and Enrolment Figures
l
5 32 54
78
160 178 242
269
i
SOU CES
THE minutes of the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts to 1909, and nearly all its annual reports up to the present time, were studied
at the Mitchell Library, Sydney. The minutes subsequent to 1909,
and such annual reports as were missing from the Mitchell Library series, were seen at the School of Artso The minutes and annual reports
of the Melbourne Mechanics' Institute~-now the Melbourne Athenaeum--were studied at the Athenaeurn.
BBRBVIATIONS
A. ch· sholrn (ed~) ,The Australian Fl cyr1 ;,~1Fd:lE., Groli r , ydney, 19650 = - . . ~ - ·
A.D. B.! D. Pike (ed.) , Australian Dictionary of Biogra~hy2 1788-185~, Melbo Uni o Press, V. I, 1966, V. II, 1967.
INTRODUCTION.
THE culture of every nation is an amalgam of indigenous and exotic ideas. In a new nation--especially one which has been colonized by a parent nation, as distinct from a federation of
local ethnic groups--the proportion of ideas newly borrowed from
elsewhere is usually high. Some ideas may be introduced
discretely, as points of detail; others in complexes, as more or less complete institutions.
Where a particular institution has been imported into one society from another, its fortune in the new environment is a subject for special study. To what extent, if at all, has it
been modified to suit changed conditions? In what ways has this been done••in form, or function, or both? What success has it
. d? enJoye ..
By design, all the formal institutions established in the young colony of New South Wales were imported. The colony
comprised elements from the society of Great Britain, deliberately selected and sent to set up certain specified institutions of
types already familiar to Englishmen. The indigenous culture was brushed aside. But from the beginning some social elements and some institutions were under•represented or not represented at all:
there were few women, Scotsmen or skilled workers; there was no heavy industry, no peerage and no representative government.
differences in the new society as a whole: in addition its small scale, together with geographical factors such as isolation and dispersal, influenced its character. Similarly, any one part of it was liable to adaptation so that it could fit in better with related parts, and with the physical environment.
During the first decades of settlement in Australia, the mechanics' institute movement was in its incipient stages in Great Britain. By 1833 the movement had produced a fairly
stable form of institution, which had enjoyed ten years of
increasing popularity. The institutes were an attempt, in the first instance, to provide technical education for industrial 'WOrkers; but they adopted other goals as well which had nothing
to do with economic issues--goals related to social, cultural
and moral matters, and even spiritual matters. In its turn the institute movement had freely adapted some ideas borrowed from the Continent.
The Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, founded in 1833, was the first attempt to establish the movement in New South Wales. Among the institutes founded in the colony it was unique in
certain respects. There was no colonial precedent for it
(discounting the Van Diemen's Land institute); on the other hand it led to precedents in government policy. The colonial
administration and the Colonial Office in Whitehall took an
official interest in it, Governor Bourke being largely responsible for its foundation and some important aspects of its character. A policy of financial support was adopted which was subsequently applied, on a modified basis, to similar groups later established
elsewhere in the colony. The Sydney group led the other
institutes, and for a brief time helped them, in starting and managing classes and lectures. Alone among the institutes it
got as far as founding a working men's collegeM•the colony's
first attempt to provide cheap post-primary education with an integrated system of classes and examination,. Finally the college, when taken over by the government in 1883, became the
first step in the programme that set up a system of technical education throughout the colony.
This thesis studies the history of the School of Arts from its inception until the time when it ceased to play a significant part in the development of technical education in New South Wales.
The story has been divided into three main parts. In the first part, the first chapter describes the origins of the
institute movement overseas, and the ideas which had been tried out by 1833; the second examines the colonial situation at the
time, and discusses features likely to affect the institute; the
third chapter recounts the events leading to its foundation, surveys the individuals and groups that played prominent parts,
and examines the original constitution. The second part covers the first phase in the career of the School of Arts, fraught with the failures and dissensions which culminated in a crisis in 1851. In the third part, the first chapter brings the picture of the colonial background up to date, and gives an account of continuing
influences from Britain; the second and third chapters cover the
history of the institute proper until the 1880's, and the
development, first of classes, and then of the working men's
college, up to the point of its transfer to the government.
The conclusion comprises a brief epilougue, sketching the
subsequent history of the institute, and a discussion of those
features in the character of the developing colony which were
reflected in the career of the School of Arts.
The reader should be very cautious about generalizing from
the story of the Sydney institute to that of the institute
movement as a whole throughout Australia. Many schools of
arts and mechanics' institutes, particularly those in the rural
areas, took on such a different character, and experienced such
different fortunes, that an account of them would entail a wide
diversion from the line of enquiry that has been taken here.
PART !••BACKGROUND AND ORIGINS
Chapter 1--British Ori&ins.
On 13th March 1833 a public notice containing the following
passage appeared in the Sydney Monitor:
••A
large body of mechanics and others residing in Sydney, being desirous to establish an association to promote the diffusion of scientific and useful knowled&e extensively, throughout all ranks of the community of New South Wales ••• a number ofresolutions have been prepared by them ••• with a view to their forming the basis of a Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, in the progress of which, provision should be made for ••• a Library,
the delivering of Lectures, and the establishment of classes for mutual instruction ••• "
1 Nine days later, at a public meeting at which the S.M.S.A. was formally founded, these aims, objects and activities were
voted into its articles of association. They were typical of the aims and activities specified in the constitutions of the
mechanics' institutes which were then being established in many cities and towns throughout Great Britain.
It is necessary, as a preliminary, to take account of the circumstances in which the institute movement began, and its early character. Great Britain was its birthplace. The first successful mechanics' institution so-called was formally established at Glasgow in 1823, developing from special classes for v.10rkmen
1. Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts. Nadel states that this title was not official until 1837, the School being formally titled "Sydney Mechanics' Institute" until then. (2) There is no evidence for this in minutes, reports or public notices
sighted.
started by George Birkbeck in 1800. The occasion for the
movement was the Industrial Revolution, which created a new
need for technical instruction; but from the beginning the
situation was complicated by social and cultural factors as well
as economic. As a result it attracted the attention of various
people with special points of view, who added some important
incidental elements to its character.
Since the decline of public education in the seventeenth
century, scattered, tentative attempts had been made to found
working-class educational groups relying largely on mutual
instruction. At first these groups were mainly concerned with
elementary school subjects. The Spitalfields Mathematical
Society, founded in 1717, was perhaps the only notable group.
A change came in 1789 with the formation of the Birmingham Sunday
Society (later Birmingham Brotherly Society), which introduced the
study of scientific subjects. The formation of new pioneering
groups was much more rapid after this; but it should be noted
that the earliest groups were less interested in the sciences,
and included shopkeepers as well as artisans among their numbers.
G
The lines along which the movement grew reflected developments
in the economy: as commerce expanded at home and abroad, the need
for literacy and arithmetical training increased; later, as
industrial technology became more complex and subtle, and subject
to more rapid change, applied science increased in value. This
latter need enhanced the importance of mathematics and grammar,
which were vital ancillaries in advanced education of any kind.
education for their children. It can be assumed that most of the fathers held jobs ebove the level of unskilled work; but the evidence at hand does not show how many were artisans and how many were shop and office workers, or whether they wanted their
children to qualify for workbench, shop counter or office desk. (This diversity was to have an important effect on the development of the institutes.) Regardless of its origins, however, the
demand for elementary education was so strong that the institutions providing it--largely the Sunday schools 1 and monitorial day
2
schools --grew and spread with remarkable speed. According to figures quoted by Brougham in Parliament, national attendance at elementary schools rose from six hundred thousand in 1830 to twice that number in 1833. 3 The third Report of the Select Committee on the Education of the Lower Orders, tabled in 1818, stated
emphatically, " ••• The anxiety of the poor for education continues ••• 4 daily increasing, and extends to every part of the country ••• "
There was then no national system, either governmental or non-governmental, for imparting knowledge and skills to the work
force according to the requirements of the economy. Apart from calling for reports, the government showed little interest. While endowing the "public0 schools according to tradition, it made no contribution, either financial or administrative, to elementary education for the working classes until 1833. In Parliament many
Tories, including a number of High Anglican churchmen, feared it
7
1. S.J. Curtis: History of Education in Great Britain. London. 1953, p.199.
2. 3. 4.
as socially evil and dangerous. The first venture by the House
of Commons into this field did not involve the government in
direct administration: instead, funds were voted to aid church
odies in erecting schoolhouses for the education of the poor. 1
The sum voted was £20,000 At this time, calculating from
Brougham's figures, the fraction of English children of school
age actually receiving schooling was something like one in eight.
During the same period, Parliament was fidgetting with one
part of the problem which related to technology--the growing
national need for training in industrial art. In 1830 the
Commons set up a committee on means of promoting art, especially
among the manufacturing population. As a result of its
deliberations, the Normal School of Design was started in 1836, on
a vote of Ll,500. By the time of the World's Fair at the Crystal
Palace in 1851, about twenty such schools had been established
in important industrial centres, with enrolments numbering fifteen
to sixteen thousand. The inadequacy of these efforts was exposed
by the Crystal Palace fair: the standard of design among British
exhibits was sadly inferior to that of the best from the Continent.
This revelation frightened leading British industrialists, and the
government, into more intensive activity. Up to this time the
applied sciences had not received even as much attention as
industrial art.
The torpor of the central government until half-way through
the nineteenth century--an example generally followed by the
regional and local authorities--left the field to any non-governmental
force, organized or not, which took an interest. This tacit
abdication accorded with the theory of ""oluntaryism0 ... -a label
which dressed it up as positive liberal policy, although it was
really only laisser-faire applied to social problems. In this
context its limitation lay in the facts that, in politics and
economics, Great Britain was an oligarchy, and in England (though
to a lesser extent in Scotland) the social structure was heavily
stratisfied. Nearly all the resources needed for a voluntary
enterprise in education--economic power, political power, prestige
and influence, leisure time, even the existing store of
learning--were vested in arelatively small number of privileged individuals.
The people most directly concerned--the working classesw-did not
even have voting power, and their individual wages were at little
better than subsistence level. Voluntarism in any major enterprise
benefiting the poor usually implied help of some sort from others
more fortunate.
The forces committed by tradition to providing education for
the poor were the church and private or semi-public charity.
sections of the economy with a natural interest, apart from the
workers themselves, were commercial and industrial management.
Those
The established church had no central organization to cope
with the problem. It was left to the parish vicar or curate to
provide what schooling he could for his flock as he and they saw
fit, and to supplement his income with tuition fees. This custom
was little practised. As a group, the only clergymen who were
enthusiastic and active in the cause of mass education were the
evangelists and dissenters.
Charity schools add schools of indsutry ha existed during the eighteenth century, but had been generally ineffectual, and
. 1
were dying out before 1800. The schools of industry, for one thing, taught the wrong industries (rural labouring skills for boys and domestic crafts for girls) in a rapidly industrializing economy. More important was the rural, parochial basis: the schools were usually attended by poor children wtth whom the patrons had some acquaintance. This was upset by the drift of population to the cities. One feature of urban life was its anonymity, which hid individual paupers from the notice and interest of possible benefactors. The framework of commitment to personal acquaintances that existed in the small community, once destroyed, was not readily reconstructed in the city.
Of the groups naturally interested in the promotion of
education, the more prestigious commercial companies could count -on being able to recruit the sons of well-to-do middle-class
families, educated at their parents' expense. Smaller firms could not have outlaid capital on any sort of academic
apprenticeship for their clerks. It was left to their anxious parents--most of them clerks themselves--to provide what schooling and/or home instruction they could. Schooling was obtained, as often as not, at the dame-schools, which were generally of low
standard and, for families living on clerks' salaries, expensive. In general, the world of connnerce benefited greatly from the sense of responsibility and social pride of lower-middle-class parents, on whom the financial strain must have been severe.
Large-scale industrialists might have taken the initiative
and found the capital to start schools. A few--Robert Owen and
others 1 --did this; but they were very few. The change to mass
production had introduced a new type of industrial entrepreneur
and a new employee. The entrepreneur was the capitalist, who
came from a different background, employed more men than his
predecessor had done, and had little or no knowledge of the work
they did or the lives they led. He did not feel personally
involved with them, and was not disposed to brighten their future
with gratuitous training at no advantage to himself. Competition
from other manufacturers prompted him to keep his overhead expenses
low. The new employee was the process worker, whose best
qualifications were dexterity in a narrow repertoire of operations,
plus docility and endurance. The manager was confident of hiring
the special skills he needed in the open market.
Early in the revolution, the need to conserve and advance
technology widely was obscured from all but a few industrialists
by the bewildering speed of change. In any case, the expense
of schooling and training a free labour force woµld have had to
be shared by industrialists as a whole--and they were not organized
at the time. The few guilds which had survived and prospered
were now investment corporations. Not until the 18801s did
they begin to finance technical education, and even then their
efforts were primarily a bid to regain respectability: in 1880
1. ibid., p.228.
their activities, assets and profits had been made the subject of
a Royal Commission. 1
These defections left the task in the hands of the radical
clergy, the workers themselves, and sympathetic, influential
-individuals from many walks of life'J\Politics, business, the
professions, even 11retirenent0 •
2
Professional and lay churchmen of protestant persuasion were
well in the van of experiments in mass education. Not only did
they play a part in pioneering the mechanics' institutes movement
(in groups such as the Birmingham Sunday Sociaty): they were also
mainly responsible for the development of Sunday schools and
monitorial schools. The Sunday school scheme attacked the
problem of limited time for study, posed by the need for most poor
children to work twelve or more hours a day for six days a week.
The monitorial schools were an attempt to bring means within sight
of ends--to reconcile the educational needs of millions of children
with the dearth of trained teachers and with the pitifully meagre
l. G. Howell: The Conflicts of Capital and Labour, London.1890.p.67.
12
2. Throughout this thesis the term "protestentisrn°, with its related forms, is used in a special sense. By derivation, this and similar generic terms--"non-conformism" and "dissent", emphasize the
rebellion of these sects against the rule and teaching of Rome, but say nothing of the positive doctrines--independence of
conscience, and full responsibility for one's own actions--which moved their adherents to dissent. "Protestantism0 , as applied here, emphasizes these beliefs.
Many evangelical Anglicans who did not follow John Wesley's example in leav·ng the established church agreed with much of
resources of philanthropy unaided by Treasury.
It is significant that the most interested members of the
clergy were the protestants. The humanist ideas which were
implicit in the Reformation, and which they had inherited, reached
full maturity at some time around 1800. About the same time,
humanist faith in the dignity of man had been grievously affronted
by the degradation of the poor which resulted from the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions.
be ignored.
This was a challenge that could not well
Men like Wesley had fought widespread demoralization headwon
with heroic evangelical campaigns. But the period around 1800 was
at the latter end of the Age of Enlightenment. To many men who accepted the belief that man was ultimately perfectible, and
therefore intrinsically good, it seemedlogical that the root of
evil behaviour must lie not in man himself, but in his circumstances.
Among these one obvious obstacle was ignorance. For the humanist, to be wellwbehaved it was necessary to be not only well-intentioned,
but also wellwinformed. For this reason many radical churchmen,
as well as other men of social conscience, believed that
enlighten-ment was a necessary step towards moral improveenlighten-ment. Some of them considered that it was not merely necessar~ but would in the
long run prove to be sufficient.
This line of thought led from humanism to environmentalism.
Its followers argued that education is not merely for life; it is
also an integral part of life, and all life is a potential source
instructive influences, and their effects are subject to
modification by teaching. In England a parallel theory had
been applied by utilitarians like Bentham and Howard to the
problem of prison reform; but its fullest development in
relation to mass education had been on the continent, where
educators such as Pestalozzi and Herbert had treated the issue
as a deep spiritual problem.
Pestalozzi shared Rousseau's belief that the aim of
education should be to develop all of man's powers fully and
harmoniously. Rosseau, however, had despaired of enlightening
the poor, and at this point Pestalozzi departed from his teaching.
He went on to postulate that only ignorance and lack of hope
were responsible for the degraded existence of the poor. His
conception of full personal development had strong oral and religious overtones: he adhered firmly to Christian principles
as he saw them--and his view of them strongly emphasized the
importance of love. This emphasis he maintained in both his
writings and his work. Of his experiments in school administration
he said, 0we aim to produce men educated for manhood f irst of all l
and only secondly to train citizens and workers."
Pestalozzi's environmentalism was refined and subtle. His
idea of manhood was an idea of something spiritual; and for him
the greatest service that one could do for a fellow man was to
help him to find his own way to salvation--for find it himself
he must. Of the poor, Pestalozzi asserted1 "Because they have
been most neglected and are in such desperate circumstances, the regeneration of the lower classes must receive first attention. This calls for an education which arouses the will and vitalizes their powers, for charity only makes bad
1 conditions worse. "
These feelings were reflected in the writings of Herbart, who acknowledged a considerable debt to ttthe great and noble Pestalozzi*', but added some concepts of his own. The opening sentence of his "Aesthetic Presentations" asserts, "The one and the whole work of education may be summed up in the concept--morality." 2 He defined virtue as "the idea of inner freedom which had developed into an abiding actuality in an individual. To develop the attitude of preference for that which constitutes inner freedom, 0 he went on, "is the chief aim of education. 3 To anyone with a taste for moral philosophy, the concept of ~irtue as a form of inner freedom would have been made more
real by contrast with the example of the urban poor of England, wh who were fllnally enslaved as much by the way of life into which
they fell as by the external conditions that started their demoralization.
Herbart offered a highly refined view of the good life as a harmony of morality and intellect. It helps to explain why
the term •tmoral enlightenment" became a catch-cry among many people wtth progressive ideas on education.
1. 2. 3.
ibid., p. 346.
Nevertheless,
interested men who would have found Herbart's philosophizing
too abstruse (and they were probably in the majority) could
acquire an understanding of the situation which quickened their
sympathies. For most sympathizers in Britain, the case in its
non-material aspects could probably be reduced to something
like the following formula: one--cultural pursuits offer the
possibility of interests and pleasures which can enrich one's
life at any given income-level; two--the main reason why most
working-class people do not appreciate the joys of culture is
not lack of ability, but lack of opportunity; threew•the need
of the poor for spiritual comfort is greater than that of the
rich; four--accepting that the lower social orders are not
inferior intrinsically, their inferior circumstances are a gross
inequity.
There were a number of other arguments for educating the
poor, not in themselves contradictory, which nevertheless had
appeal for people with widely divergent interests, beliefs and
sentiments. Such arguments included the following :
one•-enlightenment leads to moral improvement, and so to divine
salvation; two-•irrespective of their hopes of divine salvation,
the poor should be persuaded to behave well if possible, as bad
behaviour is evil in itself, profaning society and grieving God;
three~-cultivated people are less likely to indulge in violent,
reactive behaviour and get themselves into trouble, which poor
people frequently do; four••cultivated people, being less violent,
are less likely to injure the established order or its favoured
members through crime or insurrection; five--educated people can
get better jobs, and so improve their standard of living;
six--educated people are more valuable to their employers, and to the
economy generally.
These arguments appealed respectively to the godly, the
students of society and the economists; and each group was offered
two arguments, one suggesting benefits for the poor, and the other
benefits for someone else-~God, or the establishment, or the
entrepreneurs. As a result, when it became obvious that large
numbers of the poor would continue to clamour for education, and
that it was important to the whole economy that they should get
it, many prominent individuals with specifically limited interests
and objectives began to take an active interest in the movement.
But in its incipient stages there were only two main groups who
saw the desirability of mass education--some of the workers
themselves, notably those with anbi tion and the benefi t of some
previous education of training; and the humanists, whose faith
in education was a corollary of their views on moral and spiritual
subjects.
The humanist doctrine that all education should be related
to life and the real world implied that careful attention should
be paid to the physical aspects of reality. It is idle to argue
when or by whom this was first advocated: there were hints of it
Campanella and others were pleading for general instruction in l
the arts and sciences. It was well developed during the Age of Enlightenment, and Rousseau expounded it at length in
"Emile". He held that in the learning process reasoning is essential, but that imagination precedes reasoning, and
imagination needs the positive stimulus of contact with real objects.
On the continent, theories of this type were applied through the medium of the realschule, and experience of the physical world was pursued in the farm~school experiments of Pestalozzi and
Fellenberg. In Britain, leading nation in the Industrial
Revolution, it was natural that the philosophy of "sense realism0 should be related to industry, and humanist theories to technical
education.
Some British protagonists stressed the fact that skilled
workers were intimately acquainted with many properties of objects in the real world which went unnoticed by othersw~the ways in
which timber shrank and warped; the compressile strength and
\
tensile weakness of stone; the variable temper of steel. Artisans, it was argued, were peculiarly well placed to bring empirical
evidence to the aid of science and other forms of learning. This view led logically to the opinion that for technical education, trade training grounded on elementary schooling was not enough,
as it failed to exploit the trainee's potential fully. It should be supplemented by instruction in higher mathematics and pure and
and applied science.
But even among those who agreed that widespread technical education was necessary, their agreement posed more problems than it solved. First, there was the question of finance and administration. Before 1800 several Continental nations,
notably among the Baltic states, had founded government systems of technical educationo In Britain, however, voluntarism held sway in this as in other departments of education. Who, then, would provide the resources, including the management? Private
enterprise was as reluctant as the government to take the leado Another major issue was the problem of a syllabus. This question, which is still far from being solved to general
satisfaction even today, was even more baffling to men who were trying to cope with a novel and fluid situation for which they had no precedents.
One section of society which could provide some initiative, drive and organization, and to a limtted extent finance, comprised the protestant communities situated mainly in northern England and Scotland.
In the protestant morality, to the extent that a man lived among his fellows and affected and was affected by them,
deliberation in community affairs was at once his right and his duty. This principle meant much to responsible workingwclass people, who were bound fairly clos,ely to their immediate
neighbourhood and social circle Their involvement, reinforced often by church sermons, fostered a spirit of active democracy.
The institution which implemented democracy 1n church matters
was the council of church elders-~laymen chosen from among the
parishioners. This served as a model for bodies set up to
govern secular matters. The church council and allied groups
provided the community with a reservoir of experience in oommittee
·work and administration-weven in public speaking. The democratic
spirit and the ready--made committee pattern, working sometimes
through the lodges, were the source of such institutions as
friendly societies, co~operatives and even, in time, trade unionso
Naturally, these bodies tended to be manned by the same people.
The council of elders was thus a nexus where the hopes and attitudes
of the community were concentrated, reconciled, and within limits
satisfied.
This general character of society was especially strong in
Scotlando More remote from the south than the northern English
counties, Scotland had a long history of ethnic and other ties
with Scandinavia. Despite the general use of the English language,
the Scottish culture was quite distinctive. In addition, English
rule of Scotland was not wholly direct. The Scots maintained
many institutions which were not the work of the English government.
One of these was their own educational system. A system to
realize the Calvinist ideal of universal education had been
propounded by Knox as long ago as the sixteenth century, and
thereafter had been pursued with determination and some success,
jointly by church and state. In the eighteenth century universal
primary education was still far off, and standards in the cities
were generally low; but in most of the country elenentary schools
were widely established, well financed, and staffed by highly educated teachers. In some parts of the lowlands the literacy rate was one hundred percent. 1 The empirical temper of the Scottish universities reached right down to the primary schools
through the many graduate teachers, and a system of secondary
schooling had been created which rejected authoritarianism and
rote learning, and sought to substitute learning through logical analysis.
~,
The greater strength, in Scotland, of the protestant community
of values and administrative facilities, and the higher level of education which resulted from it, combined to make Scotland
especially hospitable to early experiments in technical education
for the poor. Of the nine notable groups started by 1824, five began in Scotland. The same conditions, and certain other
e\i~o~~
features of the intellectual/ such as the bias towards realism, produced a disproportionately large number of self~made, often
famous men, like Watt, Nielson and Macadam. These men were a new element of the middle class"imen whose capital comprised their
ability, education and training, and who were to move in to fill a growing void in the framework of industry: although many of
them were trained as engineers, they contributed largely to the
formation of a managerial class. Their success stories were to be cited as encouraging examples to members of institutes, and
some of them, such as Nielson, played leading parts in the
1
movement. At the same time, northern England was not slow in
producing others of the same class, such as Richard Arkwright and
2
George Stephenson. Stephenson was another patron of the
institutes.
The unexceptional men who came from this background were
mostly skilled and semi skilled workers, and even labourers. None
the less, many of them had sufficient ambition and optimism to
hope that they might advance themselves through further study.
Some of those who joined the institutes were probably moved by
community spirit and the pleasure of joint endeavour. Generally,
men with these origins, independent in themselves and confident of
the groups they joined, resisted interference, and were suspicious
and even somewhat resentful of patronage.
Despite this independence of spirit, nearly all the pioneer
groups were founded on the initiative of liberally educated men,
such as clerics, teachers or engineers, who took a benevolent
interest. The workmen were ill able to found and manage
educational bodies without the leadership, or at least guidance,
of more sophisticated outsiders.
In this, protestant workmen were fortunate in having good
connections. They were in active social contact with members of
1. Nielson, a self-made engineer and inventor, founded the Glasgow Gas Workmen's Library in 1814. (For data on
pioneering groups, see M. Tylecote: The Mechanics' Institutes of Lancashire and Yorkshire, Ch. lN•Manchester U.P., 1957.)
2. For adequate discussion, this group of men should be extended in various dlrections: for example, it should include
their clergy, who, with such influential friends as they could
enlist, made up perhaps the most effective group in Britain for
an enterprise of this nature. In addition, they included
superior artisans, chargewhands and foremen, who worked close to
engineers, among whom there were some able and wellMdisposed
individuals like Nielson. If the professional men happened to
attend the same church the links were made even stronger by the
democratic mode of the protestant churches.
The protestant groups were encouraged by two other factors.
First, they were aware of the potential of communal enterprises,
and their elders had some experience of administering them.
Second, it was natural for them to entertain the possibility of
mutual instruction, a device which promised to save some of the
difficulties and costs of retaining skilled teachers.
There renained the problem of what to include in courses
of technical instruction. At least one separate group in England
tried to solve it along trade~oriented lines. In 1799 the
geologist Thomas Webster, supported by Count Rumford, formed a
mechanics' class in connection with the Royal Institution,
offering practical training extended by theoretical explanations
of the practices that were taught. The founders of the protestant
groups, however, were guided by their humanist philosophy, and
favoured instruction with an intellectual biaso They brought
together a spectrum of theoretical studies~•applied science, pure
science and mathematics; English composition, to improve
political economy, as a branch of the humanities with av tal interest for men whose livelihood was not guaranteed. Manual training was introduced in another context~-art, for industrial and commercial application. The whole approach was clearly aimed at providing a li,beral education on empirical lines.
It remained in contact with the world of the artisan's experience and understanding. Its down~towearth secularity shared much with the protestant religion, Scottish higher education, and the
sense-realist theories.
No dividing line could be drawn, however, between pure science ,
or mathematics and metaphysics, between English composition and more subjective liteDature, between technic 1 drawing or commercial
art and the more imaginative visual arts. Here was an open path along which the movement could be steered aside
from
its original purpose, and the question of the best point at which to stop and contain the enterprise offered opportunities for unendingdisagreement.
By the end of 1823 the general idea of the mechanics' institute or school of arts, as a source of technical education for workers, was well established, and these or allied institutions had been
founded in Glasgow, Edinburgh, London and a few other centres. 'Ihe movement then grew rapidly, but its voluntarist character was epitomized by the fact that it renained only a movement. Individual
institutes were autonomous, although after a time numbers of then banded together into unions to share facilities, thus cutting costs and easing some of the problens of operation. There was no
have been on a federalistic basis, as the societies varied
somewhat in character and constitutinn.
One reason for the variety was that once the movement was
well launched, numbers of prominent people began to patronize it,
sometimes even to the extent of founding and running institutes.
(Leonard Horner founded the Edinburgh School of Arts, placing
complete control in the hands of its patrons, and giving the
students no voice in its direction.) In other cases patrons had
nominally only partial control (as in the London institute, where
they held about one-third of the seats on the committee); but
their power and influence naturally exceeded their voting strength.
Often they acquired moral dominance by making substantial gifts.
Few institutes, if any, were able to grow rich on the contributions
of ordinary members.
For independentwminded workers the advent of these helpers
was a mixed blessing, and some groups strove, like the Glasgow
institute, to be completely self-supportingo They did not have
much success. Their resistance to patronage was weakened by
another factor. It was thought with some reason that large
member ips were not only a source of subscriptions, but were
vital to prestige and general success. Accordingly, most if not
all institutions extended their membership to include workers from
offices and shops.
Employees of this class had certain obvious economic interests
in the institutes: for them there was undisputed value in the
arithmetic of bookkeeping, and in being able to read with facility
and to write a good business letter. Instruction in these
or both. The institutes were one more possible source of cheap,
perhaps good, teaching. But for the black~coated workers 1 there
was something else besides.
In
the mannered world of nineteenth-century commerce thesocial hierarchy played a more important part than it did in
industry. Prospects of advancement were influenced by good
social connections and a pleasing personal style. A mechanics'
institute, which had or might acquire prominent patrons, was a
meeting~gtound where a member might come under the notice and
favour of his social superiors. Members with lower-middlekclass
values, far from resisting or even regretting patronage and
hierarchic control, actually welcomed it.
There were three important problems which the institutes
could not fiully overcome.
expense of good teachers.
One of these was the shortage and
Mutual instruction was not an adequate
substitute for them. Some students profited from it, and a few
even became well known as teachers; but these heroes would probably
have risen to fame by simply educating themselves. For most
students, expert guida~ce was needed, particularly in unforgiving
subjects like mathematics.
Another difficulty was the severe limit set on the time and
energy which a worker might spare from his scant free time for
study and attendance at classes. This was harder on men who did
manual work under severe conditions than on sedentary office
workers.
The third problem was the general poverty of elementary
grounding in reading, writing and mathematics. This forced the
institutes to start their syllabus from a low initial level of
learning. Here again the black-coated worker was better off;
he could profit directly and immediately from lessons in
arithmetic, spelling and elementary grammar; but an artisan
undertaking an ambitious course of technical education faced
several more years of hard study. Many artisans lacked the
ambition and industry to commit themselves for so long a period.
For these reasons they did not enrol in such large numbers as the
shop and office workers, who, as a group, came to dominate the
"mechanics,•• institutes. (This also helps to explain why the
classes were composed almost wholly of members under twenty~one
years of age.)
So far two main groups of ordinary members have been identified,
one strongly protestant and independent, and the other loyally
supporting ecclesiastical and social hierarchy. There is a
temptation to isolate the socialists as a third group. There was
in fact open interest in socialism within the institute movement.
Political economy was a subject which was popular for instruction
and debate, and some members frankly expressed chartist sympathies.
The issue led to some dissension within the institutes, and some of
them wrote articles into their constitutions prohibiting debates on
religious or political subjects.
The emergence of this issue was assured by the element of
socialism that exists, to however slight a degree, in all democratic
---freedom from personal connnitments, but an equitable share in
making decisions which will bind him and his fellows equitably.
In both the protestant community and the institute movement,
democratic ideals and procedufes were a result of their community
of interests. Workers' committees within protestant communities
played an important part in the formation of trade unions. Thus
the same men who had an interest in mutual self-help through
hof\-Studyw•a self-contained and ,political activity••Stood to gain by
improving their conditions through joint political action.
However, the prime object of the institutes was education, not
political action. Proletarians who wanted to better themselves
not by study but by political change had no business with the
institutes unless it was to pervert them. No serious attempt at
this was made. Studious menbers, even if proletarian ·in attitude,
shared the same interests as other studious menbers, and in this
context belonged to the same group. The rivalry that affected
the course of the institutes lay between the two groups already
defined. Diversion of the movement into non~educational
activities did occur, but this was more or less spontaneous, not
the result of a general conspiracy.
not lead to political activity.
Where it occurred, it did
The influence of the blackMcoated workers was governed by
the subservience of the lower middle class to the establishment.
In the bourgeois society, advancement was at least possible
without hereditary position, and might be aspired to; but in the
conunercial sphere economic and social advancement depended on
each other. To improve his position the clerk or shop employee
well. The standard of quality in both was the example set by
his superiors.
The aspirant cultivated his manners, at first with advancement
as his goal; but soon, in the mannerof a child's game, the ritual
of cultivated behaviour helped him to identify himself with his
superiors--to feel that he was already one of them in some little
degree. The social graces became desirable in themselves, giving
their practitioner a better opinion of himself.
Among the social graces of the time, a show of aesthetic
refinement was widely esteemed. Pretensions in this field were
perhaps made easier by prevailing attitudes to the fine arts.
The value of making some sort of aesthetic statement in a work of
art was then widely disregarded, so that a wouldwbe critic might
safely avoid the deeper waters of discussion. Amon~ the many
busy, newly-rich people whose main interests were efficient
production and indulgence in luxury, beauty was seen either as
"the perfection of utility" or as ornament, diverting attention
from, even concealing the work~a~day aspects of life; or it
was identified with moral good. The new gentry, while affecting
a patrician disdain for the banausic crafts, yet saw the fine arts
as media for little more than technical skill and standardized,
factitious sentiment. Their genteel sons and daughters dabbled
presumptuously with water-colours and sketches (often slavish
copies), and sang ballads of love, heroism and virtue triumphant,
while clerks and servant•girls dreamed of aping them.
One of the advantages of this sort of accomplishment was that
it was not necessary to pass examination( in it, or even to study
game of social graces was co~operative rather than competitive:
the players needed and gave mutual support to sustain the general
convention of refinement. Mastering the "correct" grammatic
forms and cultivating a genteel accent were basic requirements,
and reading enough suitable literature to acquire an ornamental
turn of phrase was very important. Additional accomplishments
were painting and music (singing was enough). The mere ritual
of attendance at a lecture on a refined topic, delivered by a
celebrity, conferred some grace on the listener.
The mechanics' institutes offered libraries and public
lectures. They could organize classes in elocution, art, music
or any other refined subject at a small cost to each member.
Many prominent people lectured or took classes.
Encouraged by easier and earlier rewards, clerks and shop
assistants joined the institutes in larger numbers than the
artisans, and strongly influenced the content of lecture programmes
and classes. The physical sciences were neglected, and interest
moved towards literature and the arts.
workers fell off.
Enrolments of manual
The difference in objects and activities was revealed by the
rise of institutes with a different nomenclature~"the athenaeum
and the lyceum. These sociElties were similar in form to the
mechanics' institutes, but, as their names implied, they pretended
rather to the cultural interests of the classical Greeks"~as the
Victorians saw them. Some of the athenaeums were the preserves
of the leisured classes.
Despite their pretensions, the institutes generally did
not maintain a high standard of learning. Few members endured
the discipline of programmed study for long; and without it their
own independent efforts were ineffectual. Classes declined, and
were superseded by popular lectures intended to entertain rather
than instruct. Even these had to compete with indoor games and
other sociable activities. The economic and cultural purposes
of the movement were threatened.
By 1833 these trends were already noticeable in England
(though perhaps less so in Scotland)o What the institutes had
realized had little in common with the dreams of the men who had
pioneered thm. The soil of colonial society, to which the
CHAPTER 2.
The Colonial Background.
SYDNEY in 1833 was the capital and chief port of a small,
rapidly expanding colony,whose economy was based on the export of
primary produce, mostly wool. The system of depasturing made for
a different kind of rural life from the more closely-settled farming
communities of Britain•4 a life conditioned more by distance and
solitude. The soil was unfamiliar and inhospitable, and the climate
visited the settler with fl6od, drought and bush-fire. Methods of
farming based on centuries of experience of northern European
conditions of soil and climate were often unsuitable.
Henry Carmichael, writing advice to intending migrants to the
colony in 1836, said: "The Farmer Emigrant, in coming to this country,
has much more to learn than the Mechanic or Tradesman.o.The soil,
the seasons, the rotations, the modes of tillage,•wall are new to
him. The diseases of the sheep and cattle are equally so.
At
everystep he finds how much of his early ideas and requirements he has 1 to revise, reform, reject and adapt to altered circumstances."
As an inseparable part of all this, the settler was too often
confronted by dramatically sudden changes in the situation, demanding
quick and drastic decisions. Frontier farming of this order required
intuition, improvisation and daring rather than recourse to textwbooks.
1. Henry Carmichael: Hints relating Sydney,1836,p.360
Another feature was that there was little opportunity for the
independent small-scale farmer with limited capital: the land and
climate were more favourable to extended sheep~runs, and the hardships
and abrupt changes of fortune could leave a small farmer without
enough income to live on.
The settler was a dominant figure in the life of Sydney, which
by 1833 existed largely to serve him, and owed its prosperity to him.
It was inevitable that his values and attitudes would influence
those of the town.
The fast~developing economy, with so much in it that was
temporary, needed skilled labour badly; but what it needed from
artisans was quantity, not quality, of artifacts. The economy was
simple, because of the general dependence of trade on one staple.
Diversification was not justified at that stage. Carmichael said
that there was need for " ••• Architects and other Master Mechanics•o•
masons, house and ship carpenters, joiners, cabinet-makers, coopers,
plumbers, glaziers, blacksmiths, millers, butchers, shoemakers and
tal lors ••• " He also recommended "• •• the rnanuf acture of necessaries
for common consumption, where little labour is required in production •••
leather, soap, candles, salt, beer, coarse woollen cloth, ropes,
h W· H
eart enware, bricks •• ,but cautioned,
.~.In
all manufactures, however,where much and skilled labour is required for the production, it l would be folly to attempt competing with the home producero•
The demand for quantity rather than quality, according to
Carmichael, extended to the work of the professions.
In
particular,of his own profession-.... teaching ... he said: ... It is •• cruel to entice
men of education hitherward, with the view of gathering laurels and
lucre in the course of their professional toil ••• Under the present
circumstances of the colony, there is ample room and inducement
for the labour of inferior men as schoolmasters: and certainly,
better it is to have inferior labour in this department of exertion,
. 1 than an utter destitution of the means of elementary instruction. tf
The residents of Sydney, according to the census of 1833,
2
numbered between 16,000 and 20,000, of whom about twenty per cent.
were convicts and another fifteen per cent. emancipees. Of the convicts, perhaps a quarter held tickets of leave, and only a
minority of the others were kept in barracks and denied contact with
the public. Many were assigned servants; others in Government employ
were allowed to find "open° lodging to save the Government expense.
They were thus a considerable factor in town life. More than sixty
per cent of the population was male, and more than twentywfive per
cent of the women were convicts or ex-convicts. Most of the convict
women were degraded beyond hope of rehabilitation~ if not from
choice, then by exploitation at the hands of men both bond and free.
1.
!.!2.ll!
.,
p. 45.2. Figures compiled f1t0m original abstracts of the 1833 Census, as adopted in the Colonist Secretary's Returns for the Colony. The population of Sydn,ey was given as 16,232, and of its
Thus fewer than half of the men in the colony could at that time
expect to achieve a respectable family life. Nor were many of them
in rewarding contact with socially acceptable women. These
conditions affected their behaviour noticeably.
As the growth of the population owed more to immigration
than to natural increase, its social composition was influenced more
by immigration than any other factor. From 1821 to 1630, the pattern
of free immigration was governed by the land policy, according to
which grants were made to applicants in proportion to the amount
of capital they had available to spend on it. The potential migrant
most likely to be attracted to New South Wales was the man with
capital, who could augment it at no expense with a freehold granto
Migration involved the outlay of a fair sum, which was irrecoverable. 1
(The fare alone was I.40 per passenger, steerage). But the more
money a man had to invest in land, the more was the irrecoverable
cost of migration offset by the value of the freehold land which
he could obtain (up to the point where this cost item was no longer
significant). Migration would have been a minor expense item for
a man whose capital ran well into four figures; but to the small
business~man or tradesman, the transfer would have been a heavy drain
on capital~-especially if he had to bring a family with him.
From 1831 onwards, the Wakefieldian policy of land sales and
the assisted migration schemes brought to the colony thousands of
people turned off by their parishes because they were out of work:
local governments found it cheaper to pay paupers' fares once to the nearest port of embarkation than to keep them on poor relief indefinitely. A large percentage of them were accompanied by their families. During periods of economic depression, the unemployed included competent workers who could easily find work in good
times (the Stirling Castle passengers among them); but the assistance schemes operated in good times as well as bad. As a result, the
great majority of assisted migrants were people whose services had been least sought after at home-wand assisted passages accounted for
1 more than three~quarters of immigrants from 1832 through 1850.
Many of them belonged to the "submerged tenth" of the population,
living on or over the borderline of theft and prositution, from which most of the involuntary migrants had been recruited.
For people in such case, the prospect on arrival in Australia was not encouraging. The settlements were small, and offered little of social variety and entertainment. For unskilled workers the best~ paid work was on farms and pastoral properties; but here they were brought face to face with the Australian bush, alien, harsh and silently indif£erent. Men who had not succeeded well among their fellows were no less hungry for companionship~-if anything more so. Loneliness kept them in and around the settlements or drove them back
there, where they clung in disproportionate numbers, accepting less steady and less remunerative work for the sake of the company. Such
1. Sir T.A. Coghlan: Labour and Industry in Australia, Oxford,1918,
company as offered included convicts and ex~convicts, who had their
own special reasons for lacking ambition and hope.
These people quickly learned that servility was not necessary
to survival in the colony; and their own memories of the working
of the English hierarchy were usually such that they were not moved
to spontaneous demonstrations of respect for rich and powerful men.
But as social forces they remained more or less inert. They
were politically important only as potential followers of demagogues,
where their numbers -would give them force. In the past very few of
them had played dominant roles in any sort of social exchange. Very
few had known success, or even gained experience, as active participants
in free inst~tutional activities. A fonnal act like speaking in
public or serving on a connnittee -would have daunted most of them.
Thus they were ill qualified to take a constructive part in fanning
and running a mechanics' institute. Further, the general level of
schooling among them was almost certainly low even by the standards
of the time. Their attitude to schemes for self~education as a
spare-time activity would have been despairing and apathetic, if not
made hostile by envy. In this field their deprivation was liable
to be felt acutely, and the temptation to affect scorn of formal
social activities"• in fact, to cry sour grapes-~was especially strong.
The Irish,who made up about a quarter of the population, were
for the most part ill-educated and somewhat mystical, unacquainted
democratic institutions. The percentage of immigrants from Scotland, bond or free, was small. As individuals, a high ratio of those
who came pursued very successful careers in the colony, and in greater numbers they might have strongly influenced the character of its
public institutions; but they were too few, and were absorbed by superior numbers without having a radical effect.
Between well~to-do landholders and somewhat demoralized workers, the petty~bourgeois stratum was thin, and weighted in favour of the
1
small merchant. The best professionals and artisans did not need to 2
leave Britain, and,as Nadel points out, migration to Australia was
1. "Petty-bourgeois", as used here, denominates that group in the econom~ which comprised men with enough capital, education or skill to enjoy some measure of independt;.~e, many or most. of whom were self-anployed, but who did not play a dynamic role in
economics, politics or society. The group included minor
professional men, shopkeepers(with a few shop assistants), senior office workers and master tradesmen (with some self~employed
and even a few employed tradesmen). There was thus no dividing line between this group and the lower middle class. They were men with modest incomes and little power, but they had more
faith than the proletarians in a future which they could improve by their own individual efforts. In this they were the urban equivalent of yeomanry.
3
According to the 1841 Census, there were 44,678 free males over fourteen years of age in the colony, in addition to 23,844
convicts. Of the latter, 5,843 held tickets of leave, 6,658 were in government employ, and 11,343 were assigned servants, so that most of them were in the private sector of the economy. Of all residents gainfully occupied, 4,477 were listed as
''landed merchants, bankers and professional men'; 1,774 as
"shopkeepers, and other retail traders"; and 10,175 as ''mechanics and artificers". (The last group must have included most or all men employed in skilled or semi-skilled manual wrk in the
industrial field and in construction work, regardless of their qualifications).