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‘War to the knife’? The Anglican Clergy and Education at the End of the First World War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2019
Abstract
In 1918 Charles Gore, the bishop of Oxford, issued queries preparatory to an episcopal visitation, including a series of questions about the future of church schools and religious education more generally. Coming some sixteen years after the restructuring of the dual system of state- and church-supported education by the Balfour Education Act of 1902, this material yields valuable insights into the views of approximately six hundred clergy regarding the successes and dysfunctions of the system at parish level. Set within the context of recent historiography on the trajectory of English Christianity in the1920s, this article uses this material to discuss the clergy's views on the value and purposes of school-based religious education, the prospects for sustaining these after almost four years of war and the compromises that might be required in order to preserve them.
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References
1 Oxford Diocesan Magazine 12 (1918), 89.
2 These were parishes in which there was no alternative elementary educational provision to that provided by the Church of England.
3 The surviving returns to the survey are collected in three bound volumes held in the Oxfordshire History Centre (hereafter: OHC) within which each return has been assigned an individual serial number. The returns for the Oxford archdeaconry, essentially coterminous with the pre-1974 county, are at Oxford, OHC, MSS Oxf. Dioc. c.380.
4 See, for example, Callum G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth-Century The 1914 and 1918 visitation returns for the archdeaconry of Oxford will be published in the Oxfordshire Record Series in 2019. Britain (Harlow, 2006); Robbins, Keith, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales: The Christian Church 1900–2000, OHCC (Oxford, 2008), 65–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Stewart J., Providence and Empire 1815–1914 (Harlow, 2008), 412–23Google Scholar.
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8 The 1902 Education Act allowed Local Education Authorities to give financial support raised from the rates to voluntary denominational schools, including those of the Church of England and the Roman Catholics, without taking them under state control (although they would have the right to appoint two of the managers) or supervising the religious teaching given in the schools.
9 Bebbington, D. W., The Nonconformist Conscience: Chapel and Politics 1870–1914 (London, 1982), 142Google Scholar.
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11 Bebbington, Nonconformist Conscience, 143–52; Machin, Politics and the Churches 1869–1921, 284–93.
12 For another study of church schools in part of the diocese, see, in this volume, Grant Masom, ‘Fighting the Tide: Church Schools in South Buckinghamshire, 1902–44’, 545–60.
13 OHC, MSS Oxf. Dioc. c.380, 18.
14 LEAs replaced the earlier school boards as the state providers of elementary education following the Education Act of 1902. They were essentially committees appointed by county and county borough councils and some larger urban districts.
15 OHC, MSS Oxf. Dioc. c.380, 7.
16 Ibid. 37, 93.
17 Ibid. 151.
18 Ibid. 7.
19 Ibid. 16, 154.
20 Ibid. 202; cf. ibid. 42, 104a.
21 Ibid. 166. He was probably referring to the Independents / Congregationalists, who were present in some strength in the Oxfordshire parishes along the Buckinghamshire border and had established a chapel in Piddington by 1848: Tiller, Kate, ed., Church and Chapel in Oxfordshire 1851: The Return of the Census of Religious Worship, Oxfordshire Record Society 55 (Oxford, 1987), 82Google Scholar; Lobel, Mary D., ed., A History of the County of Oxford, 5: Bullingdon Hundred, VCH (London, 1957), 258Google Scholar. A comparably dismissive attitude, in this case to Baptists, was exhibited by the vicar of Littlemore: OHC, MSS Oxf. Dioc. c.380, 123.
22 Ibid. 109, 69.
23 Ibid. 66.
24 Tiller, K., ed., Dorchester Abbey: Church and People 635–2005 (Stonesfield, 2005), 76–83Google Scholar.
25 OHC, MSS Oxf. Dioc. c.380, 131.
26 Ibid. 168.
27 Ibid. 26.
28 Ibid. 49.
29 Ibid. 1, 123, 143.
30 Ibid. 175.
31 Ibid. 34.
32 Ibid. 51.
33 Ibid. 84.
34 Ibid. 205.
35 Ibid. 150, 197, 198, 224.
36 Ibid. 98.
37 Ibid. 75.
38 Ibid. 154.
39 Ibid. 183.
40 Ibid. 89.
41 Ibid. 212.
42 Ibid. 50, 57, 107.
43 Ibid. 172.
44 Ibid. 175.
45 Ibid. 137.
46 Ibid. 1, 77, 182.
47 Ibid. 42, 68, 194.
48 Ibid. 57.
49 Ibid. 68.
50 Ibid. 181.
51 Ibid. 144.
52 Ibid. 212.
53 Ibid. 88.
54 Ibid. 226.
55 Ibid. 162.
56 Gore, Charles, Dominant Ideas and Corrective Principles (Oxford, 1918), 52–9Google Scholar.
57 Ibid. 55.
58 Ibid. 60–3.
59 Ibid. 63–6.