Robbing the poor

‘The state of strong prejudice in the public mind’ struck Maria Grey as a formidable obstacle to all the efforts made to get endowment for girls and the Commissioners themselves admitted that nothing met with less support from trustees. Amongst ‘disinterested persons,’ said Robinson, there was a strong conviction that more should be done for girls' education out of endowment; ‘but amongst those who have to manage individual endowments there is a feeling that their particular endowment ought to be exempted from the liability’. Trustees ‘seem to have a preference for boys,’ Roby said. And we shall see how they expressed it. But before that it is worth considering how girls were involved in a wider conflict arising from the operation of the Act: the struggle which accompanied middle-class encroachment on the rights of the poor in the old foundations.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was not necessary to recall that Eton had been founded for ‘indigent’ scholars to see that grammar school endowment had a tendency to move in the direction of the better-off. The years just before the Endowed Schools Act was passed showed this plainly.