PEDAGOGIC PENANCE

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 302, 16 September 1933, Page 19

PEDAGOGIC PENANCE

“Schoolmasters All,” or “Tliirty Years Hard,” by Bernard Henderson (London : Constable).

Mr Henderson is a man with a grievance, in fact with several very sound grievances directed against Boards of Education, inspectors, school. governors, headmasters, and occasionally women, though, surprisingly enough, none is expressed against the hundreds of schoolboys who have passed through his hands during his sentence of “Tliirty Years Hard.” The pupils play a very small part in this book of recollections, though to the mind of the author they are “always present as a dense background, a surging, striving mass of young humanity ...” The ordinary reader will, perhaps, be inclined to lose sight of the more serious side of the book in sheer delight at the amusing and very human character sketches of the other masters who “served time” with the author. Not the least vivid of these is that of the headmaster, “Miss Trampton,” with his precise dictoin, his green alpaca coat and baggy trousers, his unmatching eyes and shoulders and his objectionable habit of making a nuisance of himself in the classroom. There irt Piper 8.A., Mas. Bac., popular, lover of cats and with culinary ambitions, Johns the Welshman, of whom we can only regret that so very few of the stories he told are repeatable, Caesar the Cockney, thick-skinned, credulous and ambitious, Troy the mysterious, Tubbs the rotund man of Kent, Seringue of the "rude breath,” the rubber stamps and the saxophone, and a host of others far too numerous to be referred to in a brief space. “Schoolmasters AU” is written in an inconsequent rambling style peculiarly suited to the subject. There is no chronological order in the incidents given. To use the author’s words, "strange things happen when one uses the spirtle of the will to stir round the porridge of memory. Little troubles rise here and there unexpectedly. They may have been lurking unseen below the surface, but the spirtle raises them to the top, and they burst under one’s very glance.”