The 1926 Hadow report had been implemented to the extent that elementary ‘all age’ schools were in theory being reorganised into proper primary and secondary schools. That meant new buildings. But the churches had difficulty finding the necessary capital, so many of their schools remained small, inefficient and largely unreorganised, taking children up to fourteen and even older.52 Any attempt to raise the school leaving age to fifteen or even – the ultimate aim – to sixteen was bedevilled by the churches’ inability to find the capital to make that a reality. Any serious attempt at secondary education for all meant either providing much greater direct support for church schools, risking raising again the barely dormant cries of ‘Rome and Canterbury on the rates’, or asking the churches largely to withdraw from education after the age of eleven. They would not contemplate the other possibility – handing over their schools wholesale to the state. As Butler put it, ‘educational progress would not be possible unless the problem of the Church schools could be solved’.53
Furthermore, denominationalism put restrictions on teachers. Chuter Ede, for example, a man nearing sixty who had lived through the school religious strife of the first decade of the twentieth century, had been born a Unitarian, but had been taught in a Church of England school. He went on to become a teacher, and both managed a C of E school and had been chairman of the county council which helped finance it. But short of changing his religion he could never hope to teach in it. The Free Churches and the increasingly influential and organised National Union of Teachers, whose roots lay in the elementary schools, wanted all schools transferred to direct local education authority control, with the Free Churches favouring Christian instruction but insisting it must be firmly non-denominational.54
Well though Chuter Ede understood it, Butler may not have appreciated at first quite how viciously this hornets’ nest could sting.55 On 12 September 1941, shortly after his return from holiday, Butler sent Churchill a note, reminding him of his offer of advice, and proposing a major education Bill. He listed the main issues to be solved:
There is, first, the need for industrial and technical training and the linking up of schools closely with employment. Secondly, a settlement with the Churches about Church schools and religious instruction in schools. Both these questions are nationwide. Thirdly, there is the question of the public schools, which may easily raise widespread controversy.56
Had Butler achieved this agenda, Correlli Barnett would have been a happier man and Britain perhaps a more prosperous place. Churchill, however, who had in part been made a minister by the religious controversies in education in the first decade of the century, reacted as though he had been himself been stung. The next day (a Saturday) he promptly minuted Butler:
It would be the greatest mistake to raise the 1902 controversy during the war, and I certainly cannot contemplate a new Education Bill. I think it would also be a great mistake to stir up the public schools question at this present time. No one can possibly tell what the financial and economic state of the country will be when the war is over. Your main task at present is to get the schools working as well as possible under all the difficulties of air attack, evacuation, etc. If you can add to this industrial and technical training, enabling men not required for the Army to take their places promptly in munitions industry or radio work, this would be most useful. We cannot have any party politics in wartime, and both your second and third points raise these in a most acute and dangerous form. Meanwhile you have good scope as an administrator.57
Butler records: ‘Sir Maurice Holmes took the Prime Minister’s minute as a veto on education reform and wrote me a philosophic letter,’ one Butler later described as ‘disappointingly compliant’.58 It is a masterpiece of Mandarinese.
R. S. Wood and I have discussed the PM’s minute to you. I do not think we need be unduly cast down. It seems to me axiomatic that a major measure of educational reform will be demanded in quarters which make the demand irresistible, and the question then is not whether but when such reform will be brought about.
And there are, I feel, some advantages in having more time than ever your revised programme contemplated for reaching the greatest common measure of agreement on the more contentious issues, so that from this point of view the PM’s frigid reception of your proposals has its brighter side.
However, if educational legislation is to be shelved till the war is over, we shall then be able to think more clearly in terms of bricks and mortar than is possible while the war is in progress, and so form reasonably sound estimates of the dates when this and that measure of reform can become operative. The delay is of course disappointing, particularly to those of us who, like myself [Holmes was 57], cannot hope to accompany you into the Promised Land, but that you will lead the Children of Israel there, I do not doubt.59
Butler, fortunately for the nation’s children and the Conservative Party’s future, was made of sterner stuff. In his memoirs he records: ‘Basing myself on long experience with Churchill over the India Bill [the great man had initially refused to contemplate Indian independence, only finally to embrace its inevitability], I decided to disregard what he said and go straight ahead. I knew that if I spared him the religious controversies and party political struggles of 1902 and side-tracked the public schools issue, I could win him over. I intended to have an Education Bill.’60 He spent the next eighteen months attempting to do just that. ‘It was the religious issue that took the time,’ Butler later wrote.61 The one weapon he had to hand was the state of the church schools. The one solution available for the religious teaching controversy was something called the ‘agreed syllabus’ originally drawn up in Cambridgeshire in 1924 by a committee of Anglicans, Free Churchmen and teachers to provide religious instruction in the county’s schools. By 1942 more than 100 of the 400 local education authorities were using it. The syllabus was sufficiently non-denominational to keep the Nonconformists happy, while sufficiently C of E to allow some Anglican school managers to hand their schools over to the local authority in return for a promise that the agreed syllabus would be used.62 Churchill became intrigued by it, dubbing it ‘the County Council Creed’. But while some Anglicans were happy to live with it, others were not and the Roman Catholics disliked it, Cardinal Hinsley, the head of the Catholic Church in Britain, dubbing it ‘disembodied Christianity’.63
Early talks with the churches did not go well. The Roman Catholics were adamant about retaining their own schools, arguing they paid rates and taxes for the upkeep of local authority schools ‘which their consciences would not let them use’ while having spent millions over the decades to provide their own. ‘They were determined they would not be lost now,’ Butler records.64 On the Anglican side, the Archbishop of Canterbury was Cosmo Gordon Lang, seventy-seven years old and chairman of the governors of Charterhouse. In November 1941 he made Butler apprehensive by insisting that the future of the public schools was of ‘paramount importance’. It was therefore a considerable relief to Butler that Lang retired within six months. Churchill replaced him with William Temple, despite the new archbishop’s leftish leanings (apart from popularising the term ‘welfare state’ he had once, for seven years, been a Labour Party member). In Conservative circles ‘his political tendencies were suspect,’ Butler said in his memoirs, recording Temple as being ‘physically obese, but intellectually and spiritually a first-class athlete … we have few bishops today who could hold a candle to him.’65
Temple, at sixty-one, ‘looked exactly like one of Dickens’s true philanthropists; a portly, chubby-faced, twinkling-eyed, bespectacled figure with a gusty laugh, exuding goodwill from every pore,’ according to Angus Calder. ‘Buoyantly self-confident, utterly serene in his acceptance of his mission of leadership, Temple himself had never known doubt or want.’ The son of a former Archbishop of Canterbury, he had ‘easy brilliance’ and ‘far from being an impassioned extremist’ he was the ‘quintessence of compromise’.66 At the age of twenty-eight he had become headmaster of Repton, but from twenty-seven for sixteen years he had been president of the Workers Educational Association, the ‘working class university’ which ran part-time, weekend and factory-based lectures and courses. Sir Maurice Holmes’s prescient judgement was that his appointment to Canterbury offered ‘a chance of getting the Church of England into play’.67 Without him,