Contents & Illustrations Lists

I.

THE FOUNDER 1845-1903

Quintin  Hogg

1.

THE story of the Quintin School may, with some justice, be said to have begun, nearly a hundred years ago, on the playing fields of Eton - or at any rate overlooking them.  Feeling called upon to do something to check the rowdiness of some of the juniors in his House on Sunday afternoons, Quintin Hogg, one of the older boys, organised a reading circle in his room.  The reading circle developed into an unofficial Bible Class.  When he left Eton shortly afterwards, the Bible Class he had thus begun survived to be carried on by others whom he had influenced.

          It is the story of Quintin Hogg's career in miniature - a problem faced, a solution found, an institution created, an inspiration handed on.

          A year after leaving Eton to begin a business career in the City, he responded, but with more widely significant consequences, to another challenge - that of the mental and spiritual degradation of the children of the London poor.  He plunged into the dirty and dangerous underworld of alleys and narrow nameless streets in the district where now are to be found the Law Courts and the Kingsway, on a solitary mission of civilization.  His own account of this first venture is worth repeating again, because by now so many do not know of it and because for the older generation of 'Poly' boys it has the charm of an oft-repeated tale: -

"My first effort was to get a couple of crossing-sweepers whom I picked up near Trafalgar Square, and offered to teach how to read.  In those days the Thames Embankment did not exist, and the Adelphi Arches were open both to the tide and the street.  With an empty beer bottle for a candlestick and a tallow candle for illumination, two crossing-sweepers as pupils, your humble servant as teacher, and a couple of Bibles as reading books, what grew into the Polytechnic was practically started.  We had not been engaged in our reading very long when at the far end of the arch I noticed a twinkling light.  "Kool ecilop," shouted one of the boys, at the same moment 'doucing the glim' and bolting with his companion, leaving me in the dark with my upset beer bottle and my douced candle, forming a spectacle which seemed to arouse suspicion on the part of our friend the policeman, whose light it was that had appeared in the distance.  However, after scrutinizing me for some time by the light of his bull's-eye he moved on, leaving me in a state of mental perturbation as to what the mystic words I had heard hollered out meant, and to ask myself, what I, who a year before had been at Eton, was doing at that time of night under an Adelphi Arch?  Afterwards, when I became proficient in 'back slang' I knew that 'kool ecilop' was 'look (out for the) police' spelled backwards, the last word being evidently the original of the contraction 'slop', a familiar nickname for the police of London today.  Altogether I did not think my first effort a very successful one, and I cast about in my mind how I could learn the language of those boys, and ascertain their real wants and their ways of life."[1]

          Once again, a single incident illuminates a whole life.  The relaxed, unsentimental good humour, the amused awareness of the oddity of his position as a very young Old Etonian crouching 'underneath the arches,' the refreshing humility of his awareness that he lacked the qualifications for the task he had set himself, and the quiet decision to take steps to acquire them - all these things are typical of the man.

          In 1864 and the following years he gradually acquired, first a room, then two rooms, then a house, in York Place, near Charing Cross, in order to carry on a "ragged school" for young boys.  Thousands of young London children received no education in the 1860's and were indeed in such a state of poverty that before they could be taught to read it was necessary to make them fit to be in the same room as a normally civilised person.  Many of the boys who came to York Place had to be washed, scrubbed and de-loused on arrival; some came clothed in nothing but their mother's shawl pinned round them; many belonged to gangs of thieves; and if, after a little while, he was able to set them up as shoeblacks, Q.H. could feel - and with some justice - that he had done a great deal for them.

          In 1870 came Forster's Education Act, which began the provision of the elementary 'board' schools for the children of the poor, the money being raised by means of a compulsory 'education rate' levied by local School Boards.  Accordingly, the ragged school element in Quintin Hogg's work became of less importance.  In the seventies, larger premises were taken, first in Endell Street, off Long Acre, and then (in 1878) in Long Acre itself, at numbers 48 and 49.  What Q.H. provided in these premises was a "Youth's Christian Institute", which combined the functions of a social and athletic club with the provision of a certain number of evening classes in trade subjects for youths between the ages of 16 and 22.  Quintin Hogg's unique contribution to the development, one might almost say the creation, of technical education in London had begun.

          In 1881, a somewhat odd enterprise called The Polytechnic, situated in Regent Street, found itself in financial difficulties.  It had been founded in 1838 as a kind of permanent exhibition of scientific gadgets and contrivances, and had combined with this, lantern lectures and some evening classes in practical science subjects.[2]  Though commercially unsuccessful, the Polytechnic was nevertheless a place with a well known name and, for Quintin Hogg's purposes, an ideally situated building.  He acquired the lease, closed the Long Acre premises, and opened The Polytechnic Young Men's Christian Institute on 25th September, 1882.  Almost at the same time the School Board for London was opening in Soho, a new elementary board school, which it had built under the terms of Forster's Education Act of 1870.  It had nothing whatever to do with either Quintin Hogg or the Polytechnic.  Nevertheless, the monogram "S.B.L." and the date, 1881, carved on the walls of the Pulteney School in Peter Street, indicate that this building, which housed part of the Quintin School from 1945 till 1956, very nearly shares a common birthday with the Polytechnic.

          The religious, social and sporting activities of the Institute continued to flourish with the transfer to the Polytechnic, and the evening classes expanded with a rapidity which reflected the almost complete absence elsewhere in London of facilities for enabling young working men to improve their trade skills or their general education.  Within twelve months of its opening, the Polytechnic had 5,000 students, and in 1884 it was found necessary to supplement the evening classes with others, held between seven and eight o'clock in the morning, which attracted four hundred students.

          In 1885, Q.H. realised that the classrooms of the Polytechnic stood empty during the daytime, and that they ought to be put to some use.  Accordingly, on January 1st, 1886, he began the Polytechnic Day School.  In doing so, he had made what turned out to be one more major contribution to the educational needs of his time, and had begun the process of founding not one boys' day school in the Polytechnic, but several.  The years since then have seen the disappearance of all of them save one: that one is the Quintin School of today.

2.

UNTIL his death in 1903, Quintin Hogg took a close personal interest in the Day School he founded in 1886, and it is appropriate therefore to consider more closely the character of the man himself and the nature of the educational work he began.

          At this distance of time one is struck by the impression he gives of having been so very much the high-spirited and certainly high-hearted, amateur. Nobody trained Quintin Hogg in the principles either of education or of psychology, let alone educational psychology. He worked from no elaborate social plans of the sort that the Webbs were evolving for the Fabian Society and the nascent Labour movement, and his achievement emerged from the findings of no Parliamentary Committee or Royal Commission. It was, rather, the other way round. He, the amateur, was providing elementary education through his ragged school in the 1860's: the State did not itself provide elementary education until 1870. He, the amateur, was organising technical instruction in evening classes as early as 1868; not until 1889 did the Technical Instruction Act give the London County Council the power to spend public money for this purpose. He, still the amateur, began the Day School to provide secondary education for boys in 1886. The London County Council did not - in fact could not - do so until after the Education Act of 1902. In 1882, there was only one Polytechnic - Quintin Hogg's. Every other Polytechnic in London came after his, and largely in imitation of it. The very word "polytechnic" in its peculiar metropolitan meaning of "an institute carrying out the double purpose of providing evening recreation and education for persons of both sexes engaged in industry during the day" derives that meaning from Quintin Hogg's Polytechnic, the only one in London which properly claimed to be called "The Polytechnic".

          That idea had developed in him naturally and irrepressibly. He began by wanting to do something for his young men and ended by trying to do nearly everything for them; not on the basis of a book-learned theory, but as the lively and continuing response of a practical and affectionate nature to the fact that nothing was being done for them and that everything needed to be done. To house in a building that was always too crowded, and not paying its way, a social institute that provided thousands of members with a choice of clubs and societies ranging from Cricket and Football to a Mock Parliament, from a Harriers Club to a Shorthand Society, and including a Military Band, a Reading Circle and a Mutual Improvement Society; and to combine with that, a range of evening classes for thousands of students on subjects as miscellaneous as Tailor's Cutting, Plumbing, Dante Readings, Hindustani, Boot and Shoe Manufacture, First Aid for the Injured, Work-shop Arithmetic, English for Foreigners, Staircases and Handrailings, Carriage Building, Agriculture and Hygiene - this was indeed something no man, still less an educationalist, would have dreamed of planning in advance. No doubt a modern visitor, if he could observe some of those classes or those clubs, would find much to criticise and perhaps to laugh at. Yet the sufficient justification for this astonishing hodgepodge of classes and clubs was that all of them were needed, that only the Polytechnic was providing them, and that from then until now, enrolment night at the beginning of the educational year has hardly ever failed to produced queues of prospective students, on some occasions stretching out into - and even far down - Regent Street. And if, in those days, one enquired for the man who was doing the day-to-day organizing of the Polytechnic's educational work, they would have found him in Robert Mitchell, glorified from 1891 onwards with the title of Director of Education. He knew nothing about education in the accepted professional sense, and had no academic qualifications.[3]  But if Londoners wanted classes in Hairdressing or English Precis or Builders' Quantities, or Painting Still Life, Robert Mitchell was the man to see they got them.

          Behind it all - and for him they provided the generating force that began it all and kept it all in being - were Quintin Hogg's religious convictions. He was an amateur in theology as in educational matters; but in the best tradition of English Protestantism his religion was a deeply-felt personal experience. His Sunday afternoon addresses to the members were characterised by a passionate but always direct and homely evangelism, and his sincerity went hand in hand with a sunny good humour untainted by bigotry or hardness. The comment of three of his business colleagues on this point is instructive: -

"One sometimes traces an element of narrowness in the founders of a new movement, especially if it be of a religious or semi-religious character. . . But there was nothing narrow about Mr. Quintin Hogg."[4]

          In the last letter he wrote may be found the essence of his creed: -

"This one thing I know is better than a dozen creeds. Whatever else may be shaken, there are some established beyond the warring of theologians. For ever, virtue is better than vice, truth than falsehood, kindness than brutality. These, like love, never fail . . ."[5]

          Obvious enough propositions, certainly. Yet the ever-repeating failure of human beings to apply them means that they need to be said afresh to each generation, to ours no less than to his. And when Q.H. uttered them, men listened, and changed their lives.

          With him, too, religion included education. He wrote: -

"What the world wants is not so much a lot of writing about religion as a dealing with everything in a religious spirit."[6]

          - and to provide young men with classes in Cabinet Making and Metal Plate Work and Photography which they would otherwise lack and without which they might find themselves unemployed was, for him, a religious act, something (though he would have avoided the word) sacramental.

          There remains an aspect of the matter which to the young of the present time may seem strangest of all. The son of a successful business man who was the last chairman of the East India Company, Quintin Hogg was himself a man with extensive business interests, mainly in sugar and tea; he was chairman of the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company, and a director of many other concerns, including the original Bakerloo Railway. His work involved him in much travelling all over the world, and his health was much less robust than the variety of his activities would suggest. Yet for forty years he devoted all his leisure to the Polytechnic and its predecessors. Nine o'clock found him welcoming the boys as they started their work at the Day School; he was often back in time to see them off at the end of afternoon school; the entire evening was spent in the Polytechnic, and much of the night was devoted to writing letters to members, to preparing his Sunday addresses to them, or editing or supervising the Polytechnic Magazine; at week-ends he was to be found either playing or watching Poly soccer and cricket. This was his normal routine even when he was over fifty. And he gave not only his leisure, but his money. By the time official bodies stepped in to assist the Polytechnic with public funds, he himself had spent no less than £100,000 on it out of his own pocket.

          Finally, he was a passionate footballer all his life, and even in 1902, when he was fifty seven, he turned out to play for the Old Quintinians.

*          *          *

THE Quintin School may therefore justly take pride in the memory of Quintin Hogg. They may look on him as that one man, among the many great men of a great century, who worked most particularly for them. He matched deep religious feeling with profound common sense, and harnessed his idealism to the most down-to-earth problems of everyday life. To a great social and educational need which others were neglecting, he found an answer; and found it by the exercise of an abidingly affectionate concern for the well-being of others, and by a life of voluntary effort in which no time was spared for a selfish counting of the cost.