IN THE SCHOOL in Sligo, the habitual practice of the master was to seize boys by the throat and strike them with a whip or his fist upon the head and face during the time his passion lasted.
In Stradbally, a boy was flogged with a leathern strap nine times in one day, his clothes being taken down each time. In total, he received almost one hundred lashes for failing with a sum of long division. Another boy in the same school received 17 stripes of the rope.
In Castledermot, two boys working in the school garden were so hungry that they began to eat a raw cabbage. They were caught and flogged, with one receiving 16 stripes “in the usual manner” and six blows of a stick to the head.
In Clonmel, the usher knocked down and kicked a boy so severely that two of his ribs were broken. However, he went too far when he almost pulled off the ear of another boy and was reported to the master by the catechist.
At Shannon Grove, in Co Limerick, the tubs used in the bedrooms at night were used in the morning for washing and for fetching potatoes from the fields.
In New Ross, two boys who complained about conditions in their school were punished with peculiar cruelty.
In paragraph after paragraph of their report to Parliament in 1825, the five Commissioners of Irish Education set out the findings of their visits to 20 of the 34 schools under the aegis of the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland, and if these findings were shocking they were not surprising because earlier surveys had given similar results.
The Charter School project was one of the few initiatives in the 18th century aimed at changing the religion of a significant number of people rather than simply penalising them for holding a particular religion. The story began in 1731 when the archbishops and bishops of the Established Church and “persons of the first distinction” among the laity petitioned George II for a charter to incorporate persons with powers to accept gifts, benefactions and lands for the support and maintenance of schools where the children of the Irish natives would be given free instruction in the English tongue and the principles of true religion. The charter was granted in 1733, the society was incorporated, money was raised in Britain and Ireland and the donors appointed a management committee of 15, the king promised £1,000 per annum and the first school was opened at Castledermot on 20 acres of land donated by the Earl of Kildare.
Later, in 1745 when the society was short of funds, the Irish parliament made £1,000 per annum available from the proceeds of the sale of licences to hawkers and pedlars.
In 1750, officers of the society were allowed to take child beggars off the streets and “breed them up to industry”.
By 1769, there were 52 schools with over 2,000 students and because Catholic parents and the streets were not providing a sufficient supply, four nurseries for orphaned babies were opened to ensure a future intake. The schools were naturally detested by the Catholic Church but they also developed a bad reputation among Protestants, not least because the children were receiving little instruction either in the “three Rs” or in religion and were being used mainly as farm labourers or weavers.
Surveys by John Howard, a Fellow of the Royal Society and Sir Jeremiah Fitzpatrick, the Inspector of Prisons in the 1780s revealed instances of barbarous punishment, repellent diets, squalor, neglect and disease and a committee of the Irish Parliament made ineffectual recommendations for improvements.
In 1803, the society radically changed its admissions policy. Preference would now be given to Protestant orphans while schools in areas with few Catholics such as the one in Castleisland “in the heart of a very remote and Popish country” would be closed. But problems remained.
Following an inspection by a Mr Disney in 1813, some of the masters and mistresses were dismissed, but positive reports by commissioners of the Board of Education in 1813 were considered by the inquiry commissioners in 1825 to be due to deception by the school masters or the “kindly dispositions” of the authors.
In 1817 and 1819, two clergymen, Elias Thackeray and William Lee produced mixed reports and Lee noted that although the children were comfortably lodged, well clad and comfortably fed, they did not match in health, appearance, vivacity and intelligence the half-naked and half-starved children who lived in their parents’ cabins and attended day schools. He added that children received into the schools “are, as it were, the children, the brothers, the sisters, the relations of nobody. They have no vacation, they know not the feeling of home and hence it is primarily, whatever concomitant causes there may be, that they are so frequently stunted in body and mind”. His diocesan, the archbishop of Cashel, advised him that he could “consult his own interest best” by not publishing his report.
By now the reputations of the schools had deteriorated to the extent that many farmers and business people were unwilling to accept their past pupils as apprentices. Ten were closed during the late 1820s and others disappeared when government support ceased in 1830, but the society survived and morphed into a promoter of second level schools.
In 1872, the English historian, James Anthony Froude described the Charter schools as a conspicuous and monster failure: “The masters and mistresses plundered the funds, starved the children and made the industrial system an excuse for using the pupils as slaves to fill their pockets. But they only did what they saw others
doing”.
Revd Lee told the 1825 Commission that the term “a Charter School brat” was in general use, with “brat” being synonymous with “illegitimate”.
More than a century later, a lady of my acquaintance heard a man being described as “a Charter School bastard”. Cruelty takes many forms.