Bertuna’s Children: The History of Education in a Suffolk Village, by Sue Spiller, 396pp, 24 b/w photographs with colour covers, 6 maps, 3 plans, 1 family tree, 18 tables, 7 appendices, a bibliography and index. (Arena Books, 2017) £18.99 paperback.
Sue Spiller, head teacher of the primary school in Great Barton for nearly 14 years, made her retirement the opportunity to pursue her interest in its history. A keen researcher, she has been able to trace the story of her school from its original foundation in 1844 by local landowner Sir Henry Edmund Bunbury of Barton Hall. Bunbury was High Sheriff of Suffolk from 1825 and a Whig MP from 1830-32 when he voted for the first Parliamentary Reform Act. He believed in spreading the benefits of education widely and so supported the National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. The account is taken right up to the present day, ending with Great Barton CEVC Primary School becoming a Church of England Primary Academy in December 2015.
Yet this book is much more than the usual school history. Its scope is wider in that it encompasses a great deal of social and demographic history of the area. For example we learn that ‘Bertuna’ in the title was the Saxon name for the village of Great Barton which also relates to the production of barley since the village supplied this grain, fish and ice to the great Abbey of Bury St Edmunds during the Middle Ages; and later on as the depression of the 19th century worsened, details are given of some of the families who emigrated to America or to the colonies. The study is also much deeper than is usual in that it places changes in the organisation and running of the school firmly in the context of developments in national education structures and government policies. Hence the Education act of 1902, which set up state secondary schools built and run by local education authorities, is discussed and explained. Great Barton benefited because the Act also channelled much needed state funding to church schools in return for some L.E.A. oversight.
The school might also have benefited a few years later from the Liberal Government’s effort to improve poorer children’s health by the introduction of free school meals ‘for necessitous children’ in 1906, had it not been forced to wait until the L.E.A. adopted the Act in 1944 (Ipswich L.E.A. did so 30 years earlier in 1914.) The First World War affected the school greatly as two head teachers, one teacher and 120 ‘old boys’ served in the armed forces during the conflict. All the major education enquiries and legislation after 1918 are dealt with including important developments like the Hadow Report of 1926, which recommended some form of secondary education for all children and the Butler Act of 1944, which delivered it. New approaches of the late 20th century are included such as local management of schools and parent governors.
A project on this scale requires serious research among an extensive collection of primary sources both local and national. Sue has done exactly this using documents generated in the school such as log books, registers, managers’ minutes, correspondence and memoranda; documents found in the archive of West Suffolk County Council and at the National Archives at Kew such as inspection reports and Board of Education files; and also newspaper and magazine articles, census returns and poll books. Yet to obtain the best from original documents and perhaps to avoid mistakes and misunderstandings the historian must always make thorough use of the best secondary sources – text books, monographs, journal articles and websites. Sue has done so and it shows in the extensive bibliography and in her confident style of prose. The one regret this reviewer must express is the mystifying absence of footnotes or end notes which do so much to demonstrate how the author’s interpretation is underpinned by evidence gleaned by the research.
However, Bertuna’s Children is an impressive achievement by an author who has combined historical skills and knowledge with her considerable professional experience as a teacher and manager to produce a notable contribution to the social history of education, not only as it relates to Suffolk but also to the national picture.
Nick Sign 23.01.17
BERTUNA'S CHILDREN 