Bedales School
John Haden Badley had become friends with Fydell Edmund Garrett when they were both studying at Cambridge University. Fydell introduced him to his sister, Amy Garrett, a music teacher. Amy's family were active in the campaign for women's suffrage. This included her half-sister, Rhoda Garrett, and her cousins, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Agnes Garrett. Amy said she "was proud to be a member of a family many of whose members had worked for the same great cause, and she would have been ashamed if she had not tried to follow in their footsteps". (1)
Amy Garrett married John Haden Badley on 8th November 1892, at Gengenbach, Baden, Germany. (2) Amy and John began talking about setting up their own progressive school. Badley found Cecil Reddie , his headmaster at Abbotsholme School, a difficult man to work with. Although he shared Reddie's educational philosophy, that included "dismissing the classics, arguing for the study of modern societies, envisaging inter-disciplinary links between history and geography" as well as being "a firm believer in craft education and manual work", he disagreed with his autocratic style of leadership. Edward Carpenter, who had helped fund the venture, shared Badley's concerns. (3) So did fellow member of staff, Robert Franklin Muirhead, who told John Bruce Glasier that Reddie's manner had "turned the whole project sour for him." (4)
Badley commented that: "Reddie taught me everything I needed to do and what not to do". Although he admitted that it was "Reddie who helped him to discover what he wanted to do in education. He spoke later of having been apprenticed to a master craftsman." (5) Reddie, who was an homosexual "disliked the company of women" and "women were seen as servants in the kitchens". He also disapproved of Badley's marriage and so he felt he had to leave Abbotsholme School. (6)
Bedales School
John and Amy Badley wanted to create a school that would turn an "educational ideal into a way of life". (7) They made plans for the new school while they were on holiday in Norway with Fydell Edmund Garrett. They produced a pamphlet setting out the aims and ideals of the new school. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson also gave advice on this new venture. Garret designed the school badge: the rose stood for England and the bee for hard work. (8)
Edmund Garrett was working as a journalist with the Pall Mall Gazette and managed to persuade the editor, William Stead, to give the proposed school some publicity. Badley gave an interview to the newspaper where he made it clear that he objected to the idea that without a thorough classical schooling and passing a lot of exams would not have much of a future career in the world: "If the parent's wish or necessity is that the boy should carry off these prizes at all hazards, I would rather not have him."
John Haden Badley went on to argue: "A lad who can handle an axe as well as a bat, slice a broken trace, mend his own clothes like a sailor, swim a swollen ford, level a road, knock together a box or a table, graft an apple-tree: a lad who has learnt that these and other things which are useful to men are not unworthy of a gentleman... A boy who would be nonplussed by half the small contretemps of life if he happened not to be at the end of a bell-pull with a servant at the other - such a boy may get along through that world in a good enough black coat, but... well, he's a poor product, surely, of this world of ours!" (9)
John and Amy Badley opened the school in a rented house called Bedales at Lindfield, near Haywards Heath, in January 1893 in partnership with fellow teacher Oswald Byrom Powell (1867-1967), and his wife Winifred Cobb Powell (1861-1937). John later wrote to Oswald: "People ought always to speak of it as our work (yours and Winifred's as much as Amy's and mine)." (10)
Growth at first was slow, though Bedales School soon became known in other countries through the writings of the French social theorist Edmond Demolins, who sent his own son to Bedales School. (11) On 3rd October 1894, Amy Badley gave birth to John Edmund Badley, the couple's only child. (12)
In November 1893 William Stead gave Bedales more publicity in his Review of Reviews and this was picked up by the local newspaper, Mid Sussex Times: "Mr. Ruskin with his road-making and weaving, Edward Carpenter with his market gardening, and Mr. Gladstone with his tree felling, should highly approve the way in which at these schools gardening and carpentry and the like are put into the regular day's programme…. The idea is that the varied day with its alternations of manual and brain work and games, and social recreations in the evening, is so interesting that the youngsters need less driving during the brief hours at the desk… Both Abbotsholme and Bedales disavow any wish to be a wheel in the great "competition mill", the pivots of which are scholarships and money prizes. Marks and prizes are dispensed with at both schools, and it is stated their absence is not missed. Both assert strongly the schoolmaster's duty to look after character equally with mind and body." (13)
John Badley and his wife and his wife's sister, Elsie Garrett, on his left (1893)
In January 1898 Amy and John Badley decided to admit girls to the school. John told a friend: "There are not many, I think, who will seriously contest the gain for both sexes, though all will feel the grave difficulties that will prove fatal to any ill-considered or unwisely made attempt... The hunt is up, and the chorus of execration and contempt has begun... We shall lose boys, of course, but I shan't mind this (it will blow away the chaff) if we can only get the real plan started. If you do anything to make it known in likely quarters I know you won't fail Bedales now that it stands on the razor's edge." (14)
As a result of this decision Bedales became the first boarding-school in the country to which boys and girls were admitted on a fully equal basis. (15) Some parents were upset by this decision: "On the whole the idea has been better received than I expected... and so far only one boy has been actually withdrawn: but we shall lose four more when the change takes place... if only we get our six girls we shall do." (16)
At the time the main arguments against co-education included "premature development of sex feelings, weakening of sex characteristics, and overstrain of girls competing with boys." The Badleys saw their school "as a family, boys and girls as in effect brothers and sisters; therefore warm affection and comradeship were natural, and sexual feelings unnatural." (17)
One of his main critics was Cecil Reddie, his former colleague, the headmaster of Abbotsholme School. "We feel bound... to put an end, once and for all, to the widespread and misleading notion that Bedales is on similar lines and that, therefore, the views of Mr Badley and his associates, male and female, are a safe guide to the earnest enquirer about Abbotsholme. We have always stood for the rights of boys and men in Education, whereas, to us, Bedales has always appeared to lean towards the feminine view of what boys and men should do and think and be... Some years ago Bedales went the whole hog and adopted co-education... even during the unstable period of adolescence... which we have always considered fundamentally unsound in theory and pernicious in practice, between the ages of eleven and eighteen." (18)
John Haden Badley, influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud, started a new course for the students: "Sex, Marriage and Parenthood". He believed that "co-education would lead to more balanced relationships, no lop-sided preoccupation with sex, happier marriages". Basil Gimson, who was both a student and teacher at the school, did his own research into the impact of co-education, discovered that 11% of Bedalians married each other. (19)
Stories emerged that boys and girls did not use bathing costumes when swimming at the school. One prep school teacher wrote a letter on behalf of a prospective parent: "Mrs Luker... is somewhat disturbed about certain aspects of co-education due, apparently to the influence of various friends... What are the bathing conditions at Bedales? Are the usual costumes worn? Are there love-affairs between girls and boys? Have there been any regrettable occurrences in this direction." (20) Esmond Romilly, who went to Bedales found the school puritanical, especially in its attitude to sex. He claimed that relationships with girls as there were seemed to consist of "social sex of a lemonadish variety". (21)
By this time the accommodation at old Bedales had become too small and in 1899 John Haden Badley purchased Church Farm at Steep, near Petersfield, for £8,000. "In the move from Haywards Heath the school brought their possessions by horse-drawn wagons and by train. There was one substantial house and a scattering of farm buildings and cottages, no mains water, limited access roads; everything had to be made." (22)
John Haden Badley was not always successful in recruiting new staff. It was claimed that Badley did not always give staff enough support and "his trust in them to do their work, led to unacceptable discontinuity." (23) One teacher, Laurin Zilliacus, pointed out: "Each new teacher found himself without guidance - there was no course to be continued, no disciplinary standards laid down or methods to be followed." (24)
Frances Partridge, was a student at Bedales School, and was critical of some of the teaching that went on at Bedales. "Teaching was patchy and the staff were a mixed lot. The Headmaster always called 'the Chief' (or less amiably 'The Chump') was not an accessible man. His well-trimmed beard and his rather eery method of progress, walking stiffly erect through classrooms and corridors in soundless sandshoes, looking neither to right nor to the left, led to his being identified with Jesus Christ. I think he was painfully shy. However, he was an excellent, if alarming, teacher of the Classics. 'Get it right, man! Get it right!', he would explode to girl and boy alike." (25)
1918-1935
John and Amy were both pacifists who had been influenced by the writings of Norman Angell, who was a frequent visitor to Bedales. In his book, The Great Illusion (1909), Angell argued that a European war would be economically disadvantageous for victor as well as vanquished. The book had a tremendous impact on the intellectual community and study centres based on the book were established at universities and in industrial centres. (26)
Another regular visitor was Ramsay MacDonald, whose sons were educated at Bedales. Malcolm MacDonald was at the school between 1911 to 1920. He was Head Boy and played an important role in developing democracy at the school. A fellow pupil pointed out that at one meeting he asked "what is the school for?". He argued that "the school is the best possible development of each one who comes to it, and not the individuals for some body of traditions or pile of bricks and mortar known as the school." (27)
Amy Badley's relatives, Rhoda Garrett and Agnes Garrett owned a cottage in Rustington which they lent to the Bedalians for sleeping and cooking. One year, with the help of a boarding house at Rustington, they took sixty boys and girls. John Badley later recalled that "most of the holiday was spent in one long round of bathing, boating, meals and games on the beach or in our field". (28)
In May 1927 the HMI carried out an inspection of Bedales School: "The position of the present Head is one of absolute authority... Bedales is an interesting school, with, as far as the Inspectors could judge in such a short time, a strong life of its own. Its establishment and continuance has been a striking example of courage and enterprise and stout honesty of purpose. Its main purpose is to make its pupils self-reliant and mutually helpful. This it achieves." However, it did criticise its high turnover of staff, noting that: "If a Master doesn't fit into the school and is out of sympathy with its ruling idea, it is impossible for him to work his best there." (29)
Bedales School remained small, in 1935 there were 136 pupils, a decline from a high point of 194 in 1922. According to his biographer, John Roach: "Badley believed in and practised democratic management, but there was no doubt that he was the leader - a quiet, rather withdrawn figure to many people, though not to the children. After the First World War a school council was set up, although its role was entirely advisory. Towards the end of his life he defined his objectives as three-fold: a healthy environment, a wide range of work with considerable emphasis on the arts and on manual training, and a community structured on family lines. Academic work was taken seriously, and Bedalians had a good record at the universities. There were experiments in the curriculum. During the 1920s there were extensive trials of the Dalton plan of assignment work, and the Montessori method was followed in the junior house." (30)
With the onset of the Great Depression public schools faced the problem of falling pupil numbers. To survive, Badley reduced fees, delayed or suspended salaries and staff redundancies. At the same time Amy and John Badley set up a productive scheme for the unemployed in Petersfield in a field owned by the school. Pupils also joined work camps for the unemployed in different parts of the country. (31)
John Haden Badley defined his objectives at Bedales School as three-fold: "A healthy environment, a wide range of work with considerable emphasis on the arts and on manual training, and a community structured on family lines. Academic work was taken seriously, and Bedalians had a good record at the universities. There were experiments in the curriculum... The Montessori method was followed in the junior house." (32)
Frederick Alfred Meiers
It was not until 1935 that John and Amy Badley decided to retire. The school was taken over by Frederick Alfred Meiers who wrote before he took up the post: "How I wish I could at once throw all my energies into the new life. At the moment I feel like a greyhound straining at the leash - which unfortunately allows me far less liberty than I should like. There is so much to do and learn before next September and, even though it seems a long time hence, I know the months will pass in a flash." (33) Ramsay MacDonald, the prime minister at the time, offered Badley a peerage but he refused it, "it would, indeed, have denied his whole personality". (34)
Gratitude and reverence were expressed in the many letters he received upon his retirement. Kitty Jacks, a former student, wrote: "Thank you for all you did for me by creating Bedales, and the spirit which is Bedales and which will be with me always. If only we can go on in our own small ways to help to break down the three great barriers you spoke of between sexes, classes and nations, then I know you would feel rewarded. My only fear is that your living monument may not prove great enough." (35)
Primary Sources
(1) John Haden Badley, letter to Laura Elizabeth Best Badley (5th June, 1889)
The fact is, that I have had an offer of work in the autumn, and one which I am very eager to accept. My last summer's experience has shown me that I can hardly hope for congenial work at a great public school: and that to work successfully and happily I want more freedom of action than one is allowed there. Some of my friends began to laugh, and say I must wait till an ideal school was founded, which seemed a somewhat hopeless prospect: but while I am waiting, a school just after my own heart is being founded, and in the strangest manner I am asked to join.
(2) John Haden Badley, letter to James Payton Badley (14th June, 1889)
If teaching is to be my work, I think it must be, or must begin, in some such a way as this.... I have the ambition to do what I can in the fullest way, and of trying to live and teach others to live in what I believe to be the best way. I am aware that will sound presumptuous on my part: but if I am so young as to believe that some things may be changed for the better I am also young enough to be eager to do all I can.... perhaps I shall grow wiser in time; at least I am willing to buy the experience and pay the full price for it.
(3) John Haden Badley, Pall Mall Gazette (5th October 1892)
A lad who can handle an axe as well as a bat, slice a broken trace, mend his own clothes like a sailor, swim a swollen ford, level a road, knock together a box or a table, graft an apple-tree: a lad who has learnt that these and other things which are useful to men are not unworthy of a gentleman... A boy who would be nonplussed by half the small contretemps of life if he happened not to be at the end of a bell-pull with a servant at the other - such a boy may get along through that world in a good enough black coat, but... well, he's a poor product, surely, of this world of ours!
(4) Mid Sussex Times (21st November 1893)
Mr. W. T. Stead's well-known Review of Reviews is especially interesting to local leaders this month, in that it contains a most appreciative notice of Mr. J. H. Badley's school at Bedales, Linfield…. The article says that Bedales was founded last year by Mr. J. H. Badley, formerly assistant master to Dr. Cecil Reddie the headmaster and founder of Abbotsholme, near Rocester, Derbyshire, and apparently promises well…
Mr. Ruskin with his road-making and weaving, Edward Carpenter with his market gardening, and Mr. Gladstone with his tree felling, should highly approve the way in which at these schools gardening and carpentry and the like are put into the regular day's programme…. The idea is that the varied day with its alternations of manual and brain work and games, and social recreations in the evening, is so interesting that the youngsters need less driving during the brief hours at the desk… Both Abbotsholme and Bedales disavow any wish to be a wheel in the great "competition mill", the pivots of which are scholarships and money prizes. Marks and prizes are dispensed with at both schools, and it is stated their absence is not missed. Both assert strongly the schoolmaster's duty to look after character equally with mind and body, and there is a refreshingly healthy tone about the pronouncements of Abbotsholme and Bedales on the subject – the latter school, by the way making a special point of the inclusion of several women among the staff of trained teachers in daily contact with the boys.
(5) Cecil Reddie, The Abbotsholmian (July, 1908)
We feel bound... to put an end, once and for all, to the widespread and misleading notion that Bedales is on similar lines and that, therefore, the views of Mr Badley and his associates, male and female, are a safe guide to the earnest enquirer about Abbotsholme. We have always stood for the rights of boys and men in Education, whereas, to us, Bedales has always appeared to lean towards the feminine view of what boys and men should do and think and be... Some years ago Bedales went the whole hog and adopted co-education... even during the unstable period of adolescence... which we have always considered fundamentally unsound in theory and pernicious in practice, between the ages of eleven and eighteen. Consequently it is misleading to suppose that Abbotsholme and Bedales are similar schools. We have never been there (Bedales), never troubled our heads about it... we wish Mr Badley a prosperous voyage on his own peculiar course.
(6) Frances Partridge, Memories (1981)
Teaching was patchy and the staff were a mixed lot. The Headmaster always called 'the Chief' (or less amiably 'The Chump') was not an accessible man. His well-trimmed beard and his rather eery method of progress, walking stiffly erect through classrooms and corridors in soundless sandshoes, looking neither to right nor to the left, led to his being identified with Jesus Christ. I think he was painfully shy. However, he was an excellent, if alarming, teacher of the Classics. 'Get it right, man! Get it right!', he would explode to girl and boy alike.
(7) Report of Inspection of Bedales School (27th May, 1927)
The position of the present Head is one of absolute authority. He is specifically mentioned as the first Governor of the Company and the first Chairman of the Governors...
Bedales is an interesting school, with, as far as the Inspectors could judge in such a short time, a strong life of its own. Its establishment and continuance has been a striking example of courage and enterprise and stout honesty of purpose. Its main purpose is to make its pupils self-reliant and mutually helpful. This it achieves.... If a Master doesn't fit into the school and is out of sympathy with its ruling idea, it is impossible for him to work his best there.
(8) Sara Paulley, Bertha Brewster (14th December, 2020)
Bertha Brewster was born in 1887 to George and Bertha who lived in the village of Henfield, near Horsham in West Sussex. Two years after Bertha was born, the family was completed with the arrival of a brother, Philip. Brother and sister attended the progressive boarding school, Bedales, presumably as day pupils as the 1901 census records the family living in Steep, Hampshire, the village location of the school. Founded in 1898 by John Haden Badley, its foundation was in part at the urging of his wife, Amy a suffragette and cousin of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Millicent Fawcett. Bertha was academic and in 1905 was one of the first two girls to leave school to attend London University although no record has been located of her graduating.
(9) Ruth Whiting, Royal Assent to the Representation of The People Act (1st February, 2018)
On this day, I believe, Amy Garrett Badley was torn in two directions. On the one hand she was delighted that, after years of struggle, she and other women of her age and status would have full voting rights in the election due to take place in 1919. On the downside, however, she was determined to continue the fight so that all women would gain the rights granted by the Act to men of 21 years and over.
In 1935, receiving the testimonial book from "The Petersfield Society for Woman Suffrage and Equal Citizenship", she herself said that she "was proud to be a member of a family many of whose members had worked for the same great cause, and she would have been ashamed if she had not tried to follow in their footsteps". She was referring to Elizabeth Garrett, in 1865 the first woman to gain medical qualifications in Britain, her own half-sister Rhoda and cousin Agnes who had been, in 1875, the first women to found and run an interior decorating business (A & R Garrett of 2 Gower Street) and, perhaps most of all, Elizabeth’s and Agnes’s youngest sister, Millicent, who for about 40 years had been the leader of the suffragists, the NUWSS.
Bedales, not just Amy, had played its part in advocating the cause of equal rights for women. Students (especially in 1907 and 1908) held heated debates, usually carried by an overwhelming majority of boys as well as girls, demanding votes for women. Girls from Bedales took part in the famous marches which traversed London, (February 1907, the “Mud” March, and July 1908, which gained greater support from the crowds).
Garden Parties were held in Bedales grounds where speeches were delivered by luminaries who supported the movement, the most celebrated being in 1911 and 1913. In 1914 in the sitting room in The Wing, talks were given to "working women of Steep and Petersfield, many of whom themselves (or their husbands) worked for the school. They started the series with 13 members and by July, when Amy wrote about if The Bedales Chronicle, there were 40 attenders, including some of the husbands!
The more I look at Amy's support for the cause the more complicated it becomes: certainly by 1912 she had developed quite a lot of support for the militants which was causing The Chief some concern. On census day 1911, filling in the return for the female staff house (Foxcot) she conspired to hide Dora Hooper, the wife of the Art Master, from the Enumerator. Boldly across the form she wrote "No Vote, No Census. "Government must rest upon the consent of the Governed.": it was signed Amy Garrett Badley, Dora Hooper. Someone betrayed them and Dora's name was added to the form, in red ink, "by Registrar General's authority". I believe she had asked her husband not to include her in the school return. It starts with JHB and their son, then servants, teaching staff and all the students still at school that night (term had ended on Saturday) At the end in Mr Badley's handwriting, was added, "Amy Garrett Badley, wife, 47 married 18 years, 1 child, still living in 1911" precisely the information she had intended to deny the Registrar General.
(10) The Daily Mail (22nd February 1965)
John Haden Badley, the nation's latest and most alert centenarian... the grand old man of co-educational boarding schools... I went down to have a look at the institution itself: the place where they 'learn by living' according to the formula. I wish I could be rapturous and enthusiastic about this rum place, with its long roll of liberal-minded intellectual nobs in the former pupils' list. But all I found there was an overwheming feeling of desultoriness.... Girls with long, lank locks wandered about in the sloppiest of sloppy sweaters and trousers. There didn't seem to be much living going on, let alone learning... Bedales does have something. Old Bedalians stick together and are proud of their school... But I couldn't help feeling that the centenarian in the place of retirement beside the sanatorium is still one of the liveliest spirits in the place.