THE FOUNDER The stranger who comes to St Andrews today finds it odd that the local high school should be called "The Madras College", a name which seems to link this little town to a great Indian city. The visitor from England who came here one hundred and fifty years ago would not be surprised at the name. All over England from Durham to Devon, in Ireland and in the West Indies, schools using the Madras or Monitorial system of education were flourishing, supported by the very influential "National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church of England". Even in the army the Commander-in-Chief had ordered every regiment to establish a school to be conducted on the Madras system. The name, then, refers to a system of education rather than to a place; and the school in St Andrews which opened its doors to pupils in 1833 is properly called "The Madras College" because it was founded to prove to the world that the Madras system was as useful in the education of senior pupils of all social classes as it was in the education of the young children of the poor. The inventor of this system was Andrew Bell, the Reverend Dr Andrew Bell, Prebendary of Westminster and Master of Sherburn Hospital, to give him his official designation. He was born in St Andrews in 1753 in a house which stood on the site of the present "Citizen " bookshop and was educated in the old grammar school before entering the U nited College in 1769. His father was a bailie of the town, a wig-maker to trade and a man of an ingenious turn of mind with an interest in science. At college Andrew followed the normal arts course with distinction, especially in mathematics, and was encouraged to interest himself in science by Professor Wilkie, the somewhat eccentric professor of natural philosophy. Scotland in the 1770s had little to offer arts graduates as careers except the church or the poverty of schoolmastering. Andrew seemed at that time to have no calling to the church, and, more positively, he disliked poverty - a dislike that he was to retain throughout his life. His portrait, which his trustees bought in 1854 for £29, hangs on the library wall. (It is probably a copy of the one painted by Wilson which Dr Bell gave to Mrs Cook). It shows him as he was in late middle age, a portly man surveying the world short-sightedly, looking as if he had known nothing but an easy, sedentary life. The marble bust by Joseph in the rector's room gives a truer picture. It shows a grim, commanding face which has made successive rectors aware how far they are his inferiors in industry and drive and authority. It is the face of a man who fought many battles, achieved much and imposed his will ruthlessly during his long and much-travelled life. His first voyage was to Virginia in 1774 where he found employment as a tutor to the sons of Carter Braxton, a wealthy Virginian who was later one of the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence. This employment ended in 1781 when the war between the British government and the American colonists made him decide that it would be wise to return home. (It was a hazardous voyage. His ship wrecked off Halifax and he had to endure for some time the bitter cold of a North American spring). Back in St Andrews he kept himself solvent by continuing his tutoring of the two Braxton boys while they were at university here. They must often have wished that their tutor was less conscientious: he rose at five o'clock to start work at six and even during vacations made them stick to an exacting timetable. This, however, was short-term work and by 1784 he had made up his mind to become a clergyman of the Church of England. He was ordained priest and for a short time acted as minister to the episcopal congregation of Leith. Wanderlust and ambition drove him further. He decided to seek his fortune in India where great fortunes were being made by those who survived the climate and diseases. He had no post to go to but gambled and invested most of the money he had in scientific apparatus, trusting that he would become rich by giving lecture - demonstrations to the Europeans in Calcutta. He set out in 1787 with £128 10s. in money, his apparatus and the dignity of an honorary M.D. degree from St Andrews university. The ship he sailed in touched at Madras. There he disembarked and gave his first lecture - demonstration, not unprofitably and was invited to remain. He found that his status as a clergyman made many posts available to him with the East India Company, posts which required little of his time or energy. He became, for example, deputy chaplain to at least four regiments as well as one of the chaplains in Fort St George. With one of the regiments, at least, he went on a short campaign, was in the trenches at the siege of Pondicherry and entered the captured city side by side with the commanding officer. These early years in India were probably the happiest of his life. He found the climate agreeable, the company good and the standard of life to his taste. He also found what was to be his life's work. In Madras, as in other garrison towns in India, there were many orphan children of soldiers who had been killed, or died of disease, or had been unaware that they had a child. Some may have been like the little boy in Chiswick in 1798 whose baptismal record reads: "Thomas William, illegitimate son of Maria Hawes and the soldiers in Kew barracks".) These children faced an unenviable future. In the Hindu community of their mothers they were unacceptable and in the European community they were equally unacceptable because of their native upbringing. The conscience of the European community was stirred at length. In 1789 the Male Military Orphan Asylum of Madras was founded, largely by public subscription, to serve as a day and boarding school where some of these boys could be educated as Europeans and Christians. Suitable buildings were found in an abandoned redoubt at Egmore, a master was appointed and the first boys enrolled. Dr Bell offered to act as superintendent, without salary - an extraordinarily generous action for the time in India - and at once began to concern himself with every side of the school. The general health of the boys, their inoculation against smallpox, their clothing, their food and the sharp practices of the suppliers, their morals, their religious education, all came under his scrutiny and everything faulty was put right quickly. He plainly liked them and they forgave him his irascibility because of it and because they realised that he cared for their well-being. They showed their gratitude in a very real way. In 1811 when most of them were established in government service they wrote asking permission to have one hundred miniatures of his portrait made for them at their expense. They also subscribed to present him with a service of silver communion vessels and a gold medal and chain. One difficulty seemed insurmountable. Masters competent enough and conscientious enough to satisfy Dr Bell's exacting standards could not be found. For able, educated men India offered many posts more lucrative than school-mastering. Chance provided a solution. One day Dr Bell saw a Malabar schoolmaster at work teaching young children to write by tracing out their letters in wet sand. He rushed back to his school shouting, like Archimedes, "Eureka", aware that in wet sand and someone willing to kneel and work in the wet sand with beginners was the answer. The "someone" was JOHN FRISKEN, a boy of twelve, who was later to become chief printer of the "Madras Courier". His name is in capitals because he was the first monitor and because his success as a teacher emboldened Dr Bell to persevere with the system. His task was to teach the beginners their letters using wet sand as the writing surface. So well did he succeed that other senior boys were used to teach younger ones. In a short time most of the work of teaching was in the hands of senior boys and the master's work was reduced to supervising these monitors and teaching them, the master himself being supervised by Dr Bell. This simple idea expounded by Dr Bell in pamphlet and book through the rest of his life was the essence of the Madras or monitorial system. By 1796 he was beginning to suffer a little from the climate and returned home to recuperate. His nine years had been profitable in every way. He had left England with £128 10s.; he came home with £25,935 16s. 5d., money derived from his lectures, his chaplaincies and, probably, from the high rate of interest paid on money lent in India. This fortune was supplemented by a life pension of £200 per annum from the East India Company, and by his appointment in 1801 as rector of Swanage in Dorset at a stipend of £600. The figures are meaningless unless we note that the first janitor in the Madras College was paid £40 a year, or that Dr Bell was able to buy a small estate near Castle Douglas, paying £6420 for 415 acres Scots. In other words good agricultural land was selling for £15 an acre Scots. He called his little estate "Egmore" after the site of his school. The estate gave him the status of a landed gentleman and the right to call himself " Dr Andrew Bell of Egmore". His restless energy and love of travel did not allow him to settle for long in the quiet routine of a country parson's life. He certainly worked hard in his Swanage parish, bullying his parishioners into being inoculated against smallpox, starting a new home-industry of straw-plaiting, reforming the parish school on the Madras principles as well as performing his clerical duties, but he felt isolated and lacked the opportunity to spread his educational ideas. By 1803 others were seeing the need to spread them widely. As England became increasingly an industrial and commercial land the need for people who could read, write and do sums increased. England had no system of parish schools and parochial schoolmasters such as that established in Scotland in the late 17th century. Dr Bell's ideas had been taken up and applied by Joseph Lancaster , a Quaker, who, in a pamphlet published in 1803, set out his ideas, making it plain that in any school following his system there would be no formal teaching of religion based on the tenets of the Church of England. Dr Bell was insistent that the teachings of the Church of England should be the core of the religious instruction in his Madras schools. This is not the place to discuss the rivalry of Bell and Lancaster. It is enough to say that some of the leaders of the Church of England, seeing the dangers of allowing Lancaster's non-denominational schools to spread unopposed, encouraged Dr Bell to leave Swanage and become Master of Sherburn Hospital - a post which gave him both a generous salary and ample time to devote to education. For the next thirty years he devoted most of his immense energy to setting up, supervising and reporting on schools using his Madras system, becoming more and more convinced that he and he alone had the right ideas, and less and less tolerant of incompetence or deviation from his principles. He needed physical as well as mental robustness, for he travelled incessantly by mail coach, by stage coach or by gig in all weathers all over England. His work in England does not concern us directly. Much has been written about it. It brought him fame, wealth and at the end a splendid tomb in Westminster Abbey on which is inscribed: "The Author of the Madras System of Education". The best account of his work in England is still that given by Robert and Charles Southey in their official biography. It is a tactful biography concerned with Dr Bell as a public figure, reticent about his private life, but allowing a lively picture of his world to emerge by including many of the letters he wrote and received.