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The 1888 Scheme turned the Madras College into a small, relatively inexpensive day and boarding grammar school with its own primary department - a scheme not unlike the one devised for the schools of the Edinburgh Merchant Company. The principal terms of the Scheme were these. The Trustees were replaced by a larger body of Governors, two of whom were chosen by the Town Council, two by the Senate of the University and two by the School Board. One was appointed by the Lord Lieutenant and one by the Sheriff. Two of the Trustees remained as life members to be replaced eventually by a representative of the landward School Board and a representative of the Presbytery. The Governors were required to appoint a rector who would have under his control methods of teaching, choice of books, arrangement of classes and in general the whole organisation and discipline of the school. He was also given the right, essential in any good school, to appoint and dismiss staff, subject to the approval of the Governors. The subjects to be taught were prescribed in the Scheme. In addition to the 3 Rs school was to offer at least English grammar, composition and literature, Latin and Greek, two modern languages, history, geography, mathematics, drawing, book keeping, mensuration and at least one natural science subject. Boys and girls were to be taught, if practicable, in separate classes and to enter school by different doors. Fees were to be charged, those in the primary department to be sufficient to meet the full cost of education. Pupils entering senior school had to pass an examination "of such nature as shall be fixed by the Governors". School was henceforth to be open to inspection by HM Inspectors of schools. To satisfy, in part at least, the claim of the School Board to share in Dr Bell's bounty, the Governors were required to spend £90 a year in paying in whole or in part the fees, with books and stationery, of some primary pupils in the School Board schools, after competitive examination or other evidence of ability. They were also required to provide in the Madras College not more than twenty scholarships giving free education to local children. Tertiary education was not neglected. In addition to the bursary of £20 which was open to the kin of the founder the Governors were authorised to spend the residue of £100 on additional bursaries of £20 a year for former pupils who were students in St Andrews University. The Commissioners when framing the Scheme were tactful in the wording of the section which dealt with the primary or preparatory department. They required the Governors to discontinue the primary department within a year of the date of the Scheme but added, "notwithstanding the provisions hereof they may, on obtaining the authority of the Scotch Education Department, continue the school until such time as may be fixed". It was a neat way of satisfying temporarily, the School Board, which wanted the pupils as a leaven, and the Governors who wanted to retain them as a recruiting ground for the senior school. The Governors took advantage of the "notwithstanding" clause, appealed successfully to the Department for the right to continue the primary department, which flourished till 1971 when it was swallowed up in the new Canongate school. The new Governors who met for the first time on June 25th 1888 formed a strong and influential body. The Town Council was represented by Bailie McGregor and the Provost, John Paterson; the School Board by James Welch, a solicitor and John Hall, the manager of the St Andrews Gas Company; the Senate by Professor Meiklejohn and Principal Donaldson; the former Trustees by Dr Boyd and Dr Anderson; the Lord Lieutenant by Mr Cheape of Strathtyrum and the Sheriff by George Gibson, an advocate. Mr Grace continued as secretary. One of their first tasks was to appoint a rector. In John MacKenzie, the rector of Elgin Academy, the "Jock MacKenzie" of many generations of pupils, they found the right man for the new organisation. He was an experienced teacher of all ages of pupils. Indeed his first post had been that of headmaster, and sole teacher, of Crathes parish school, required there to teach some fifty pupils ranging in age from five year olds to lads of fifteen or sixteen who hoped to enter Aberdeen university. He was a man of strong will and clear mind who set the new model school on the path it was to follow for the next half century and more. His reforms began soon after he was appointed in March 1889. One decision called for courage - he refused to renew the contracts of some of the long-serving masters. Dr Fogo, the classics master, had to go to make room for the rector who was to be classics master; Dr Armstrong, the English master and even the much esteemed Dr Lonie, the maths master, had to make way for younger men. The new session of 1889-90 opened, then, with a new staff whose names may be noted, for they with the rector laid the foundation of the modern school :
The last appointment was an innovation. There had been women teachers in very humble positions in the old school but Jane Finlayson's position was not a humble one. She was to be de facto head of the primary department, lady superintendent and teacher of industrial work and was to become a legendary figure in school, a person of dread to misbehavers who learned the sharpness of her tongue, a woman who earned the respect and affection of girls as they matured, and someone whose memory is still green with the old girls who knew her, and with others who have learned the legends of "Jean" Finlayson from their seniors. The days when masters could expect to have a large income from salary and fees had ended. The fall in the Governors' income and the huge reduction in the number of pupils brought incomes down so that none of the masters had more than £200 a year and "Jean" Finlayson had, at first, to make do on £80. How great the fall in numbers was can be seen from the rector's report to the Governors in June 1890. There were then 197 pupils on the roll. Including 90 in the upper school and 107 in the primary department. The practice of parents paying separate fees for each class and selecting which classes their children should attend had stopped. Parents were now required to pay a composite fee for each year, a fee ranging from 5/- a quarter in primary to £2 a quarter in the "highest or extra class". All pupils had to follow a set curriculum. The rector also decided that pupils would write the examinations for the newly instituted Leaving Certificate, so beginning a practice which came to dominate the work of the school. He did not neglect practical subjects and physical Education. The janitor was authorised to teach the boys hand-work and a stove was provided for Miss Finlayson so that she could teach the girls cookery. For the gym he bought parallel bars, 24 dumb-bells, and 24 callisthenic rods. He himself taught, in addition to classics, hygiene and, after school hours, agriculture. The Governors made considerable alterations to the interior of the building to make it more suitable for its new purpose. The huge rooms on the east, south and west sides of the quad were subdivided to give two rooms on the east side, two on the west and four on the south, classrooms which retained their high, vaulted ceilings until the 1960s alterations when false ceilings were put in. In this reconstruction the Governors made provision for science teaching turning one of the rooms in the south range into a laboratory with 12 benches and £40 worth of equipment. In all they spent £2326 on the conversion, remodelling the interior into a shape which was to last till 1955. The formal opening took place on November 1st 1889. One other alteration was made to their buildings. The rector's house was enlarged by the addition of two rooms on the west side to make it more suitable for boarders, an addition which marred the symmetry of the two houses. Financially the new Governors were fortunate. Dr Bell, as well as endowing the Madras College, had created a trust fund to be used to provide, inter alia, professorships of Education in the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh. By 1889 this had been done and the trustees of this fund paid to the Governors the residue of the fund, some £10,000. The Education and Local Taxation Act of 1892 authorised county councils to make grants to schools such as the Madras College and to give scholarships tenable at such schools to deserving pupils resident in the county. The extra income and the increase in the number of pupils in school which rose to 270 by 1902 enabled the Governors to increase staff and extend the curriculum, appointing a full-time teacher of science and assistants for the rector, the drawing master and Miss Finlayson. As the years passed numbers increased slowly and prestige quickly. Girls came to have a real position in school too. The old school had made no distinction in the early years between boys and girls but once they were of secondary age girls were largely segregated and offered little to challenge them intellectually. When universities were open to women girls had incentives to tackle traditionally male subjects such as classics and mathematics. In school the small numbers made it necessary, in spite of the recommendations of the Scheme, for most classes in the upper school to be made up of both boys and girls. Girls discovered, or rather proved to others, that they were intellectually the equals of boys. In 1910 for instance Maud Joyner and Mary Hay both graduated with first-class honours in classics. The girls' F. P. club which was founded in 1908 was influential in safeguarding girls' interests, for it was a very active club, running very select dances, whist drives and other social functions, and providing school with amenities, among them the elegant tea-set which has survived in use for more than half a century. (It is significant of their attitude to school that at first membership was confined to girls who had been at school after 1889.) The boys' F. P. club was older, established in 1902 as a successor to the "Madras College Club". These clubs with the two main F. P. games clubs symbolised the growth of a school spirit which found musical expression in the school song written by Mr James Beattie, the English master, which was first sung at an end-of-session concert in 1890 and was still sung as late as the 1960s:
The self-confident, snug world of the little school ended in 1914. Schooling was interrupted in many ways during the war and peace brought uncertainty about the future. It is hard for us who were not born or were in their infancy in 1914 to catch and understand the spirit of that autumn of war. Moral indignation, a confidence in the nation's invincibility after a century of little wars and high patriotism combined to send a flood of volunteers into the ranks of army and navy. Few brought any military skills with them; only a handful had served in volunteer units or in Haldane's new territorial forces and acquired there some skill at arms. They brought instead resolution, self-reliance and determination, and were to stand till the end against a brave and disciplined enemy. In school early casualties brought home the realities of war, for they included many who had been pupils a year or less before their death. The magazine records the name, among many others, of Logan Studley who left school "to enlist as a private but a year ago, to be promoted Serjeant before the outbreak of the war, to win a commission in the field before the war was a month old, and to die fighting for his country before his eighteenth birthday". His name and achievement may stand to represent the names and achievements of all those who served. Most men served in Scottish regiments, but the wanderers came back in the ranks of the Canadian, ANZAC, Indian and South African armies. The school buildings were requisitioned by the army in 1915 to be used as a musketry and machine-gun school. The senior school found a home in Seaton House on the Scores, the primary in Holy Trinity church hall. The surplus energies of pupils were used in war-related ways. The Girl Guides company in school, and others, learned first aid and knitted enthusiastically. The school troop of Boy Scouts produced a Scout Defence Corps of boys over fifteen who were trained in shooting and used to patrol the beaches of St Andrews and Kinshaldy to give warning of enemy landings. The primary school collected money for Belgian relief. Sales of work, whist drives and bazaars were held to raise money to buy "comforts" for the forces. John MacKenzie retired in the summer of 1915. The burden of carrying school through the difficult war years fell on his successor Mr James Moore, who had been French master in the Royal High School. He was a sound classical scholar and teacher but his passion was for French studies, believing that in careful and accurate translation from and into French pupils would gain as much understanding of the niceties of language as they would from translation work in classical languages. The manuals he later wrote in collaboration with Professor Ritchie were to make their names known wherever in Britain French was studied. He carried school though the war years and the great post-war influenza epidemic and saw it back in the old building at the start of session 1919-20. During his short reign he made at least two changes which lasted. The length of periods was cut from an hour to 45 minutes and prefects were appointed. He made, too, an appointment for which generations of pupils had reason to be grateful. The log-book records on February 24th 1919 "Miss Margaret P. Brown entered on her duties". He had added to the staff someone whose personality and gifts of mind and heart were to endear her to all in school for nearly forty years. In 1920 Mr Moore left to take up a lectureship in Edinburgh university and thence to the chair of French in that university. His successor as rector was Mr H. F. Martin whose stay was short, for he left in 1923 to become rector of Dollar Academy and later of Daniel Stewart's College. Perhaps his departure was hastened by rumours of change in the control of school, of a threat to its independence. An Act of 1918, the Munro Act, had created elected Education Authorities in each county with responsibility for secondary as well as primary education in their counties. He may have guessed that the Madras College could not long survive in its old state. |