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The Edinburgh history of education in Scotland, edited by Robert Anderson, Mark Freeman, and Lindsay Paterson, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2015, 384 pp., ISBN 978-0-74867-915-7

Social concern as part of the moral strand in Thringian manliness and in public schools has received much less attention than the problem of sporting manliness. It had its origins in the widespread unemployment and social unrest of the “hungry forties” when Thring was a young curate encountering grim social conditions in Shrewsbury and there was a threat of serious violence with the 1848 Chartist demonstration on Kennington Common in London. In response, a short-lived Christian socialist movement developed under the leadership of liberal churchmen such as Charles Kingsley and his mentor F.D. Maurice. While Thring had no sympathy with socialism as such, his awakened social conscience made him sympathetic to the establishment of an Uppingham Home Mission in the East End of London. This in turn inspired the Clifton College Mission in the Bristol docklands, run in the first instance by Rev. Hardie Rawnsley, an exemplary pupil at Thring’s Uppingham and captain of School House. To modern readers such ventures can seem patronising, an unintentionally condescending form of middle-class conscience-salving, and they have not worn well. Nor has “manliness”. Tozer’s last section on “survival” to some extent begs the question. It carries the story forward into the twentieth century, claiming elements of Thringian manliness were revived in the work of John Royds, another visionary Uppingham Head, in the New School Movement, the Outward Bound Movement, and innovative new foundations such as J.H. Badley’s Bedales and Kurt Hahn’s Gordonstoun. Tozer notes, with some relief, that “imperial manliness” and its militarist excesses died in the Great War, though he has no space to consider the occasional export of the English public school and more or less Thringian manliness to parts of the empire, particularly Canada and Australia. This would require a separate study, in addition to the study he calls for of Thring’s influence (if any) on state-funded secondary education. While Tozer faithfully and critically documents the growing tyranny of games and the descent into militarism in late-Victorian and Edwardian public schools, he is perhaps too tolerant of Thring’s idiosyncratic, well-intentioned, but ultimately incoherent and unsustainable “manliness”. It now seems something of a masculinist dinosaur from the days before co-education and state-funded schools, depending too much on autocratic personal direction and dedicated clerical schoolmasters with private incomes and wives expected to become totally immersed in the school. Attractive and comprehensive though it was, Thringian manliness was the unstable and expensive product of a privileged lost world.