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Thomas Morton Colson 1833-1908

Apr 2nd, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
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The Revd. John Morton Colson and his wife Julia had a daughter and a son; a small family for the early 19th century. We might have expected their daughter, Julia, to marry and have a family and their son to follow his father, grandfather and great grandfather into the church. It was their daughter who championed the Christian cause and spent her life doing good works and helping others, but what did their son, Thomas, make of his life? (See our story Miss Julia Colson of Swanage in the Swanage Category.)

It was clear from an early age that Thomas was not going to take up an ecclesiastical vocation. Early in 1851 when the census was taken we know this small family was all together at the family home in Swanage. Thomas is described as a midshipman. Thomas’ father died in 1863 and his mother passed away two years later.
 
We have not found Thomas in the 1861 census but we do know he married Sarah Wardley early in 1861 at Islington in London. Sarah was from Suffolk but in 1851 at the age of 15 she was working as a servant in a coffee house at 15 South Street, St. Marylebone, London; it seems Thomas did not hold with convention and married below his station.
 
Thomas and Sarah named their first child Louisa Story, Story being a reference to the maiden name of Thomas’ mother. The child was born at Poplar in London in the first-half of 1864. The couple named their second child, Julia, again after Thomas’ mother; the birth was registered at Mile End Old Town, London in 1867. We believe the couple had at least one other child that did not survive infancy.

A year later their third child, another daughter, Florence Maude was born at Netherbury in Dorset. Then in Somerset in 1869 Sarah delivered a son who was named after his father, Thomas Morton Colson. A year later another daughter, Mary, was born at Creech. These events suggest something of a turning point in the fortunes of Thomas and Sarah. The 1871 census shows the couple living at Creech St. Michael, Somerset. Thomas is described as a landowner – no occupation. Here in Somerset Thomas and Sarah benefited from the help of two servant girls but it seems they did not stay long in Somerset. By the first quarter of 1872 Thomas had moved his family back to Dorset and they were living in Radipole near Weymouth. It is here that their next child Robert Worgan Morton Colson was born.

We do not know how long they stayed in Dorset but by 1881 the family had moved to Linkenholt in Hampshire. The census for that year reveals that Thomas is a Farmer Landowner occupying 1030 acres and employing thirteen men, eleven lads and two women. All of the children are with their parents and in education except their eldest, Louisa, who is a pupil at a boarding school at Littlehampton.

A decade later we find the family back in London at 3, Adam Street, St. Martin-in-the-Fields where they own a small hotel run by Sarah who is described as a Hotel Keeper; she is assisted by daughters Louisa and Florence. Thomas Junior is an Electric Engineering Student; Mary is a clerk in an envelope addressing office and Robert is a clerk in a stained glass works and their father is working as a clerk in a newspaper office. Ten years on and we find Thomas and Sarah still running their hotel; with them is their daughter Mary who works as a clerk. Judging by the guests registered at the hotel in the 1891 and 1901 census returns the hotel was not a tremendous success.

Thomas Morton Colson was baptised at St. Mary’s, Piddlehinton, on the 10th of April 1833. His death was registered in the first quarter of 1908 at Wandsworth, London; he was 75. Three years later we find his widow on her own, a lodger at 24, Sydney Road, Richmond, Surrey: she is said to have “small private means.”  Sarah’s death was registered early in 1913 at Chelsea, London, she was 73 years old.

Thomas Morton Colson appears to be a man who did not play by the rules and conventions of the day. We wonder what his father, who for forty years was the Rector of St. Peter’s, Dorchester, would have made of his son’s journey through life. Marrying for love his entrepreneurial spirit was, perhaps, kick started by an inheritance that does not seem to have grown under his guardianship.

Miss Julia Colson of Swanage

Jan 9th, 2012
by Dorset Ancestors.
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She was a kindly, good-hearted lady, a stalwart of the church, confident and not shy in letting her opinions be known. A woman of independent means, Julia Colson knew that with privilege came responsibilities. In his seventy-ninth year Thomas Masters Hardy (1887-1976), the son of a Swanage builder, thought it important to write down his memories of this “grand old lady.” As a boy he had attended classes run by her and she clearly played a part in shaping his life and the lives of many other young men of Swanage.

Her father was the Reverend John Morton Colson who for forty years was the Rector of St. Peter’s, Dorchester. He married Julia Story of Stockton, Durham, at Stockton on the 27th of April 1826. Julia was their first child, baptised at St Mary’s, Piddlehinton on the 21st of March 1830; she had one sibling, a brother, Thomas Morton Colson, who was baptised in the same church on the 10th of May 1833. (See our story Thomas Morton Colson 1833-1908 in the Swanage Category.)

Her grandfather was the Reverend Thomas Morton Colson (1764-1830), he took over the position of Rector of Studland from his father, The Reverend Thomas Colson, following his death in 1784. The middle name of Morton is in remembrance of Jane Morton, the second wife of the Reverend Thomas Colson.

Census records from 1841 to 1861 reveal the family home was at Swanage and subsequent census returns tell us that following the death of her father in 1863 and her mother’s passing two years later she continued to live in the town until her death in the closing month of 1916. Mr Hardy recalls: “she was a great church worker and used to run a Coal Club and Blanket Club for Swanage and Herston.”

In those days Swanage had a fleet of ketch-rigged sailing vessels, taking away stone, bringing back coal and building materials as well as engaging in other coastal work. Julia Colson was the local agent for the Shipwrecked Mariners Society and she is remembered for attending the wreck of the Netto at Peveril Point ledges in 1900 and making all the arrangements for the welfare of the captain and his crew. When Mr William Brown, Coxswain of the Swanage lifeboat, lost his life in a gale during 1895 it was Julia Colson who broke the news to his widow and family and some years later she had to tell Mrs Brown that her youngest son had been drowned when a sailing boat was run down off Swanage by the pleasure steamer Stirling Castle.
 
For well over fifty years Julia Colson ran a class for teenage boys and taught them reading, writing and drawing. Mr Hardy remembers she had text books on trades and encouraged her pupils to take up subjects connected with their trades, such as masonry and building construction. Mr Hardy recalls “there were piles of drawings of church tracery windows, arches, buildings, also ships and boats – mostly etchings these latter – and she could tell you the names of former lads who copied these same drawings. I think every boy who went to the classes copied the particular etching called ‘The Wolf, Brig of War, off Dover, flying signal flags.”

The classes commenced in the autumn and went on until the spring.  The Sunday classes lasted only half-an-hour as Julia Colson knew the lads liked to take a walk along the cliffs. A dinner was held at the end of each year when roast beef, two large veal and ham pies and other treats were served and the best drawing by each lad was exhibited. There was no charge for the classes; Julia Colson provided everything and each Christmas she gave each lad the Parish Church Almanac and also a pair of mittens that she had knitted herself. There were book prizes for the best class attendance. Mr Hardy recorded an occasion when he could not decide which of his drawings he would put forward for the “party.”  He told a chum that he “would toss a coin.“ Miss Colson overheard him and told him in a stern voice “I will have no gambling in this house” and selected the drawing herself.

She kept a library and her students would take out books, returning them on Fridays. She employed a young lad to work in the garden and run errands for her and he would take books to the lighthouse-keepers and bring back the ones lent previously. On a fine summer’s evening she would have ‘her boy’ row her boat to the stone quay where she would board and he would row her around the bay.

Mr Hardy remembers her arriving at church one Sunday and seeing a silk top hat placed on the font – she knocked it off with her umbrella as she sailed down the aisle. On another occasion the parson’s sermon was rather long, so Miss Colson announced she had to get home to her dinner and left the church.
 
Mr Hardy tells us: “If we met Miss Colson outdoors, we had to give her the naval salute and she would promptly return it, but she wore dark blue glasses and looked straight in front. However, she would reprimand a boy if, thinking she did not see him, he did not salute.”

A Miss Bartlett of Wareham was a life-long friend and the two ladies visited each other for their summer holidays. Julia Colson died during the First World War when some of her lads were away in the services but they were well represented by many of her older ‘old boys’ who were present at her funeral.

The Dorset Coast – Old Harry’s Rocks

Apr 2nd, 2011
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The Dorset Coast - Old Harry and his Wife near Swanage. Photo taken in the early 1890's.

The Dorset Coast - Old Harry and his Wife near Swanage. Photo taken in the early 1890's.

Dorset Coast – Old Harry Rocks

Apr 1st, 2011
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Old Harry Rocks nr Swanage

Old Harry Rocks nr Swanage

Dorset Home to the Development of Radar

Mar 5th, 2011
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It would not be an exaggeration to say that Dorset played an irreplaceable part in overcoming the Nazi threat in the 1940’s, and in the preservation of freedom for the world. Not far from Corfe Castle, where for centuries events were played out which are part of our history, on the seaward side of the Isle of Purbeck is where for two years the sciences behind electronic defence, attack and navigation were worked out.

Today, through radio technology we can watch events on the other side of the world as they happen, and view missions to the moon or Mars, and it can all be traced back to Worth Matravers and St.Aldhelm’s Head, on the Dorset coast, not forgetting earlier as well as later research locations elsewhere. Four miles from Swanage, in the early days of the Second World War, a vast radar experimental complex was set up, which was to draw Service and scientific personnel and leading electronic engineers from all parts of Britain. The inventors moved in, academics mixed with mechanics – and it was all hushed up.

From their researches came, perhaps most notably, blind bombing by an amazing new system code-named ‘H2S.’ Later, the Aircraft to Surface Vessel technique was developed to pinpoint U-boats as they hunted in packs for shipping from North America carrying the vital supplies which kept Britain going – one of the greatest threats to our survival – as well as armaments for D-Day and the conquest of continental Europe.

Even the microwave oven owes much to the Isle of Purbeck, although the idea of the cavity magnetron, which was to be used in wartime as a transmitting valve creating echoes, came from two research workers at Birmingham University – John Randall and Harry Boot. Fundamentally, they were the ones who made Worth Matravers famous. Some would say the magnetron won the war.

Microwave links for telecommunications and television have much to thank Dorset for. So have weather forecasting by radar, and navigational aids. Computers came later. Long before the war, though, with Hitler seeking world domination, defence strategies involving radar began to be developed from the mid-1930’s and a chain of early warning stations with tall masts was built all down the east coast and as far west as the Isle of Wight.

With the research station established, the small airfield at Christchurch further along the coast towards Southampton was in use for 18 months by aircraft testing the devices. The aim was to create equipment that would show echoes from the ground or from the sea aboard Allied ‘planes. Sometimes a target aircraft would fly above Swanage Bay, towards or in line with the coast so that its image could be picked up on a screen on the shore.

Reg Batt, in his book ‘The Radar Army,’ relates how echoes were first received at Worth Matravers from a coastguard hut and the chapel of St.Aldhelm, on the headland. The old chapel is now the only vestige of the research station that still exists.

But a moving target was required, so one day he set out along the headland on his bicycle, apparently on his own initiative, with a sheet of metal wired to his machine. This was to lead to exciting results on the screen. They were getting somewhere. But their big task was to reduce the wavelength they used to a few centimetres for clarity, which had never been done before, and to site the equipment they invented aboard an aircraft.

The best brains from the universities, including (Sir) Bernard Lovell, later the inventor of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, were brought in to get the best results. All this led to the perfection of radio beams and blind bombing with the use of the magnetron valve, so that darkness or poor visibility presented no problem at all in marking the target.
 
Not only ‘H2S.’ but other techniques such as OBOE and GEE were developed in Dorset too. All were vital to defence, navigation and attack. Secret experiments were made with crystal and klystron, where Britain co-operated with the United States, and which was a pulse transmitter of less power than the magnetron. High-powered parties from London and abroad visited the site.

Eventually 17th century Leeson House in Swanage was to be taken over by the research station, which was an easy target with its high masts that could be sighted far out to sea. The position was very advantageous, however, and there was great excitement when distant points such as the Needles and St.Catherine’s Head, 32 miles away, were picked up.

Meanwhile, manufacturers across the country were ready to put the new creations into large-scale production for installation. Giant aerial systems involving dishes looked out on Swanage Bay, a factory production unit sprouted in north Bournemouth, and then came the day when Telecommunications Flying Unit at Christchurch was promoted and moved to a new airfield at Hurn, which was one day to become Bournemouth Airport.

In early 1942 the whole of the Worth Matravers complex moved in to Malvern College, as it was assumed to be under possible threat from commando attack. Defford Airfield in Worcestershire became the associated flying unit housing a large number of test aircraft.

It meant an upheaval for 800 personnel and in some cases their families. The seaside town of Swanage, where many of them had lived, became a quiet Dorset community once again. Masts had to be dismantled and crates packed and as many as 90 removal vans and flatbed trucks would be on the move out of the Isle of Purbeck in one day. As for the workers, they packed their things and left in fleets of coaches brought from all over the area. The move was accomplished in three weeks.

Some of the aircraft flying out of Defford, which included heavy bombers such as Lancasters, Halifaxes and Super-Fortresses, were quick to pick up echoes from the shores of the Bristol Channel, Chepstow and the River Wye. The nearest large towns of Gloucester and Cheltenham were seen almost as on a map. Meanwhile, down below, as in Dorset, the people went about their business completely ignorant of the experiments being conducted in the skies above them.

A terrible tragedy struck in June 1942, when a Halifax heavy bomber crashed in flames in the Forest of Dean, carrying all 11 RAF and scientific personnel on board to their deaths, including A.D. Blumlein, who has been called the foremost electronic engineer in Britain at that time, and who advised the type of television system adopted by the BBC in 1936 rather than the Baird system.

Prime Minister (Sir) Winston Churchill immediately ordered a redoubling of efforts on ‘H2S’ research, and some three years after the principle was discovered the cavity magnetron was installed in many of the RAF’s aircraft by the following year, as well as in U.S. Air Force aircraft. The national radar memorial window was erected in Goodrich Castle, two miles from the Halifax crash scene, in the 1990’s.

While it functioned in close association with Worth Matravers, the airfield at Christchurch, whose runway was only just long enough for the Boeing airliner shipped over from the United States, and which had been adapted as a flying test bed, was Top Secret and had its own uniformed Air Ministry police force.

What a change, and what an upheaval, came over these sedate Dorset towns (although Christchurch was then in Hampshire,) in the early years of the war; then the busy scene changed and the action moved elsewhere. Working conditions were often primitive and without heating.

Yet everyone pulled together, no secrets appear to have been divulged, and in a few years the war had been won, on the Continent, in the Atlantic, in Africa and the Far East. It is difficult to see how it could have been without radar, in which Britain took the world lead. Without that, and the part that Dorset played, world history would be very different from what we know today.

John Mowlem

Feb 21st, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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Many people will have noticed the name Mowlem on the side of heavy construction machinery without giving a thought to the story behind the name. But this business of international renown had, as had so many others, very lowly beginnings: with a man born in an ancient cottage at Carrants Court, Swanage on October 12th, 1788. John Mowlem was one of six children; four of who were boys, born to a general store keeper whose name was also John.

By the early 1800’s when he would have been in his early teens, young John joined his three other brothers at work in the Tilly Whim Purbeck stone quarry. These were the days when child labour for farms and industries was universal because it was cheap. But by 1812 the effect of the recession caused by the long naval war with France had hit the Purbeck quarries, and Tilly Whim closed.

During these years it is believed that Mowlem came under the tutelage of Dr. Andrew Bell, Rector of Swanage from 1801 to 1809 and a learned schoolmaster, though the younger John’s education came mainly through the experience of his working life. Another milestone for Mowlem came in 1804, when Henry Manwell, a son of a friend of John Mowlem senior, left Swanage to go to work as a stone cutter in Portsmouth, but not before suggesting that his son John could find employment in the same industry in the Isle of Wight.

Accordingly and soon after, Mowlem threw up his job in the Purbeck Quarry with the original intention of finding a job in London. About this move there is a romantic story of how, with little more than his sack of tools, John persuaded a local captain to grant him a free berth on his vessel. But Mowlem’s nephew George Burt later noted that John did not go directly to London but stopped off at the Isle of Wight. Here, at the Norris Castle Quarry, he found his first job outside of Dorset.

After he had been at work in the Norris Castle Quarry for some while Mowlem was spotted by James Wyatt, an architect who recommended him to Henry Westmancott, one of two brothers in charge of running a masonry and sculpture workshop for the Government Masons Department in London. Following up this recommendation Mowlem left the Isle of Wight and moved into lodgings adjacent to the Westmancott’s in Mount Street, near to the site of the shared workshop in Pimlico.

It was during these earliest years in London, sometime in the first decade of the 19th century, that Henry Manwell’s sister Susannah visited her brother, by then living in London and working as the rate collector for St. Marylebone. Inevitably this brought her into contact with John Mowlem, to whom she soon found herself attracted, and in 1812 he and Susannah were married. That year Robert Burt, long a friend of John’s married Susannah’s sister Letty in Swanage Church.

At this time the Government masons works had contracts for work at Greenwich and Kensington Palaces, the Royal Mews and Somerset House. For all these contracts in the capital Mowlem was made foreman over all the workers in 1816. He was later to record that he was put over men “..old enough to be my father.” But despite the promotion, Mowlem did not hold his boss in any high esteem. Indeed, he said of Westmancott that he was a hard niggardly taskmaster who paid him only punitive wages. He further wrote that the only virtues he (Westmancott) possessed, which he made a point of emulating were punctuality and cleanliness.

Mowlem left the Westmancott’s works in 1822 to found his own company with only about £100 capital, though he was much helped by several friends including MacAdam, who pioneered pitched road surfacing. Initially the company had much to do with the paving of roads, but as soon as he was solvent Mowlem took out a lease on a wharf in Pimlico basin, on the site later occupied by Victoria Station. It was to these works that the contractor imported Purbeck Limestone, York Sandstone, and Aberdeen Granite for many of the London landmarks we know today. With the help of his brother-in-law Henry, Mowlem next moved his office and yard to Paddington Wharf, then known as Little Venice.

Two of John’s brothers James and Joseph also went into business of their own in London, leaving Robert the only one of the brothers never to leave Swanage. Then in 1853 George Burt, who had mastered the craft of masonry in the Swanage Quarry, went into partnership with Mowlem in the capital. A third, a Yorkshireman called Joseph Freeman then joined the two men to form a company, which then operated under the name Mowlem, Burt and Freeman. Freeman married Elizabeth Burt, George’s sister in 1839.

Shortly before 1840 the company began work on its first major contract: re-paving Blackfriars Bridge with a Telford pavement of Granite setts. This was the first such pavement of its kind, and the contract specified that a delay in completion would incur a heavy penalty with no stage payments. But a shortfall in the supply of the granite led Mowlem to purchase another quarry on Guernsey. It was therefore Burt and Freeman who were left to manage the business during the time that Mowlem was overseeing the shipping of the rock from the Channel Island. Following the success of the undertaking Mowlem went on to re-pave London Bridge and the Strand.

But Mowlem was considering retirement before 1838, when he would have been 50. He is often regarded, together with Burt and William Morton Pitt, as one of the three gentlemen of Swanage. Morton Pitt was a wealthy entrepreneur and Dorset MP who had built Belvedere, a seven-room house in Swanage for which Mowlem made a failed purchase bid of £260. A Chancery sale took place at the Royal Victoria Hotel in 1838 and included the hotel itself, the Quay, Seymer Place, Sentry Field, the Watch and Preventative Station, Durlston Quarries and Whitecliff Farm. Mowlem moved into 2, Victoria Terrace, a road named after the future Queen who, when a Princess, made a brief stay at the hotel Pitt had developed and which was itself re-named after her.

Between 1858 and 1860 Mowlem bought the estate now occupied by most of Swanage north of the brook and extending to Ulwell. During these years he played a part in the construction of the town’s first pier (now gone) and the granite memorial on the seafront to King Alfred. In 1862 he added a memorial to Prince Albert and founded the Mowlem Institute, now the Mowlem Theatre.

Mowlem passed his retirement by watching the coast from an observatory on the roof of the house and by starting a famous diary, which he kept for the rest of his life. Burt meanwhile took full charge of Mowlem’s company in 1844 and undertook an ambitious landscaping project in what is today Durlston Park. This included the estate’s castle and The Great Globe, a massive 40-ton stone ball made in the Mowlem works and shipped to Durlston in 15 segments. Here the monument was set up on a platform just below the castle.

John Mowlen died in 1868, ten years before his company would become involved in electrifying the tramways, including the work of building the Northumberland Avenue Tramway, so beginning the long association of the name Mowlem with today’s transport infrastructure. In recent times Mowlem’s company also built the Dorchester by-pass, the new London Bridge, the Vickers Tower on Milbank, London Airport, and roads and docks, sewers and tunnels.

Dr. Andrew Bell

Feb 12th, 2010
by Dorset Ancestors.
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In 1801 a young Episcopalian minister from Scotland was appointed Rector of Swanage on a stipend of £240 a year. He was the Reverend Andrew Bell, and his incumbency at this popular resort of the future was one of unprecedented philanthropy and innovation. As Rector of Swanage Bell energetically set up benefit societies, social clubs and even a small cottage industry for plaiting straw. He arranged for every child in his parish to be inoculated against smallpox, a great contagious scourge of the 19th century. And this minister had a considerable influence on the young John Mowlem, the master mason of Swanage and founder of the international construction company of that name.

But Andrew Bell will probably be remembered for one thing above all others: as the inventor of the method of elementary education known as the Madras System, after the state in India where it was conceived. The Madras System was a legacy of a past period of colonial servitude in Bell’s life, but by the time of his death it would be adopted across much of Britain. Several educationalists even sought Bell’s advice about how they could implement the system themselves, including Joseph Lancaster, an opportunist businessman and rival. Lancaster, however, infuriated Bell when the latter discovered that he was passing off the Madras System as his own conception. At one point Bell took two years leave of absence from the church to concentrate on disseminating his educational method more widely. Eventually he had 13 day schools and three Sunday schools using the system in Dorset, but would by no means neglect to further the provision of education in his Scottish home town.

Dr Bell would devote only about a decade of his life to the spiritual and material wants and needs of the Swanage people, yet he had no leanings towards an ecclesiastical career until he was 32. Before then he was something of a maverick, a speculator in New World cash-cropping, and while his life in holy orders was a resounding success the same would not be said for his business interests or his marriage, which ended acrimoniously in divorce after only six years.

But the single-mindedness so indicative of his character throughout his life doubtless showed itself early. Born in St. Andrews, Fife, on 27th of March 1753, Andrew Bell was the son of a barber/wigmaker-cum-horologist who in the latter capacity was responsible for regulating the clock of St. Andrews University and making scientific instruments for the physics (then National Philosophy) faculty. Andrew was first educated at the grammar school where mathematics was his greatest strength and languages his greatest weakness. However, during these early schooldays he was the subject of bullying from older boys, an experience that would instil in this future educationalist a lifelong abhorrence of corporal punishment. Bell’s proficiency in maths led him, at 16, to matriculation at the United College of St Salvatore & St Leonard’s in St. Andrews University. Here he studied for four years, but there is no evidence that he graduated at the end of this time. However, it was common in those days for graduates not to undertake a formal graduation ceremony.

So with his sound academic background Bell sailed from Glasgow in 1774 to take up a post as a tutor to tobacco plantation owners in Virginia, though not without “moonlighting” as a tobacco trader with a good sense of business. In 1779 Bell was engaged as tutor to the sons of a Virginia planter Carter Braxton, but with the colony in a politically unsettled state in the aftermath of the War of Independence Bell returned to Britain two years later with the Braxton Boys, so that their education could be finished. During the voyage however, their ship was grounded on an island near Nova Scotia by a storm for a time before they could be rescued, whereupon they eventually reached London in June. But Bell’s charges were not inclined to stay on the right side of the law, and after two years he returned to St Andrews to eke out a meagre living by running a small private school.

It was at this point that Bell considered studying for the priesthood, but with the Church of England, since he was an Episcopalian. His first living following ordination was at Leith Episcopalian Chapel under a one-year contract. The St Andrews MP, George Dempster, approached Bell with the proposition of a lecture tour to Calcutta teaching science. The newly-appointed minister duly accepted the offer and sailed for Calcutta in 1787, but stopped off on route at Madras. Here Bell decided to stay and give a brief course of lectures, but when appointed as Chaplain to four regiments, he decided to abandon going on to Calcutta.

In 1789 Bell was asked to take over running the Madras Male Orphan Asylum, an orphanage-school for the bastard sons of soldiers and native women. Struck by the great inadequacy of the teaching methods at the asylum, Bell was instead impressed by an open-air school where the pupils were being taught their letters by inscribing them in sand. But his employees, embittered by his forthright manner, were obstructive in Bell’s plans to improve the methods of education. Bell then introduced sand-trays into his school instead of books, but the move was not approved by the master and ushers either. In desperation Bell then instructed a boy called Jonnie Frisken in his lessons, teaching the eight year-old to teach even younger children. This led to the school being segregated into classes where boys could be masters, pupils and sometimes both, and Bell found that this way the children had no learning difficulties. But the school master and two ushers were so disgusted with the method that they left Bell to continue running a school going from strength to strength.

The Madras climate however, proved so indifferent to Bell’s health that in 1796, though much praised for his work, he returned to England. Here he immediately prepared a report on the asylum, then another report in the summer of the following year setting out the operation of the Madras System, i.e. in which all but the youngest children could hold pupil-teacher status. All lessons were taught and learnt by rote. A boy “master” teaching young children a lesson after learning it himself. The 1797 report was circulated to all important figures in the Church and Government. Child education would now be Bell’s consuming passion for the rest of his days.

Funded from his own pocket and with some outside support, Bell opened a few charity schools putting his system into use. It was then in 1801 he came to Swanage and as Rector involved himself in the parish and Sunday school (soon converted to the MS.) Soon Mrs Sarah Trimmer, a religious pamphlet writer, was writing to Bell desiring his opinion of Joseph Lancaster and at the same time extolling Bell’s system above that of his rival. She was convinced Lancaster had merely improved Bell’s system, while basically plagiarising it. Bell, after persistent entreaties from Sarah to come to London to organise a campaign against Lancaster and his method, eventually did so in 1807, staying there a month.

Once in the capital, Bell set up a charity school in Whitechapel with the assistance of two or those who had been involved in running the Swanage Sunday school. Realising it had become impossible to undertake his parochial duties at Swanage, Bell obtained a special licence from his Bishop in May1807 for two years leave of absence. As new schools were opened Lewis Warren, a teenage boy who had been assisting at the Swanage Sunday school, undertook their organisation in the West Midlands. On the expiry of the first two years Bell realised he would have to relinquish the Swanage living entirely.

In 1811 Bell was appointed advisor and sponsor for the newly formed Society for the Education of the Children of the Poor, and the Church versus non-denominational education schism came to public attention. Raised to a pitch of ire, Lancaster came out into the open and even declared in an article that he alone invented the Madras System, that all other claimants (presumably including Bell) were counterfeiters and impostors! The feud wasn’t to be defused until 1818, when Quaker friends sent Lancaster to America to disseminate the blunders of his system there. The organisers of his society then gave Bell the authority to travel the country as an inspector of his schools. He also travelled and lectured on the continent for some years, before ill-health forced his return to England.

On his return Bell retired to Cheltenham, where he revived his aim of furthering education in St Andrews. He acquired two properties in South Street for a school, and in 1831 established a fund of £120,000 to finance the building of a Grammar and English School. Under the terms of Bell’s will his estate at Egmore was left in the hands of Trustees who were supposed to set up another Madras School at Cupor, in Fife.

But the trustees, in defiance of his wishes, instead spent the money on projects to build an observatory, provide a dispensary and improve public water supply. Nor would the educationalist-cleric live to see his school finished. Dr Andrew Bell died on 27th of January 1832, just ten weeks before the foundation stone was laid, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.