XIII. The Village School

Gordon Morgan Holmes was born in Dublin on 22 February 1876, the son of Gordon Holmes and his wife Kathleen Morgan). There were three brothers and a sister all of whom survive. The family is believed to have come to Ireland from Yorkshire and to have been settled in King’s County during the last of the Cromwellian plantations at the time of the Acts of Settlement in 1652. Holmes’s mother acquired by inheritance Dellin House and property at Castle Bellingham, Co. Louth, just south of the Ulster border, and this then became the family home and was farmed by his father. In complexion, physique and predominantly in temperament, Holmes was indubitably an Irishman, and during the centuries Irish blood must have mingled with the English strain. His mother died while he was a child and his formal education began late. He has said that he taught himself to read, but it is recalled that later in the village school his schoolmaster discerning unusual ability in the lad voluntarily gave him extra tuition. Thence he went as a boarder to the Dundalk Educational Institute where his schooling was completed. The school had a reputation for turning out good mathematicians, and when Holmes went up to Trinity College, Dublin, his choice wavered between reading mathematics or classics. But he was a determined walker, and had rapidly grown to love the Wicklow Hills, so easily within reach of Dublin, and to develop an interest in their flora. He thus decided to read natural science, was attracted by botany and biology, and so became a medical student. In 1897 he took his B.A., Senior Moderator in Natural Science, graduated in medicine in 1897 and proceeded M.D. in 1903. During his course he took a number of scholarships and a travelling prize. His hospitals were the Sir Patrick Dunn’s and—after graduation—the Richmond Hospital.

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The Village School

The Downside Review ◽

10.1177/001258060302200206 ◽

1903 ◽

Vol 22 (2) ◽

pp. 177-183

Keyword(s):

Village School ◽

The Village

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David Brunt, 1886-1965

Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society ◽

10.1098/rsbm.1965.0003 ◽

1965 ◽

Vol 11 ◽

pp. 41-52 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Keyword(s):

Elementary School ◽

Mother Tongue ◽

Intermediate School ◽

Considerable Effort ◽

Large Classes ◽

Mining Town ◽

The Bible ◽

Village School ◽

South Wales ◽

The Village

David Brunt was born on 17 June 1886 at Staylittle, Montgomeryshire, a small village in the heart of the Welsh countryside. He was the youngest of the five sons and four daughters of John Brunt, a farmworker, and his wife Mary ( née Jones). Both his parents were of Welsh farming stock and there is no record of any of his forebears having been in any way connected with or even interested in science. As a child Brunt spoke little but Welsh and until the age of ten was taught in the village school by one master mainly in that language. In 1896 John Brunt moved his family to the mining town of Llanhilleth, in the densely populated Western Valley of Monmouthshire, where he worked as a collier. By then the language of that part of the South Wales coalfield had become almost entirely English. For the next three years David attended the local elementary school, and it must have been a considerable effort for a boy accustomed to being taught mainly in Welsh by one man in a tiny rural school to follow lessons in English in a school of large classes and many teachers. It is clear that he quickly overcame these difficulties for in 1899 he secured first place in the list of entrance scholarships (value £2 5s. 0d. a term) for the Intermediate School at Abertillery, a larger mining town a few miles up the valley. Although he never forgot his mother tongue his facility in Welsh naturally declined as opportunities for speaking it became fewer, and in later years, except for a characteristic use of emphasis in argument, there was little in his speech to reveal that, as he often said, he was born ‘west of Offa’s Dyke’. As a part of his education he had to commit to memory long passages from the Authorised Version of the Bible, which no doubt did much to shape the taut prose of his scientific writings.

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Alexander Fleming, 1881-1955

Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society ◽

10.1098/rsbm.1956.0008 ◽

1956 ◽

Vol 2 ◽

pp. 117-127 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Keyword(s):

Medical School ◽

Medical Practice ◽

Water Polo ◽

Technical Ability ◽

Village School ◽

High Intelligence ◽

University Degree ◽

The Village ◽

Alexander Fleming

Alexander Fleming was the youngest of four children born to an Ayrshire farmer, Hugh Fleming, by his second wife Grace ( née Morton) on 6 August 1881. His education, up to the age of twelve, was at the village school (Darvel) and, for a further two years, at the Kilmarnock Academy. At fourteen he joined his brothers in London, where he worked for a time as a clerk in a shipping office, and also attended some classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic. His eldest brother Thomas was already practising as an ophthalmologist and, perhaps influenced by his example, Alexander also decided to study medicine. His choice of a medical school (which was to prove all important) seems to have been largely determined by the fact that he had competed in a water polo match against the students of St Mary’s Hospital. He therefore sat for an Entrance Scholarship at that Medical School, and won it, in 1901. After winning many other prizes as a student, he duly obtained his London University degree, M.B., B.S., in 1906. At that time he seems to have had no strong predilection towards any particular sphere of medical practice. Surgical work evidently made some appeal to him for he proceeded to take his F.R.C.S. examination, and it may well be that, if he had pursued that career, his great technical ability and high intelligence would have made him an outstanding surgeon, and won him a substantial fortune.

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John Dalton's Lakeland Excursions

Notes and Records the Royal Society journal of the history of science ◽

10.1098/rsnr.1999.0064 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 53 (1) ◽

pp. 79-94 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

S. Ross

Keyword(s):

John Fletcher ◽

Village School ◽

The Village

This paper is a narrative of John Dalton's summer excursions, for which he never allowed more than a fortnight away from his work, but which seldom failed to include a visit to his beloved Lakeland. The story of these excursions was first told by Jonathan Otley, his guide and companion on these occasions, who provided it at the request of William Charles Henry, Dalton's official biographer. A brief summary of Otley's account is included in this paper; but Dalton's own accounts, as reported in letters to John Fletcher, his first teacher at the village school at Pardshaw Hall, have not been published previously. Owing to my having acquired, about 20 years ago, the originals of some of these letters, I am able here to amplify Otley's accounts with Dalton's own fuller narrative.

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THE EXCURSION OF VILLAGE SCHOOL CHILDREN FROM BORISOGLEBSKIE SLOBODY TO YAROSLAVL IN 1911

Pedagogy of Rural School ◽

10.20323/2686-8652-2020-3-5-40-51 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 5 (3) ◽

pp. 40-51

Author(s):

Evgeny B. Antonov ◽

◽

Viktoriya V. Gorshkova ◽

Keyword(s):

20Th Century ◽

School Children ◽

Learning Process ◽

Real Life ◽

Rural School ◽

School Education ◽

Educational Value ◽

Village School ◽

Pedagogical Innovations ◽

The Village

The article is devoted to the review of the excursion to Yaroslavl of rural school children in 1911. It was the teacher of the primary school of the village Borisoglebskie slobody S. Maksheev who described this excursion. The report of the teacher is very detailed. This rare document depicts the inclusiveness of the rural school into pedagogical innovations of the beginning of the 20th century. Russian teachers of that period tried to avoid bureaucratic formalities in the process of education. They seeked new forms of teaching to approach school to the real life, to make a learning process more vivid and visual and to expand horizons of their pupils. Such new forms of teaching they found in school trips. The teachers of the Yaroslavl region were very active in the process of organization of the excursions. Teachers of the Rostov district were the most active. The excursion of the Borisoglebian school children was one of the first. It was well prepared and well spent. It also reflected rules of the excursions that later would be common for educational tours. S. Maksheev showed advantage of the excursion for his pupils convincingly. His conclusion about cognitive and educational value of excursion corresponded with the opinion of many other teachers about great potential opportunities to improve school education. The excursion of the Borisoglebian school children in 1911 reflected that fact that village teachers of the Yaroslavl region took an active part in the all-Russia process of realization of new forms of teaching. It was specific compensation of the lack of systematic reform of the school education

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