Frank Foden on John Charles Buckmaster
Passages transcribed from:
Frank Foden, The Education of Part-Time Teachers in Further and Adult Education: A Retrospective Study
Leeds Studies in Continuing Education. University of Leeds School of Education, 1992.
(ERIC document ED404508; ISBN 0-900960-52-3)
The following three passages are the only sections of Foden’s book that deal directly with John Charles Buckmaster. They appear in Chapter 1 (“Part-Time Teachers for a Part-Time Service”) and are transcribed here in full. Foden draws mainly on the unpublished MEd thesis by Mary Tasker (University of Bath, 1974) and on his own earlier book, The Examiner (University of Leeds, 1989). Footnote numbers are Foden’s own; the original footnotes are reproduced at the foot of this page.
Passage 1: Buckmaster at the School of Mines
Chapter 1, pp. 18–19. Foden is discussing the early attempts by the Science and Art Department to train science teachers, starting in 1853.
There is now interesting information available about those early attempts to train teachers for science schools. The modest scheme at the School of Mines was introduced by the teachers there, one of whom was T. H. Huxley. One of the group, carefully chosen for the special training was J. C. Buckmaster,7 an unusual scholar with unusual previous experience. In part because of his achievements as a self-taught public orator, mainly on behalf of the Anti-Corn Law League, he had been admitted as a ‘mature student’ to Kay-Shuttleworth’s Battersea College for the training of elementary teachers. Here he was taken on in 1853 as Science Master and also given a strong recommendation for the award of one of the five training scholarships offered by the School of Mines in that year.
The two-year course was gruelling, but Buckmaster combined his period of strenuous studies with part-time teaching at pioneering institutions such as the Battersea Mechanics Institute, the Wandsworth Trade School, and the Royal Polytechnic. The success of his pupils in the first ever public chemistry examinations, those of the Society of Arts in 1856 and 1857, demonstrated unambiguously the value of good teaching.8
Buckmaster tells in his autobiography how he attended and enjoyed the course at Jermyn Street, taught by brilliant teachers such as Huxley, Robert Hunt and Professor A. Hofmann of the Royal College of Chemistry. Buckmaster’s account of the rigours and misery of the final examination, and the exhilaration of passing, is most entertaining. Of the five who entered the course, only two were successful, Buckmaster and Thomas Coomber. Coomber went as headmaster to the new Bristol Trade School, Buckmaster into the Science and Art Department itself, where he served for more than thirty years as Science ‘Organising Master’. It is true, however, that the School of Mines ‘experiment’ was not continued.9
Passage 2: Buckmaster as ‘Organising Master’
Chapter 1, pp. 30–31. Foden is discussing the influence of the Science and Art Department’s inspectors and organising staff in the latter part of the 19th century.
The influence of J. C. Buckmaster during his long run as ‘Organizing Master’ (1859 to 1894) was considerable. He was appointed by Cole at the critical time when the Department was branching out into the examination business in a big way. Cole recognized in him just the man to stump the country, explaining and describing to all who might wish to know what were the services being offered by this mysterious department. His knowledge of science teaching, the fact that he was already author of a science textbook, the Elements of Inorganic Chemistry, and his known ability as an orator, all recommended him for the post of ‘Organizing Master’. Buckmaster organized little, but became the most knowledgeable and most widely travelled man in the Department.
He had views on methods of teaching that owed much to the ‘Object Lesson’ technique. What the method mostly amounted to was ‘practical demonstration’, presenting scientific information from the teacher’s demonstration bench rather than encouraging the pupils to learn for themselves. It was to be attacked by supporters of Armstrong’s ‘heurism’, but in real life Buckmaster’s approach had much to commend it, for there was little in the way of laboratory equipment in many of the ‘schools’ preparing students for the Department’s examinations. How was the teacher to do a demonstration, let alone allow the pupils to try an experiment for themselves?
Buckmaster produced numerous textbooks, ranging through elementary chemistry, physics, mechanics, acoustics, magnetism and electricity, heat, light and sound, and all written from the viewpoint that the student would learn mostly from reading, ‘being taught’ and the occasional demonstration. For him, as for most of his contemporaries, the science which needed to be taught was of principles ‘which are applicable to the various specified employments of life’, rather than the basic understanding of the professional scientist. Accordingly his arguments, for all their becoming old-fashioned, were more in tune with the experience and aspirations of science teachers preparing students for the examination ‘pot’ than were the higher ideals of the professors at the Royal College and the City and Guilds College.
He had a connection with the tentative moves, begun in the late years of the century, by the City and Guilds Institute to enter the field of teacher training. These moves had to do with manual training and especially the teaching of cookery. Buckmaster had begun to explore the problems of cookery, becoming in due course a notable demonstrator. Indeed as a showman in the art of simple cookery and author of several popular textbooks, he helped to promote popular demand for cookery classes, both in the evening for adults and in day school for girls. Philip Magnus, the City and Guilds examination chief, got caught up in the movement, as he did in that for manual training, and set in train the initiatives leading to the first examinations for teachers by that body.
Passage 3: Buckmaster and the growth of cookery classes
Chapter 1, p. [later in chapter]. Foden is discussing the City and Guilds Institute’s domestic subjects examinations around the turn of the century.
There was also at the time a considerable growth of popular interest in better cooking, itself an outcome of the commoner use of the gas stove in towns (and not unconnected with the efforts of J. C. Buckmaster). In total the domestic subjects attracted 1,067 examination candidates in 1900, 227 of them in Cookery.
7 Mary Tasker, ‘J. C. Buckmaster 1819–1908: a study of his life and work’ (unpublished MEd thesis, University of Bath, 1974), 107–10.
8 Frank Foden, The Examiner (University of Leeds, 1989), 146, 157, 164–5.
9 Tasker (1974), 111.
Note on Mary Tasker’s thesis
Foden’s footnotes confirm that his principal source for the Buckmaster material is the unpublished MEd thesis by Mary Tasker — John Charles Buckmaster’s great-granddaughter — submitted to the University of Bath in 1974: ‘J. C. Buckmaster 1819–1908: a study of his life and work.’ This thesis is cited at pp. 107–111, suggesting it covers the School of Mines period in some detail. The thesis is also listed in Foden’s bibliography. A copy may be held by the University of Bath library.