Catholic Women Teachers and Scottish Education in the Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries
The 1990 collection of essays edited by Fiona Paterson and Judith Fewell (Girls in their
Prime: Scottish Education Revisited) revealed the gender-blindness of the educational
tradition and gave examples of the gender inequality of educational practice; but nowhere
in the collection was the experience of Catholic girls or women discussed. 1 In The
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), Jonathan Rose gave only two
examples of Catholic education in Scotland. Both testimonies come from the early
twentieth century and were given by women whose experiences he portrayed as typical of
working-class Catholics, males as well as females. Compared to non-Catholics, he
observed, working-class Catholic adults:
gave their schools and teachers a much lower positive rating, were more likely to
complain about corporal punishment in education, were less likely to see any
benefit in their education, were far more prone to regret the quality of their
schooling, and were much happier to leave school. 2
As will be discussed below, the poverty of the mainly working-class Catholic population,
the impact on it of large-scale immigration from Ireland, especially from the 1840s, and
the Church’s decision to remain outside of the national system of education set up by the
1872 Education (Scotland) Act account for the inadequate accommodation and limited
resources. That teacher training remained under the control of Protestant denominations
while there was no Catholic college in Scotland until the mid 1890s helps explain the
reliance of Catholic teachers, themselves poorly educated and often un-certificated, on
learning by rote and the tawse. Within this context, the focus here is on the part played by
women in Catholic schooling, particularly elementary, and their place in Scottish
education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such a focus also fills a gap in
the historiography of Scottish Catholic education: with the exception of Bernard
Aspinwall, most historians of Catholic education in Scotland, if they consider women at
all, tend to concentrate on the religious orders and neglect the contribution of lay
women.3
As the following discussion will reveal, the majority of Catholics in this period
lived in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, but a national focus is necessary to provide a
comprehensive assessment of the role of the elementary schoolmistress. Indeed, one of
Rose’s witnesses grew up in a crofting family in the Grampians. Born in 1913, Anne
Kynoch’s first school was non-Catholic, and she regretted losing its comparative
‘intellectual freedom’ when she moved to a Catholic school. The fact that ‘intellectual
freedom’ was embodied in a simple bookcase is a sure reflection of the persistent poverty
in Catholic schools. Anne, however, went further: the Catholic school she remembered as
‘a prison and hell for me’. Rose related how Anne:
felt insulted by the low academic standards, the history lessons grossly slanted in
favour of Mary Stuart (‘the blackmail of hate’), the time wasted on saints’ lives
and catechism, her teacher’s sadistic bouts of caning (‘which gave her great
sensual pleasure’), and above all the restrictions on library privileges.4
This reminiscence reflects a pedagogy which was prevalent in nineteenth-century
Scotland: ‘ram it in, cram it in, little heads are hollow/ belt it in, strap it in, more to come
tomorrow!’ 5 Scottish teachers, it has been quipped, inculcated the 3Rs with the aid of the
3Bs: belt, blackboard and bible; Catholics simply substituted the catechism for the third
‘B’. 6 The corporal punishment which was inflicted on Anne might thus be seen as one
way in which the experience of Catholic children was very much in line with Scottish
educational practice generally. While Anne recalled her Catholic mistress’s cane, there
was a playground rhyme chanted in board schools which encapsulated the archetypal
Scottish schoolmaster in very similar terms:
Mr Rhind is very kind,
He goes to Kirk on Sunday.
He prays to God to give him strength
To skelp the bairns on Monday. 7
This verse identifies key elements in Scotland’s educational tradition: the importance of
Presbyterianism and the central role played by the dominie, or parish schoolmaster, in
socialising the children. Historians of Scottish education see that tradition as embedded in
the Education Act of 1696, and revived by an act of 1803 which improved the position of
the dominie, shown to be under threat by the late eighteenth century. 8 While there is a
debate over the impact of the 1872 Education (Scotland) Act on the national tradition, the
dominie remained a revered figure into the twentieth century, reflected in memoir, novel
and poetry. 9 It was, however, an educational tradition which focused on men. Hence,
another integral figure was the ‘lad of parts’: however poor, the talented boy was to be
given the opportunity to attend university, and in turn become a dominie, so perpetuating
the masculine meritocratic system. 10
Although Catholics remained outside of the national system until the1918
Education Act, the aim of the Church was to win acceptance from the host community
while moulding a distinct identity in what was a hostile environment; and in this separate
schools played a crucial role. 11 However, the Church’s decision not to transfer their
schools to the boards set up with the 1872 Act meant that whereas Catholic schools were
eligible for grants for ‘salaries, equipment and efficiency’, they received ‘no building
grants, no aid from the rates and no exemption from them’. 12 This was a considerable
burden on a poor community which was unable to keep pace with the educational
advances of the rate-funded board schools; even more than in board schools, class
numbers were large and attendance erratic. 13
Catholic education in the nineteenth century faced the twin problems of
population growth and relocation. Until the late eighteenth century, the majority of the
30,000 Scottish Catholics had lived in the Highlands and Islands. 14 Whereas only 30
Catholics lived in Glasgow in 1779, the city's Catholic population began to increase from
the 1790s with the coincidence of Highland clearances and Glasgow's industrial
expansion, but especially from the early nineteenth century with Irish immigration. In
1831 there were 35,554 Irish in Glasgow, the majority Catholic. 15 In Scotland as a
whole, the numbers of inhabitants born in Ireland rose in the next decade to just over
126,000, constituting 4.8 per cent of the total population. 16 The census of 1851 showed
that of the 207,367 Irish-Scots, 135,975 (or 66.6 per cent) had settled in the industrial
west-central region (Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire, with the focus on
Glasgow), where they made up 15.4 per cent of the population. 17 Although numerically
fewer Irish settled in Scotland than in England, by the middle of the nineteenth century
they represented more than twice the proportion of the Scottish population (6.7 per cent)
than of the English (three per cent). 18 The Catholic Church in Scotland feared the influx
of Irish would be disruptive for both it and the wider society so that, according to Mary
Hickman, the aim of separate education was to strengthen Catholic but eliminate Irish
identity. 19 Certainly, there were Irish priests, but they were generally kept out of the
important posts in the Scottish Church; at the same time, the hierarchy relied particularly
on female religious to socialise and civilise the children of the immigrant poor. 20 Thus, a
study of Dundee between 1846 and 1886 records the primary aim of the Roman Catholic
mission as to establish schools where poor Irish had settled. The Sisters of Mercy were
introduced to Dundee from Ireland in 1859, and they ran the day schools in what became
St. Joseph’s parish. 21 Even more so after the 1872 Education Act and the imposition of
compulsory schooling, ‘religious orders were brought in, mainly sisters to strengthen the
supply of teachers, and to provide what are now called social services among the poor
and the sick’. 22
Although Dundee’s textile industry was a magnet for migrants, by the late 1870s
around a fifth of the Scottish population lived in Glasgow, and two-thirds of those born in
Ireland lived in the city and surrounding areas. 23 By 1910, when Catholics made up ten
per cent of Scotland’s population, they were 17.6 per cent of Glasgow’s. 24 As the
numbers grew, so did the Church's educational activity in that area. In 1847, the Catholic
Poor School Committee was set up by the bishops in England and Wales, and later joined
by the Scots, with the purpose of negotiating with the Government for a share in the
grants. 25 This Committee's reports show that Catholic schools throughout Scotland faced
massive problems because of the poverty of parishioners, while its successor, the
Catholic School Committee, recorded that even at the end of the century, demand for
certificated teachers and in particular for qualified assistants was still far in excess of
supply. 26 Nor were there enough schools: for example, in 1878, it was estimated that the
number of schoolchildren in the Glasgow Archdiocese was considerably over 33,000, but
government returns showed accommodation for only 24,618. 27
Catholic schools throughout Scotland were plagued by irregular attendance and
lack of punctuality of both boys and girls, the standard of teaching was lower and there
was a heavier reliance on pupil teachers than in the board schools. Moreover, the failures
of Catholic pupil teachers at scholarship examinations were numerous, while none
achieved high places. These problems were acknowledged by the Catholic School
Committee which reported in the early 1890s that there was still a need for betterprepared pupil teachers. The Committee admitted that, unable to afford the wages paid by
school boards, Catholic schools had perforce to rely on them, and as a result the pupil
teachers could turn to their own lessons only after an exhausting day’s teaching. 28 Thus,
the Committee recorded an Inspector’s assessment in 1889:
Our Catholic candidates are kept hard at work all day in school (in some cases till
six in the evening), having, as a rule, no more than one hour of instruction five
times a week, from a teacher worn out with her hard day's work. The Board
candidates, on the other hand, are allowed to leave their schools to attend
afternoon classes taught by first-rate masters - men who have taken university
degrees, and who devote themselves to special subjects - and by mistresses
engaged for tuition at the ‘Centres’, who come fresh to their work, and have no
school duties to absorb their time and strength. The same tutors and governesses
succeed each other throughout the day on Saturdays; while every facility that
money can procure in the shape of books and apparatus is at the command of their
fortunate pupils. Until something of the kind is done for Catholics they can never
meet their competitors on equal grounds. 29
Although the Inspector spoke of ‘candidates’ and did not differentiate by sex, girls
outnumbered boys as pupil teachers from the start. However, he clearly identified the sex
of the Catholic teacher. By 1880 there were already three to four times as many females
as males at all levels of the teaching profession in the Glasgow Archdiocese. 30 There
were efforts to attract men to the profession: special grants, which were not offered to
women, were given to male pupil teachers and to students and their teachers at male
training colleges; but they were to little avail. 31
Both lay teachers and the religious orders felt that they were up against not only
the prejudice of the Protestant majority, but also the ignorance of Catholic parents,
especially mothers. 32 The sisters who taught evening classes in Glasgow told the Argyll
Commission into the state of education in Scotland in the mid 1860s that ‘the girls who
attended school were much better behaved than those who did not, and made much better
wives’. The Commissioners agreed, and were of the opinion that the sisters’ efforts to
remedy such ignorance were ‘satisfactory’. 33 Indeed, before 1872, contrary to the
situation in the parochial school system, it appears that Catholic girls in Glasgow had a
better (relatively speaking) education than Catholic boys, because of the earlier arrival of
female religious orders, notably the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception
(1847) and the Sisters of Mercy (1849). 34 Within a decade this seemed to change when
the Marist Brothers arrived in Glasgow (1858) and took charge of boys' education,
followed by the Jesuits (1859) who concentrated on middle-class boys. 35 However, the
girls’ apparent loss of that early advantage may have been compensated by the pupil-
teacher system, introduced in 1846. This gave opportunities for those Catholic girls
whose parents could afford to do without either their daughters’ wages or their help at
home. The Church had particular concerns about girls’ schooling and sought to ensure
that the low level of female education would not persist into the next generation. Yet only
a minority became pupil teachers and even fewer went on to training college, for whereas
the Church considered teaching a respectable occupation for a woman, factory work was
better paid, while the needs of the family came first. Thus, in 1888, at St. John's R.C.
mixed-sex school in Port Glasgow, the headmistress regretted the absence of a female
pupil-teacher who stayed at home to look after a sick mother while the girl’s sister
worked in a factory. 36 This same teacher had noted resignedly the previous year that ‘one
by one girls who thought to work on in school in prospect of a [pupil teacher] vacancy,
have left for employment which would presently add a little to the family income. A few
were required at home’. 37 Some became half-timers, and although this was not common
in Scotland, being generally limited to textile areas such as Renfrewshire and Dundee,
both clergy and teachers found half-time education particularly frustrating: one reverend
manager insisted that St James’s school in Renfrew would not admit half-timers, who
were mainly girls. 38
In the mixed as in the single sex schools, complaints of the impact of poor and
irregular attendance on both academic progress and discipline persisted into the twentieth
century. The headmistress of St. John's Girls’ school in Glasgow noted in the log book
for 30 April 1899: ‘It is impossible to advance the standard work of the school owing to
the great irregularity of the children’. 39 The same incentives were offered to both sexes
to improve attendance - a tea party, a lantern entertainment, badges, sweets - but appear
to have had little effect. 40 At St. John's in Port Glasgow in 1885, the mistress noted that
‘mothers keep their children, especially their girls, at home to “mind the house” or “mind
the child” when they themselves are attending church services’. 41 Similarly, in Catholic
schools in the Highlands both girls and boys were recorded as absent on account of
‘home circumstances’ or ‘home work’. Older boys were more likely than girls to be noted
as working with peat or driving cattle, but there were reports of older girls doing both. 42
Younger children too would be kept at home if their parents found them ‘sufficiently
useful’ in spreading peat. 43 Thus, although girls were more likely to be kept from school
to help in the home boys’ education was also circumscribed by family circumstances.
Even at Glasgow’s St Mungo’s Academy, run by Marist Brothers whose aim was to
develop a Catholic middle class, boys were reported to be kept at home ‘to run messages
or to mind the child while the mother is working’ or to take dinner to the father. 44 Log
books for Catholic schools also reveal that very few, girls or boys, stayed on into the
senior standards. At St. Mary's Girls' school in Glasgow, the mistress lamented in 1889
that a number of pupils had left to go to work, most having gained a labour exemption. 45
At the same time, many children between the ages of nine and ten who had not gone
through the infant department were now coming to school: as one headmistress
complained, they were not only ‘almost unteachable [sic]’ but also a ‘drag’ on the other
pupils . 46
The Church’s preference was for mixed-sex infant schools and then either
single-sex schools or separate departments within the same school. Generally, however,
this arrangement was impossible outside of the larger urban centres, particularly
Glasgow. 47 Even there, a few schools were mixed-sex and had a female head. 48 As in
board schools, women were considered to be naturally best suited to teach infants and
girls, but even in the Catholic boys’ schools, female assistants were increasingly
employed in the later Victorian period. 49 Outside of Glasgow, especially in small towns
and rural areas, Catholic schools were mainly mixed-sex with a predominantly lay female
staff, while the logs show a higher teacher-pupil ratio as well as the previously noted
greater reliance on pupil teachers, mainly female, than in board schools: indeed, often
schools relied on a head teacher supported only by monitors and pupil teachers. 50 Class
sizes, particularly in cities, were generally large: even at the end of the nineteenth
century, some contained 100 pupils and it was reported that the number of pupil teachers
was decreasing while the number of children in Catholic schools was ‘constantly
increasing’. 51 As in board schools, Catholic head teachers often found it more efficient to
have the older pupils in the same classroom: for example, at Holy Cross, Glasgow, in
January 1900, the mistress regretted that it was impossible to teach drawing to girls and
boys together. 52
The curriculum in Catholic schools was limited to meeting minimum government
requirements for both sexes, with the focus on the ‘3 Rs’, while the later nineteenth
century saw a heavy emphasis on domestic subjects for girls, even if in practice that often
meant only sewing. This emphasis on domestic education for girls was in line with
government policy and school board practice. It also reflected the Catholic community’s
strategy of surviving in a hostile environment by endorsing the values they shared with
their host, including honesty, hard work, thrift, sobriety, self-help and loyalty to the
British state. 53 The focus on education emulated the Presbyterian tradition; that on the
family and in particular on female morality reflected the Victorian ideology of
domesticity. There was, however, some parental resistance to the prominence of sewing
in the girls’ curriculum in Catholic schools, just as there was in board schools. 54 It is not
always possible to distinguish between the denominations on this issue, notably in the
Highlands where more Catholic girls went to board than to church schools. Yet even in
that region, Catholic mistresses echoed a board teacher’s complaint that parents in most
cases persistently declined to provide the necessary materials for their daughters,
especially the younger ones. 55 Indeed, it was particularly difficult to offer a range of
domestic subjects in Catholic schools because of the cost, lack of accommodation, and
heavy pressures on the mistresses who were often expected to teach these in addition to
the basic curriculum. Few Catholic schools could afford to introduce cookery and
laundry, and when such subjects were taught, conditions were generally inadequate: thus
in one school in Glasgow, cookery classes began only at the end of 1888 when the
reverend manager had a stove installed in a cupboard. 56 Nevertheless, from the
establishment of the School of Cookery in Glasgow (1876) the city’s Catholic
Archbishop sat on its board of directors and was an enthusiastic supporter of efforts to
extend the teaching of domestic economy in Catholic schools which he considered
essential both for domestic harmony and comfort and for the health and prosperity of the
community. 57
This reflects the willingness of school managers to sacrifice academic subjects in
the girls’ curriculum so that domestic skills might be taught. 58 It limited the mistress, but
still the log books for Glasgow's Catholic schools show a positive approach to the
introduction of domestic economy for girls, especially in the evening classes, in contrast
to board schools where it was regarded as a distraction from more academic subjects. 59
Often, it was the only specific subject open to girls in Catholic schools; when other
specific subjects were introduced, they appear to have been mainly reserved for boys, at
least to the 1880s. 60 Specific subjects were even less likely to be offered in Catholic
schools in the Highlands and Islands and when they were introduced, it was in urban
centres. Thus, Latin, French, domestic economy and, by the 1890s, cookery, were offered
at St. Joseph’s school, Inverness. 61 Throughout Scotland, however, most Catholic
schools lacked the staff, both in terms of numbers and expertise, and the regular
attendance of pupils, all of which was necessary to teach specific subjects effectively.
Nevertheless, despite the obstacles, both clergy and teachers were determined to raise the
standards of education, and by the end of the century girls as well as boys were
encouraged to try for the Merit Certificate and to enter university examinations. 62 These
were exceptions to the general pattern of leaving school as soon as possible, since the
numbers receiving a secondary education remained tiny into the twentieth century, for
boys as well as for girls. As late as 1918, only 8.5 per cent of Catholic children benefited
from some form of post-elementary education. 63 Indeed, in Glasgow, as little as three per
cent received secondary education. 64
Thus, before the Education Act of 1872, the Catholic Church in Scotland lacked
resources to provide comparable educational opportunities to those offered by parish
schools which were funded out of the rates; and thereafter, the Act put many new burdens
on Catholic schools. Hence, despite the efforts of the male religious orders, even the
brightest of Catholic working-class boys could not aspire to become a lad of parts, as at
least a minority of their school board equivalents could, because of the poverty of both
parents and of the educational facilities until well into the twentieth century. 65 However,
the late nineteenth-century development of elementary schools for the Catholic
community provided the opportunity for a minority of girls to become ‘lassies of parts’
through the pupil-teacher system. While only a minority of this minority could go on to
college, usually Mount Pleasant in Liverpool, run by the sisters of Notre Dame, it has
been noted that the Scottish students went against the general trend of movement in that
almost all of them returned to Scotland. 66 In 1894 the first Scottish Catholic teachertraining institution, Dowanhill College, also run by the sisters of Notre Dame, was
established in Glasgow. It was for the training of schoolmistresses, which confirmed the
even greater dependence on female teachers in Catholic than in board schools, but also
gave those women an opportunity to enter a respected profession. 67 Indeed, whereas the
Church had tried to attract men into its schools, it now accepted its reliance on women.
Thus, an early twentieth-century proposal to establish a training college for men
foundered because the bishops were unwilling to take on an additional responsibility
requiring a public appeal to finance what would have been considerably more costly than
a female college. 68
Lay women teachers, then, played an important role in building and maintaining
Catholic communities. Indeed, the sisters of Notre Dame assured the young women they
trained that they stood ‘between the priests and the parents and like them derive authority
from Almighty God’. 69 Certainly, as noted above, the clergy accepted that their pupil
teachers needed to be better prepared to enter college, even as the training they received
was limited by the narrow range of subjects they were expected to teach. However, where
possible the sisters of Notre Dame widened the curriculum beyond government
requirements to include, for example, foreign and classical languages, and also
encouraged their students in self-education and professional development. 70 Their
training included management not only of Irish parents, whom the sisters insisted had to
be dealt with firmly and professionally, but also of priests, where tact rather than firmness
was advised. The schoolmistresses should ‘respect the priest in “his little whims and
plans about his school”, conciliate but retain a respectful distance, yet never compromise
on professional educational issues’. 71 Teachers were encouraged to continue their
education after college if at all possible. One example was Miss Mary Ginlay,
headmistress of Holy Cross mixed-sex school in Glasgow, which had an all-female staff,
who received the LLA (Licentiate in Arts) from St. Andrew’s University in 1898. The
HMI report for 1900 noted approvingly that she taught the most senior class:
Nothing can have a more beneficial effect upon the older pupils and tend more
to induce them to prolong their stay at school than the feeling that they are being
directly taught and trained by the most highly qualified teacher. 72
She was not unique: in 1893 it was reported that ‘several’ students at the Mount Pleasant
College in Liverpool prepared for the matriculation examination of London University
for the first time, with the aim of raising the standard of education and ‘mental
cultivation’ so that these women could in turn improve the education in Catholic schools,
pupil-teacher centres and training colleges; ten years later, nine Dowanhill students
registered at Glasgow University, while in 1906 the Notre Dame sisters were given
permission to attend the University and take higher degrees. 73 Miss Ginlay, however,
was exceptional among ordinary Catholic schoolmistresses in Scotland. More often, HMI
reports highlighted the lack of a serious intellectual education for teachers in Catholic
schools. As one Inspector reported in 1891:
The work done in the [Catholic] schools shows creditable progression in recent
years and is often very good, especially in the junior classes. But, speaking
generally, there is a point beyond which the work, especially of the senior classes,
will not rise, a point considerably lower than that attained in the Board schools.
This holds true after making all allowances for the poor class of children in R.C.
schools. It is a deficiency which no industry of teachers, no skill of the managers,
no stimulus of inspection can remedy, for it arises solely from the intellectual
defects of a staff who have not received a regular and thorough training. By this I
mean, not merely a training in the method of teaching, but a training in
intellectual study. The good teacher must first of all be the good student. 74
The opening of Dowanhill College four years later was in response to such concerns. It
also meant that Catholic women now had a better chance of educational advancement
than most Catholic men who stayed in Scotland. Catholic schoolmistresses, however,
were paid less than not only Catholic male teachers, but female board teachers. In 1911,
the average annual salary of male teachers in Catholic schools was £4 lower than their
equivalents in board schools, and that of Catholic women teachers was on average £7
lower than board schoolmistresses who in turn received on average around half the salary
of their male counterparts. 75 In contrast to the women, many of those Catholic men who
went into teaching preferred to train and work for school boards. 76
At least one priest acknowledged the injustice of such low pay for women
teachers. Father Joseph Holder, member of the Dundee School Board in the mid 1890s,
expressed his surprise at the ‘enormously disproportioned rates at which we are
accustomed to pay our male and female teachers’. In Dundee‘s Board schools, for
example, male assistant teachers were paid almost £98 per annum, whereas their female
equivalent got just under £55. He proposed that the salaries’ committee should be
instructed to frame a scheme which ‘if it fails to equalise the payments made to our male
and female teachers for performing the same kind and amount of work, would at least
reduce to a very large extent the difference in the rates at which they are paid’. He was
not challenging the belief in the sexes having different characteristics or that some
occupations were best suited to either women or men. Rather, he argued that where men
and women were doing similar work, they should receive similar pay. Moreover, he
recognised that as women in board schools were concentrated in teaching infants and the
lower standards, they had bigger classes than the men in the higher standards. In addition,
mistresses who taught needlework and domestic economy to the majority of girl pupils
earned more in grants for the school than the men who taught specific subjects such as
Latin and mathematics to a minority of boys. In Dundee, he pointed out, men were not
the only breadwinners: ‘female teachers who have to support claims beside their own are
far more numerous than those who have not’. 77 The burdens on and contributions of
mistresses were even greater in Catholic than in board schools. Father Holder, however,
appears to have been a lone voice not only on Dundee School Board but within the
Catholic community. Reverend school-managers were particularly reliant on those low
salaries.
In Dundee as throughout the Lowlands, Catholics were in a minority, even if
considerable in places, whereas significantly Catholic areas stretched across the
Highlands and Islands. The Church’s educational efforts to meet the growth in numbers
and of Irish-born children concentrated on the Lowlands and, it has been claimed
disregarded the Highlands and Islands as a ‘distinct, organic, cultural and linguistic
entity’, which affected the schooling of the Catholic community. 78 Thus, when the Notre
Dame training college was opened in Glasgow in 1895, Gaelic was not part of the
curriculum. 79 Moreover, Catholic as well as board schools found it difficult to attract
men to isolated regions and both tended to rely on a single mistress with pupil teachers as
her only assistance. There were, in fact, few Catholic schools in the Highlands and
Islands. In 1867 in Perthshire, which has a Highland region, only 13 per cent of Catholic
children (of whom there were around 300 in total) attended the two schools in Perth. The
rest were in non-Catholic schools. Even after the arrival of the Ursuline Sisters (1865),
the numbers of Catholic children in Perthshire were generally too small to merit separate
schools. 80 Before the 1872 Act, the only schools in the predominantly Catholic islands of
South Uist, Barra and Eriskay were provided by Protestant organisations of which the
Catholic Church was very suspicious. After 1872, the appointment of teachers to board
schools which Catholics attended was sometimes a cause of bitter dispute, though
generally the Church did not object so long as religion was not taught. Until the mid
1890s, certificated Catholic applicants usually had been trained in England, and Scottish
HMIs and school boards regarded them as inferior to Scottish-trained teachers, due partly
to a belief in the superiority of training in Scotland and a preference for teachers with
some experience of university education, and partly to a concern, shared by the Catholic
Church, about the ‘low’ social origins of Catholic teachers. 81
The Catholic Church had grounds for suspecting a sectarian bias. 82 At the same
time, the success of any such applicants represented a significant loss for Catholic
schools. In contrast to the board schools, the majority of teachers in schools for Catholic
working-class children were without certificates: as late as the beginning of the 1890s,
two-thirds of female Catholic teachers and a half of the males were untrained. 83 Whereas
only eight of the 216 teachers employed by the Glasgow School Board were untrained, of
the 38 teachers in Catholic schools only 14 were qualified. 84 Nevertheless, the log books
of Catholic schools and the reports of religious inspections leave no doubt that the
Church sought to inculcate a desire for education in its flock. Given the generally
negative image of Catholics in certain sections of the Scottish press - ignorant, drunken,
superstitious, improvident - perhaps the Church’s educationalists were trying to
undermine the stereotype. 85 It may be, too, that both clergy and teachers were influenced
by the Scottish democratic tradition in education, since the Church’s strength lay in its
identification with the poor. The religious orders, moreover, aimed to stimulate the
development of a middle class by instilling a desire for educational improvement, and as
the Catholic poor developed its own labour hierarchy, a few at least among its skilled
workers and lower middle class wanted their children to benefit from the meritocratic
tradition in Scottish education: indeed most students at Dowanhill came from this social
background. 86
Still, only a tiny minority could follow this route of social advancement. 87
Further, even at the end of the century, there was a high proportion of untrained, mostly
female teachers in Catholic schools, with a continuing heavy reliance on former pupil
teachers. 88 When Dowanhill opened in 1895, it had only 21 students and over the next
six years a mere 143 qualified as teachers. 89 Given the poverty of most Catholics in
Scotland and the low educational level of the teachers themselves, the efforts of their
schools to reach the standards of the boards had little chance of success, at least before
the 1918 Education Act. Nevertheless, whereas Irish-born males and females were
concentrated in unskilled or low-skilled occupations, there was significant improvement
in the training of Irish-born schoolmistresses by the early twentieth century. 90 Though
most certificated teachers were employed in the Lowlands, this trend was also seen in the
Highlands and Islands. For example, among the former pupils of a Catholic school in
South Uist ‘some of the girls became head teachers and qualified nurses, some of the
boys doctors, head teachers, captains and mates of seagoing ships’. 91 Thus, space had
been made for the Catholic ‘lass of parts’ by the end of the nineteenth century, although
her schooling remained much more restricted than that of the traditional lad of parts with
his classical education, and indeed of her school-board counterpart, especially in
Glasgow.
Given the numerical predominance of lay women in Catholic schools in Scotland,
what role did female religious orders play? It has been argued that the dominant
distinctive component of being a Catholic girl in Scotland between the 1872 Education
Act and the end of the Second World War was the possibility of being taught by nuns. 92
They were certainly crucial for the development of Catholic education, including the
training of teachers, in the larger urban centres. Whereas lay teachers were subject to the
reverend manager, the sisters regarded his authority over them as limited: he could, for
example, engage their services, but they reserved the right to withdraw and the manager
was ‘helpless to contest their decision’. 93 Lay mistresses could not act so independently,
but as noted above, the sisters taught them how to ‘manage’ the manager, and as Francis
O’Hagan has argued the sisters provided some ‘outstanding examples of leadership’. 94 A
recent study suggested that female religious orders were not only integral in establishing
the Catholic school system in Glasgow, but that the sisters often remained the principal
teachers in most of the city’s Catholic schools, thereby maintaining their influence. 95
Whereas the paucity as well as the scattered holdings of school logs make it difficult to
assess in detail the importance of the female religious orders for Catholic elementary
education in Scotland as a whole, the annual reports of the religious examinations of
Catholic schools in the Western Province, which included Glasgow, confirm the
numerical predominance of lay women. For example, in the Greenock mission area for
1880 to 1881, there were 30 schools of which three were for boys and three for girls,
seven for infants and 17 mixed-sex; the principal teachers included two lay men, six from
religious orders (four Franciscan Sisters and two Sisters of Mercy), and 22 lay mistresses,
of whom one was married. 96 This example also confirms the enormous expansion in
Catholic elementary schooling after 1872 which overwhelmed the religious orders: by
1894, there were 180 Catholic schools in Scotland, with accommodation for 60,000
children. 97
The religious orders, moreover, concentrated on Glasgow, with fewer in
significant urban centres such as Paisley, Dundee and Greenock, whereas elementary
schools in small towns and rural areas throughout Scotland relied on lay women. In 190910, it was recorded that there were 81 mostly mixed-sex schools in the mission area
within Glasgow’s orbit: 22 had male lay principals, 17 were from religious orders, with
the majority being lay women. In contrast, in Glasgow’s 55 departments, there were 14
male principal teachers, 12 lay women and 24 from religious orders. Some schools had a
mixture: thus St Joseph’s had William Loxam as principal teacher in the boys’
department, the Sisters of Mercy were in charge of the girls, and Miss Margaret Galbraith
managed the infants. 98 In the mission schools of the Glasgow Archdiocese for 1912-13,
there were 43 headmasters, 96 headmistresses, 58 trained male assistants, 521 trained
female assistants, 16 untrained male assistants and 584 untrained females. 99 By 1918,
only four per cent of Scotland’s Catholic schoolteachers were members of religious
orders, and they were concentrated in Lowland secondary schools, orphanages and
reformatories. 100 Thus, their role in elementary education does not appear to have been
as significant as was the case in Ireland. 101 They were certainly important for middleclass schooling and teacher-training, as well for the very poor and for delinquent
children. Indeed, without the three female orders of the Franciscans, the Sisters of Mercy
and of Notre Dame ‘there would hardly have been any Catholic secondary education for
girls in Glasgow in the nineteenth century’. 102 As pointed out earlier, however, well into
the twentieth century very few Catholic children stayed on to secondary school. Yet by
1918, the religious orders did not have sufficient numbers even to provide opportunities
for the minority of Catholic girls and boys who were able to go on to secondary
education. 103
As this article has shown, for reasons of cost and the size of school rolls, as well
as the failure to attract either males into teaching or women into the religious orders in
significant numbers, lay women came to predominate in Catholic elementary education.
The reverend manager certainly visited often, but my research shows that the day-to-day
running of the school was the responsibility of the mistress who was at the centre of the
education of the largest minority in Scotland, accounting for around an eighth of the
school population. 104 As one headmistress noted in 1888 when dealing with an
‘insolent’ assistant: ‘Hitherto in my schools, I have been considered as the first, and
under certain necessary and fitting restrictions so far as the Reverend Managers were
concerned, the supreme authority’. 105 Anne Kynoch’s bitter memories of her Catholic
schoolmistress provide a vivid picture of a harsh and even brutal pedagogy, but they do
not prove that her experience was typical of Catholic schoolchildren. At the same time,
teaching by rote was the norm in board as in Catholic schools, and discipline was strict in
both. Socialisation was a shared aim: the school boards saw themselves as preserving the
national tradition in education, the Catholic schools as transforming the immigrants into
subjects loyal to both the Church and the British state.
After 1872, board as well as Catholic schools became increasingly reliant on
female teachers. 106 Although salaries in Catholic schools were considerably lower than
under the boards, Catholic mistresses had more chances of a principal teacher’s post than
those employed by the latter. The teaching profession was hierarchical and maledominated, but the position of teacher had status within an educational tradition which
esteemed the (under-paid) dominie. Certainly, there was a lack of professional
alternatives for women in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Scotland, and little
scope for promotion within teaching. 107 Nevertheless, in view of the numbers of girls and
women who taught at all levels in Catholic schools, it seems to have been a position to
which many aspired. The religious orders were brought into Scotland, mainly from
France and Ireland but also via England (notably from Mount Pleasant in Liverpool), and
were expected by the Church hierarchy to provide leadership in female education.
However, in Catholic elementary schooling lay mistresses were not only in the majority
but also more representative of their community. Their role was key to the
implementation of the Church’s strategy to enhance the respectability of a largely
immigrant community. Indeed, since more parents sent their children to Catholic schools
than attended church, these women were vital to the success of that strategy. 108
The aim was not just to ensure social control but also to raise expectations of what
could be achieved through education in a host society which believed that schooling
should foster a common citizenship. 109 Further, when the 1918 Education Act
incorporated Catholic schools into the national system, it gave their mistresses more
opportunities for both intellectual and professional development. 110 Thus, despite
remaining apart from the national system of education until 1918, such women
nevertheless played a significant role in the schooling of the country’s working class. Of
course, the mistress was still at a disadvantage compared to the dominie, but elementary
schooling depended on her. Along with the better paid and generally better qualified
school board mistresses, female Catholic teachers had secured an indispensable place for
women in Scottish education.
Notes
1 Paterson, Fiona M.S. and Fewell, Judith, editors. Girls in their Prime: Scottish
Education Revisited. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1990. For religion and
education, see Brown, Callum G. The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730.
London: Methuen, 1987; Walker, Graham and Gallagher, Tom, editors. Sermons and
Battle Hymns: Protestant Popular Culture in Modern Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1990; Gallagher, Tom. Glasgow: The Uneasy Peace. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1987.
2 Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. London: Yale
University Press, 2001, 184-85.
3 Aspinwall, Bernard. “Catholic Teachers for Scotland: the Liverpool Connection.” The
Innes Review, 45, no.1 (spring 1994): 85-108. See also Dealy, Sister Mary Bonaventure.
Catholic Schools in Scotland. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press,
1945; Sister Martha Skinnider. “Catholic Elementary Education in Glasgow 1818-1918.”
In Studies in the History of Scottish Education, 1872-1939, edited by Bone, T.R.
London: London University Press, 1967; Fitzpatrick, T.A. Catholic Secondary
Education in South-West Scotland Before 1872: its contribution to the change in status of
the Catholic community. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986; Fitzpatrick, T.A.
“Scottish Catholic Teacher Education: the wider context.” The Innes Review, XLV, 2
(autumn 1994): 147-70; O’Hagan, Francis J. The Contribution of the Religious Orders to
Education in Glasgow During the Period 1847-1918. Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen
Press, 2006.
4 Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, 184.
5 Hendrie, William F. The Dominie: A Profile of the Scottish Headmaster. Edinburgh:
John Donald, 1997, 1. See also Northcroft, David. Scots at School. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2003.
6 Hendrie, The Dominie, p.1. See also Anderson, R.D. Education and the Scottish
People 1750-1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
7 See “The Dominie’s Happy Lot.” In Poems. Wingate, Walter. London and Glasgow:
Gowans and Gray Limited, 1919, 60-61. See also Montgomerie, William and
Montgomerie, Norah. Scottish Nursery Rhymes. London: Hogarth Press, 1964.
8 See Sinclair, Sir John. The Statistical Account of Scotland (1791-99), general editors
Donald J. Withrington and Ian R. Grant. Wakefield, England: EP Publishing, 20 volumes,
1983.
9 See Cruikshank, Marjorie. “The Argyll Commission Report 1865-68: A Landmark in
Scottish Education.” British Journal of Educational Studies, 25, no.2 (June 1967): 133147. See also Scottish Life and Society Volume 11: Institutions of Scotland: Education,
edited by Heather Holmes. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000.
10 See Anderson, Robert. “In Search of the ‘Lad of Parts’: the Mythical History of
Scottish Education.” History Workshop Journal, 19 (1985): 82-104.
11 For anti-Catholicism in Scotland, see for example Gallagher, Glasgow: The Uneasy
Peace; Walker and Gallagher, Sermons and Battle Hymns; Boyle, Raymond and Lynch,
Peter, editors. Out of the ghetto? The Catholic community in modern Scotland.
Edinburgh: John Donald, 1998; Devine, T.M., editor. Scotland‘s shame? Bigotry and
sectarianism in modern Scotland. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2000.
12 Rev. Brother Kenneth, Catholic Schools in Scotland 1872-1972. Glasgow: Catholic
Education Commission, 1972, 8.
13 Fitzpatrick. Catholic Secondary Education in South-West Scotland Before 1872, 31.
For a study of the Glasgow School Board, see Roxburgh, James M. The School Board of
Glasgow 1873-1919. London: London University Press, 1971.
14 McCaffrey, John. “Roman Catholics in Scotland in the 19th and 20th centuries.”
Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 21 (1991), 275-300: 275.
15 Skinnider. “Catholic Elementary Education in Glasgow”, 13; Cleland, James.
Enumeration of the Inhabitants of the City of Glasgow and the County of Lanark for the
Government Census of 1831. Glasgow: J. Smith, 1832, 260.
16 Lynch, Michael, editor. The Oxford Companion to Scottish History. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001, 331.
17 Mitchell, Martin. The Irish in the West of Scotland 1797-1848. Edinburgh: John
Donald, 1998, 2. Estimates of Protestants among the Irish in Scotland vary between a
fifth and a third: ibid, 4.
18 McCaffrey. “Roman Catholics in Scotland”, 275.
19 Hickman, Mary J. Religion, Class and Identity: The State, the Catholic Church and
the Education of the Irish in Britain. Aldershot: Avebury, 1995, 12.
20 McCaffrey, “Roman Catholics in Scotland”, 277.
21 Quinn, John. “The Mission of the Churches in Dundee 1846-1886.” MLitt, Stirling
University, 1993, 106-107.
22 Ross, Anthony. “Education in Perthshire to the Act of 1872.” PhD, Dundee
University, 1975, 802.
23 McCaffrey, “Roman Catholics in Scotland”, 276.
24 Smyth, J.J. Labour in Glasgow 1896-1936: socialism, suffrage, sectarianism. East
Linton, East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2000, 127.
25 Minutes of the Committee of Council on Education, 1847-48, 1, xlvii. See also the
Reports of the Catholic Poor School Committee, Catholic Archdiocese of Glasgow
Archives (CAGA), ED9/2.
26 The Forty-Sixth Annual Report of the Catholic School Committee, 1893, CAGA,
ED9.
27 Report of the Religious Examination of Schools for 1878-79, 3, CAGA, ED7.
28 The Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Catholic School Committee, 1894, CAGA,
ED9.
29 The Forty-Second Annual Report of the Catholic School Committee, 1889, 15,
CAGA, ED9/2.
30 Report of the Religious Examinations of Schools for 1880-81, CAGA, ED7.
31 The Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Catholic Poor School Committee, 1886, v-vi,
7, CAGA, ED9/2.
32 Head teachers often complained of mothers’ attitudes to education, including religious
education, and to teachers: see for example, the log book entries for 17 June and 1 August
1865, 2 October 1867, St Lawrence’s School, Greenock, Glasgow City Archives (GCA),
CO2/5/6/36/1.
33 Greig, James and Harvey, Thomas. Education Commission (Scotland). Report on the
State of Education in Glasgow. Edinburgh: Thomas Constable for H.M.S.O., 1866, 84.
34 McHugh, Mary. “The Development of the Catholic Community in the Western
Province (Roman Catholic Dioceses of Glasgow, Motherwell, and Paisley) 1878-1962.”
PhD, Strathclyde University, 1990, 116-17.
35 Skinnider. “Catholic Elementary Education in Glasgow”, 17-18. See also the Minutes
of the Committee of Council on Education for 1853-54, 1153-55 and for 1857-58, 42.
36 St John’s School, Port Glasgow, GCA, CO2/5/6/78/2, log book entry for 3 February
1888. It had started as a girls’ school, but the reverend manager soon reorganised it as
mixed-sex in 1884.
37 Ibid, log book entry for 17 October 1887.
38 St James’s School, Renfrew, GCA, CO2/5/6/77/1, log book entry for 18 September
1895. The local mill manager ignored the request not to employ children from the school.
39 St John’s Girls’ School, Glasgow, GCA, D-ED7/222/2/1, log book entry for 30 April,
1899.
40 See St Margaret’s Girls’ School, Glasgow, GCA D-Ed7/161/2/1, log book entry for 11
February 1898; St John’s Girls’ School, Glasgow, GCA, D-ED7/222/2/1, log book entry
for 25 June 1896.
41 St John‘s School, Port Glasgow, GCA, CO2/5/6/36/1, log book entry for 14
September 1885.
42 Eskadale R.C. School, Highland County Archives (HCA), CI5/3/39b, log book entry
for 17 May 1895; Duisdale School, HCA, CI5/3/34a, log book entry for 17 May 1895.
43 Strontian School log book, HCA, CA5/3/16a, entry for 26 September 1879.
44 St Mungo’s Academy, GCA, D-Ed7/247/1/1, log book entries for 24 August 1867, 12
and 24 November 1868, 12 October, 1883.
45 St Mary’s Girls’ School, GCA, SR10/3/894/2/1, log book entry for 20 August 1889.
46 St Margaret’s Girls’ School, GCA, D-ED7/161/2/2, log book entry for 11 April 1902.
See also St Margaret’s Boys’ School, GCA, D-ED7/161/1/1, log book entry for 10
September 1883.
47 See for example St Aloysius’ School for Girls, GCA, D-ED7/188/1, log book entries
for 1876.
48 Ibid, a girls’ and infants’ school. See also Holy Cross School log books from 1882,
GCA, D-ED7/103/1/1 for boys and girls; St Michael’s School log books from 1877,
GCA, SR10/896/1/1.
49 See for example St John’s Boys’ School, GCA, D-Ed7/221/1/1, log book entry for 18
May 1888; St Margaret’s Boys’ School, Kinning Park, GCA, D-ED7/161/1/1, log book
entry for 18 February 1884. Francis O’Hagan gives the example of St Mary’s Boys’
school, Glasgow, employing female teachers in the early 1900s: The Contribution of the
Religious Orders to Education in Glasgow During the Period 1847-1918, 181.
50 John McCaffrey points out that Glasgow was exceptional in Scotland, which was
otherwise a small-town society. See McCaffrey, John F. Scotland in the Nineteenth
Century. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, 3. From my own sample of 35 R.C. schools, 24
were run by lay women. Twenty schools in the sample were outside of Glasgow, with 14
lay head mistresses, one nun and five male head teachers. See for example the log books
of the following schools: GCA, CO2/5/6/45/1, St Margaret’s, Johnstone; CO2/5/6/77/1,
St James’, Renfrew; CO2/5/6/65/1-2, St Mary’s, Paisley; CO3/10/7/52/1, St Mary’s,
Largs. See also Dumfries Ewart Library, KD5/151/1, St Peter’s, Dalbeatie,
Kirkcudbright; and HCA, CI5/3/39/a, Eskadale R.C. School, Inverness. In the absence
through illness of one headmistress, her school was run by a pupil teacher from another
school: St Ninian‘s School, Gourock, May 1893, GCA, CO2/5/6/18/1.
51 The Twentieth Annual Report of the Religious Examination of Schools (1896-97),
CAGA, ED7. See also the Forty-Second (1889) and Fiftieth (1897) Annual Reports of the
Catholic School Committee, CAGA, ED9/2.
52 Holy Cross School, GCA, D-ED7/103/1/1, log book entry for January 1900.
53 See Aspinwall, Bernard. “Children of the Dead End: the Formation of the Modern
Archdiocese of Glasgow, 1815-1914.” The Innes Review, 43, no.2, (autumn 1992): 119144. See also McCaffrey. “Roman Catholics in Scotland in the 19th and 20th centuries.”
54 See for example St. Lawrence’s School Greenock, GCA, CO2/5/6/36/1, log book
entry for 31 July 1866; Albert Public School, Airdrie, GCA, CO1/5/5/2/2, log book entry
for 31 August 1893.
55 Achnarrow Public School, HCA, CI5/3/4a, log book entry for 16 May 1882. See also
Braes School, HCA, CI5/3/14a, log book entry for 21 May 1896.
56 St. Aloysius’ School, GCA, D-ED7/188/1, log book entry for 30 November 1888.
57 For the School of Cookery, see the Hill and Hogan Bequest Correspondence (18891903), GCA, T-HH4/3/1-3, and the Sederunt Book of Directors of the Glasgow School of
Cookery, GCA, T-HH4/1//1.
58 See Holy Cross School, GCA, D-ED7/103/1/1, log book entry for 20 December 1889.
59 See for example St. John’s Girls’ School, GCA, D-ED7/222/2/1, log book entry for 15
November 1895; and St. John’s Evening School for Girls, GCA, D-ED7/222/4/1, log
book entry, HMI Report, 1899-1900. See also McDermid, Jane. The Schooling of
Working-Class Girls in Victorian Scotland: Gender, Education and Identity. London:
Routledge, 2005, chapters 3 and 4.
60 See for example St. Andrew’s Boys’ School, GCA, D-ED7/192/1/1, log book entry
for April 1877; St. Margaret’s Boys’ School, GCA, D-ED7/161/1/2, log book entry for
January 1897.
61 St Joseph’s School, HCA, CI5/3/53a, log book entries for February 1873, May 1876,
and the HMI Report for 1898. See also McDermid, Jane. “Gender and geography: the
schooling of poor girls in the highlands and islands of nineteenth-century Scotland.”
History of Education Review, 32, no.2 (2003): 30-45.
62 See for example St Aloysius’ School, GCA, D-Ed7/189/1/1, log book report for 1899;
St Mary’s Girls’ School, GCA, SR10/3/894/2/1, book entry for 6 August 1897.
63 McCaffrey, “Roman Catholics in Scotland,” 298.
64 Skinnider. “Catholic Elementary Education in Glasgow”, 31.
65 See for example O’Hagan, The Contribution of the Religious Orders to Education in
Glasgow During the Period 1847-1918.
66 Wall, Alexander. “The Supply of Certificated Teachers to the Roman Catholic
Elementary Schools of Britain 1848-1870.” MPhil, Lancaster University, 1983, 289.
Bernard Aspinwall has drawn up a list of 195 women associated with Scotland who
trained at Mount Pleasant College in Liverpool, run by the Sisters of Notre Dame,
between the mid 1850s and early 1900s, which shows that 57 entered religious life, 67
married, 71 remained single and lay teachers: “Catholic Teachers for Scotland”, 89-101.
67 For the ratio of female to male teachers in board schools see Corr, Helen. “The sexual
division of labour in the Scottish teaching profession.” In Scottish Culture and Scottish
Education, edited by W.M. Humes and H.M. Paterson. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983.
68 Scottish Catholic Archives (SCA), Edinburgh, DE99/1, Catholic Education
Committee, 1906-07: November 1906 and February 1907.
69 Aspinwall “Catholic Teachers for Scotland”, 87. See also The Fifty-First Annual
Report of the Catholic School Committee, 1898, 4 and The Fifty-Third Annual Report of
the Catholic School Committee, 1900, 2-3, CAGA, ED9/2.
70 See Lowden, Kim. “Spirited Sisters: Anglican and Catholic Contributions to Women’s
Teacher Training in the Nineteenth Century.” PhD, Liverpool University, 2000, 316.
71 Aspinwall “Catholic Teachers for Scotland”, 87. See also O’Hagan, The Contribution
of the Religious Orders to Education in Glasgow, 243.
72 Holy Cross School, Crosshill, GCA, D-ED7/103/1/1, log book entries for 15 August
1898 and summary of HMI Report. The first ‘L’ in ‘LLA’ is usually taken to mean
‘Lady’, though this was never entirely clear. See Bell, Robert & Tight, Malcolm. Open
Universities: A British Tradition. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993, 78. It is
also referred to as “Lady Literate in Arts”: see for example Lindy Moore. “Women in
Education.” In Scottish Life and Society Volume 11: Institutions of Scotland: Education
edited by Holmes, 320.
73 The Forty-Sixth Annual Report of the Catholic School Committee, 1893, CAGA,
ED9/2, 13: ‘several’ was not quantified. See also O’Hagan, The Contribution of the
Religious Orders to Education in Glasgow, 246-47.
74 Report of the Committee of Council on Education in Scotland, 1891-92, 257. See also
the Report for 1902-03, 18, for the belief that the ‘higher culture’ gained at university and
not available in ‘any institution devoted to purely professional training … will greatly
help in maintaining the high standard which has always been a traditional characteristic
of Scottish education’.
75 Skinnider. “Catholic Elementary Education in Glasgow”, 39.
76 The Fifty-First Annual Report of the Catholic School Committee, 1898, 4, CAGA,
ED9/2.
77 Holder, Rev. Joseph. Basis for An Argument in Favour of the Better Payment of
Female Assistant Teachers in the Employ of the Dundee School Board. Dundee: John
Leng & Co., 1894, SCA, SM/13/43/2.
78 Burnett, Ray. “ ‘The Long Nineteenth Century’: Scotland’s Catholic Gaidhealtachd.”
In Out of the Ghetto?, 166-68. For the growth in Catholic elementary education and its
concentration in Glasgow and the West of Scotland, see the Report of the Committee of
Council on Education, 1902-03, 80-94.
79 Where possible, the reverend manager catechised the pupils in Gaelic. See for
example Eskadale R.C. School, HCA, CI5/3/39a, log book entry for 29 April 1874.
80 See Drummore Public School, Perth and Kinross Record Office, CC1/5/7/27, log book
entry for October 1876.
81 For the social origins of Catholic teachers, see the Fifty-Third Annual Report of the
Catholic School Committee, 1900, CAGA, ED9/2, 2. For the preference for university
educated teachers, see the Report of the Committee of Council on Education in Scotland,
1895-1896, 16-17, and 1902-03, 759-70. For a complaint about teachers ‘brought up in
English schools’ and as a result careless when marking registers, see the log book entry
for St John’s Girls’ School, Port Glasgow, 6 October 1888, GCA, CO2/5/6/3/1. See also
Cruikshank, Marjorie. A History of the Training of Teachers in Scotland. London:
University of London Press, 1970.
82 McPhail, I.M.M. The Crofters’ War. Stornoway, Isle of Lewis: Acair, 1989, 22, n.5.
83 Fitzpatrick. “Scottish Catholic Teacher Education: the wider context”, 60.
84 See the Report of the Committee of Council on Education in Scotland, 1891-92.
85 For efforts to undermine the stereotype see Gallagher, The Uneasy Peace, 23;
Carmichael, Kay. “Protestantism and gender.” In Sermons and Battle Hymns, edited by
Walker and Gallagher, chapter 11. Not all of the press was hostile to Catholics: see
Bruce, Steve et al. Sectarianism in Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2004, 22-23.
86 See O’Hagan, The Contribution of the Religious Orders to Education in Glasgow,
chapters 3 and 5.
87 See the annual Reports of the Religious Examination of Schools for the early
twentieth century, CAGA, ED7.
88 Skinnider. “Catholic Elementary Education in Glasgow”, 29, 32.
89 Fitzpatrick. Catholic Secondary Education in South-West Scotland Before 1972, 32.
The Report of the Committee of Council on Education in Scotland, 1902-03, shows that
there were 101Catholic students in training, all of whom were female, and two of whom
were attending Glasgow University.
90 McHugh. “The Development of the Catholic Community in the Western Province”,
76.
91 Rea, F.G. A School in South Uist: Reminiscences of a Hebridean Schoolmaster, 18901913. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1997, 81.
92 Limond, David. “The Female Experience of Schooling in Scotland, 1872-1945:
Lassies o’ Pairts or Lassies Apart?” PhD, Glasgow University, 1996, iii.
93 Memo of 23 November 1917 from the Ecclesiastical Managers, St Patrick’s School, to
Lord Skerrington, SCA, DE105/1.
94 O’Hagan, The Contribution of the Religious Orders to Education in Glasgow, 22.
95 Kehoe, Sara Karly. “Special Daughters of Rome: Glasgow and its Roman Catholic
Sisters, 1847-1913.” PhD, Glasgow University, 2005. The thesis cannot be consulted
without the author’s permission until July 2008. See her “Nursing the Mission. The
Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception and the Sisters of Mercy in Glasgow,
1847-1866.” The Innes Review, 56 (2005): 46-50.
96 Report of the Religious Examination of Schools, July 1880-July 1881, 14, CAGA,
ED7. Bernard Aspinwall has pointed out that it was common for Catholic
schoolmistresses to continue teaching after marriage: Aspinwall. “Catholic Teachers for
Scotland: the Liverpool Connection”, 89.
97 Ibid, 85.
98 Report of the Religious Examination of Schools, July 1909-July 1910, 9, CAGA,
ED7. The remaining principals were recorded with initials only. Whereas lay mistresses
were identified by surname and usually first name, this was generally not the case for the
sisters who taught. For another example, see York Lane R.C. School Accounts book
1889-1903, SCA, SM13/15, where the maximum number of un-named sisters who taught
there in the 1890s was three, whereas the names of lay mistresses, whose numbers
fluctuated between 10 and 13, are given.
99 Report of the Religious Examination of Schools, July 1912-July 1913, 6, CAGA,
ED7. ‘Untrained’ denoted former pupil teachers who did not go on to teacher training
college.
100 Dealy. Catholic Schools in Scotland, 162.
101 See for example Raftery, Deirdre & Nowlan-Roebuck, Catherine. “Convent Schools
and National Education in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Negotiating a Place within a Nondenominational System.” History of Education, 36, no.3 (May 2007): 353-65.
102 O’Hagan, The Contribution of the Religious Orders to Education in Glasgow, 12.
103 Dealy. Catholic Schools in Scotland, 162
104 Rev Brother Kenneth. Catholic Schools in Scotland 1872-1972, 11.
105 St John’s School, Port Glasgow, GCA, CO2/5/6/73/1, log book, 205: emphasis in the
original.
106 See McDermid, The Schooling of Working-Class Girls in Victorian Scotland.
107 See Corr, Helen . “Teachers and Gender: debating the myths of equal opportunities
in Scottish education 1800-1914.” Cambridge Journal of Education 27, no.3 (November
1997): 355-63.
108 For a discussion of the importance of schools to the Church’s strategy, see Hickman.
Religion, Class and Identity, 252.
109 See Anderson. Education and the Scottish People. See also Paterson, Lindsay.
Scottish Education in the Twentieth Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2003; McCrone, David. Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994.
110 See Ross, Andrew. “The Development of the Scottish Catholic community 18781978”. The Innes Review 29 (1978): 30-55 on the significance of the 1918 Act for the
Catholic community in Scotland in guaranteeing religious freedom, relieving financial
burdens, and contributing to the growth of a Catholic middle class.