The David Gribble Archive : Talks

My Apprenticeship

Leipzig , 2006
Page 4

Fourth Chapter: Dartington Hall School

My first impression of Dartington was simply colour. At Repton the boys had to wear grey suits, but in Dartington the girls wore clothes of all colours, and so did the boys.

I felt myself in some ways to be younger than the students. They were more self-confident than I was, and more at ease with the opposite sex.

To my astonishment I found that in spite of that I was better respected here that at Repton. At Repton a teacher had to assert himself in order to get any artificial respect, but at Dartington there was no need for that. It was the opposite. You had to earn respect rather than demand it, and the respect you earned was genuine.

One more story. Not long after my arrival at Dartington a string quartet from the nearby music school came to give a concert one evening. I went along, and when I came into the room I saw children sitting about everywhere on the floor, or backwards on chairs, chatting and laughing loudly. The four music students stood at the end of the room, tuning their instruments. At Repton such a scene would have been considered highly impolite and disrespectful, and I wondered whether I should demand that everybody should sit in straight rows and keep quiet. Luckily I didn’t do anything, and when the young woman playing the first violin turned towards the children, and announced that they were now going to start with some piece or other, everyone was immediately quiet and listened attentively.

This behaviour was actually perfectly understandable. They had only come because they wanted to hear the music. Why should they sit uncomfortably on chairs, in rows, when they could hear just as well if they were lying comfortably on the floor?

There is so much that we want to force children to do, because it fits in with adult ideas, and that is not only unnecessary but also harmful, because the grown-ups have to be fussily authoritarian. “Sit straight on your chair.” “Your name is written too small.” “No eating in lessons – spit it in the bin.” “Hands out of your pockets.” And so on.

I have commented that at Repton a genuinely friendly relationship between staff and students was impossible. At Dartington I used to take groups of young people out in my car at the week-ends, to go for walks. An eighteen-year-old girl called Jenny Davies, was particularly often one of the party. We fell in love, and a year after she left school we got married.

From Jenny I learnt a great deal. She had been a pupil at Dartington for thirteen years, and understood the school well. One of the most important things I learnt from her was the idea the people are more important than things. The story of the thermometer at my first school could have taught me that – our learning was more important than the broken thermometer – but that was an exception. Jenny showed me, that when a child breaks something, the child must be cared for first, not the broken object. This is so obvious to me now that I can hardly believe that I haven’t always known it, that there are still some people who don’t know it, but unfortunately it is clear that a great many teachers and almost all politicians have a completely different opinion.

A. S. Neill from Summerhill said that above all, he wanted children from his school to be happy. Jenny wanted above all that our children should be kind. In my opinion she was right.

Jenny died from a twisted intestine when she was only twenty-four years old.

I thought, one third of my life is gone, but I still have our children, and I still have my job at Dartington. Dartington was as important to me as that.

Dartington, however, was also not immortal. Almost thirty years later I had remarried and luckily the four children in our family had already finished with the school. A new head teacher was appointed who did not understand the school at all. He tried to assert himself and immediately aroused strong opposition from the staff as well as from the students. In order to suppress this opposition he wrote a letter to all the parents, in which he announced that he had unearthed the following crimes at the school: abuse of alcohol, abuse of drugs, under-age sex, organised burglary and witchcraft.

There was no witchcraft, the burglary was a break-in at a nearby restaurant, where the children had stolen pizzas and cakes, but the three other accusations could not be denied. They were not a big problem, but they happened. The head teacher called the police into the school to look for drugs. They arrived with their dogs and did not find any. According to the police there was no problem at the school which was not to be found in every other school in their patch.

The head teacher’s letter got to the press, and for the summer months the school was perpetually in the headlines.

Then one boy found a picture of the head-teacher’s wife, topless, on the cover of a book of Beatles songs. He photocopied this picture and stuck it to his back at the end-of-term party, and the head teacher saw it. First he kicked him, and then he said, “That is not my wife.”

This event too appeared in the papers, and The Sun, a paper with a bad reputation, found the woman’s agent and then discovered that seven yeas earlier she and her husband, the head teacher, had posed for pornographic photographs. Then, at last, he resigned, but it was too late. He had only been head of the school for one term, but he had completely destroyed its reputation. Three or four years later the school’s trustees closed it, against the wishes of the pupils, the staff and the parents.

My last lesson from Dartington was similar to a lesson from Eton – if you have power, you do not need to act fairly.