52 Ancestors Week 35 – At work
I come from a long line of illiterate peasants. For hundreds of years, my forebears on both
sides were agricultural labourers. They worked
hard from an early age and had little or no formal education. Until the second half of the 19th
century, most of them could not read or write.
Had they all stayed where they were – in Ireland and England
– this would inevitably have improved with industrialisation and the move to
city life, but it was changed more quickly by migration to Australia.
The sons of my maternal great grandfather, Anthony Whitten (who
arrived in 1862) were all landowners and two sons became Methodist clergymen.
In my father’s family, it was Robert White, his grandfather,
who effected the real change. Like most
country children of the time, he left school at 12, but he never stopped educating
himself, and he instilled in his children and grandchildren an appreciation of
the value of education. His daughter
Alice, my grandmother, was determined that her children would have an education
and she sacrificed much to make sure it happened.
My father (Bill) was the first member of his entire extended
family to finish High School and the first to go to University. He was fortunate that Australian Governments,
for much of the 20th century, had a scholarship program for the
training of teachers. The scholarship
paid University fees and a small living allowance and the student was “bonded”
to teach with the Department of Education for a period of five years. He wrote in his memoir that he hadn’t really
wanted to be a teacher (he would rather have studied Law) but that as a country
boy from a poor family it was his only chance of higher education.
Thus we became a family of teachers. First my father and one of his sisters, then my two
sisters, my brother and I, and numerous cousins in the next generation all
benefitted from the Teachers’ College Scholarship.
Bill graduated from University with a B.A Dip Ed (Bachelor
of Arts and Diploma of Education) in 1934.
NSW was in the depths of the Great Depression, and the Department of
Education had been forced to make staffing cuts. Despite his “Bond” there was no job to go
to. He returned home to Lismore and
tried to earn some money. First he painted
his grandmother’s house and fence, then he went to his uncle’s dairy farm – a job
that gave him a lifetime loathing of cows and milk.
Then the Dept found him a teaching job. With a BA Dip Ed with majors in English and
History with a bit of Philosophy and Latin, he would have expected to teach
High School. Instead, he was appointed
to teach at The Channon, a small school in the hills about 12 miles from
Lismore. He was one of two teachers,
responsible for about 60 children, divided into two age groups. He taught the 6,7 and 8 year olds.
These were the children of dairy farmers and farm
labourers. Most of them came to school
having already risen at 4.00 am to muster cows for milking, then doing the milking
before catching the bus or riding their bicycles or horses to school. He recalled that they sometimes fell asleep
at their desks, and having so recently done those jobs himself, he was
understanding.
It is an irony that Bill, with
his University education, relied heavily during his two years at The Channon on
his great aunt Liddie, who was reaching the end of a long teaching career. She had commenced teaching under the old “pupil
teacher” system and by this stage was mistress in charge of Bill’s old primary
school at South Lismore. She had no
formal Teachers’ College training but was extremely experienced, and generous,
and Bill survived two years at The Channon with her help.
Bill’s career took him next to Woodburn, also not far from
Lismore, and then to Quirindi in the North West of NSW where he met Mum. He moved back to the city – to Sutherland High
School – to help with the wartime teacher shortage, and then from there he and
Mum went to Young, in the south west.
Somehow during the next nine years, during which they had four children,
he managed to complete a Masters’ degree in History as a part-time student.
Like bank employees, teachers
were expected to move regularly if they wanted promotion. The whole family moved to Glen Innes in the
north of NSW in 1954. Here Bill would
meet perhaps his greatest mentor, Frank Moroney, who was his boss as Headmaster
of the High School. Years later, when he
became a Principal himself, he often approached an issue by asking himself, “What
would Frank do?”
Country schoolteachers were expected
to be involved in their community. In
Glen Innes Bill became part of a major civic exercise – the building of a
Children’s Library. The physical
building was done by the Apex Club; Bill’s role was to chose and buy the books,
and then prepare them for borrowing by adding them to the catalogue and assigning
a Dewey decimal number. For my elder
sister and me, then aged about 12 and 9 and both avid readers, this was
heaven. We got first access to the books,
painted the numbers on the spines, and worked in the library when it opened
after school each day.
In 1960, Bill made his last move –
to Dubbo in the Central West. This was
to become home for the rest of his life as he was first Deputy, then Principal,
of Dubbo High School and chose to stay in the city after his retirement in
1973.
Because we lived in country towns
with only one school, both my older sister and I were in classes taught by our
father. We were lucky – he was a great classroom
teacher. He also became a wise and thoughtful
administrator who was much loved and admired by students and colleagues. The boy who hadn’t
really wanted to become a teacher enriched the profession by his 39 years of
commitment.
Bill Gleeson - about 1962
