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Key Workers: Toward an Occupational History of the Private Music Teacher in England and Wales, c.1861–c.1921

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2020

Dave Russell*
Affiliation:
Independent Scholar, Halifax, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
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Abstract

Making particular use of material drawn from the Census of England and Wales, this article confirms that music teaching was above all an urban activity, increasingly dominated by women, albeit with some local variation, and that the highest provision of teaching was invariably in middle-class areas. Seaside resorts and suburbia were especially prominent market locations by the early twentieth century, with the south-east particularly favoured. The often-derided part-time teacher is shown to have been a key figure in working-class communities. While teachers showed little interest in formal professionalization, it is argued that they were probably better paid than has been assumed and were able at least to maintain a social position within the lower-middle and skilled working classes that most were born into. Although women's careers were frequently short, for a growing minority, music teaching was a serious career option. It is suggested that teachers met contemporary needs rather more effectively than some have claimed.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 The Royal Musical Association

The publication of Cyril Ehrlich's magisterial study of the British music profession in 1985 ushered in a body of rich scholarship on the topic.Footnote 1 For all this rewarding work, however, the music teacher remains a rather shadowy figure, flitting in and out of wider narratives but infrequently surfacing in his, or, more normally, her own right. Moreover, as David Wright has observed, music teaching is ‘conspicuously absent from conventional musical histories’, despite its being ‘essential to a flourishing musical culture’.Footnote 2 When historians have engaged with the topic, they have tended to focus on problems and deficiencies. In regard to the Victorian and Edwardian periods considered here, Ehrlich has drawn attention to ‘an ever-expanding army of importunate teachers, pleading for [the] custom’ of aspiring musicians. Paula Gillet argues that ‘each young woman who chose the path of music-teaching was joining the ranks of a vast proletariat of underpaid and often poorly qualified, exploited workers’, while David Golby has identified ‘a culture of self-perpetuating mediocrity and a devaluation of skills’ as hallmarks of much teaching practice.Footnote 3

This relative neglect and negative tone are unfortunate. Teachers, as defined in census returns, comprised almost half of the total music ‘profession’ (a term explored later) in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries and, indeed, formed a substantial majority in most suburbs and smaller towns. They were central to the nation's musical life, the first resort for most aspirants to musical education, crucial figures in the emerging system of musical examination and often influential in the wider musical life of their localities. This study aims to begin a process of reappraisal by building toward the collective biography so essential to an understanding of the teachers' role and function. It falls into two broad sections: the first outlining the demography of music teaching in terms of its size, geography and social structure; the second examining career patterns and working practices. More widely, such an occupational history allows for rewarding consideration of the role played by class, gender and geography in the shaping of Victorian and Edwardian musical environments. The article is not concerned with pedagogical issues, although some thoughts are offered on the relationship between the social and cultural role of music teaching and the quality of the tuition that resulted. It certainly does not purport to full-scale revisionism; plentiful evidence can be found for the negative assessments noted above. However, it aspires to a more nuanced view than is currently available and will hopefully help open up avenues for future research.

The focus is on the private music teacher, working in, or from, his or her own premises and earning income from tuition of individual pupils.Footnote 4 Beneath this apparently unproblematic description, however, lie several difficulties. The range of ability and experience within music teaching was vast, extending from ‘the humble tyro giving lessons in a terrace house drawing room, to the exponent of some internationally famous “method” running a London studio’. Eric Mackerness's observation is given telling specificity by the presence in the 1901 Census of England and Wales of teachers as diverse as Louisa Pyne, a leading English soprano who ran a singing academy in North Kensington with her similarly eminent husband, tenor, Frank Bodda, and Ellen Butterworth, the 15-year-old daughter of a Darlington engine driver.Footnote 5 Generalization is thus often difficult. At the same time, apparently neat categories were in reality frequently blurred. Many ‘private’ teachers were also employed in conservatoires and schools, with the balance between the different elements of their work sometimes leading to interesting conflicts of interest: a key factor in the closure of the City of Leeds School of Music in 1911 was the loss of fees resulting from its staff ‘poaching students for private tuition’.Footnote 6

More fundamentally, the division between ‘teachers’ and ‘musicians’ has always been extremely permeable. As numerous writers have noted, either preference or economic necessity has resulted in most musicians teaching at various stages of their career. Many teachers, especially males, were, indeed, simply regarded within their localities as jobbing musicians or musical ‘general practitioners’ as one journal termed them. Although, for example, Harold Vauzey Richardson appeared as a Halifax ‘music teacher’ in the 1901 and 1911 censuses, his press obituary discussed this period in terms of his work as an Anglican organist and choirmaster and musical director of a local theatre.Footnote 7 The flexibility of contemporary labelling is further demonstrated by changes in individual self-designation; Fitzwilliam English, another Halifax resident, termed himself a ‘professor of music' (a teaching category in contemporary parlance, particularly favoured by males) in 1901 and a ‘professional musician’ in 1911, despite little obvious change in his work.Footnote 8 Nevertheless, for all this untidiness, the necessity of completing a return for the Census of England and Wales required all musical practitioners to choose a label that best reflected the balance of their work and/or self-image. It is with those who opted for the descriptors ‘professor of music’ or ‘music teacher’ that this study is concerned.

The census looms large in what follows, providing much of the underpinning statistical data and helping define the chronology. It has been carried out decennially from 1801 and findings are currently in the public domain for the period up to and including 1911. Although Marie Kent's recent study of the English piano-making industry provides a welcome and exemplary exception, the census remains underutilized by historians of music despite its representing an unparalleled source of information on music and its allied professions at national, regional and local levels.Footnote 9 Much of this has long been available in the published reports that followed each census but the appearance of material in electronic form has greatly extended research potential. In particular, the easy availability of census schedules (the documents recording the vital demographic statistics of the inhabitants of every household and currently available for each census from 1841 to 1911) has much enhanced the possibilities for analysis of birthplace, social origins, age and other key facets of any occupational study.Footnote 10 Moreover, the 1881 and 1911 censuses can now be searched electronically by occupation, thus partially removing problems arising from the fact that the categories of ‘teachers’ and ‘musicians’, treated separately until 1861 and again from 1921, were amalgamated into a single grouping in the intervening period.Footnote 11 Reasonably accurate figures for teaching numbers in 1881 and 1911 can now be offered for the first time.

Despite these developments, 1861 and 1921 have been adopted here as chronological boundaries that allow for the drawing of worthwhile conclusions about the size, distribution and nature of the music-teaching profession over a substantial period of time. This choice is partly practical for, while some macro-data on teachers can be derived electronically for 1881 and 1911, the detailed, processed local and regional information crucial to this study is currently only to be found in the published documentation of 1861 and 1921. The resultant period is also coherent, commencing when music teaching had become a fully established commercial cultural activity and ending in the last decade before teachers, and the music profession in general, had to face the transformation wrought by technological change associated with the gramophone, broadcasting and sound cinema.

Like any source, the census has specific problems and limitations and, beyond a range of more general issues, two in particular face the historian of the private music teacher.Footnote 12 The most important is its almost exclusive concern with full-time occupations. Alongside the teachers recorded in the census existed an army of part-timers who may well have matched and perhaps even outnumbered their full-time counterparts: the high level of piano ownership noted below suggests that full-timers alone could not have met burgeoning demand.Footnote 13 Viewed as a threat both to standards and to the economic viability of ‘bona fide professors’, part-timers were often the victims of considerable hostility from the contemporary musical establishment and have received scant and sometimes equally dismissive attention from historians. Although a difficult group to penetrate, they are discussed wherever possible here and should play a far more central role in future histories of music teaching. The second issue concerns the difficulty in proving an exact measurement of the number of full-time private practitioners. By 1921, the census categorized all individuals as ‘employers’, ‘employed’ or ‘working on their own account’. In that year, approximately 6,000 music teachers, almost 30% of the total number, were recorded as ‘employed’.Footnote 14 While a number of these would have been essentially ‘private teachers’ in that they married self-employment with some form of educational work, some will have been permanently salaried staff in educational institutions undertaking little or no private work. As there is no way of disaggregating this group from the whole, all statistical analysis in the ensuing discussion uses the overall total figures given for teachers at both national and local level. This is unlikely to have affected general conclusions made, but may colour the picture drawn of levels of teaching provision in certain settlement types.

Although every attempt is made to operate at a properly national level, this research emerged from an entirely different project focused on the West Riding of Yorkshire and the town of Halifax in particular, and the traces of this are, fruitfully it is hoped, undoubtedly evident. It should also be noted that while the census data relates to England and Wales, Welsh teachers (and musicians in general) only ever comprised about 4–5% of the profession as a whole and do not appear to have demonstrated any distinctive characteristics in terms of the issues debated here. England, then, is decidedly the focus.

The structure of the music-teaching profession

Numbers

The growth of the music profession was one of the most striking cultural features of the nineteenth- and earlier-twentieth centuries with a full-time practitioner existing for every 750 members of the population in the especially propitious period from 1890 to 1914. To place this in context, in 1911 there were only slightly fewer musicians (47,000) than policemen (53,000), almost exactly the same number as there were postmen, and more than twice as many as there were railway guards (21,000). Music teaching was a critical element of this rapid expansion and the number of music teachers listed in the census rose from 3,054 in 1841 to 22,635 by 1931, a threefold increase in terms of the ratio of teachers to population (Table 1); the greater part of this rise occurred between 1861 and 1911. Growth patterns pertaining to part-timers probably reflected those of their professional counterparts, although a slight time lag to accommodate a rise in working-class incomes and the development of the second-hand piano market is likely.

Table 1. Music teachers and musicians as recorded in the Census for England and Wales, 1841–1931.

1841185118611871188118911901*191119211931
All Musicians and teachers (in thousands)6,69311,20315,02118,63125,54638,60643,24947,11643,94148,515
Music Masters and Mistresses (teachers)3,0545,1235,55512,000+19,000+21,36922,635
Teachers as % of music profession46463747+40+4947
Population of England and Wales (in millions)15.917.920.022.725.929.032.536.037.839.9
Ratio of teachers to population1: 5201: 3,5001: 3,6001: 2,158+1: 1,894+1: 1,7701: 1,760
Ratio of all musicians and teachers to population1: 24,1091: 1,6001: 1,3301: 1,2201: 1,0101: 7501: 7501: 7601: 8601: 800

Notes: *Ehrlich's Music Profession, Table 1, 235, a standard source, is incorrect for this year; + Estimated figures: The figures for 1881 and 1911 are drawn from electronic sources and there appear to have been a small number of cases where individuals have been wrongly attributed to these particular categories or there has been double counting. The ‘total numbers’ given here are thus rounded down to the nearest thousand in partial compensation. Figures in later columns are derived from these rounded numbers.

As with the enormous expansion of leisure pursuits more widely during this period, rising incomes and increases in leisure time were of fundamental importance, but music also had the distinctive benefit of enjoying a well-established role as a vehicle for the respectable and ‘improving’ education (especially for young women) so enthusiastically sought across the Victorian and Edwardian social spectrum.Footnote 15 Girls and young women studying piano always comprised the biggest single group of music students, forming ‘an overwhelming majority of examinees’ attending the local centres of Trinity College and the Associated Board, as well as the much criticized but heavily patronized ‘proprietary colleges’, returned to later.Footnote 16 (A social history of the music student remains an urgent task.) In this favourable climate, teaching opportunities were legion. Tuition in singing, violin and theory was relatively easily available and every instrument from banjo to bassoon had its teachers, although it is probable that much instrumental teaching beyond piano, organ and violin was undertaken by ‘musicians’ adding to their incomes. As already suggested, however, it was the growth of piano ownership that proved critical. Ehrlich has estimated that by 1910 there were between 2 and 4 million pianos in Britain, one for every ten to 20 of the population. As families sought both an outlet for musical expression and the respectability and opportunity for social emulation that the piano provided, the piano teacher became an essential fixture of the cultural landscape.Footnote 17

Gender

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the role of music in women's lives, the single most striking demographic feature of this rapidly expanding occupation was its reconfiguration in predominantly female form. As has been frequently observed, music teaching provided an excellent opportunity for Victorian women seeking a socially acceptable route to some degree of financial independence. Music was generally deemed a social good and as teaching was in essence a ‘private’ occupation undertaken either in the tutor's own house or in the relative safety of the pupil's, it was largely resistant to concerns about women's advancement beyond their ‘correct’ domestic sphere. Ideologically, at least, music teaching was an ideal female occupation and its enthusiastic embrace by women was absolutely fundamental to its growth. While representing only 24% of teachers recorded in the 1841 census, they comprised 45% of the total number in 1851 and 56% by 1861. While later developments are partly obscured by the nature of the census categorization, analysis of the electronic record suggests that by 1881 their share of the profession was already a little over 70%. In just four decades, women had moved from minority to clear majority, a position that was never to be threatened. By 1921, the figure stood at 77%.

While the process of feminization undoubtedly forms the central narrative, subtle geographical variations can be observed. Male teachers only slowly and incompletely ceded dominance in the desirable market locations of central London; although women made up 60% of the city's teaching force in 1861, they comprised only 40% in prosperous St George/Hanover and Marylebone while, conversely, they were found at above average levels in the far less lucrative East End and its neighbouring communities. These modest but telling imbalances had not entirely disappeared by 1921. Several of London's wealthiest boroughs had a female share somewhat below the capital's overall average of 78%, with the number falling as low as 66% in both St Marylebone and Paddington, while the albeit very small teaching communities of the East End recorded shares well in excess of that average: Poplar's stood at 91%. In a rather different setting, there is also evidence that male teachers remained well entrenched in the textile regions of industrial west Yorkshire and east and central Lancashire. In 1921, women comprised 67% of teachers in the West Riding of Yorkshire and 68% in Lancashire when the national average stood at 77%, with four towns, Halifax, in Yorkshire and Rochdale, Burnley and Bolton in Lancashire, forming the only English communities with populations at or above 100,000 in which men formed a majority of the teaching population; that share reached 64% in Halifax.Footnote 18 This gender balance differed significantly from that appertaining in most other major industrial communities, even within those two counties. Males formed only 19% and 16% respectively of the trade in the port cities of Liverpool and Hull, 13% in the shipbuilding town of Barrow (the lowest of all towns detailed in the census) and 20% in Sheffield, dominated by steel. Further afield in the shipbuilding and mining towns of County Durham, males comprised only 15% of teachers in Sunderland and South Shields and a similar proportion in the railway town of Darlington. Only certain towns in the Black Country and the Potteries, notably West Bromwich (38%) and Stoke (34%), came close to the model of ‘textile’ Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Partial explanation might lie in local working-class female employment patterns and especially the oft-noted difference between the favourable female labour market in textile communities and the far more restricted one in areas of ‘heavy’ industry.Footnote 19 Simply put, women were perhaps most likely to opt for a full-time music-teaching career in areas where job opportunities were at their lowest and least likely to do so where employment was more plentiful. Not the least attraction in the latter areas was the possibility of combining full-time paid employment with part-time teaching. A 1908 trade directory, for example, listed amongst those advertising as music teachers in Bradford, Edith Bayfield, a burler and mender in a worsted factory, Margaret Hemingway, a worsted twister, and Sarah Sutherall, a stocking knitter.Footnote 20 As will be discussed below, however, only a minority of women music teachers were drawn from working-class backgrounds and an argument centred on female manual employment has clear limits. It is also important, therefore, to consider the perspective of male teachers. The Yorkshire and Lancashire textile districts were nationally recognized as major centres of popular music-making (they were at the absolute core of the national brass band and choral cultures), and in an area where musical accomplishment carried such high status, teaching may have offered an untypically prestigious male career avenue.Footnote 21 It is by pursuing such local complexities that a richer understanding of past musical worlds can be reached.

Origins and social structure

Most teachers were British-born, women almost exclusively so and such foreign practitioners as there were, were mainly to be found in London. In 1861, the census recorded only some 350 European-born teachers, just 6% of the total number, and 60% of them, with Germans and Italians comprising much the largest groups, were based in the capital.Footnote 22 Equivalent figures for 1921 are unavailable but the situation is unlikely to have changed markedly. Communities generally met their own expanding market for teachers; eighty percent of teachers working in Edwardian Halifax and district, for example, were born within ten miles of the town.Footnote 23 Only London, the largest cities and certain resort towns, often major centres of inward migration, attracted any significant influx of external talent. Manchester's aptly named Alice Tinkley and Brighton's Dorothy Crosskey might suggest that some teachers were pre-destined for the profession and a significant minority were certainly born into it, although professional musicians no longer supplied the next generation to anything like the extent they observable in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. Rohr's analysis of some 720 musicians in that period showed that 80% were themselves the children of musicians, but that figure may have fallen as low as 10–15% by the late nineteenth century.Footnote 24 In general, teachers simply took up the occupation in the manner of anyone entering the job market and seeking to match skills and interests with the hope of reasonable remuneration.

Music teachers are too numerous to allow for a comprehensive study of their social origins. Sampling has therefore been adopted, with a focus on the established, mature profession of the Edwardian period. When this research commenced, the electronic returns for the 1911 census were not searchable by occupation. Sampling (subsequently referred to as Sample One) took the form of a random examination of some 500 individuals initially identified in listings of teachers in a geographically diverse selection of trade directories and then analysed through census schedules.Footnote 25 On the activation of the electronic search facility, Sample Two, a systematic sampling of 380 teachers, was undertaken. In effect, every fiftieth teacher and professor listed in the census returns was surveyed.Footnote 26 Both samples have used the standard criterion of father's occupation as the key indicator of social background with that occupation recorded, where possible, when their child was teenaged. This was felt to provide the best general indication of social background.

In broad terms, the two samples show close correlation. What is especially striking is the narrowness of the social stratum from which most teachers were drawn. The upper and upper middle classes furnished less than 5% of teachers, with the number falling as low as 2% in Sample Two; interestingly, the children of higher professionals such as lawyers and doctors were almost entirely absent in each case. At the other social extreme, only 1–2% emerged from the semi- and unskilled working class. Teachers came disproportionately from within a social range embracing the skilled working class and lower middle class, with the latter group making a particularly notable contribution. Some 55–60% of teachers were drawn from lower-middle class backgrounds, with the children of self-employed tradesmen, small businessmen and shopkeepers especially prominent; clerks, commercial travellers and lower or para-professions such as elementary teachers were also well-represented. The skilled working class in its turn produced between 25% and 30% of the teaching profession. In many ways, these findings might have been expected. Music teaching (and musical occupations more generally) lacked sufficient social status to appeal as a career to the wealthiest members of society, while the poorest will have found access to it, in terms of facilities, equipment and training, highly problematic. The social groups to which teaching appealed were precisely those that had both sufficient economic capacity and social need to opt for an occupation that offered respectability and a good chance of at least maintaining existing social status while holding out hope for potential economic enhancement and upward social mobility.

One interesting difference between the samples can be identified. While they broadly concur in their measurement of the overall working-class presence within music teaching (29% in Sample One, 24% in Sample Two), they show a divergence suggestive of notable gender differences at regional level. While the systematic Sample Two found only modest gender difference, with 23% of women teachers coming from working-class backgrounds as opposed to 29% of their male counterparts, Sample One generated figures of 25% and 43% respectively. The explanation for this difference probably lies in the flawed (although perhaps fortuitously so) design of Sample One. This was intended to provide a reasonable geographical spread and thereby surveyed teachers from Durham, Yorkshire, Birmingham, London and its environs, South Wales, Bristol and Cornwall. In retrospect, this choice gave far too much weight to industrial areas, but the unbalanced nature of the sample has demonstrated the possibility that music teaching attracted higher numbers of working-class men in such regions. In Halifax, 62% of male teachers (22 out of 35) active between 1901 and 1911 whose social origins are traceable, came from working-class backgrounds, a percentage far above even the average posited in Sample One. While more work is needed to secure this argument, it seems probable that music teaching's potential to generate increased social and economic standing held particular attraction to working men in industrial England.

Geography

As this and the earlier discussion of gender demonstrates, geographical variation was a marked feature of music teaching and its major manifestations are explored in this section. As Table 2 demonstrates, the enhanced market opportunities afforded by large concentrations of population ensured that full-time music teaching was most frequently an urban activity, with the largest numbers always found in the largest cities and towns. In 1861, London, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol and Birmingham collectively provided 50% of the entire teaching population of England and Wales. By 1921, that figure had fallen to just over 20% but size continued to matter, with seven of the ten most populous English provincial settlements featured amongst the ten towns with the largest body of teachers. Music teaching existed beyond urban areas, but thinly populated rural counties were always amongst the worst provisioned; Herefordshire, an admittedly extreme case, recorded just two teachers (and only 22 musicians) for its population of some 120,000 in 1861.

Table 2. Music teachers in London and the next ten best-provisioned urban centres by total number, as recorded in the census, 1861 and 1921.

PlaceNumbers, 1861PlaceNumbers, 1921
London2,158London2,940
Liverpool216Birmingham496
Manchester and Salford184Liverpool473
Bristol119Bristol360
Birmingham103Manchester347
Leeds93Sheffield252
Brighton66Portsmouth212
Sheffield57Plymouth209
Norwich49Leeds208
Hull46Hull165
Newcastle-upon-Tyne36Nottingham157
Plymouth and Devonport36

London's dominance remained one of the outstanding aspects of English musical geography. The longevity and scale of that hegemony has been well established, with Rohr noting that over 50% of the 5,500 musicians included in her collective biography of musicians active from 1750 pursued their careers in the capital.Footnote 27 By 1861, London housed 39% of the nation's music teachers, a ten-fold advantage over its nearest rival. The sheer scale of provision is forcefully demonstrated if the city is disaggregated and its constituent districts treated as distinct settlements. The registration districts of Pancras, with 272 teachers, and Marylebone (219) would thereby emerge as having the nation's two single biggest teaching communities, while no fewer than six London districts would feature in a listing of the nation's ten best-served locations.Footnote 28 As late as 1921, London still housed six times as many teachers as Birmingham, its closest challenger.

Important as brute numbers are, however, they tell only a limited story. A subtler picture emerges if the ratio of teachers to population becomes the main tool of analysis, allowing for much closer consideration of the distribution of teachers according to settlement type. The single most obvious point to emerge is that provision was directly related to levels of disposable income within individual communities, with the best teacher–population ratios invariably coincident with the presence of a substantial middle-class element and the worst with their virtual absence. While this is unsurprising, the link between music teaching and social class has generally been left unconsidered despite the consequences that follow for our understanding of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century musical life.

London provides striking evidence of the class-inflected nature of provision. Capturing social tone within the capital is never straightforward, with pockets of extreme poverty often located within wider areas of equally extreme wealth, but clear patterns do emerge. Rohr's painstaking reconstruction of the geographical distribution of London's Georgian musical profession demonstrates that communities to the west of the City of London, blessed with numerous theatres and entertainment venues, distinct areas of genuine wealth and significant constituencies of the ‘middling sort’, provided a far more suitable milieu for musicians than the essentially lower-class areas to the east.Footnote 29 This division still appertained in 1861, with eight London registration districts, all to the west and north of the City, enjoying teacher–population ratios below 1:1000 at a time when only two other locations in England and Wales attained that figure (Table 3) and the national average stood at 1:3600. Conversely, another six, running westward from the inner districts of the East End across to Southwark, had ratios in excess of 1:5000, with St George's-in-the-East home to a mere four teachers, exhibiting one of 1:12222. By 1921, although some equalization had occurred, there was still substantial differentiation. While Hampstead to the north-west could boast 190 teachers and a teacher–population ratio of 1:453 (the nation's best), proletarian Shoreditch in the east had only ten, a ratio of 1:10424.Footnote 30 It must be stressed that there was no absolute correlation between degrees of wealth and levels of teaching provision. While Hampstead was undoubtedly an extremely wealthy borough in 1921, the cultural predisposition of a resident community that contained London's highest number of professionals per capita as well as the second highest body of artists and a large quota of journalists, may have proved the ultimate arbiter.Footnote 31

Table 3. The ten provincial locations (populations of 20,000 and over, teacher populations of 15 or more) with best ratios of teachers to population, 1861.

PlaceNumber of teachersPopulationRatio of teachers to overall populationCategory of town
Canterbury2521,3241: 852Cathedral city
Cambridge2926,3611: 909Cathedral and university city
Bristol119154,0931: 1,294Commercial, port city
Brighton6687,3171: 1,322Seaside resort
Norwich4974,8911: 1,528Cathedral city and regional capital
Wakefield1523,1501: 1,543Cathedral city and county town
Bath3452,5281: 1,544Spa resort
York2540,4331: 1,617Cathedral city and railway centre
Ipswich2337,9501: 1,650Regional capital and port
Oxford1627,5601: 1,722Cathedral and university city

Away from the capital, while the settlement type most favourable to teachers changed over time, the presence of a substantial middle-class, or, at least, white-collar element, remained the key prerequisite. In regard to the largest cities and towns, those with a substantial commercial sector, always sources of significant professional and clerical employment, invariably enjoyed far better teacher-to-population ratios than their more obviously industrial counterparts. Of the locations with the largest teaching numbers in 1861 listed in Table 2, the port city of Bristol exhibited a ratio of 1:1294 compared with 1: 3248 in the manufacturing town of Sheffield and, although the differential is not so striking, the ratio in Liverpool, ultimately a commercial port city, stood at 1:2055 in comparison with 1:2501 in more industrialized Manchester and Salford. By 1921, the differences were less extreme and the exact situation within and between cities had altered, but Bristol (1:1189) still enjoyed the best ratio, Liverpool (1:1697) continued to outperform Manchester (1:2104) and Leeds (1:2203), with a substantial manufacturing sector, was the worst provisioned of the provincial locations listed. Especially at the earlier date, the commercial-industrial imbalance was also apparent beyond the major cities and led to interesting variations between towns that superficially might look similar. In ‘cotton’ Lancashire, Preston, an unofficial county town in the eighteenth century and still clinging to many of the cultural institutions and structures associated with one in the mid-nineteenth, boasted 24 teachers and a ratio of 1:3457, while Oldham, slightly larger but lacking Preston's earlier social standing, had just three and a ratio almost ten times higher.

The best teacher–population ratios, however, were rarely to be found in these larger urban settings. While the larger towns and cities of the north and midlands featured strongly in the rankings for 1861 and 1921 based solely on gross numbers, none of them survive into Tables 3 and 4 which list the ten provincial towns with the highest teacher-population ratio in those years.

Table 4. The ten locations with best ratios of teachers to population, including London, 1921.

PlacePopulationNo. of teachersRatioCategory of town
Hampstead86,1531901: 453London borough
Folkestone30,650611: 528Seaside resort
Harrogate38,885681: 571Inland spa resort
Bexhill20,363351: 581Seaside resort
Weston-Super-Mare31,643541: 585Seaside resort
Bedford40,242681: 591County town
Eastbourne62,0281011: 614Seaside resort
Hornsey87,6591421: 617Greater London suburb
Hove46,505721: 645Seaside resort
Bournemouth91,7611371: 669Seaside resort

Table 3 has been constructed from analysis of certain of the 70 ‘principal towns’ for which the 1861 census report provides detailed sets of occupational data. In order to avoid possible distortions arising from very small numbers, only those towns that had both populations above 20,000 and a teaching body of 15 or more have been considered.Footnote 32 The table has a decidedly pre-industrial flavour, with smaller regional capitals, and especially those that were also cathedral cities, continuing to exhibit a prominence already enjoyed for at least a century. Rohr notes that eighteenth- and earlier nineteenth-century cathedral cities ‘had a somewhat higher proportion of musicians’ and argues that, while the easy availability of church employment may have been an influence, ‘an added factor was probably the social structure of these towns, which included enough middle-class families to support a small community of performers and, especially, teachers’.Footnote 33 Of the ten locations listed here, six could be described as cathedral cities, even if their functions went beyond that single label, while Chester, Exeter, Gloucester and Lincoln were also extremely well provided for. The distinctive social complexion identified by Rohr undoubtedly remained the critical factor in this relative wealth of provision both in these cities and the other settlements tabulated.

By 1921, the census provided occupational data on over 260 ‘principal towns’ and Table 4 illustrates the substantial changes had occurred by that year.Footnote 34

While Hampstead heads this list, London's wealthier districts no longer dominated as they had in mid-century, with no other London borough appearing amongst the 30 locations with the best teacher–population ratios and only five in the leading 50. Similarly, none of the ten premier provincial locations of 1861 retained their positions and, indeed, only three, Oxford (24th), Brighton (38th) and Cambridge (44th), would feature in a listing of the leading 50 settlements. It was now the seaside resort, or, at least, its more exclusive representatives, that emerged as the single most propitious environment for music teachers. Alongside the six seaside towns listed in Table 4 (and the Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate adds a seventh resort), another nine were ranked amongst the top 50 locations. The prominence of Brighton and Bath in the 1861 rankings demonstrates the importance of the longer established leisure resorts within the mid-Victorian musical landscape but it was the emerging settlements of the later nineteenth century that now featured so strongly. While seaside resorts have long been acknowledged as key sites for the employment of professional musicians, the enhanced role of the music teacher has largely gone unnoticed.Footnote 35 In this instance, resident populations rather than visitors drove demand. As the leading historian of the seaside has argued, Victorian resorts ‘were centres of wealth and conspicuous consumption, and had more than their fair share of comfortably-off residents’, scoring highly on almost any indicator of affluence from the ratio of people per room, to numbers of female servants employed and the percentage of residents in self-employment or managerial roles.Footnote 36 One of the few potential market limitations was the generally lower than average presence of schoolchildren that resulted from the high populations of single women and the growing popularity of resorts as retirement locations. However, this was largely offset by the fact that many resident children would have occupied a social milieu in which music lessons were particularly prized, while captive pupils existed in the many private schools that flourished in such settlements; in the 1890s, Brighton had at least 125, Hastings 70 and Eastbourne 67.Footnote 37 Some will have employed their own specialist music staff and, returning to the earlier discussion of accurate measurement of teaching numbers, their presence may exaggerate the actual extent of private provision in resort towns. The importance of such settlements to the private teaching market nevertheless remains clear.

Affluence also typified the more prosperous Greater London suburbs that had emerged over the course of the nineteenth century and which were only slightly behind resort towns as major employers of teachers. Although Hornsey is the only representative to appear in Table 4, another five were amongst the 20 best-served locations while 16 of the leading 50 locations were in suburban London.Footnote 38 Many provincial suburbs also enjoyed high teacher-to population ratios. Suggestive here are the presence amongst the best-provisioned 50 locations of Sutton Coldfield (27th), a commuter town for Birmingham, and Wallasey (35th), which included the resort of New Brighton but was also a dormitory for Liverpool. It is also significant in this context that the largest single town in England and Wales to achieve a place in the leading 50 was the London-facing dormitory town of Croydon (ranked 26th).Footnote 39 In something of a continuity from 1861, a number of county towns including Bedford (7th), Tunbridge Wells (15th), Cheltenham (17th), Winchester (20th) and Taunton (29th) also feature quite notably.

Unsurprisingly, the lowest levels of provision were found where large working-class communities predominated.Footnote 40 The paucity of provision in the poorest parts of London has already been noted and the industrial settlements of the north and midlands were also frequently badly served. Professional music teaching had certainly become an ever more sustainable career option in such places from the mid-nineteenth century; Oldham, for example, boasted 28 teachers by 1921. Nevertheless, specialising as a teacher in such locations represented a considerable risk and ratios fell well below the national average. Smaller industrial communities remained largely without provision even by 1921, with mining communities particularly bereft. The Derbyshire urban district of Ilkeston recorded not a single teacher to serve its 32,000 people, the Lancashire coalfield towns of Ince and Hindley only one and two respectively and their Staffordshire compatriot, Cannock, just three.Footnote 41

As might be expected from these distribution patterns, music teaching, as with so much cultural life, was marked by a strong North–South divide. This is not to deny Ehrlich's argument that, with reference to the music profession as a whole, the location of provincial employment shifted over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from its earlier strongholds such as Bath and Norwich ‘to the industrial midlands and north’.Footnote 42 These areas in combination saw their combined share of the musical profession increase from 34.8% in 1861 to 40.1% in 1891, before falling back slightly to 37% by 1921. In terms of teachers specifically, the figure rose from 31.5% in 1861 to 37.7% by 1921.Footnote 43 These were relatively modest rises and only slightly ahead of the 3% increase in the population share of the north and midlands to 1921, but rises they were.

However, they do not signify any fundamental shift in the cultural balance of power. The fall in London's share of the teaching profession from 35% to 19.5% over the period has been noted, but these figures are for the administrative county of London and, as one official commentator noted in 1921, that had ‘long ceased to enclose, with any approach to completeness, the aggregation of districts which jointly make up the Metropolis’. London was now better understood, he suggested, in terms of ‘what is known as Greater London, the area covered by the City of London and Metropolitan Police Districts’.Footnote 44 While the census returns do not allow for the gathering of data for that exact area, it undoubtedly formed part of an especially fertile teaching market. The south-east of England was the only region showing a major increase in teaching numbers between 1861 and 1921, with the counties of Essex, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey and Sussex collectively seeing their share of the profession rise from 11% to 23.9%. Middlesex's teaching force increased fivefold over this period and Essex and Kent also experienced impressive rises. By 1921, a ‘greater’ London comprising the administrative county of London and the four contiguous counties of Middlesex, Essex, Kent and Surrey housed only 24% of the population of England and Wales but 31% of its music teachers. If the neighbouring counties of Sussex, Hampshire and Hertfordshire are added, the respective figures for this ‘Home County’ block stand at 30% and 40%. A raft of other statistics demonstrates the extent of south-eastern dominance. Of the 20 English communities with the best teacher–population ratios in 1921, only three, Harrogate, Weston-Super-Mare and Cheltenham, were outside it. Again, of the 57 towns where this ratio fell below 1:1000, 22 were in Greater London as formally defined and another 17 in one of Essex, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Kent and Sussex. Conversely, only 12 were in the north or midlands, an area that also housed 15 of the 20 communities with the poorest provision, all exhibiting ratios of above 1:5000. Music teaching was a national phenomenon but it tended to speak with a southern accent.

Before ending this discussion of distribution, it is important to give further consideration to levels of teaching provision for the working class. Much of the discussion above might suggest that working-class communities were effectively musical deserts and that the music lesson was peculiarly a middle-class phenomenon. Both propositions would be highly misleading. The smaller industrial towns of the north and midlands in particular were frequently marked by strong traditions of popular voluntary musical culture, most notably in the form of the brass-band and choral movements. Ince and Hindley, for example, were located in an area of west Lancashire that produced a number of brass bands in the late nineteenth and early centuries, with the best known, Wingates Temperance Band, winning the British Open and coming third in the National competition in the census year of 1921. Tom Burke, a leading English operatic tenor of the 1920s, the son of an Irish migrant collier and who himself spent his early working life in manual work, was another local product. Similar detail could be given for industrial Yorkshire, the north-east colliery districts, the pottery towns of Staffordshire and the valleys of south Wales.Footnote 45

In such regions, music teaching was frequently delivered collectively within a specific context shaped by the demands of musical competition and distinctive forms of instrumentation, and provided by experts drawn from within their specific field. However, while these associational cultures are the form of popular music-making best known to historians, a growing working-class musical constituency was formed from the late nineteenth century by those purchasing pianos (bought second-hand or via hire purchase) in order to facilitate the domestic performance that was ‘perhaps the most usual way for a [working-class] family to enjoy its leisure time together’.Footnote 46 While Wright is correct to argue that the ‘economically hard-pressed working or artisan classes [were] the social classes least likely to afford systematic music lessons’, there were clearly significant numbers at this social level who did seek tuition. Between the extremes of Hampstead and Ilkeston, there were many gradations. In 1921, London suburbs with large working-class populations such as Walthamstow and Edmonton had teacher-population ratios only modestly above (Edmonton at 1:2226) or even slightly below (Walthamstow at 1:1597), the national average of 1:1770.Footnote 47 Again, trade directory listings for Lancashire and Yorkshire suggest a reasonable level of teacher clustering in, or close to, areas with substantial skilled working-class populations. Halifax's Irene Brown, the daughter of a Halifax print worker, pupil of local teacher Jonathan Daniels and winner of the piano sight-reading class for the age range 14–16 at the 1912 Blackpool Music Festival, was probably exceptional for her talent rather than her social background.Footnote 48 Some working-class musicians continued to receive tuition beyond adolescence although the most ambitious were sometimes forced into dependency on the generosity of others. When, in 1913, Walter Widdop, later a leading British operatic tenor but then a Halifax dyehouse worker, was faced with a charge of one guinea for half an hour's singing tuition, his workmates combined to fund his early lessons. Later, dressed in his workday clogs, Widdop visited local wool merchants to canvass sponsorship for further classes.Footnote 49

However, the extent to which there was demand for the services of full-time music teachers from the working-class market generally did not match, at least in monetary terms, that generated higher in the social scale. Many working-class individuals instead relied on tuition from family and friends, class teaching through mechanics’ institutes and similar bodies, the much criticized ‘cheap’ teachers plying their trade at the lower end of the profession and, above all, the part-timer. Pariah for many contemporary teachers and their spokesmen, the part-time teacher was actually a necessity within the world of popular musical instruction. This point will be returned to later.

Careers in music

While the census provides a powerful central source through which to reconstruct the essential architecture of the teaching profession, the occupational conditions and culture that individual teachers experienced and created have to be approached through a rather more scattered and patchy body of material. Although music teaching was frequently touched upon in a variety of contemporary publications including the music press, obituaries, autobiographies and the reports of bodies such as the Incorporated Society of Musicians, coverage was often episodic and can rarely be interrogated systematically. Moreover, individual business records relating to fees, student numbers and hours of work are rare. This section therefore offers a provisional view which future local and regional research, not least in the local press, so often the historian's richest resource, will hopefully deepen and refine.

Entry, pay and conditions

New recruits encountered remarkably few financial barriers to entry. According to Henry Fisher's 1888 survey of the profession, a ‘very large majority of teachers’ taught in their homes, from which it follows that the only significant potential expense incurred would be the purchase of a piano (or other relevant instrument) if the home did not already possess a suitable one. This form of home-working had obvious consequences. ‘Complaints from neighbours are frequent’, one teacher reported to Fisher, who himself expressed gratitude for ‘the long-suffering and kindly nature of the English people, as piano practice must be, in many cases, an unmitigated nuisance’.Footnote 50 A small number adopted the more sociable but expensive option of working in town-centre ‘studios’ or adapted their homes to provide proper music rooms, with Bradford-based teachers, husband and wife, Samuel Midgley and Henrietta Tomlinson, building one measuring 40 by 14 foot in their substantial semi-detached villa.Footnote 51

With no agreed mechanism or generally accepted level of qualification in place, educational barriers to entrance also were low. The traditional route of apprenticeship was still exercised in the 1850s and 1860s, although it became ever less common in the expanding market economy.Footnote 52 The number of colleges and conservatoires grew considerably from the late Victorian period and although their alumni undoubtedly helped swell the teaching body, they were probably not a major line of supply outside of its higher echelons. Most practitioners began after only minimal formal training. John Shinn (b.1837), originally a cabinet-maker in London's Clerkenwell, will have been one of many teachers who took only a few short courses of organ and piano study in his entire career: ‘all the rest I did by hard work’. Shinn was also far from untypical in beginning as a part-timer, building a body of pupils in the 1860s from within the congregations where he worked as organist and choirmaster.Footnote 53 By the late nineteenth century much concern was expressed that young women were commencing teaching immediately upon achieving a basic level of certification from one of the many examination-awarding bodies. One strident supporter of formal music-teacher registration claimed it a ‘well known fact that seventy-five per cent of all the pupils who pass these small tests start immediately teaching in opposition to the properly qualified teacher’.Footnote 54 While this sounds exaggerated, it is undeniable that many new entrants began and, as will be discussed, often remained, at this level of qualification.

Teaching loads and remuneration levels varied enormously according to individual circumstance. For the ambitious, the conscientious and the financially hard-pressed, teaching was highly demanding. At the height of his private practice in the early 1900s, Manchester-based teacher, Walter Carroll, taught about 50 pupils each year. It is unclear how frequently they attended for lessons (and some were correspondence students) but this was a heavy and challenging schedule given that a significant part of his work, which had to be married with part-time duties at the Royal Manchester College, involved preparation for external undergraduate and doctoral examinations.Footnote 55 Long hours were the norm, with those teaching large numbers of younger pupils forced to work in evenings and at weekends, while, for some, travel added a further burden. Although most teachers were home-based, in certain contexts a peripatetic approach was essential. This could be lucrative, with Robert Janes, organist at Ely Cathedral from 1831 to 1866, building a large teaching connection as he toured rural Norfolk and Suffolk on horseback. More commonly, travel was the necessary lot of those lacking suitable premises, reputation or equipment. Fisher noted that home visiting was a practice more common in early career, while Gillet has seen it as a particular burden of the young female teacher.Footnote 56

Were earnings commensurate with such effort? Fees were typically levied by a ‘term’ or ‘quarter’ comprising anything from ten to 13 weeks, with the length of individual lessons ranging from 30 minutes to an hour. While many practitioners were only too anxious to decry the excessively low charges at the bottom end of the trade – the sixpenny lesson (or cheaper) was a feature of much outrage in the music press – they were decidedly coy about what might be a more acceptable level. Rohr has noted that as early as 1851, a ‘respectable London professor’ could earn between £400 and £800 per year. Given that £300 a year was ‘frequently mentioned as a minimum necessary for the normal range of middle-class expectations’ according to one leading historian of early Victorian Britain, such individuals were in an extremely privileged position.Footnote 57 For those in the upper reaches of the profession, rewards could be extremely high. One soprano recalled Sir Henry Wood charging £3 an hour for tuition in the early 1920s and while this is likely to have an exceptional figure, it suggests that leading teachers with full pupil lists potentially could command annual incomes of several thousand pounds.Footnote 58 At a less elevated but still well remunerated level, Walter Carroll had begun taking private pupils while studying music at Owens College in Manchester, and his income from their tuition alone rose from £104 in 1893 to £499 in 1902 and £616 by 1913. This was a far cry from the 5/- a week he had earned as a warehouse clerk in the 1880s.Footnote 59 However, at the very bottom, earnings could be at or below even modest working-class income levels. In 1910, during bankruptcy proceedings against Demas Rotheray, a Bradford music teacher of 26 years standing, it was announced that his earnings had never exceeded 12/- a week and that he regularly had to supplement them by performing at a local hotel.Footnote 60 Here truly was a member of Ehrlich's army of the importunate.

Rotheray, however, was not typical. Although normal earnings were probably far closer to his level than Carroll's, most teachers enjoyed an income level somewhat above the Bradford teacher's pitiful rate. Ehrlich has seen low income as the norm for most teachers. Speaking of the 1920s and 1930s, he argues that ‘few were likely to have earned more than £100 a year: below the wage of a domestic servant, above that of a shop assistant’. This interpretation seems largely based on the experience of teachers in working-class areas charging 1/- a lesson and struggling ‘to cram forty lessons into a week and earn £2′.Footnote 61 However, as demonstrated earlier, many teachers, a majority in some communities, taught in decidedly different social locales. Poverty, genteel or otherwise, might have knocked in the music rooms of Folkestone, Harrogate or Wallasey, but not necessarily too loudly or too frequently; these were good environments within which to sell musical services.

Moreover, it is likely that a majority of practitioners, irrespective of location, earned beyond the bare subsistence level Ehrlich posits. In 1920, the Union of Music Teachers, a trade union more or less exclusive to the Liverpool area, was recommending that members charge a minimum of £1–5/- for a ten-week term of 40-minute lessons, the equivalent of 2/6d a lesson. A teacher with 30 pupils would have earned just under £4 a week under such arrangement.Footnote 62 Obviously, many charged below these recommended levels: the union expressed disappointment that some 40% of its members charged below one guinea a term, although it did not record how low rates might fall. These figures represent only a single snapshot taken at the very end of the period under consideration, and are problematic in that they are drawn from a short-lived moment of economic prosperity that it is likely to have seen at least some fee inflation. However, they do suggest a reasonable level of remuneration for many; 60% of the Liverpool teachers surveyed were, after all, charging at least one guinea (2/- a lesson). Generalizations about wage and salary rates is always problematic, but in the inter-war period the vast majority of the male working-class earned up to £150 a year, while male weekly-paid salaried staff such as clerks received about £200 a year.Footnote 63 It would not be unrealistic to assume that at around 1921, most teachers were placed in the income brackets typically enjoyed within the skilled working and lower-middle classes into which so many of them had been born. Significantly, although the highest paid teachers were generally male, women teachers appear to have been better served than their peers in the wider workplace where, typically, they were paid at about half the male rate. Although more research is required, there is little evidence of such a major gender differential within the general body of the teaching profession.

It should also be noted that teaching income could be supplemented from other musical sources, including stipends for work as organists and choirmasters and fees for examination, performance and the training and conducting local musical organizations. These often time-consuming opportunities sometimes came at the expense of standard teaching, thus increasing incomes only slightly, and they fell largely to male teachers. Overall, however, while individual situations could be perilous, full-time music teaching was not an unattractive financial proposition for many.

Career length

While numerous factors might shape individual teaching careers, gender was the dominant structural determinant. David Golby has described music teaching for women as ‘most often a stopgap prior to marriage, after which many would sacrifice their work and freedom for relative financial security’ and much evidence supports this claim.Footnote 64 Teaching could certainly also be a short-term option for men. Halifax's Arthur Jowett was recorded as a wiredrawer in 1881, a publican in 1891 and a music teacher in 1901 but was again a wiredrawer by 1911. His local compatriot Hervey Jowett (no relation) had returned to the grocery trade by 1911, after a brief spell as a music teacher around 1901. However, while initial employment outside of teaching was a common experience for male teachers, such relatively brief teaching careers were unusual. Nineteen of the 29 Halifax male teachers active between 1890 and 1914 whose occupational histories are fully traceable had spent at least ten years in the profession by 1911, with 13 active for at least double that period. Women's occupational histories were markedly different as is highlighted by the census data on age profiles presented in Tables 5 and 6. Here women can be seen to have both entered and left the profession at a much earlier stage than their male counterparts.

Table 5. Structure of music teaching by age, 1861.

Age range15–20–25–30–35–40–45–50–5960–6970–7980+
Men
Number114316359364310276219285147539
%4.612.814.614.812.611.28.911.65.92.10.3
Women
Number50980353735526922016917059102
%16.425.817.311.48.67.05.45.41.90.30.1

Source: Based on CEW, 1861, Population Tables, vol. ii, ‘Ages etc.’, Tables xix and xx, pp. xlvii, lvii.

Table 6. Structure of music teaching by age, 1921.

Age range14–1920–2425–3435–4445–5455–5960–6970+
Men
Number641526911,0641,411583711243
%1.33.014.021.628.611.814.44.9
Women
Number9152,4864,4963,5512,7109331,060299
%5.515.127.321.516.45.66.41.8

Source: Adapted from CEW, 1921, Occupational Tables, Tables 2 and 4, pp. 32, 101.

This was particularly marked in 1861, with 16% of women teachers still in their teens, 42% under 24 and nearly 60% under 30: only 13% were over 45. In comparison, only 32% of male teachers were under 30 but almost 30% over 45. These broad patterns were still discernible in 1921.

Although there were far fewer female teenage entrants to the profession (disruption to traditional gender employment patterns between 1914 and 1918 may have had an impact), female teachers were still generally far younger than their male equivalents, with some 48% aged under 34 in comparison to just 18% of men. Indeed, by this stage there is strong evidence of an ageing male profession, with the percentage of males aged over 45 doubling from approximately 30% to 60% across the period; young men were perhaps eschewing what was now so definitively a female preserve.

Some female careers were simply ended by a move to another occupation. Both Ellen Butterworth, the fifteen-year-old encountered earlier in this study, and her peer, Elsie Metcalfe of Halifax, were recorded in the 1901 census as music teachers but had become, respectively, a confectioner and a shorthand typist by 1911.Footnote 65 For most women, however, as in society more generally, marriage was the defining moment. As in the wider world of employment, young, unmarried women always predominated. In 1921, just 7.7% of full-time women teachers were married, somewhat below the married women's national employment participation rate of 13.7%.Footnote 66 An individual such as Bradford's Mary Longthorpe, still teaching in 1911 after nine years of marriage and the birth of two children, were rare creatures indeed. There is some evidence that women married to music teachers were well-represented amongst the ranks of those continuing to work, with the woman possibly seen as much as helpmate as independent practitioner. Another 6.2% of women teachers in 1921 were widows, most of whom had taught full- or part-time earlier in their lives and who found teaching a respectable and reliable way of earning money.

For all this necessary emphasis on women's early entry and departure, it should be stressed that, from the later nineteenth century, a growing minority did come to enjoy lengthy careers. While, as noted, only 13% of female teachers were over 45 in 1861, by 1921 that figure had increased to 30%. These bald statistics capture the experience of women such as the Elizabeths Hawkins of Halifax and Walker of Bradford, recorded as music teachers at every point in the 40-year census cycle between 1871 and 1911, Hull's Florence Carlton, 24 years old when recorded as a music teacher in 1891 and still advertising in trade directories in 1921, and her fellow-townswoman Emma Aaron, aged 22 in 1901, and still active in 1933.Footnote 67 For these (single) women at least, music teaching offered a genuine career rather than a short-term enterprise.

Part-timers

The emphasis so far has been upon full-time practice. Historians have clearly been aware of the parallel world of part-time teaching, but have paid it little attention. This neglect stems partly from a relative paucity of evidence but also from a tendency to accept a little too easily the criticism of the ‘semi-professional weed’ that pervaded Victorian and Edwardian musical discourse.Footnote 68 Ehrlich is too thoughtful a chronicler to indulge in caricature but his reference to ‘clerks and other incompetents [who] took pupils in their spare time’, is nicely in tune with contemporary voices but risks merely repeating them.Footnote 69 ‘Part-time’ or ‘semi-professional’ covered a multitude of teaching experiences. Especially in small towns, individuals sometimes adopted what were effectively ‘dual’ careers. In the 1901 census, for example, Walter Wilson of Clitheroe, in Lancashire, was described as a ‘music teacher and coal dealer’, while Robert Racher of Barnard Castle, Durham, went one trade better and appeared as a ‘shopkeeper, watch repairer and teacher of violin’. In most communities, teaching was invariably a supplementary activity for tuners, instrument dealers and makers and others in the music trade. In general, however, a part-time teacher had another entirely separate full-time occupation but taught in ‘spare’ time.

Some can be identified through trade directories, where, typically, perhaps 10–20% of those advertising as teachers had an entirely different occupation recorded in the census. They were usually drawn from a similar social range as their full-time equivalents. In the first decade of the twentieth century, directories for Halifax record, inter alia, the proprietor of a small ironworks, an insurance agent (peripatetic and enjoying flexible schedules, insurance agents featured quite strongly among the part-time ranks) a retired woolsorter and a warehouseman. An elementary head teacher advertised his music-teaching services in Midhurst, Sussex, as did an iron moulder in Camborne, Cornwall and a bookbinder and an ironworks labourer (two brothers) in Darlington, Durham.Footnote 70 At the same time, most directory listings included women for whom the census records no profession but who were clearly exercising a degree of the respectable independence that teaching allowed.

The vast majority of part-time teachers, however, did not trouble with directories, becoming known through the local, working-class communities into which many of them were born. Just occasionally, their lives can be glimpsed within autobiographies and oral history testimony. Kathleen O'Loughlin, born in Hull in 1896, was the daughter of a seaman who later deserted the family and a mother who worked in a variety of manual jobs. Kathleen took lessons from the age of nine and began teaching at 16 in order to supplement her income as a domestic help. Working from home using a Schiedmayer piano bought on hire purchase, and charging the inevitable sixpence per lesson, she quickly attracted seven pupils. As winter approached and parents became reluctant to allow children out at night, she began home visits for an increased fee of 9d. In her turn, an anonymous part-time teacher born in Keighley, West Yorkshire in 1908, was the daughter of an iron moulder and worked as a half-timer in a textile mill before becoming a cotton spinner on leaving school. After taking lessons from a family friend, her teaching began in adolescence when a neighbour asked her to instruct her daughter so as to prevent the girl from ‘go[ing] through town’ for lessons.Footnote 71

Both these young women were classic penny capitalists, joining the ranks of the part-time bakers, hairdressers, gardeners and others so central to the landscape of the urban working class.Footnote 72 Their work dovetailed into the needs of the local community, servicing a youthful clientele with some musical aspirations but whose parents were unwilling to allow them to venture too far afield and unable to afford the fees of all but the cheapest full-timers. The sixpenny lesson was clearly well below an acceptable minimum for most in the profession but, for the working-class consumer, it represented a realistically priced product broadly in line with that demanded for other popular leisure activities. From the teacher's perspective, these earnings were a vital supplement to family incomes. Kathleen's older sisters had worked at a printer's for a weekly wage of 4/6d on leaving school and she was able to match that in just a few hours a week.Footnote 73 The financial appeal of such work must have been hard to resist.

Professional status

For full-time teachers in working-class communities Kathleen O'Loughlin and her kind represented a genuine economic threat. They also presented a serious problem for those seeking to elevate teachers and musicians more widely to the status of professionals. The major thrust in this direction came from the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM), founded as the Society of Professional Musicians in Manchester in 1882 and incorporated ten years later. From its original provincial base it grew to become a national body with headquarters in London advocating the ambitious aim of raising the standing of music as close as possible to that of law and medicine. At the heart of its activity was the desire for a rigorous system of teacher registration that would clearly demarcate the serious professional from the many pretenders at large.Footnote 74 The ISM provided (and continues to provide) many important services to its members. Samuel Midgley, for example, recalled with great pleasure the annual conferences where a programme of concerts, business meetings and a lively social life ‘left little time for sleep’ and brought musicians from various backgrounds into fruitful interchange.Footnote 75 However, it failed singularly in its central aims and that failure reveals much about the nature of contemporary music teaching.

The thwarting of plans for registration owed much to what Ehrlich has aptly described as the ‘anarchic proliferation’ of examinations and qualifications that had emerged in the nineteenth century.Footnote 76 Wright has helpfully distinguished between the ‘formative’ qualifications, essentially the certificated grade exams intended for students, and the ‘summative’ professional diplomas aimed at their teachers and it is the latter that are important here.Footnote 77 A relatively small number of teachers, almost always men, obtained undergraduate and postgraduate music degrees (usually awarded externally), while below this level an ever denser thicket of qualifications of varying value developed. The most demanding and prestigious were the fellowships and licentiateships available through the increasingly popular system of non-resident, local examination.Footnote 78 Trinity College London, which offered its first such award in 1875, and the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, founded in 1889, were the main providers, although other bodies including the Royal College of Organists and the Incorporated Society of Musicians offered similar qualifications, with the RCO's especially highly regarded.Footnote 79 However, there was no absolute agreement on which qualifications amongst this plethora of awards might be the most desirable for teachers and, with only few exceptions, no specific awards were aimed directly at teaching as an activity. In the words of Musical Opinion, registration schemes were ‘impossible because the teachers do not exist. There is at present no real training of music teachers and no provision for certification.’Footnote 80

From the 1890s, the issue was complicated yet further with the emergence of the proprietary colleges seeking to take advantage of the contemporary enthusiasm for examination and certification.Footnote 81 The London and Victoria Colleges of Music were the most prominent but there were many like them, limited companies almost entirely lacking in the rigorous mechanisms and procedures demanded by leading boards. They were often little more than qualification factories selling mainly lower-level certificates for pianists, although some ‘advanced’ awards were also offered, along with a pseudo-professional paraphernalia of often expensive hoods, gowns and robes. There was, too, a blatant parading of fake, purchased or misleading qualifications. In a highly publicized libel case in 1892, ISM activist Arthur Akeroyd succeeded in proving that Stocks Hammond, fellow Bradford music teacher and prospective head of a local branch of the Victoria College of Music, had only an honorary degree from an American University, a fellowship of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries and Licentiateship of London College of Music Ltd, rather than the bona fide degree, Fellowship of the Society of Arts and qualification from Trinity College, London, that his post-nominal letters had been designed to suggest.Footnote 82 The colleges were vigorously resisted by the ISM, the Union of Graduates in Music (founded in 1893), the major examination-awarding bodies and sections of the press led by the Musical News (edited by the secretary of the Union of Graduates) and Jerome K. Jerome's satirical weekly, Truth. Discussing the 57s 6d required for the full regalia of the Birmingham-based National Academy of Music, Truth mused in 1902 as to whether ‘there are many people, even in Birmingham, sufficiently idiotic to array themselves in such garb’.Footnote 83 The spread of the colleges, however, would suggest that both they and individuals associated with them were able to resist much of the criticism. Hammond continued to teach and undertake other musical activity in Bradford quite successfully, while a number of leading journals including the Musical Times continued to accept advertising and publish pass lists from the colleges until the early 1920s.Footnote 84 Indeed, it is possible that discussion of the proprietary problem simply generated bad publicity for the profession generally, with potential customers ever less sure of whom might be trusted amidst a bewildering sea of abbreviations.

Numerous other problems faced the professionalizing lobby. The part-timer, whose very existence challenged the claim that teaching expertise was the exclusive property of his/her full-time peers, has already been noted. Again, although small private colleges grew in number from the later nineteenth century, the individual nature of most private practice hindered a collective approach.Footnote 85 However, the greatest difficulties were cultural, with music teaching simply lacking the social profile necessary for a putative profession. Rooted ultimately in the lower middle class, it had too much of the grocer's shop and the tradesman's counter about it to establish a social tone commensurate with aspiration to professional status. Yet more troublesome was the numerical domination of women. Rohr has argued that the long association of music with femininity has been ‘perhaps the most serious obstacle to the achievement of unequivocal professional status’ and the intensely feminized environment of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries in which women predominated amongst both teachers and taught was hardly conducive to an elevation in the overall standing of music teaching.Footnote 86 Women faced the double burden of enduring the hegemony of the male minority within the profession's albeit limited organizational structure, while also being held responsible for teaching's lower than desired social position. Although women were granted membership of the ISM from 1884 and comprised almost half of its membership by 1914, both the organization's ruling General Council and the panel of examiners administering its professional qualifications were entirely male by that date, while it was not until 1956 that the Associated Board finally countenanced women examiners.Footnote 87

At the same time, women's numerical domination generated a contemporary narrative associating them with poor standards and defining them as a brake on aspiration to improved status. Particular attention was paid to the working-class girls and young women who were deemed the prime target for the proprietary colleges. In 1898, Musical News discussed how easily a ‘person, say an ambitious mill-hand girl who has had a few lessons on the pianoforte, and has purchased one of the diplomas lavishly issued by the irresponsible musical certificate distributing companies’ could masquerade as a competent teacher ‘in the eyes of the ignorant public’.Footnote 88 This specific criticism could sometimes expand to embrace a wider discontent with women teachers more generally and one that was long-lasting. Writing as late as 1950, music educationalist J. Raymond Tobin drew what he termed a ‘sorry picture’ of the earlier twentieth-century private music teacher.

A suburban side street; a dull, drab house of the terrace type; a ‘front parlour’, musty and morgue-like, and boasting an upright or ‘cottage’ piano…and a faded, jaded woman struggling to convert a child of no particular mental or musical-artistic aptitude into a passable pianist…and, for the teacher, this trial and error process was a source of pin-money, or, at best, an uneasy and uncertain livelihood.Footnote 89

Tobin, a long-time editor of the Music Teacher, was knowingly propagandist, providing a striking context against which to chart the subsequent improvements generated by his fellow expert (often male) professionals. Nevertheless, that his embodiment of an unambitious and flawed profession came in female form suggests a deep-seated anxiety about women's impact.

This narrative was deeply unfair in that it both equated poor-quality teaching with women and cast them in an intellectually and physically unflattering light, the ‘faded and jaded’ denizens of ‘musty and morgue-like’ homes. The anxieties underpinning it, however, did indeed highlight a genuine problem. Quite simply, young women embarking on what they expected to be relatively brief careers were unlikely participants in a wider occupational project. Indeed, even as individual teachers, they sometimes retreated from public view. They were, for example, surprisingly under-represented within trade directories, with evidence drawn from the Yorkshire city of Bradford a case in point. In 1861, when the national census recorded the existence of ten women teachers, all 23 individuals listed under the category of ‘Music Professors and Dealers’ in White's Directory of Bradford were men. The numbers of women advertising grew gradually from the 1880s, but as late as 1923, two years after the census returned 97 (68%) of the city's teachers as women, the local Post Office Directory, recorded only 37 women teachers, just 34% of the total listed. While the territory covered by the directories did not directly map onto the census-registration district and directories were never remotely intended to capture entire occupational groups, this lowered visibility is striking. Despite all the obvious advantages offered by directories, women often opted not to utilize them. Whether this stemmed from an internalization of male leadership, a collective lack of self-confidence or simply a preference to work through a network of personal contacts and pupil recommendation is unclear, but it suggests a preoccupation with immediate neighbourhoods and narrow concerns.

Lack of interest in a collective search for raised status was hardly a feminine preserve, however. For all its efforts, the ISM signally failed to build a numerically significant membership. Its 1460 members in 1914 amounted to less than 3% of the music profession in its entirety. Other attempts at the formal organization of teachers specifically, were even less effective. The Music Teachers' Association, founded by Royal Academy professor, Stuart Macpherson, in 1908, had only 11 branches in 1920 (including six on the English south coast) and the Liverpool trade union noted earlier lasted only two years and does not appear to have been replicated elsewhere.Footnote 90 Teachers also appeared to lack any substantial interest in professional self-improvement.Footnote 91 This is nowhere clearer than in the poor level of qualification generally demonstrated. For all the spread of higher-level summative qualifications discussed earlier, there are plentiful clues that they were held by a distinct minority. By the early twentieth century, only about 10–15% of teachers cited qualifications of any type, including lower-level certificates, in trade-directory listings, a forum in which the chance to impress potential students would surely have been taken.Footnote 92 The published membership lists of the ISM are also revealing. Given the organization's desire to serve as definer and defender of high standards, members might have been expected to take full opportunity to parade hard-earned qualifications. However, as late as 1914, only slightly more than 50% of members listed a degree or recognized fellowship and licentiateship against their name.Footnote 93 The organization was not the exclusive domain of teachers and the existence within it of many musicians for whom formal qualifications were irrelevant obviously affects these figures. Nevertheless, fewer names with qualifications appear than might have been expected. Perhaps nameplates and professional cards told a different story, as may future detailed analysis of the career paths of the thousands of ARCMs, LRAMs and others suitably qualified. From current evidence, however, educational advancement does not appear to have been essential to career advancement and the appetite for it was thereby rationed. It is also clear that commercial self-interest often trumped any aspiration to professional purity with the ISM forced to pass a bye-law in 1905 expelling members who worked for proprietary colleges or who entered students for their examinations.Footnote 94 Work was to be taken where it was found.

Social status and social mobility

For all the limitations to collective progress and elevation, the individual social standing of teachers was often reasonably high. Teaching had the capacity to confer respectability and, if not professional status, then at least some occupational standing. Wright has argued persuasively for the growth of the properly managed certificated musical examination from the later nineteenth century as ‘the single most important factor transforming the status of music teachers’, with examination board successes, often well publicized in the local press, both an objective measurement and potent symbol of competence and skill.Footnote 95 Similarly, male teachers especially were often extensively involved in high-profile aspects of local musical culture through their work as organists, conductors of choral and orchestral societies and as specialist tutors at local schools, and such work can only have added to their store of cultural capital within their communities.

Teaching was probably more frequently a career that maintained existing social standing rather than raising it, although that in itself was a useful function. For a significant number, albeit still a minority, teaching could also lead to a modest rise in social status and perhaps even a genuine degree of upward social mobility. Men, a little more likely to be drawn from working-class backgrounds than their female counterparts and more likely to have undertaken manual work before commencing teaching, were probably the main beneficiaries. The processes involved were complex. The mere fact of a manual worker or the child of one becoming a music teacher did not necessarily have a significant impact on the overall social milieu in which he existed. In the Halifax area, for example, Henry Akroyd (b. c.1847), John Bates (b. c.1851) and Simeon Pickles (b. c.1853) had undertaken manual trades until their twenties and thirties (Akroyd was a cotton spinner, the other two, cloth finishers) and all three were still living in working-class communities in 1911. Moreover, their children and other family members were largely in manual occupations. When Akroyd began teaching in the 1880s, all three of his working children were millworkers and two daughters remained so in 1911, while during the early stages of Bates's teaching career in the 1890s, his wife still worked as a worsted weaver. In 1901, Pickles's children included a shoemaker, an engine fitter and a draper's assistant. For such individuals, teaching offered, if not significant social mobility, then at least the crucial change in status given by white-collar employment, combined with a range of possible rewards including the exchange of industrial discipline for the independence offered by self-employment, greater job satisfaction and (probably) increased earnings.

For some, however, upward mobility was a genuine outcome. Fellow Halifax teacher Jonathan Daniels was born to a general labourer and his wife, originally a worsted twister, in 1881. By 1911, now a L.R.A.M. and well established as a teacher, he was living in a substantial middle-class suburban development, with two ladies of private means and a cork merchant as his neighbours. In 1912, he took a post as an organist in Blackpool where he remained until his death in 1946, combining this with teaching and concert work as an accompanist.Footnote 96 Social mobility, of course, does not merely imply movement between classes and one final Halifax teacher, William Eckersley, showed a not uncommon upward movement within the middle-class, his teaching career taking him, the son of a commercial clerk, from a book-keeper's office in a dye works to residence in a street of middle-class professionals and the employment of a live-in servant.

Examples of enhanced social status for women can certainly be provided by individuals such as Jarrow's Sarah Washburn, Mary Lilley, of Ripley, Derbyshire and Birmingham's May Jones, daughters of an engine fitter, coalminer and toolmaker respectively, and all teachers of at least 20 years standing by 1911. While Gillet's observation quoted at the outset that young female recruits were ‘joining the ranks of a vast proletariat of underpaid and often poorly qualified, exploited workers’ draws helpful attention to the undeniable problems that awaited those at the lower end of the trade, the pointed use of the term ‘proletariat’ surely overstates the case and deflects attention from the positive aspects of teaching. It is likely that most kept their place within the lower-middle class that bred so many of them (for single women living at home, wider family incomes would have acted as a further barrier to proletarianization), were able to earn a modest but not necessarily inadequate income and, in some cases, to enjoy what was becoming a genuine career. For the minority of women actually born in or near to the industrial proletariat, teaching was a far better employment option than most, offering greater independence and better pay than many of the manual or even lower-middle occupations available to their peers.

Assessing the role of the Victorian and Edwardian music teacher

While detailed analysis of the teaching process itself must be left to other scholars, it is important to consider the quality of teaching activity and its relationship with the structure and culture of music teaching that developed from the mid-nineteenth century. As in any educational context, the quality of tuition offered will have ranged from the execrable to the outstanding, with most situated somewhere between. There was undoubtedly much drudgery for both parties, with one retired part-timer acknowledging that ‘nine out of every ten’ of her pupils ‘didn't do much’ and lost interest because of the demands imposed by regular practice.Footnote 97 Golby is also correct to stress that teaching was frequently undemanding and conservative, restricted in ambition by low expectations, particularly of middle-class girls for whom music was often seen as mere social decoration, and by a business imperative that held pupils within the limits of their teachers' capacities. As he argues so convincingly, the pursuit of excellence was far more likely to be demanded and attained within the musical world of brass bands and choirs than the drawing room.Footnote 98 Nevertheless, an excessive focus on limitations would be unhelpful, for a steady current of solid achievement, and sometimes far more, ran through private music teaching. While the teacher quoted above was realistic about her influence, her overall conclusion was that ‘I didn't teach in vain, thank goodness, when I look back’ and she took pleasure in the successes that her pupils had enjoyed.

It would also be misguided, in the manner of some contemporaries, to assume a natural correlation between a teacher's level of qualification and their effectiveness. Poor or indifferent teaching could be provided by an apparently well-qualified teacher as easily as high-quality tuition could flow from an unlettered but naturally gifted one. Particular care should be taken not to take at face value the mass of contemporary criticism directed at young girls teaching with only basic certificates or proprietary college awards. ‘Much harm is being done by these uneducated and ignorant persons’ the Musical News argued, and while it might have been correct in certain instances, there is no reason to believe that the efforts of, for example, Ethelreda Pelleymounter, the teenage daughter of a grocer in St Blazey, Cornwall, or Lavinia Morse, daughter of a Swindon locomotive fitter, both recipients of diplomas from the proprietary Victoria College in 1912, were by definition sub-standard or inadequate. Especially amongst those with limited means, market forces would have exerted at least some control on the quality of teaching, with hard-earned money unlikely to be wasted indefinitely on unsatisfactory activity.Footnote 99

Much teaching was undeniably mediocre, unchallenging and unlikely to raise levels of general musicality. However, this was in many ways inevitable and even appropriate. Pupils sought music lessons for a variety of reasons, many of which were rooted almost entirely in the realms of the social rather than the aesthetic. Some were simply ‘put to the piano’ because that was standard behaviour; others sought a basic competence that would allow them to fulfil social obligations and expectations, while others still might hope to develop sufficient competence to perform basic musical functions in church, chapel or any number of secular locations. Although amateur musicians could reach astonishing levels in an appropriate setting, most decidedly could not and the job of the teacher was to equip students for the often limited roles they or their parents had determined and their talent allowed, while, at best, pushing them a little beyond this point. The history of music has frequently been written by trained musicians with a level of ability far beyond the norm. Much of the music around them, however, has been made by people with far less aptitude or, certainly, less appetite for the time and commitment that serious music-making demands. While it would be ridiculous to celebrate mediocrity, any assessment must be sensitive to the fact that it was all that many could manage and much teaching was structured in acknowledgment of this.

Victorian and Edwardian teachers were both products and creators of the musical culture around them. They were ultimately tradespeople as much, or, indeed, often rather more, than they were educators and they met the needs of a buoyant urban market with a shrewd assessment of both the expectations of their pupils and their own practical requirements and limits. For the majority of teachers – often young, female and drawn from a generally secure financial social stratum – working life was largely a matter of providing a solid service while minimizing wider professional commitments. Maintaining a sustainable pool of modest talent mattered far more than the garnering of qualifications or institutional trappings. Beyond this core group were a more ambitious minority that looked rather more like a profession in the making but who were neither able nor fully willing to turn potential into actuality. Between them, this often inchoate body in many senses served their markets well, providing at minimum a basic service that doubtless gave pleasure to at least some recipients and at best fired the imagination and aspirations of the talented minority.

From the 1920s, the foundations underpinning the culture of music teaching began to shift fundamentally. Gramophones and wireless both drew people away from active music-making and allowed standards of comparison which put much amateur effort in an unfavourable light. New forms of popular music introduced styles and instruments (saxophones and, later, guitars) that were anathema to many teachers and anyway leant themselves far more to self or peer-led tuition, schools took on a wider teaching role and shifts in popular leisure provided numerous private and public alternatives to piano practice. Between 1931 and 1951, the number of teachers recorded in the census halved and although many continued (and continue) to earn their livings through teaching, what might termed ‘the age of the private teacher’ was effectively over. It had not been without its achievements, however, and its practitioners deserve rather more credit and certainly more scholarly attention than we have so far allowed them.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the journal's two readers for their penetrative comments and Professor Geoff Timmins for his sage advice on the census and on sampling. Any errors are entirely my responsibility.

Notes on contributor

Dave Russell has interests in the history of music, sport and the construction of regional identities. Within music history, he is the author of Popular Music in England, 1840–1914. A Social History (1997, second edition), and of essays and articles covering topics ranging from musicians in Victorian Manchester, to the brass-band movement and the cabaret clubs of the 1960s. He retired from Leeds Metropolitan University in 2010 and is now an independent scholar.

References

1 Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century. A Social History (Oxford, 1985). Other valuable titles from this point include Paula Gillett, Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 (London, 2000); Deborah Rohr, The Careers of British Musicians, 1750–1850. A Profession of Artisans (Cambridge, 2001); David J. Golby, Instrumental Teaching in Nineteenth Century Britain (Farnham, 2004); David C. H. Wright, The Associated Board of the Royal Colleges of Music. A Social and Cultural History (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2013).

2 Wright, Associated Board, 19.

3 Ehrlich, Music Profession, 104; Gillett, Musical Women, 207; Golby, Instrumental Teaching, 268.

4 Some private class teaching began at the end of the period. Stanley Turnbull, The Business of Music Teaching (London, 1938), 34–40.

5 Eric Mackerness, The Social History of English Music (London, 1964), 233; ‘Louisa Fanny Pyne’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 45 (Oxford, 2004). For Bodda, obituary in Musical Times, April 1892, 219; Kelly's Directory of Durham, 1902, 902–3.

6 P.S. Morrish, ‘Percy Alfred Scholes (1877–1958): Music Critic, Educator and encyclopaedist’, Transactions of the Thoresby Society, 2nd series, 13 (2003), 53–4.

7 Music Student, January 1921, 217; Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian, 25 March 1948.

8 Obituary, Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian, 2 January 1924.

9 Marie Kent, ‘The Piano-Industry Workforce in mid-Victorian England: a Study of the 1881 Census’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 46 (2015), 95–158.

10 All electronic census data have been taken from census schedules provided by Ancestry at www.ancestry.co.uk.

11 ‘Music master’ and ‘music mistress’ were the official terms used in occupational tables. Practitioners usually chose the term ‘music teacher’ or ‘teacher of music’, with a minority, largely but not exclusively male, preferring ‘professor of music’. ‘Musician’, in its turn, gathered together many different categories including ‘singers’, ‘pianists’ and ‘violinists’. Census of England and Wales [CEW] 1921, ‘Classification of occupations’, His Majesty's Stationery Office [HMSO] (1924), 82–3.

12 For a full analysis of problems and possibilities, Edward Higgs, Making Sense of the Census Revisited (London, 2005). Kent, ‘piano-industry workforce’, is helpful throughout on the kind of specific practicalities encountered by scholars in the musical field.

13 Family members and friends provided another (presumably largely unpaid) source of tuition.

14 CEW, 1921, ‘Occupational Tables’, (HMSO, 1924), Tables, 3 and 4, pp. 50, 101.

15 D. A. Reid, ‘Playing and Praying’, The Cambridge History of Urban Britain, vol. 3, 1840–1950, ed. Martin Daunton (Cambridge, 2000), iii. 745–807.

16 Ehrlich, Music Profession, 118–19; See, for example, Musical Times, March 1912, 148–9, October 1912, 151–2, for results lists for the proprietary London and Victoria Colleges.

17 Ehrlich, Musical Profession, 51–75; Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano, a History (London, 1976), 91, 97–107.

18 Their populations were 99,000, 90,000, 103,000 and 178,000 respectively.

19 Elizabeth Roberts, Women's Work 1840–1940 (Basingstoke, 1988), 29–36.

20 Kelly's Directory of the West Riding (1908), 909–11.

21 Dave Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840–1914. A Social History (2nd edn, Manchester, 1997), 205–71.

22 CEW 1861, Summary tables, tables xxx and xxxi, pp. lxxx, xc. Nineteen percent of those returned as ‘musicians’, however, were European-born; ‘Tables of the Ages, Civil Condition, Occupations and Birthplaces of the People, division 1, London’, tables 16 and 17, 46, 54.

23 For a perceptive study of a Dutch-born teacher, composer and musician living in the town, Andrew M. Wilkinson, ‘Hermann Francois Charles Van Dyk: a Critical Review of the Life of a Professional Musician Working in a Northern Town’ (MA Northern Studies dissertation, Leeds Metropolitan University, 2009).

24 Rohr, British Musicians, 22–3. This figure is based on the two samples outlined below.

25 The sources used were Kelly's Directory of Birmingham, [Kelly's] 1913, Kelly's Bristol, 1914, Kelly's Cornwall, 1910, Kelly's Durham, 1902, Kelly's North and East Riding, 1909, Kelly's South Wales, 1910, Kelly's Sussex, 1911, Kelly's West Riding, 1908, Reeves Musical Directory, 1902 (London, 1902). Reeves has been used mainly to gather information on London and the south-east.

26 This size of sample allows for a confidence level of 95% with a degree of error of ± 5%. This is felt to be sufficiently accurate to produce a strong indication of social backgrounds. In the sample 282 were women, 98 men.

27 Rohr, British Musicians, 30.

28 ‘Registration districts’ were the administrative units utilized for census purposes. The city's metropolitan boroughs were not established until 1899.

29 Rohr, British Musicians, 31–9.

30 The six best ratios, in descending order, were to be found in Hampstead, St Marylebone, Lewisham, Paddington, Kensington and Stoke Newington, the poorest, in ascending order, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Bermondsey, Southwark, Finsbury and Stepney.

31 CEW 1921, ‘County Report, London’, 26.

32 CEW, 1861. Population Tables, vol. ii, ‘Ages, Conditions, Occupations and Birthplaces of the People’. The information utilized here is derived from the individual county reports gathered in this volume under the headings ‘Occupations of Males aged 20 years and upwards – in Districts’ and ‘Occupations of Females aged 20 years and upwards – in Districts’. These are usually, although not always, numbered as Tables 19 and 20 respectively.

33 Rohr, British Musicians, 30. See also Ehrlich, Music Profession, 19–26, for provincial provision before 1850.

34 ‘Urban areas with more than 20,000 population’ was now the official term employed. ‘County Reports’, information located for each county in Table 16, ‘Occupation by Sex of Persons aged 12 years and over’. Twenty thousand remains the minimum population base for consideration, but the number of teachers required has now been set at 20.

35 Although see Wright, Associated, 29. The 1921 census took place in June as opposed to the normal month of April and thus conflated resident musicians with the many seasonal performers. However, it is unlikely that the changed date had any impact on the recording of teachers, who were largely permanent residents.

36 John K. Walton, The English Seaside Resort. A Social History, 1750–1914 (Leicester, 1983), 75 and John K. Walton, The British Seaside. Holidays and resorts in the twentieth century (Manchester, 2000), 143, 149–50.

37 Walton, English Seaside Resort, 98–100, 97.

38 The five were Hanwell, Southgate, Hendon, Ealing and Woodford.

39 Its population was 190,000.

40 Such communities also generally housed smaller than average communities of musicians, thus restricting another possible form of teaching by full-time musical practitioners.

41 Many of the communities of this type were ‘urban districts’, effectively clusters of smaller towns and villages.

42 Ehrlich, Music Profession, 52.

43 The ‘industrial midlands’ is defined as comprising the counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the ‘north’ Cheshire, Cumberland, Durham, Lancashire, Northumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire. Given the lack of formal definitions, this is a personal choice. Data drawn from CEW 1861, 1891, 1921, ‘County Reports’.

44 CEW 1921, ‘County Report, London’, 2.

45 John D. Vose, The Lancashire Caruso (Blackpool, 1982); Reginald Nettel, Music in the Five Towns (Oxford, 1944); Gareth Williams, Valleys of Song. Music and Society in Wales, 1840–1914 (Cardiff, 1998).

46 Elizabeth Roberts, ‘Working-Class Barrow and Lancaster, 1890–1930′ (Lancaster: Centre for North-Western Regional Studies, occasional paper no. 2, 1976), 52; Ehrlich, Piano, 98–104, 171–2.

47 Wright, Associated Board, 52.

48 Halifax Guardian, 12, 19 October 1912.

49 Michael Latchford, Walter Widdop. The Great Yorkshire Tenor (Letchworth, 2012), 18–27, 57–8.

50 Fisher, The Musical Profession (London, 1888), 171–2. Fisher's book was based on questionnaire responses from what he claimed to be ‘a thoroughly representative body of men and women’.

51 Samuel Midgley, My Seventy Years Musical Memories (1860–1930) (London, [1935?]), 61.

52 Golby, Instrumental Teaching, 90.

53 John Burnett, ed., Destiny Obscure (London, 1994), 188–92.

54 Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, October 1891, 28.

55 Walter Carroll, Account of Income and Expenditure, 1902–1913, Carroll/WC/7, Royal Northern College of Music Archive. See also, Howitt, Walter and his Daughters, 36. Correspondence teaching, made ever easier by improvements in postal and rail services, flourished at this time and was particularly well- suited to theory tuition.

56 Rohr, British Musicians, 92; Fisher, Musical Profession, 24; Gillett, Musical Women, 9–10.

57 Rohr, British Musicians, 137; J.F.C. Harrison, The Early Victorians (London, 1973), 131.

58 Halifax Courier, interview with Madame Emily Crowther, 6 June 1983.

59 Carroll, Account of Income and Expenditure; Howitt, Walter and his Daughters, 32–5, 45, 60.

60 Bradford Daily Argus, 9 November 1910.

61 Ehrlich, Music Profession, 193.

62 Music Student, June 1921, 544.

63 Music Student, May 1921, 494. Ehrlich draws less positive conclusions from this source. Music Profession, 193. John Stevenson, British Society, 1914–45 (Harmondsworth, 1984), 119–24; Ross Mckibbin, Classes and Cultures. England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), 114–19.

64 Golby, Instrumental Teaching, 85.

65 Kelly's Durham, 1902, Robinsons Halifax and District Directory, 1905–6 (Leeds, 1905).

66 CEW, 1921, Occupation Tables, Table 4, 101; Roberts, Women's Work, 45.

67 For Carlton and Aaron, Kelly's Directory of the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, 1921, 681; 1933 edition, 843.

68 Monthly Journal, September 1889, quoted in Ehrlich, Music Profession, 131.Percy Scholes, Mirror of Music, 2 (London and Oxford, 1947), 726–7.

69 Ehrlich, Music Profession, 131.

70 Robinson's Halifax Directory, 1905–6; Kelly's Sussex, 1911, Kelly's Cornwall, 1910, Kelly's Durham, 1902.

71 Kay Pearson, Life in Hull – From then till now (Hull, 1979), 16, 31–4, 76; Bradford Heritage Recording Unit [BHRU], Bradford Central Library, A0190/k-01, 16–17. Both individuals continued to teach in adulthood.

72 John Benson, The Penny Capitalists. A Study of Nineteenth-Century Entrepreneurs (Dublin, 1983).

73 Pearson, Life in Hull, 16.

74 Ehrlich, Music Profession, 126–36; Edmund Bohan, The ISM: The First Hundred Years (London, 1982).

75 Midgley, Memories, 78.

76 Ehrlich, Music Profession, 127.

77 Wright, Associated Board, 55–7.

78 Wright, Associated Board, ix–102 and also his ‘The Music Exams of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, 1859–1919′, in Paul Rodmell, ed., Music and Institutions in Nineteenth Century Britain (Farnham, 2012), 161–80.

79 Wright, Associated Board, 55–9; for a contemporary view, Fisher, Musical Profession, 230–67.

80 Musical Opinion, March 1902, 436.

81 Anon, Musical Examinations (Dubious, and Imitation Degrees) (London: Musical News, 3rd ed., [1907?]).

82 Musical Opinion, Sept. 1892, 599–60.

83 Truth, 5 October 1902, quoted in Anon, Musical Examinations, 139.

84 A campaign by Percy Scholes in the Music Student finally ended this publishing practice in 1921. Music Student, August 1921, 629.

85 The 1921 census recorded 192 ‘employers’ amongst music teachers.

86 Rohr, British Musicians, 180.

87 ISM Memorandum and Register of Members, 1907, 18, 57–8; Wright, Associated, 10, 140–3.

88 Anon, Musical Examinations, 72.

89 J. Raymond Tobin, ‘The Music Teacher’, in Robert Elkin, ed., A Career in Music (London, 1950), 159.

90 CEW, 1921, ‘Occupational Tables’, Tables, 3 and 4, 50, 101; Music Student, Oct. 1920, 40; Musical News and Herald, 4 Feb. 1922.

91 Although see Howitt, Walter and his Daughters, 79–82.

92 Cost may have been a factor for some directories (although most did not charge), but only a marginal one. It will have also been a factor influencing membership of the ISM and other bodies.

93 Based on analysis of ISM Memorandum and Registry of Members, 1914. Ehrlich, Music Profession, 133, takes a slightly more positive view of these qualifications.

94 Anon, Musical Examinations, 212–13.

95 Wright, Associated Board, 33, 114. Also 21, 26.

96 Halifax Guardian, 29 August 1946. He was also accompanist for the Blackpool Music Festival for 20 years (and a cinema pianist in the 1920s).

97 BHRU, A0190/k-01, 19.

98 BHRU, A0190/k-01, 16. Golby, Instrumental Teaching, 7–8, 9, 23.

99 Musical News, 14 November 1896, quoted in Anon, Musical Examinations, 4; Musical Times, March 1912.

Figure 0

Table 1. Music teachers and musicians as recorded in the Census for England and Wales, 1841–1931.

Figure 1

Table 2. Music teachers in London and the next ten best-provisioned urban centres by total number, as recorded in the census, 1861 and 1921.

Figure 2

Table 3. The ten provincial locations (populations of 20,000 and over, teacher populations of 15 or more) with best ratios of teachers to population, 1861.

Figure 3

Table 4. The ten locations with best ratios of teachers to population, including London, 1921.

Figure 4

Table 5. Structure of music teaching by age, 1861.

Figure 5

Table 6. Structure of music teaching by age, 1921.