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.

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.

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.

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.

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.