‘Book don’t feed our ch ildren’: Nonconformist missionaries and the British and Foreign School Society in the development of elementary education in the British West Indies before and after emancipation.

‘Book don’t feed our ch ildren’: Nonconformist missionaries and the British and Foreign School Society in the development of elementary education in the British West Indies before and after emancipation.

Inge Dornan

Ascription: Inge Dornan is Lecturer in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London, Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, UK. Email:

inge.dornan@brunel.ac.uk

Abstract: This study examines the ways in which Nonconformist missionaries joined with

the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) to provide elementary instruction to enslaved and emancipated children in the nineteenth-century British West Indies. Using predominantly untapped historical sources from the BFSS archive’s newly catalogued West Indian

collection, this article seeks to address a long-standing historiographic gap regarding the pedagogic methods and practices employed by Nonconformist missionaries in the British Caribbean. In so doing, it highlights the combined impact that local conditions and global currents of missionary and educational fervour had on establishing an effective elementary system during the emancipation era.

Key words: Slavery. Emancipation. British West Indies. Elementary education. Pedagogy.

Unsectarian. Missionaries. British and Foreign School Society. Slave children. Apprentices.

Child labour.

Writing to the Secretary of the British and Foreign School Society (hereafter BFSS), in 1854, Baptist missionary Edwin Wallbridge summed up the Society’s role and impact on the West Indian elementary system: ‘The cause of education throughout our West Indian colonies owes much to the assistance rendered by your excellent society during the last 20 years – and even longer than that; for I rather think you aided most of the few schools which were

permitted to exist, or that sometimes contrived to exist without permission, in the dark days of slavery.’ From Demerara in 1851, Reverend Henderson concurred: ‘but for benefit which the British and Foreign School Society has conferred in furnishing many of the best teachers, there would not have been half the good done among the labouring population of this country which has been accomplished by means of scriptural education.’ Alex Lindo’s dispatch from Jamaica in 1855 was equally appreciative: ‘the friends of Education in this country cannot be too grateful to your Society.’

Historians have long lamented the lack of studies and available sources on the pedagogic methods employed by West Indian missionaries in the nineteenth century.

The recent cataloguing of the BFSS’s collection of West Indian correspondence now makes it possible to begin to address this long-standing historiographic gap by examining the Society’s role in providing pedagogic expertise, training and educational materials to

Nonconformist missionaries in the British West Indies during slavery and emancipation. This

study expands on the work of historian and BFSS archivist, George Bartle, whose article, The

Role of the British and Foreign School Society in the Education of the Emancipated Negro,

1814-75 (1983) remains the only published study to include an examination of the BFSS’s

operations in the British West Indies. Bartle drew predominantly from the BFSS’s published

annual reports and used examples from Nova Scotia, South Africa and the British West

Indies to illustrate the Society’s role in furthering the development of black elementary

education in the nineteenth century. He keenly observed the tremendous fervour for

education and evangelism exhibited by missionaries in the West Indies, but also the weight of financial difficulties that beset them.

Drawing on the Society’s voluminous collection of West Indian correspondence allows for a focused analysis of its operations in the British West Indies before and after slavery and a close examination of the widespread ambitions of BFSS trained missionaries and teachers, the multiple obstacles that impeded the

implementation of the BFSS’s curriculum in the colonies, as well as a glimpse into the responses of slaves and the emancipated to elementary instruction. In casting new light on the pedagogic aims and methods adopted by Nonconformist missionaries, this study provides a fresh perspective on the challenges of establishing an effective elementary system in the colonies following the abolition of slavery.

The BFSS was founded in 1814, after having previously operated as the Society for Promoting the Royal British or Lancasterian System for the Education of the Poor.

Pioneered by Joseph Lancaster in the late 1790s, it aimed to provide elementary education -

founded on the Three Rs of reading, writing and arithmetic, in conjunction with Christian

instruction - to the mass of poor and working-class children, through a system of monitorial

instruction, designed to be both efficient and economical, in which the ablest pupils were

trained as ‘monitors’ and tasked with teaching younger and less literate pupils. An additional

hallmark of the Lancasterian system, also known as the British System, was that it was

religious in ethos but unsectarian in practice. Thus it appealed to Nonconformist religious

bodies, like the Baptists and Wesleyan Methodists, who seized upon it as an alternative mode

of religious instruction to the catechism. Anglican missionaries, by contrast, preferred the

monitorial method developed by Andrew Bell, named the Bell or Madras System, which was

adopted by the BFSS’s principal Church of England rival, the National Society. These two

educational societies, with their contrasting Nonconformist and Anglican monitorial

pedagogies, were responsible for helping to shape the transformations in elementary education in England and Wales in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The BFSS also extended its field of influence overseas in this period, principally via the Nonconformist missionary societies, who in the 1810s and 1820s set their sights on the West Indian slave colonies and looked to the BFSS to provide them with the pedagogic training and resources to promote the religious instruction of enslaved children.

The BFSS archive contains letters and reports from 18 Caribbean islands where Nonconformist

missionaries sought to introduce the British System, including non-British territories such as St.Eustatius and Haiti, where teaching the British System also had the effect of introducing, alongside Christian unsectarian instruction, the teaching of English to slaves and free persons.

The BFSS’s teacher training school, Borough Road College (BRC), based in Southwark, London, played a key role in receiving and instructing ministers in the British System, from the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society

(WMMS) and the London Missionary Society (LMS), before they were dispatched to deliver religious instruction to West Indian slaves.

It is evidence of the educational ambition of the Nonconformist missionary societies that they consciously favoured sending missionaries to train at BRC at a time when the vast majority of teachers in Britain were not expected (or had the opportunity) to be trained. In reaching out to the BFSS’s pioneering training school and its unsectarian pedagogy, the Nonconformist religious societies established themselves as the primary conduit for conveying the British System to the West Indies.

The BFSS’s strong institutional bias toward abolitionism further explains its support

of the Nonconformist missionaries in the British West Indies in this period. Prior to 1814, the

Society’s committee comprised leading parliamentary abolitionists, William Wilberforce and

Henry Brougham, in addition to the anti-slavery supporter and Quaker, William Allen, who

served as treasurer. Following its change of name and leadership in 1814, anti-slavery leaders

Thomas Fowell Buxton and Zachary Macaulay added their names to the Society’s list of subscribers and donors. Thomas Clarkson also took a strong interest in the Society and encouraged his associates in Jamaica to establish schools on the ‘British & Foreign System’

and to enrol students at the BFSS’s training school at Borough Road.

The presence of leading abolitionists within the BFSS played a definitive role in the Society’s decision to give aid and support to the instruction of slaves in the West Indian colonies.

Evidence of the BFSS’s influence in the British West Indies during ‘the dark days of slavery’ first appeared in the Society’s 1820 annual report, which observed: ‘In various islands of the West Indies, schools have lately been formed, and already produced much good among children’.

The Society had already been informed that the British System was starting to spread among Nonconformist missionaries in Jamaica, although precisely how far and widely it took root in Jamaica and the other islands is hard to say since neither the BFSS nor missionaries kept records of the numbers of schools which followed the British System.

Overall, it was most popular among the Baptist missionaries, who introduced it into their schools in Jamaica, Barbados, Demerara and the Bahamas. The Baptist-led Jamaican

Education Society also taught the British System in all its schools, and it was the pedagogy of choice among leading Baptist missionaries William Knibb, James Phillippo, Edwin

Wallbridge, Thomas Burchell and Jabez Tunley. Additionally, the Mico Charity schools and teacher training schools also adopted the British System. These schools were formed in the aftermath of abolition when, in 1835, Parliament instructed the Mico Charity (established in 1670 after Lady Mico bequeathed money toward the redemption of captured Englishmen enslaved by the Barbary states), to direct some of its funds to build schools for the education of freed children and apprentices. Thomas Fowell Buxton was among the Mico Charity’s trustees and played a formative role in championing its new educational agenda in the

colonies.

By mid-century, the British System had also become the principal pedagogy in all

schools run by the Bahamas Board of Education.

In all, the British System’s emphasis on unsectarian instruction ensured that in terms of its pedagogy it operated as a formidable counterpoint to the monitorial system employed by Anglican missionaries.

William Knibb, perhaps the most renowned Baptist missionary in the British West Indies, trained at BRC and was one of the first missionaries to adopt and extol the British System in the colonies. In a letter to the BMS in 1824, he enthused: ‘The British System is one exactly suited to Jamaica.’

Methodist missionaries, Moses Rayner and John

Stephenson, went so far as to underline their appreciation, when they declared: ‘as a system it is admirable adapted to further that important work in which we are engaged’. They

requested a copy of the BFSS’s teaching manual to advance their operations in Bridgetown.

In St.Eustatius, another missionary observed, ‘We have taught the Teachers a part of the Lancasterian system; and they go through their work with facility and success.’ He thanked the BFSS for sending lesson books to schools in St.Kitts, and added ‘I have no doubt but thousands in that island will thank God for a system so calculated to establish the knowledge of the Scriptures.’

Reverend Wray, writing from Berbice, admitted to adopting the plan of

‘Mutual Instruction’ since 1813, and ‘constantly made use of the Lancasterian lessons to

teach the slaves and poor free coloured children to read’.

None of the aforementioned

missionaries, Knibb included, spelled out precisely why they believed the British System was

so well matched and ‘adaptable’ to the educational aims and goals of their mission stations -

nor does Knibb’s memoir throw further light on this.

An explanation may nonetheless be

gleaned from correspondence between Baptist missionary James Phillippo and Jamaica’s

Governor, Lord Sligo. Sligo approached Phillippo to provide him with a ‘plan of general

education, having special application to the circumstances of Jamaica, in which there existed

so many people attached to religious denominations other than the Establishment. It was

desirable that the plan adopted should not interfere with the peculiarities of any.’ Phillippo’s

response was to propose the British System, on the grounds that it was ‘liberal and comprehensive, while its simplicity and economy are unrivalled. It knows no creed,

recognises no sect, teaches no catechism, but takes as its fundamental principle the common Christianity of Christendom, and adopts the Bible as a class-book.’

Thus it was the

colonies’, and particularly Jamaica’s, diverse religious character which made the BFSS’s unsectarian and cost-effective monitorial pedagogy especially attractive. Altogether, the BFSS’s incursion into the West Indies during the 1810s and 1820s confirms Nonconformist missionary efforts to teach slaves to read and, more controversially, in some cases also to write, as part of their evangelical mission to convert slaves. More significantly, it also points to how and why missionaries like William Knibb went about instructing the enslaved through acquiring and implementing the British System as part of their modus operandi in the West Indian slave colonies.

The scope of the BFSS’s role in the British West Indies visibly increased in the wake

of the Abolition Act (1833) as a result of the importance Parliament attached to the education

of the emancipated population. MPs and social reformers in Britain agreed that the purpose,

goal, and content of elementary instruction was to morally elevate the poor and working

classes, whilst also inculcating social discipline. Such an ethos readily translated to the newly

emancipated in the British West Indies, where according to the British government, the

slaves’ freedom and the slaves’ education occupied two sides of the same coin; only through

proper moral and Christian instruction, it was believed, would the slaves be persuaded to

proceed peacefully and passively toward freedom. Nonconformist missionaries shared the

government’s concern, as Phillippo observed to the BFSS, shortly after the act came into

force:

The first of August is past & 30,000 children under six years of age are thrown upon the community. Neglect them & I verily believe that the consequences will be deplorable both to themselves, to the colony & to society at large. Educate them & I am persuaded that a more virtuous, enlightened & industrious people will no where exist.

The role of elementary instruction as a tool of social discipline and moral reform to

transform slaves into ‘virtuous, enlightened & industrious’ free British subjects largely

explains the British government’s decision to place the religious bodies in charge of

establishing a system of elementary instruction in the colonies. In order to support the

transition from slave religious instruction to a fully-fledged elementary system for the

emancipated population, Parliament introduced the Negro Education Grant (NEG) to help

defray the costs of developing an educational infrastructure in the colonies – in all, £235,000

of educational aid was sent to the former British slave colonies between 1835 and 1845.

The

BFSS and the National Society were responsible for distributing the educational grant among

the various Nonconformist as well as Anglican religious societies. The Mico Charity also

received a portion of the grant, which it directed toward the creation of four normal schools

(teacher training schools) in Jamaica, Trinidad, Antigua and Demerara, with a view to

developing a pool of ‘native teachers’ in the colonies, in addition to establishing elementary

schools in various islands, including Trinidad, St Lucia, Grenada, Dominica, St Vincent,

Barbados and the Bahamas.

All three developments - placing elementary instruction in the

hands of the religious bodies, introducing the NEG, and delegating the division of funds to

the BFSS and National Society - signified an important intervention to bring together

financial support as well as educational expertise in the formation of an elementary system in

the immediate aftermath of slavery.

In the first decade following the Abolition Act, missionaries and educators wrote

optimistically regarding the cause of education in the colonies. On several occasions,

Phillippo observed a marked appetite for learning among the apprentices and former slaves in

Jamaica, noting, in 1835, ‘the desire for education continues to increase’ and, in the following

year, ‘the thirst for instruction seems to be universal’.

Evidence of a ‘thirst’ for education

appeared to be matched by the willingness of the apprentices and freed population to assist in

laying the foundations of the elementary system. Several missionaries took pains to point out

to the BFSS that it was the apprentices and former slaves who gave their labour, skills and

money to constructing the new schools. Phillippo wrote of the support he received from the

local population in Jamaica: ‘the greater part of the materials having been furnished and no

inconsiderable portion of labor performed gratuitously by the children and adult scholars of

the institutions’.

Reverend Walter Dendy, also operating in Jamaica, keenly acknowledged

the contribution made by the apprentices: ‘it ought to be mentioned to the honour of the

apprentices in connexion with my stations that they cheerfully and willingly in their own days

gathered together the stones and broke them as well as cut the wood and packed it up’. The

apprentices’ financial contribution to the new schools was often essential. When one of

Dendy’s schools fell into debt during construction, he turned to the apprentices in the hope

that ‘by the exertions of the apprentices themselves (I have none other to look to) that it will

be liquidated.’

In 1841, Dendy reported to the BFSS that funds to purchase ‘slates, pencils,

reading lessons, and books’ as well as to build more school rooms ‘are principally raised

from the emancipated negroes.’

Nonconformist testimony to the BFSS reinforces the broad

picture painted by scholars that there was considerable enthusiasm among the apprentices for

elementary instruction immediately following the Abolition Act, evident in the growing

numbers of children entering schools, and also in the eagerness of adults to pay literate

children to teach them how to read and write. Indeed, in Jamaica, children could earn

between three and ten pence a week giving instruction to adults.

It was by no means common for missionaries to highlight the contribution of non-Europeans to missionary education and evangelism in the nineteenth century and therefore missionary correspondence to the BFSS is in this respect unusual. But not without good reason. For it was by consciously highlighting the role of slaves and apprentices in the formation of elementary schools that Nonconformist missionaries simultaneously underlined the desire for education that existed among the apprentices, whilst also making the case for continued support and aid from those in Britain, like the BFSS, who sympathised with their cause.

The creation of teacher training schools for ‘native teachers’ comprised a further source of optimism among missionaries and educational reformers, particularly once Apprenticeship ended in 1838. Former BRC pupil, John McSwiney (arguably the BFSS’s principal advocate in the West Indies), was appointed to oversee the Mico normal schools in the West Indies. From British Guiana, in 1839, he wrote encouragingly to the BFSS of his hopes and expectations regarding ‘native agency’ in the colonies:

In the Bahamas, Barbados & in B Guiana many of the most active, useful and clever teachers are natives – what appears chiefly needed to improve the agency and to raise up a supply of good native teachers are such institutions as the one I have the honour to superintend – with a limited & very select European agency, and a few Normal Seminaries well conducted I feel sanguine a broad and permanent foundation may be laid.

In addition to the colonies’ normal schools to train native teachers, a handful of

promising West Indian pupils were sent to London to train at BRC. William Towler, a

Wesleyan missionary from the Dominican Republic, was keen for one of his pupils to

become a trained teacher and wrote to the BFSS ‘most earnestly [to] beg the favour of his being received into your Normal School, Borough Road, to be instructed in your system of teaching, that he may in two or three years return to his native land.’

Scouring the lists of pupils who attended BRC reveals the names of former slaves and subsequent generations of West Indians, who over the course of the nineteenth century travelled from the British West Indies to London to train at BRC.

Trained West Indian teachers never reached the numbers that educational reformers hoped and called for, a point I shall return to later, nevertheless those who seized the opportunity to become teachers and ministers represented an unmistakable desire on the part of the emancipated to play a direct hand in their own education.

Conscious efforts by the missionaries to promote ‘native agency’ and establish a bank of qualified native teachers in the colonies was by and large driven by the high costs attached to transporting and employing European teachers in the West Indies, many of whom were trained and recommended by the BFSS. Lucy Kingdon was one of the first British women teachers to obtain a teaching position in the British West Indies. In 1833, she enrolled in BRC’s women’s teacher training department with the aim of qualifying ‘as a governess for some foreign station’. After completing her training, she travelled to Jamaica, following in the footsteps of her missionary brother, and by 1834 opened a girls’ school in Spanish Town, for which the BFSS sent her a donation of teaching materials and a grant of £10.

Women teachers were frequently preferred to male teachers because they cost less to employ.

Missionaries’ wives were also highly sought after to teach girls needlework and manage

girls’ schools, again because of the low cost associated with their employment. The ‘Seventh

Report’ of the BFSS Ladies Committee duly highlighted married women’s role in

transmitting the British System abroad: ‘several of the wives of Missionaries to distant

countries, have devoted their time to acquire knowledge of the British System, by which,’ the

Report stated, ‘the advantages of the plan will be more extensively spread.’

Requests for trained BRC teachers and BFSS teaching manuals to assist missionaries and teachers account for a substantial volume of the Society’s nineteenth-century West Indian correspondence, second only to requests for teaching resources.

Maintaining moral and material support from Britain, particularly from their own societies and organisations like the BFSS, encouraged Nonconformist missionaries to highlight their pupils’ progress and praise their capacity for learning. Few failed to remind the Society that such strides were made by a population who had suffered under slavery and who had long been denied any form of learning. Edwin Wallbridge, writing to the BFSS in 1837, was openly critical of the impact of slavery on education: ‘Slavery & sound intellectual

& scriptural education it seems evident have no very strong affinity for each other’, he observed. He gave an example of a trainee teacher, ‘a free black lad – the son of an apprentice’ whose ‘aptitude’, he noted, ‘in the work of teaching is a proof of the falsity of the statement so often made at one time and not yet entirely thrown aside – that the slaves &

especially the negro slaves are so closely allied to the brute creatures as to be incapable of

mental cultivation.’

James Howell wrote to the BFSS that former slaves ‘are quite as

capable of improvement in mental discipline as Europeans …in any thing that is entirely

mechanical, they are already equal to if not superior to the children of labourers in

England.’

Occasionally, missionaries and teachers dictated letters to their pupils to send to

the BFSS as evidence of their abilities and enclosed samples of their pupils’ handwriting and

embroidery as a sign of their progress (the BFSS archive contains a bound copybook of

pupils’ handwriting and embroidery sent to the Society by William Knibb).

Letters and

samplers were proof of pupils’ progress, but they were also vital evidence in challenging

long-standing racial prejudice which held that blacks were inherently inferior to whites and

were therefore incapable of so-called mental and moral ‘improvement’. Those Nonconformist

missionaries who extolled their pupils’ capacity for learning in letters to the BFSS actively strove to reassure their supporters back home in Britain that through a good Christian (and British) education, the emancipated were perfectly capable of being transformed into

‘virtuous’ and ‘industrious’ British subjects.

Notwithstanding, many among the plantocracy disagreed and objected to the curricula

introduced into the colonies’ mission schools on the grounds that they failed to prepare the

emancipated for estate labour. Nonconformist missionaries sent the BFSS numerous letters

and reports that included references to the curriculum taught in their schools, which variously

included reading, writing, grammar, spelling, arithmetic, music, (hymn) singing, history

(often also referred to as ‘Bible History’), geography (which included studying maps of

England, alongside what was described as ‘scriptural geography’, which usually involved

studying maps of Palestine), and needlework, which was taught exclusively to girls. In 1845,

the BFSS received a ‘statistical report’ from the Jamaica Education Society regarding the 29

schools under its care run by Baptist missionaries, all of which taught the British System. The

report contained a detailed list of registers of pupils, numbers of attendees, numbers of pupils

in reading and spelling classes levels 1 to 8, arithmetic classes levels 1 to 10, and numbers of

pupils writing on paper, studying English grammar, geography and needlework.

Missionary

reports offer little insight into how well pupils were taught, but they do reveal just how much

of the curricula introduced into missionary schools emphasised secular learning and literacy

alongside Christian instruction. And it was the missionaries’ focus on ‘book learning’ which

sparked fierce criticism from the West Indian plantocracy. Charles Latrobe’s 1837

government report on the state of education in Jamaica articulated both the subject and source

of planter concerns: ‘still tinctured with the prejudices of the old time’, Latrobe observed, the

planters’ objection is ‘avowedly founded upon the fact that so few of the plans hitherto set on

foot embrace lessons of labour or industry’.

To the Nonconformist missionaries, all such

criticisms of the curriculum represented a thinly disguised attempt to bind the emancipated to agricultural labour and thus maintain them in a state not too dissimilar from slavery. Only through an elementary system based on a combination of Christian instruction and book learning would the emancipated, so the missionaries believed, become truly free from material and spiritual bondage.

To scholars, the greatest shortcoming of the colonial curriculum was the fact that it was wholly British in terms of subject matter and pedagogy and as such failed to speak to the specific needs and interests of the West Indian population. As Shirley Gordon astutely remarked, ‘the content and method of education’ were ‘introduced with the values that gave them birth in class conscious England. Not only have they been alien to …. the “African element”, but the social and economic advantages which might accrue from such instruction in England were largely absent here.’

Writing on the state of British West Indian education from the late 1860s onwards, Brian Moore and Michele Johnson complained that it was

‘simply imported [from Britain], without regard for its (un)suitability’.

The monitorial

system, in particular, William Green argued, ‘was able to equip British children with basic

techniques, and it encouraged them to be orderly and quiet. But in the West Indies where

English was a quasi-foreign language for Creole children and where the religious precepts

hammered at them were strange and confusing, the monitorial system had very limited

utility.’ Furthermore, he observed, it was typically taught by badly trained monitors and

teachers who in regards to monitorial pedagogy were ‘woefully deficient in understanding.’

Such criticisms are entirely justified. However, with the exception of Green’s shrewd

observation on monitorial pedagogy, they overlook the fact that the missionaries were

compelled to adapt the British System in their schools, sometimes in order to attract pupils,

but more often than not because they lacked the teaching resources and pedagogic training

needed to fully and thoroughly implement the British System.

The experiences of both Jabez Tunley and James Phillippo underscore this. Writing to the BFSS in March 1846 from Jamaica, Tunley reported that in his school the older boys were ‘taught to make receipts and Bills for their Parents, also, to write notes for them to their employers.’ ‘These things’, he observed, ‘tend much to obtain the good feelings of their Parents, and obtain their confidence in the School.’ On the whole, he concluded, ‘ye idea many would gladly encourage is that, our instructions unprepared the people for the Estates work.’

Most missionaries were less candid than Tunley in communicating how they adapted the curriculum in their schools, but almost all wrote unreservedly of the fact that conditions in the colonies were such that it was nigh impossible to ensure a perfect application of the British System in their schools. The mixed fortunes of the British schools under the care of Phillippo are a further case in point and constitute the rule rather than the exception in terms of the challenges faced by Nonconformist missionaries in establishing the British System in their schools. In the 1830s, Phillippo informed the BFSS of the schools being built on the British System in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and described the plans for his Metropolitan School, according to the school building specifications outlined in the BFSS manual:

it is proposed to fit up the interior on the plan of the British and foreign school society, with seats and desks and a platform in each, with monitors desks enclosed by rails; that a cupola for a clock and a bell be constructed; that a range of offices be erected, and that the whole of the premise and the rooms attached be enclosed by substantial brick walls and a paling and gates conform to a plan and specification prepared.

Once the school was built, however, Phillippo struggled to obtain local teachers who were

capable of teaching the British System and he was eventually forced to approach the BFSS to

send out a ‘good’ and ‘competent school master from among their former pupils at the boro [sic] road’.

Phillippo’s experience highlights that it was no small undertaking to build and operate a British School in the West Indies. Writing to the BFSS in 1836, he concluded: ‘to educate the entire black &coloured population of Jamaica nothing is required but men &

money.’ He added, ‘I could now open 20 schools had I but the means, the thirst for instruction seems to be universal but how long the appetite for knowledge may remain thus, if unsatisfied is not for me to say’.

Four years later, in 1840, Phillippo experienced severe difficulties in operating the British System in his schools and wrote to the BFSS pleading for a supply of school materials:

they will be the more acceptable as for some months, some of the schools under my charge have been so destitute of every thing of the kind as to render them any thing but lancasterian schools – in some of the establishments in the country recently formed scarcely a lesson of the british & foreign school society has been seem to adorn the walls, as I had not a spare sheet of them in possession.

He blamed his inability to purchase teaching materials on the high cost of running eight schools, whose ‘support are entirely dependent upon my efforts’.

Phillippo’s struggles to fully and consistently implement the British System in his

schools in the 1830s and early 1840s were as nothing compared to the difficulties he and

other Nonconformist missionaries faced following the British government’s decision to end

the NEG in 1845. Upon his return to Jamaica in 1845, after a brief spell in England, Phillippo

sent a heartfelt letter to the BFSS in which he confessed how ‘grieved and discouraged’ he

felt by the state of his schools. Two had been ‘given up’ and the others, with the exception of

the Metropolitan School, were ‘so reduced in numbers’, he explained, that ‘I could scarcely

bear to think of them’. Parents were ‘unwilling or unable to pay the trifle [fee]’ to send their children to school and he believed that the schools that were still open would soon have to close. ‘More than two thirds of the schools that were once in vigorous operation are discontinued from an absolute want of means to carry them on’, he observed. He begged the BFSS to send him whatever aid it could to keep his schools open, before concluding somewhat in despair: ‘our british [sic] friends seem to have thrown us off and forsaken us just when we began to gather the first fruits and we have a very dismal prospect before us’.

Phillippo’s thoughts were echoed by the educational reformer, John McSwiney, who wrote to the BFSS the following year from Jamaica:

I fear much that our friends at home are indulging unreasonable expectations … why should there be such great inclination to abandon the West Indies. There [sic]

communicants are not in a position to be abandoned. They are but in their infancy &

needs much as ever young paternal help.

The BFSS could have been in no doubt as to the grave circumstances facing

Nonconformist missionary schools after 1845, not just as a result of the cessation of the NEG

but also as a consequence of the 1846 Sugar Duties Act, which plunged the colonies into

economic crisis, for Phillippo and McSwiney were far from alone in communicating to the

BFSS the dire circumstances they faced and the sense of despair this wrought. From the mid-

1840s the Society received a steady stream of letters detailing the pitiful state of elementary

instruction in the colonies, all of which echoed the content and sentiment of a missionary

from Anguilla who wrote, ‘This island presents a fine field for school operations. The only

obstacles in our way are a want of Books, and means to pay the salary of the Teachers.’

In

1847, the BFSS was briefed on the ‘sad state’ of elementary instruction in Jamaica as a whole:

The state of Education in this Island is very low indeed … the Missionaries have not the means of supplying the schools either, with Teachers or the needful apparatus to carrying on of a school… It is a lamentable fact, that instead of new schools being opened for the poor of Jamaica, old ones are being closed ... [which] Is not the way to fit the numerous youth for this or the world to come. It is painful to see things in such a sad state here.

A desperate need for basic school materials continued through to the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1861, the Wesleyan Mission House wrote to the BFSS to say, ‘every where we suffer from the want of school materials in Jamaica.’

Needless to say, a dearth of teaching materials had a visible impact on the ability of missionaries to implement the British System in their schools, as a Wesleyan missionary, writing to the BFSS from Tobago, made clear: ‘We cannot do all that we would for want of funds. We are very much in want of school materials and are unable to carry out our system of teaching in consequence, but we have not the means of procuring them.’ He concluded his letter with a request for a grant of school materials, and a desperate plea: ‘will you not have pity upon us?’

The fledgling elementary system faced a further crisis when in the wake of the

colonies’ economic depression, British teachers and missionaries, citing poverty, poor pay

and ill-health, began in droves to leave the former slave colonies. In 1847, Tunley described

the situation plainly:

European agency in the Educational department in this Island, is become very scarce indeed, and this is not to be wondered at, when we consider, the difficulties, climate, etc with which Europeans have to contend. Instead of nearly twenty, who were once engaged in one of the most honourable callings, there are only four or five now, seen toiling in our Day Schools and most of these are expecting soon, to be otherwise employed.

The BFSS continued to receive reports well into the 1860s regarding the dismal state of the teaching profession in the West Indies. In 1861, a missionary from Jamaica observed:

The influence and support of the Christian teacher are fast on the decreas[e], the one depends on the other. What will become of our schools I know not, the few shillings recd from the few that attend our schools, will not induce them of colour to keep Schools neither will it induce Europeans to remain in the field, in fact, they can’t and the Black young men with a few exceptions are unable to do it. Two of our Teachers from England are about to leave us. And others must follow ere long. It is with great difficulty now that I keep at the work for the last two years all that I have had for all purposes has been only about £64 per annum. This would be little at home where things are cheap therefore it must be less here, where importations are dear.

Another missionary from Grenada wrote simply: ‘I love the work and leave it only because I

cannot obtain a livelihood.’

The exodus of British teachers may not have met with such

despair had the efforts to train up local teachers been more successful. John McSwiney’s

initial optimism regarding ‘native agency’ quickly dissipated once the NEG ceased in 1845

and forced the closure, due to lack of funds, of two of the four Mico normal schools: by 1846

only those in Jamaica and Antigua remained in operation. The quality and standard of teaching inevitably suffered and this had an obvious impact on how the British System was conducted. Tunley, writing from Jamaica, reported to the BFSS:

I am sorry to have to inform you, that, those schools which are in opperation [sic], are not conducted so fully on the British System as one could wish the Masters of which schools, never having been in the ‘Normal Institution’ except on a visit or so – which, is not sufficient to prepare for the important duties claiming the attention of the instructors of the young.

The difficulties that Nonconformist missionaries confronted in operating the British System in their schools were compounded by what was perceived to be a visible slump in educational fervour among the emancipated after 1845. Some missionaries blamed parents, citing ‘Parents don’t prize instruction’ and ‘Parents [are] so careless respecting the education of their children’.

Others were a little more sympathetic and argued that parents were not disposed to appreciate the value and benefits of educating their children because they themselves had never been permitted an education in slavery. In 1845, Jamaica’s Governor, Lord Elgin, in a confidential dispatch to the British Secretary of State, offered his thoughts on the emancipated’s attitude toward education:

During the apprenticeship and immediately after the establishment of freedom,

undefined expectations of the advantages which book learning would confer were

excited in the breasts of Parents and Children – it was looked to as the means of

obtaining political privileges and advancement in life. As things have settled down

those impressions have worn off. Social rights and the enjoyment of freedom and independence have fallen to the lot of the instructed and ignorant alike.

Elgin’s assessment broadly marries with the narrative that emerges from the BFSS’s collection of West Indian correspondence which suggests that following the abolition of slavery the apprentices had high expectations of the advantages to be gained from education, but within a few years of emancipation this had largely ‘worn off’. His perception that this was related to the emancipated’s enjoyment of social rights and freedom does not, however, square with missionary reports, which instead identified poverty and child labour as root causes of the emancipated’s diminished appetite for education. As Reverend W G Barrett observed in a revealing letter to the BFSS, in 1846:

The high spring tide that set in favour of our schools from 1838 to 1841-2, and perhaps a little later, was the result of feeling and not of intelligence. Schools were new things; our lessons, our pictures, our hymns, our school-songs, were all new, and the people wondered as they saw their “little picanninies sing many buckra tunes”….

Now it is no uncommon thing to see parents send their children to work for a few pence a day, justifying their conduct by the remark, “Book don’t feed our children.”

(My italics.)

Barrett highlights the problematic that existed for poor and working-class black families

during the emancipation era: to invest time and money in their children’s education or to

direct their time and labour toward their family’s financial support. Given the profound

poverty that many families found themselves in, as well as the fact there was no guarantee

that elementary education improved employment prospects, many parents settled for the latter.

The prevalence of child labour in the British West Indies during this period is well- documented in the BFSS’s West Indian collection. Despite parents’ desire to remove their children’s labour from the estates in the immediate aftermath of slavery, it proved hard to sustain this in practice once economic conditions worsened in the colonies after 1846.

Echoing the concerns of many of his counterparts, James Milne, writing from Jamaica in 1847, observed: ‘I am sorry to say that the good cause of education retrogrades rather than progresses in this part of the island’ and he attributed this to the tendency of parents to

‘employ them [children] regularly on the estates as from 6stg a day.’

Missionaries also drew attention to the routine employment of children on family provision grounds, as another missionary from Jamaica explained: ‘In this locality the people are almost entirely dependent on their provision grounds for support & consequently the children are frequently kept from school to “Look Bittle” which means to go to their grounds.’

To Nonconformist missionaries, the cause and effect of child labour was undeniably detrimental to the progress of elementary education in the colonies. In 1854, Edwin

Wallbridge wrote to the BFSS of the impact of child labour on Demerara’s elementary system, in which he drew attention to the ‘great discrepancy, taking the colony as a whole, between the number of children who ought to be at school, and the number actually

attending.’ He concluded, ‘Not above 1/3 or at best not more than ½ of the children, between 5 and 12 years of age attend any school at all.’

Efforts to address the impact of child labour on the elementary system were attempted by some legislatures, but largely failed in the face of strong resistance from the plantocracy. As Wallbridge explained, a new Education Bill to introduce compulsory education in Demerara in 1855 was staunchly opposed and

successfully defeated by the planters on the grounds that ‘it will deprive them of the services

of the children upon their estates’.

The adverse effects of child labour on rates of school attendance were not peculiar to the West Indies; Britain too experienced considerable

difficulties in persuading parents, mainly from the agricultural and industrial working classes, to send their children to school.

However, what was distinct about the West Indies was the meaning and significance of education and child labour in the context of slavery and

emancipation. For the generation of ex-slaves and their children, education was an important symbol of the transition from slave to free person. It is therefore hardly surprising that missionaries witnessed a thirst for education among former slaves and apprentices (and that they embraced the novelty of it, as Reverend Barrett observed) following the Abolition Act.

There was, however, a yawning gap between what education symbolised during slavery and what it actually delivered in emancipation. Here it is worth recalling Shirley Gordon’s criticism of the colonial curriculum: that it failed to confer the same socio-economic advantages to children in the West Indies as it did to children in Britain. Paradoxically, children’s access to education following slavery was limited by the value of their labour in freedom.

The high expectations which Nonconformist missionaries entertained in the years

immediately following abolition to educate vast swathes of the emancipated had largely

fallen short by mid-century. Frustration that the emancipated were not making a speedy

transformation into ‘virtuous’, ‘industrious’ and ‘civilised’ British subjects was felt by both

missionaries in the West Indies as well as their supporters back in Britain. But it was the

missionaries’ strong sense that British political and public interest was turning away from the

colonies which caused them most concern and clouded their correspondence with the BFSS

after 1845. As one missionary wrote to the Society, in 1866:

I am disposed to think that our friends at times are a little too impatient and expect too much from Jamaica considering the short time since the abolition of slavery… Its curse & fears still cling to the land. But it is for us to diligently and perseveringly labour and patiently wait… The cause of Religion and Education has begun to work and I trust that our friends at home will not hinder its progress by withdrawing now their sympathy and aid.

Nonconformist missionaries were correct to sense that support and sympathy for their cause were on the wane in Britain. By the time the above letter arrived at the BFSS

headquarters, the Society had already begun to wind down its overseas operations and ceased including extracts of foreign correspondence in its annual reports. In 1867, the BFSS’s new secretary, Alfred Bourne, a former West Indian planter, reduced the BFSS’s foreign

operations to ‘grants of books and materials to a limited extent and the recommendation of teachers.’ His response to a plea for aid from Jamaica summed up the Society’s changed priorities: ‘The requirement [in Jamaica] being immediate and the home demand pressing, it was found impossible to grant their wishes.’

For the first time since it established a foothold in the colonies during slavery, the BFSS could no longer be fully depended upon to give aid and support to the Nonconformist missionaries in furthering the cause of elementary

instruction in the West Indies.

Why the BFSS scaled down its West Indian operations is best understood by situating

the cause of elementary education in the British West Indies within the wider current of

global missionary fervour and educational reform in this period. Insofar as the missionary

societies were concerned, the British West Indies comprised one small corner of a world-

wide enterprise, which in the second half of the nineteenth century led missionaries and

teachers as far afield as India, Africa, China, the Middle East, and Australasia. Similarly, the

West Indies composed one of several branches of the BFSS’s foreign and domestic

operations in this period and in regards to the aid and support it gave the missionaries it acted – just as the missionary societies themselves did – according to its own agenda. As a society dedicated to the principles of unsectarian education and the reform of education for the working classes and poor, the BFSS was intent on transmitting the British System as far and wide as possible. In so doing, however, its priorities were shaped by the combined religious, political, social, economic, as well as national and international interests, of its committee and subscribers. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the anti-slavery activism of many of the BFSS’s members readily translated into a crusade to elevate the ‘rising generation’ of the emancipated in the nineteenth-century British West Indies. By the 1840s, however, the Society’s focus had already long moved on the heels of British imperial interests to Africa and India. Nonconformist teachers and missionaries in the West Indies were themselves part of this sea-change and left their posts in the West Indies, not always owing to poverty and poor health, but because they were keen to make their mark on the next uncharted foreign station. However much West Indian missionaries and educational reformers pleaded not to be abandoned by their British supporters, they were unable to prevent either their own

missionary societies or the BFSS from following the global tide of missionary and educational fervour.

This study has traced the role played by the BFSS in supporting Nonconformist

missionaries to introduce unsectarian elementary education to the British West Indies during

the latter years of slavery and the early decades of emancipation. Scrutinising the BFSS

archive casts new light on the methods that Nonconformist missionaries adopted to shore up

their educational mission: through teacher training at BRC, employing BRC trained men and

women teachers, building customised British schools, seeking to implement the British

System curriculum, and utilising BFSS manuals and teaching resources. In resorting to the

British System, missionaries like James Phillippo and William Knibb underscored the scale of their ambition to build a system of elementary instruction on a new and progressive unsectarian pedagogy. Nevertheless, whilst this enabled them to look to the BFSS for training and resources, the costs of embracing the British System without sufficient funds and

materials, in conjunction with poor levels of pupil attendance and difficulties in securing and retaining trained teachers, compromised their ability to fully and consistently operate the British System in their schools. Their correspondence with the BFSS indicates they felt dependent on Britain for financial, material and moral support. In this context, the

observations quoted in the introduction to this study are not simply praise for the BFSS, but also the response of Nonconformist missionaries to bolster support and commitment from the Society at a time when, after 1845, they felt they had been abandoned by the British

government and public.

At the same time, the initial wave of enthusiasm displayed by the emancipated toward elementary education had also diminished. In seeking to explain this, missionaries highlighted child labour, parental indifference and poverty as factors that prevented children from attending school. Focusing on empirical explanations discouraged them from turning the spotlight on themselves and acknowledging that a system of fee-paying instruction that offered few real grounds for hope in transforming the emancipated’s poor and subordinate status was unlikely to retain its appeal, particularly in the face of spiralling economic

depression after 1846. In this way, missionaries largely failed to apprehend the real value and

meaning of education to the emancipated. For just as illiteracy was a symbol of enslavement,

so literacy was a symbol of freedom. When the Abolition Act was passed in 1833, however,

Parliament seized upon the education of the emancipated and apprentices not as a means to

underscore their freedom and enhance their socio-economic and political status, but to mould

former slaves into ‘civilised’ British subjects with all the imposition of control and authority

that that entailed. That this was far from the role and purpose of education envisaged by the emancipated is amply illustrated by the fact that they chose not to send their children to school in anything like the numbers anticipated by missionaries in the wake of abolition.

Parents’ foremost need and concern was to provide for their families and not to put their money and faith in an education system which, it quickly became apparent, was not a solution to poverty and prejudice. With freedom came the right (unknown to parents in slavery) to exercise their own decisions about how to raise their children and care for their families, a fact which few missionaries failed to appreciate. Ultimately, for all the obstacles they encountered, and despite the clear strides taken to establish elementary education in the colonies after slavery, neither Nonconformist missionaries nor the BFSS succeeded in developing an effective response to the emancipated’s concern that ‘book don’t feed our children’.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Kenneth Morgan and Phaedra Casey for their invaluable advice and guidance on this article; however, any inaccuracies and errors of argument and judgement are, of course, my own.

I would also like to thank Mandy Mordue and Phaedra Casey, senior archivists at the BFSS archive, for cataloguing the BFSS West Indian collection.

Foreign School Society Archives (hereafter BFSS Archives), Brunel University Archives, Uxbridge,

England; Reverend Henderson to the BFSS, British and Foreign School Annual Report (hereafter BFSS AR) (1851): 25; Alex Lindo to Henry Dunn, 3 April 1855, Jamaica (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/93), BFSS Archives.

2 Patricia T. Rooke, ‘Missionaries as Pedagogies: a Reconsideration of the Significance of Education for Slaves and Apprentices in the British West Indies, 1800-1838’, History of Education, vol 9, No. 1 (1980):

75. Also see, Patricia T. Rooke, ‘The pedagogy of conversion: missionary education to slaves in the British West Indies, 1800-33’ Paedagogica Historica, 18 (1978): 356-374; Felicity Jensz, ‘Missionaries and Indigenous Education in the 19^th Century British Empire. Part II: Race, Class, and Gender,’ History Compass, 10/4 (2012): 310.

3 George Bartle, ‘The Role of the British and Foreign School Society in the Education of the Emancipated Negro, 1814-75’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, vol. xv, no.1, (1983):1-9. William Green mentions the role of the BFSS and the British System in his study, William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830-1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976):

334-5.

4 Carl C. Campbell has written extensively on the history of education in the Caribbean. On the problems and challenges of establishing an elementary system in the British West Indies during the emancipation era, see Carl Campbell, ‘Social and Economic Obstacles to the Development of Popular Education in Post- emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1865’ in Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd, eds, Caribbean Freedom:

Economy and Society from Emancipation to the Present (Kingston: I. Randle Publishers, 1993): 262-268.

Also, M. K. Bacchus, Education as and for Legitimacy: Developments in West Indian Education Between 1846 and 1895 (Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1994).

5 BFSS AR (1814): v; on Joseph Lancaster see, Moira Dickson, Teacher Extraordinary: Joseph Lancaster, 1778-1838 (Lewis: The Book Guild Limited, 1986); Joyce Taylor, Joseph Lancaster: The Poor Child’s Friend – Educating the Poor in the Early Nineteenth Century (Kent: The Campanile Press, 1996).

6 Frank Smith, A History of English Elementary Education, 1760-1902 (London: University of London Press, 1931); Philip McGann, ed, Popular Education and Socialization in the Nineteenth Century (London:

Methuen &Co, 1977); Gillian Sutherland, Elementary Education in the Nineteenth Century (London: The Historical Association, 1971).

7 On missionaries in the West Indies during slavery see, Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The

Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1998).

8 On Borough Road College see, G. F. Bartle, A History of Borough Road College (Kettering: Dalkeith Press Limited, 1976).

9 Richard Taylor to James Millar, 18 August 1817, (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/123), BFSS Archives.

10 BFSS AR (1820): 25.

11 For a full analysis of the history and role of the Mico Charity see, Frank J Klingberg, The Lady Mico Charity Schools in the British West Indies, 1835-1842, The Journal of Negro History, Vol 24, no 3 (July, 1939): 291-344.

12 On the Bahamas Board of Education’s adoption of the BFSS’s unsectarian pedagogy see, Report of the Board of Education of the Bahamas (Nassau: W.D McLeod, 1850): 3.

13 Extract of a letter from Reverend William Knibb to the Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, in ibid (1824): 133.

14 Moses Rayner and John Stephenson, Bridgetown, to Central School, Borough Road, 30 August 1827, (BFSS/FC/Barbados/4), BFSS Archives.

15 BFSS AR (1820): 90.

16 Ibid (1821): 124.

17 John Howard Hinton, Memoir of William Knibb, Missionary in Jamaica (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1849).

18 Edward Bean Underhill, Life of James Mursell Phillippo: Missionary in Jamaica (London: Yates and Alexander, 1881): 133.

19 James Phillippo to Henry Dunn, 23 September 1834 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/7), BFSS Archives.

20 Shirley C. Gordon, ‘The Negro Education Grant 1835-1845: Its Application in Jamaica’, British Journal of Educational Studies, vol 6, Iss. 2 (1958): 141.

21 The term ‘normal school’ derives from the French école normale and was applied to the ‘model’ schools established in the nineteenth century for the instruction of teachers in ‘model’ teaching practices, now commonly referred to as teacher training colleges.

October 1836 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/13), BFSS Archives.

24 Ibid, 27 February (year unclear) (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/10).

25 Walter Dendy to Henry Dunn, 15 September 1836 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/32), BFSS Archives; Ibid, 7 February 1837 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/33), BFSS Archives.

26 Ibid, 25 September 1841 (BFSS/FC/JAMAICA/36) BFSS Archives.

27 O. Blouet, ‘Slavery and Freedom in the British West Indies, 1823-1833: The Role of Education’ History of Education Quarterly, vol 30, no 14 (1990): 636. Turner, Slaves and Missionaries, 88.

28 John McSwiney to Henry Dunn, 1 November 1839 (BFSS/FC/McSwiney/10), BFSS Archives.

29 William Towler to Henry Dunn, Postmark 1851 (BFSS/FC/DomRep/1), BFSS Archives.

30 On West Indian and African students at BRC see, Borough Road Training College, Male Students, 1810- 1877, BFSS Archives.

31 Joseph Hanson to the BFSS Ladies Committee, 13 May 1833 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/20), BFSS Archives;

Committee of Ladies Central Negro Funds Society to BFSS, 11 January 1834 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/23).

32 Seventh Report of the Ladies Committee of the British and Foreign School Society (1821): 26.

33 Edwin Wallbridge to Henry Dunn, 5 April 1837 (BFSS/FC/Edwin Wallbridge/2), BFSS Archives.

34 James Howell to Henry Dunn, 31 January 1838 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/135), BFSS Archives.

35 William Knibb to the BFSS, ‘Slave Book’ 12 January 1828 (BFSS/1/5/1/8/4/3), BFSS Archives. The Slave Book contains samples of enslaved children’s handwriting and embroidery, with their names and ages.

36 The Jamaican Education Society, established by Baptist missionaries, embraced the principles and teaching methods of the BFSS and sent various statistical reports to the Society, for example ‘Report of the year 1845’ which included data returns on 21 schools associated with the Baptist Western Union in Jamaica (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/44) and ‘Statistical Report of the Year 1844 of the Jamaican Educational Society connected with the Baptist Western Union’ (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/43), BFSS Archives.

37 Shirley C. Gordon, A Century of West Indian Education (Malta: St Paul’s Press, 1963): 30.

38 Ibid, 3.

39 Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865-1920 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004): 220.

40 Green, British Slave Emancipation, 334.

41 Jabez Tunley to Henry Dunn, 6 March 1846 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/53), BFSS Archives.

42 James Phillippo to Henry Dunn, January 15 1836 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/24), BFSS Archives.

43 Idem, 20 October 1836 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/13), BFSS Archives.

44 Ibid.

45 Idem, 11 February 1840, (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/14), BFSS Archives.

46 Ibid.

47 Idem, 6 May 1845 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/17), BFSS Archives.

48 John McSwiney to Henry Dunn, 15 April 1846 (BFSS/FC/McSwiney/19), BFSS Archives.

49 George Croft to Henry Dunn, 2 April 1839 (BFSS/FC/Anguila/1), BFSS Archives.

50 Jabez Tunley to Henry Dunn, 13 March 1847 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/54), BFSS Archives.

51 Wesleyan Mission House to BFSS, 22 April 1861 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/175), BFSS Archives.

52 My italics. Reverend Hurd to Henry Dunn, 6 May 1845 (BFSS/FC/Tobago/1), BFSS Archives.

53 Jabez Tunley to Henry Dunn, 13 March 1847 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/54), BFSS Archives.

54 Ibid, 10 March 1848 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/55), BFSS Archives.

55 Ibid, 29 August 1848 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/56), BFSS Archives.

56 Ibid, 13 March 1847 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/54), BFSS Archives

57 Reverend Williams to Henry Dunn, 21 April 1842 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/ 49), BFSS Archives; Jabez Tunley to Henry Dunn, 29 August 1848 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/56), BFSS Archives.

58 Gordon, A Century of West Indian Education, 59.

59 Reverend W G Barrett report in BFSS AR (1846): 23.

60 On the impact of the economic crisis on education see, Jay Mandle, Persistent Underdevelopment:

Change and Economic Modernization in the West Indies (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1996): 26; M.

Bacchus, Education as and for the Legitimacy: Developments in West Indian Education between 1846 and

63 Edwin Wallbridge to Henry Dunn, 1 March 1854 (BFSS/FC/Edwin Wallbridge/8), BFSS Archives.

64 Ibid.

65 Smith, History of English Elementary Education, 227-9 and 296-8.

66 William Reeve to BFSS, 8 August 1866 (BFSS/FC/Jamaica/182), BFSS Archives.

67 Quoted in Bartle, ‘The Role of the British and Foreign School Society’, 6.

68 On missionaries and imperialism see, Andrew Porter, Religion versus empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).