The Charlotte Mason Archive with Dr. Carroll Smith and Dr. John Thorley

Transcript

Our goal in sharing selected talks from past CMI conferences is to foster deeper engagement within the Charlotte Mason community. By providing access to these enriching discussions, we hope to inspire reflection, growth, and a renewed commitment to the principles of a Charlotte Mason education. Each talk is a valuable resource for educators and parents alike, offering insights, encouragement, and practical wisdom to help guide the next generation in a life filled with curiosity, wonder, and learning.

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Introduction

Dr. Carroll Smith: Today we are talking about the history of the Charlotte Mason Archive, and I am interviewing Dr. John Thorley, who was the last principal of Charlotte Mason College. John, before becoming the principal of the Charlotte Mason College, was head of a comprehensive school in the northern part of the Lake District in Carlisle, England. John, how many students were in that school? 

Dr. John Thorley: Actual school students, it was 1,750, but it was also a community school, so the school was responsible for what we call the adult education of half of the city of Carlisle.

Dr. Carroll Smith: And you have also, when you left Charlotte Mason College as principal, you became a professor at Lancaster University or was that at the same time? 

Dr. John Thorley: Yes, I actually became a professor of education while I was the principal of the college. All the principals of the colleges within the Lancaster University Ambit were given the title of Professor. 

Dr. Carroll Smith: Ah, okay. So what are the courses that you have taught at the University of Lancaster?

Dr. John Thorley: That I actually taught myself? 

Dr. Carroll Smith: Yes. 

Dr. John Thorley: Well, of course, I taught within the college. The college, Charlotte Mason College, was at the time independent financially, but we were academically validated by Lancaster University. So our courses led to B.Ed. degree or PGCE of Lancaster University. My own teaching within the college was fairly restricted. I did some history teaching but I always, because my history is all entirely in schools, I was always involved on teaching practice. I always, every teaching practice, I had two or three students that I looked after, so to speak, on teaching practice around the schools of Cumbria and North Lancashire.

Now, it's quite different because, ever since retiring from the college, I've still continued to teach actually at Lancaster, but I've now reverted to being a classicist. So I've taught, and I'm still teaching, a course on medieval Latin at Lancaster University. This is for MA and PhD students. And I've also taught, believe it or not, Medieval Greek to some students as well. So I've returned to being my original subject and even my doctorate is not in education. It's in Greek and Latin.

Dr. Carroll Smith: So you are what is typically referred to as a classicist, right? 

Dr. John Thorley: That's right. Apparently, yes. 

Dr. Carroll Smith: Yes. Okay. So that gives us a little background about John. John also was one of the first speakers at the first CMI Charlotte Mason Education Conference and has a wealth of knowledge about Charlotte Mason and her history. And so today we want to talk about how the Charlotte Mason Archive was established. And I understand, John, that there are several stories about the establishment of the Mason Archive that include the story of the PNEU archive, the Mason Archive. Tell us those stories.

The History of the Charlotte Mason Archive

Dr. John Thorley: Well, it is complicated and in preparation for this session, I have tried to piece together where things were when. When I arrived at the college in 1983, of course the college by that time was fully a part of the national system. The fact that it had been established by Charlotte Mason was simply a part of its history. We were not, by my time, actually teaching Charlotte Mason methods.

We were fully a part of the national system. But of course, I was interested in Charlotte Mason as an educationist as most people in the college were. I discovered soon after I arrived that there was a considerable archive in various places. We had had some of the archives actually in college, but they had been transferred to the Armitt which was then actually in Ambleside Library. It wasn't the modern building that there is now. The college had transferred what the college had of the archives, to the Armitt in the Armitt Library, so that was one piece so to speak. The college no longer retained the archives and well, we retained a few books that Charlotte Mason had owned and they're still there.

"When I arrived at the college in 1983, of course the college by that time was fully a part of the national system. The fact that it had been established by Charlotte Mason was simply a part of its history. We were not, by my time, actually teaching Charlotte Mason methods."

And so that was one part of the archive. Another part of the archive was in what was by then called the PNEU/WES. That's the PNEU/World Education Service based in London. They were still providing schools, mainly overseas schools, with materials on Charlotte Mason lines. That eventually closed in 1988 or 1989, I think it was. They, in London, had an office, and they had essentially what were any records that were still relevant to the PNEU. I was aware of that, and, in fact, when the PNEU/WES closed in 1988-89, I went down there with a large van and collected the archives that they didn't want to hand on to anybody else. So, of course, we weren't particularly keen on the materials that they've been dealing with in recent years. We got anything before about 1960. Anything that they possessed, we brought it up to Ambleside. 

Now I discovered then, that was 1988, I discovered then that the PNEU/WES based in London had already handed on some of its archives, the older archives, they told me, to London University. And as far as I knew in 1988, that's when it was. So when I retired from full-time principalship in 1994, we knew where the Armitt section of the archives, after the college piece, and what the Armitt already had. That was in the Armitt, and then we had the material that I had brought up from London from the PNEU/WES, but we were aware that, we thought that, there was another section that had been handed on to Lancaster Churchill London University. I contacted London University 1994/95 to ask if we could have them please.

And then, after several months, a letter came back saying they had no record of them in their present collection. I then discovered, I'm not quite sure through whom but through someone else, that London University, we don't know the exact date, around 1985 apparently, had handed the record, the archives, that they had received from PNEU/WES to Kendal - to the Kendal record office. And what I didn't know at the time the Kendal record office, because I contacted them to ask what they did with them, they couldn't find them. We then discovered sometime later that they had actually handed what they had received from WES - World Education Services - they had handed it to the Armitt. So actually by 1994, all the material was in the Armitt. Unfortunately, it wasn't all in the same place so when I started to catalog the archive, there had been an attempt by the way around 1980 by the county archive service to catalog it but they have not gotten very far. So when I started to catalog in 1994/95, I knew the location of most of it, but I didn't know where the section which was actually those were not, these are the PNEU boxes.

They had apparently been handed to London University then back up to Kendal and then to the Armitt, but I had never seen them. By accident one day when I was elsewhere in the Armitt, down in the bowels of the Armitt, in the basement, I saw some boxes that were simply labeled PNEU boxes. Lo and behold, they were the boxes that had been handed over by London University to Kendal then from Kendal to the Armitt, but nobody had recorded the fact that they had been left there. But as soon as I looked in, of course I realized what they were.

So I can be sure, I'm sure now, that we do have everything, the whole archive is together in the Armitt and the catalog that I did, I hope, covers all the archives available from Charlotte Mason today certainly. But rather long story, I'm sorry about that. But I think the situation now, the catalog that we did and that Deani and her colleagues then digitized, is, I think, the whole archive certainly on Charlotte Mason herself up to 1923 when she died. 

"By accident one day when I was elsewhere in the Armitt, down in the bowels of the Armitt, in the basement, I saw some boxes that were simply labeled PNEU boxes. Lo and behold, they were the boxes that had been handed over by London University to Kendal then from Kendal to the Armitt, but nobody had recorded the fact that they had been left there. But as soon as I looked in, of course I realized what they were."

Why Gather the Archives? 

Dr. Carroll Smith: Just so that our listeners understand, Kendal is on the edge of the Lake District not very far from Ambleside, which is where the Mason House of Education was and where the Armitt is now, just so people understand that. So there is this, to me, it's an interesting story about the the Mason Archive. I'm curious to know why you made the decision to go to the trouble of getting that archive together. Why not just get rid of it? 

Dr. John Thorley: I have to say that I think I suspect the thought did occur to me. Because there were in total, by then, without the PNEU boxes, which I didn't know at the time when I started the process, there were, I think it was something like 80 archive boxes. Now archive boxes are a considerable box, cardboard boxes, and there were about 80 of them. And as soon as I looked into one, I realized that there was little organization of the papers that were in. I consulted a friend of mine who was an archivist, I've always had an interest in the archive, so that's probably part of the answer I should give, I'm interested in the archive, so I just spoke to a friend of mine from the Kendal Archive office.  And I said, “What? How do I deal with these? Do I try to reorganize them into some sort of topics?” And he said, “Oh no, no. Don't do that. Certainly not nowadays because we now have computers. All you need to do is record each item in each box where it is, exactly where it is - don't move it. Put it on your computer and then it means that it can be word searched.”

And that is the state of place still. Everything is as it was, in that everything is in the same box that it was in when I started the process in 1994. Now some of the boxes are coherent, of course. In some, there are coherent material, you know: Charlotte Mason's letters from here to there, and so on. But in many, it isn’t like that. There are 30/40 items which could be, frankly, anything, and they are listed exactly as they were in the box and put on my computer, and that's of course the origin of Deani’s digitized system so they can be searched for quite simply on a computer. Now that's really,  I want, I realize that the cataloging that had been started around 1980 was incomplete. I think the story there was that one of the archivists had been asked to do it, and she had moved on to another job. So the job was simply left.

So it was only about half finished, and I decided to start again because I thought there were better ways of doing it. So that’s my interest in archives and the fact that, of course, I knew about Charlotte Mason. I knew something about her at this time; not a lot, I have a bit, but I knew something about her and I thought that whatever she had written, whatever materials were still available to research her history, and I knew, of course, several researchers who had been doing research - Margaret Coombs and several others at the time - and I thought these must be both preserved and also organized in such a way that other people can get access to them. 

Dr. Carroll Smith: So I know you don't like the praise, but we are looking at the gentleman who made the archive possible because if you hadn't made the effort and gone through the trouble of going to London and the various sites to gather the archive together, such as Kendal and London, we wouldn't have it today.

Somebody else may have thrown it away, but we are forever thankful to you John Thorley. So, can, let me ask you one other another question: What do you think might be significant about Mason's work?

"So I know you don't like the praise, but we are looking at the gentleman who made the archive possible because if you hadn't made the effort and gone through the trouble of going to London and the various sites to gather the archive together, such as Kendal and London, we wouldn't have it today. "

What Are Some Significant Findings About Charlotte Mason’s Work?

Dr. John Thorley: From my ideas at the time, I knew something about Charlotte Mason's educational ideas. But as I said, I haven't read everything that Charlotte had written at that stage while I was prinicpal of college. I knew something about her as an educationist because, of course in a sense, she is part of educational history. But what I did realize was that many of her ideas are now there firmly embedded in the British education system.

In primary education, especially. Her ideas about the importance of the child and about the importance of a broad curriculum, the importance of science and other things in the curriculum. All those are there in Charlotte Mason and those have fortunately been built into our primary education system over the decades since Charlotte started to talk about those things. When you realize the huge difference she made. When you go to a museum today in England, you often see a school room as it was around 1870 or something. They will come. And when you see what they were doing, of course, what Charlotte herself did down in Worthing (she had to do it because the curriculum was set for them), essentially what they did was the so-called “Three R’s” - reading, writing and arithmetic together with a bit of girls sewing and boys a bit of woodwork and that was pretty much it, and run around the playground and so on and that was what the curriculum was.

"I knew something about her as an educationist because, of course in a sense, she is part of educational history. But what I did realize was that many of her ideas are now there firmly embedded in the British education system."

And Charlotte, by 1880s, about when she wrote Home Education, she was saying it shouldn't be allowed at all. We shouldn't start with what the curriculum is. We should start with what is the child? And I knew enough about Charlotte Mason at the time to know that her ideas, many of her ideas, not all, but many of her ideas had become thoroughly a part of British schools as I knew it because I did teach briefly in a primary school myself. I knew that those ideas being incorporated in so much English education that you see today in schools. 

How Did the College Get It’s Name?

Dr. Carroll Smith: So I want to change topics just a bit. At the North End of Ambleside on Rydal Road going out of town is where, toward Grasmere and Rydal, is where Charlotte Mason had her college. She, I think, purchased the building from Wordsworth's niece and changed the name, I think it was called Greenbank when Wordsworth's niece lived there, but Mason changed the name to Scale How, which is a hill, “how” means hill, and the building Scale How sits on a hill, but right across the road at the bottom of the hill is a home, now, called Springfield - still has that name today. It's called Springfield. How does that fit into Mason's story? 

Dr. John Thorley: Well, when she started in 19-, in 1892, in January 1892, that's where she started. She rented Springfield, which is where I lived for 11-12 years. So that was the beginning of the college, but she started, as you probably remember, with just four students. That first year was just four students, and they were based at Springfield, and what later became my sitting room was where Charlotte started the college. She was there until I think 1894, and then she rented, she first rented and later bought, she rented what is now Scale How. Then, it was simply the white building that you see on top of the hill. It was later, of course there have been many extensions since then, but it was the white building that she first of all rented realizing that, by that time, she had 20, 20 something, 30 students so that she couldn't put them on in Springfield. And she retained Springfield, which is why I was able to eventually use it as the principal’s house. So that's what Springfield was. It was the first college. 

College Growth and Change 1983-1989

Dr. Carroll Smith: So you were, and correct me if I'm wrong, you were the last principal, and for our listeners, I want to distinguish that in the states, a principal of a college is called president of the college and I think it's the same in Canada. (Hmm.) They refer to their college principals as presidents as we do. You were, here in the UK even to this day, you are referred to, if you are the leader of a college, as principal. Can you share just your experience as the last principal of the Charlotte Mason College?

Dr. John Thorley: Yeah, when I went there in 1983, the college was, as far as student numbers were concerned, it was in a dip because there had been a, how can I put it, the teacher education in this country has always been manpower planned. That is, the government gets an idea from the birth statistics how many teachers are required, how many new teachers are required each year. In the early ages, the population had dropped, the child population had dropped, and, therefore, the number of teachers allocated, so to speak, to each training institution in the country that had been reduced. And the result was that Charlotte Mason College in 1983 had only around 200 students. When I was appointed, the point was made that the expansion was now going to come very rapidly because the birth, the birth statistics had changed, there was a great more teachers had retired than they thought, so there was a sudden need for primary school teachers especially, and after three or four years by the way, also secondary teachers. That’s why we expanded into secondary teacher training. When I arrived, the numbers were just over 200, and then within the first three or four years, the numbers of students on the B.Ed. program was somewhere in the region of 500. So we had to expand extremely quickly. It reached around 700 fulltime B.Ed. students by around 1988-89, so the expansion from 83 to 89 was, it was very very rapid.

So we had to find not only teaching room for them - several places were rebuilt or a new buildings put up - we also had to find accommodation. We built several accommodation blocks. We also found accommodation in various places in Ambleside and Windermere. We also made this arrangement with Lancaster University, which is 25 miles away, that most students would spend one year, that's the second year of the four-year course, they would spend the second year actually at Lancaster University doing whatever subject that they were specializing in. So that made it possible to expand so rapidly from 200 in 1983 to around 700 about six years, six years later. 

So a lot of the day-to-day work was involved in setting up those different things, you know, the arrangements at Lancaster University, who was our validating body as I've mentioned. So most people, the only exception were the people doing outdoor education as a specialism. They stayed in Ambleside, but all the other students in each year went to Lancaster for one year, for their second year. We also expanded in, as I said, into the secondary. We did secondary PGCE’s in several different subjects, including modern languages, French mainly, and we all, in that context, we developed a link with six French universities.

What we did, we ran a joint post graduates certificate in teaching French in English schools like this with a French certificate for teaching French in high, in further education in French colleges. This was a dual qualification which took a full year. Students arrived in September, and they didn't finish their qualification until the following August, so it was more than the academic year, and that was, they spent six years, six months in France. They spent six months in a London College. We hired premises in a London College to do that course, so that was, it was suggested to us actually by a, well, it was suggested to me personally, by someone I knew at the Department of Education and Science at the time. We said we must expand the number of teachers teaching French and other modern languages in our secondary school. Can we in any way contribute? So I said well, yes, almost certainly. So we had 50 students each year taking that one year course for French.

We also did secondary courses in English, in Religious Studies, in History and Modern Language. So we expanded into the secondary area as well. But that was just one year. Students were there for one year. But the one, the other big expansions for us, it was the fact that we realized Ambleside’s Village was only 2,000 population, and the college population was already, that is the full-time students, already 700 plus, and we decided there's an area where we did have expertise and we could almost certainly contribute to the National pattern was in-service education for teachers.

So we were able to expand there partly because, at the time, in the expansion of students, of course together with that had gone expansion of staff. And the expansion of staff was mainly primary, some secondary specialty schools, but mainly in the primary field, and we, by that time, by 1987-88, we had six former Primary School heads on the lecturing staff at the college, and we decided that that was an opportunity. So we specialized in management courses for running primary schools that was for head teachers and deputy head teachers, and it was extremely successful because we were able to run these courses, not necessarily in Ambleside, only a few of them were in Ambleside, for Cumbria Education Committee, for several other education committees in the country including two London boroughs. We actually sent people down to London to run these courses over the year. They would go down for a week and then come back to college and do some other work, and then two or three months later, they would go down and teach for another week. 

We did that in several locations including not just London, but the Isle of Man, Little Island, between us and Ireland, which does not have a college. So we got the contract to teach to the in-service training for teachers on the Isle of Man. We also got the contract to teach teachers, give in-service courses to teachers, who were in English forces schools overseas because there are still English schools for forces personnel, Army personnel, Air Force personnel, in Germany, in Cyprus, and, at the time, there was in Hong Kong, so we were delivering courses, some of our staff were delivering courses in Germany, in Cyprus, and in Hong Kong. So the total of the in-service work that we were doing was actually one third of the college's work. One third was in-service and the other two thirds, well, not quite, most of the other two thirds was the initial teacher training. We did a few other courses, as well, because we moved into courses, for instance, for tourism because,of course, Cumbria is a tourist area. So we were asked by the tourist board if we would be able to provide courses for the management of tourism. So we had to buy in people to deliver those courses. 

So that's how the college expanded very very rapidly in those years between 1983 and 1988/89. I was also regularly in France. I speak French and, yeah, I was regularly negotiating how we were going to split up the money between ourselves and the French universities - the six different French universities in France. And by the way, two other colleges joined our system. Okay, the Hamilton College Cambridge and Nottingham University also joined us in that scheme to provide modern language teachers in English secondary schools by using this system of giving students two qualifications - one to teach in English schools; another to teach in French colleges. And it was, as I said, a full one year course. It was very popular each year. We have 25 French people and 25 English people each year in that course, and there was never any problem in recruiting students for it. We regularly got 100/115 applications for that course, so it was a very successful course. I enjoyed the teaching that I did on it, too. So, that was my job.

Final Thoughts

Dr. Carroll Smith: So back to the archive, do you have any stories or any final thoughts about the archive and the collection?

Dr. John Thorley: Well, the fact that Deani and her team, at Redeemer College at the time, near Toronto, digitized it, digitized most of the collection, but not all. There's still some to be done. I gather Deani, at one point, wants to complete it. That has been invaluable. That doesn't mean that the archive is going to survive. I mean, it will survive in physical form. And we have had advice from the archivists on how to preserve the material because some of the materials, of course, are already 150 years old in the archive. So we did get advice on what to do to preserve materials that were in it. 80 boxes full. Not all on, but some of the material you've seen Carol. You've seen some of the letters from Charlotte Mason from the 1860s, 1870s.

Those are very very fragile now. So they've all been properly preserved and there's no doubt that the fact that they're now digitally available means that the archive is going to survive for, I hope, many hundreds of years from now. 

Dr. Carroll Smith: Well, thank you, John, for taking time out of your day and your week to tell us the history behind the preservation of Mason's archive. Um, we appreciate that very much and we hope that this video will remain around for many many years as a historical record. 

Dr. John Thorley: I hope I've got it right Carroll. I'm working from memory for most of this, as you realize. 

Dr. Carroll Smith: That's okay. You have a good memory. Much better than mine. All right, so thank you John. We appreciate you joining us today. 

Dr. John Thorley: Okay! Right, Carroll.