The army and the first state funded schools in England. This review of the late Howard Clarke’s book I undertook for the Book Review section of the Journal of the Royal Army Historical Society’s summer edition of their journal. However, I thought that it might also interest some in education, not least for the light that it shines on when the State first started paying for the education of some children.

The best books are those that arise from the author’s love of the subject. Howard Clarke’s passion for education shines through what was sadly his last work. He did not live to see its publication.

‘Redcoats in the Classroom’, published by Helion & co, stands as a monument both to Clarke and to the pioneering work of the army in creating elementary education in that period of the nineteenth century when the State in Britain clung to the notion, as J S Mill put it in his book, On Liberty, that the State’s role was to see it citizens are educated and not to educate them itself.

The army took up the challenge of schooling long before Gladstone’s government finally introduced a defining role for the State in elementary education, with Forster’s 1870 Elementary Education Act. Indeed, many familiar with the history of the battle for universal elementary education in England, and the role of the State, will have to reassess their views following the publication of this book.

The 1830s no longer can be viewed as the beginning of State funding for schooling. The Army Order of 1811, and the associated vote of funds in 1812, predates the generally accepted date for the first funding for elementary education by a good two decades, albeit for a restricted group of children in society.

Although the schooling introduced by the army during the Napoleonic War with France was rudimentary, it was revolutionary in its own way by including not only the basic schooling for boys, but also for girls. These weren’t the Redcoats of the title, but their offspring. The Redcoats were for the most part the ‘schoolmaster sergeants’ employed to teach them.

Some initiatives established during a period of warfare don’t survive the cutbacks of the subsequent peace. Schooling in the army didn’t suffer that fate after 1815, although after its early start Clarke notes little innovation until well after Queen Victoria came to the throne and the beginnings of a scheme for the wider state involvement in schooling.

This review isn’t the place to discuss the religious question, and how it affected the development of schooling in England, but even the army wasn’t able to avoid the competing claims of Bell and Lancaster with their links to either the Established Church or to nonconformism. Scotland and Ireland, and the regiments and militia raised in those countries, had other issues in this respect.

The book is stronger on the history of education in Ireland than in Scotland, but both probably had a clearer local identity than was the case for many of the regiments of the army raised in England before the reforms of the late nineteenth century finally tied regiments to specific geographical areas.  The pragmatic solution of allowing children to miss the prayers of the first half hour of the morning was just one of the army’s decisions that has influenced education in England up to the present day.

The judgement in Walden v Bailey, curiously not included in the index, was important in shaping the balance between the education of children and the work of schoolmasters with soldiers. Had the judgment been in the other direction, I am sure that the education of children of serving soldiers might have been much less important than was the case until the end of the century and the recognition that army children in Britain could use the ‘state’ system but that there was still a responsibility to educate the children of troops serving overseas: as is still the case.

Readers will find this book heavy going in places. There is a complete absence of sub-headings that might have helped in some of the chapters, especially where the relationship of the educators to their work with soldiers as opposed to children is concerned. In passing, it is worth noting that a large proportion of those soldiers never wore the red coat used in the title.

Whether as a result of either the author’s untimely death or a cavalier attitude to publication standards doesn’t matter, but the poor attention to detail in the book goes beyond mere irritation into making it something of a challenge to read. The collection of the tables into an appendix would have prevented the mis-alignment between table numbers quoted in the text and the table actually under consideration, as occurred on page 294. However, more will be needed in any reprint to eliminate the myriad of missing spaces, confusion between the use of upper and lower case in the description of terms such as commissioners and other typological issues that occur throughout the book.

Despite these shortcomings, this book reveals the dedicated work of the author in researching many records of individual regiments, especially in the early nineteenth century when the schooling in the army was in its infancy. The latter part of the book relies more heavily on national reports and as such is more comprehensive, but less detailed at the regimental level, especially as garrison schools became the norm in larger centres in England.

The book is arranged chronologically, and this means that for each time period schooling in England, in India, and elsewhere in the world where there were troops garrisoned, are merged together, except for one chapter on India. A geographical approach might have made the book easier for the reader to follow, especially since the frequent movement of units caused great problem for the education of some children. Indeed, that is still an issue today, when soldiers are posted during the school-year.

The army, out of necessity not enlightenment, achieved in 1812 what parliament had failed to do during the previous decade, ensure state involvement in the education of at least some of its citizens. In uncovering this fascinating, but hidden area of early schooling, Clarke has created a book for both those interested in military history and those interested in the history of education in England.