By Ian Cooper.
From his excellent series, Records of a Bygone Age, first published in The Stronsay Limpet and republished here with their kind permission.
My family had a long association with the North School in Stronsay and, out of interest, I started doing some research into its history. As can so often happen, I got completely side tracked and have finished up looking at past schools and education in
Stronsay as a whole.
The first reference to the importance of education in Stronsay I can find goes back to somewhere around the middle of the 17th century when William Baikie, a son of James Baikie 1st of Tankerness and a keen reader and collector of books, was living on the Holland estate. Known as William Baikie of Holland, he was a life-long bachelor with a love of books who spent much of his life in the study of his beloved books and is attributed with the founding of the Orkney Library in 1683, recognised as the oldest public library in Scotland.
William was a man of means with a reputation as a good and likeable man and a compassionate landlord, caring deeply for his fellow man and often giving encouragement to those with an aptitude for study. In a letter to the father of one boy who was showing some academic promise, William wrote ‘Faill not to keep your sone diligent reading and wreating yt he losse not what he hes attained’. Does that quote ring any bells for you?
Whether the boy did continue diligently reading isn’t known but it was William who, on his death in 1683, bequeathed his collection of books ‘extending the number thereof to eight score’ to the care of his long time dear friend Rev James Wallace, minister of St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, with the instruction that they were to be left ‘to the ministers of Kirkwall successive for the Publick Liberarie to be keept within the town of Kirkwall’. This collection of books was known as the ‘Bibliotheck of Kirkwall’ and has evolved over the years into the magnificent resource that is the Orkney Library and Archive of today.
Now back to the quote from William Baikie’s letter: ‘Faill not to keep your sone diligent reading and wreating yt he losse not what he hes attained’. Can you remember seeing it before? This quote was shown on the bookplate inside a great number of Orkney Library books up until around 2003 when, with a change of book supplier, the bookplate was no longer used and I suppose that after more than 300 years the quote was possibly becoming a little dated! It was still rather sad to see the passing of what was possibly the last direct link back to the foundation of the library in 1683.
For those interested, a fuller account of Scotland’s first library is given in issue 180 of the Stronsay Limpet published in June 2020.
Information about schools and schooling in Stronsay before the introduction of the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872, which made education of all children aged between 5 and 13 mandatory, seems to be quite hard to come by but schools before that there certainly were.
An Act of Parliament in 1696 gave Presbyteries the right to enlist the Commissioners of Supply (the forerunners of local Councils) to force the Heritors of each parish to provide schools in their area if they hadn’t already done so voluntarily. Those Heritors were the landed gentry and privileged people in each parish and as such were legally obliged to pay an annual set sum toward such things as Minister’s stipend, Manse and Glebe costs, schoolmasters’ salaries and contributions to the Poor Fund of each parish.
Progress was slow and the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, together with resistance from the Heritors, meant this Act had limited success. The Commissioners, many of whom would have been Heritors themselves, didn’t appear to carry out their duties with much enthusiasm and the Heritors of the parishes with even less. While the Church wished to pursue education for all, particularly education of a religious nature, the Heritors placed little value on the education of their tenants, many of whom in reality would have been little more than slaves at their master’s beck and call. Learning, they felt, could give their tenants ideas above their station and there was also a widely held belief that education of the masses would produce a race of idlers!
By the end of the 18th Century this resistance meant that there were still only a handful of schools, known as Parochial or Parish schools, set up and overseen by the local church and Heritors, with nearly all of these few schools in Orkney situated on Mainland Orkney. The teachers in those schools appear to have had minimal formal education themselves and were paid little more than a labourer’s wage.
In 1798 this shameful lack of action by the Heritors led to Thomas Dundas, the Lord Lieutenant of Orkney at the time, to write:
‘For several years past a good deal of noise has been made in the General Assembly for want of schools in some of the parishes of Orkney. By law, Heritors must erect and support a school in each parish, so in being applied to by the Rev Dr Kemp, secretary for the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge, I consented in writing to the Erection of Parochial Schools in all the parishes of Orkney and Zetland in which my property lies, and hereby directed my factor in all meetings of Heritors or of Commissioners of Supply before whom this business may come to agree in my name to grant such Salaries and such accommodation to the several Schoolmaster as the particular circumstances of the cases may render necessary and proper.’
The first structured education to be offered in the north of Scotland seems to have been organised by the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), the Society whose secretary had contacted Lord Dundas to ask for his assistance.
This Society had originally been set up in 1709 to establish schools ‘where religion and virtue might be taught to young and old’ in the Scottish Highlands and other ‘uncivilised’ areas of the country. They were tasked with setting up schools ‘for the instruction of children in some of the most necessary and useful arts of life’, with a strong bias to teaching morality and Christian values to those attending. According to the Society’s principles, a teacher should be ‘a person of Piety, Loyalty, Prudence, gravity, competent knowledge and literature and endued with other Christian qualifications suited to that station.’ That seems quite a demanding job description!
By the 1720s there were a few SSPCK schools on Mainland Orkney and apparently also one in the North Isles for a period, at Bacaland in Eday, but it seems it was some time before these schools spread to other isles.
The SSPCK schools were, for the greater part, only established where they could place a teacher in an existing Parochial school or where the Heritors or parishioners of the parish were willing to find or erect a suitable building for a school and make a contribution to the teacher’s salary.
In Rev John Anderson’s 1795 Statistical Account for Stronsay and Eday he explains that ‘As few or none of the heritors reside within the bounds of this district, and as not any of the non-residing heritors contribute any sum whatever for the maintenance of the poor, their support must depend on the families of the minister and parishioners.’ before noting that, about 15 years previously (c.1780), the Heritors of Stronsay had agreed to give a salary of £3 to a schoolmaster, then goes on to say:
‘But this salary, small though it be, hath not been regularly paid, and to procure, in terms of law, a salary and schoolhouse, would infer greater expense than the minister can, in his present circumstance, afford. The heritors are unwilling, and the parishioners of Stronsay and Eday are unable, to accomplish this desirable end. A society school hath, for several years past, been a great benefit to the poor children in the parish of Stronsay.’
Could it have been this promise of £3 toward a schoolmaster’s salary that led the SSPCK to look favourably to Stronsay? This would fit well with the Society making its first appointment to the island in 1782, this being the appointment of John Skethway as Society schoolmaster at a salary of £5. He had, it was said, been teaching without salary in Stronsay for nigh on 30 years before his appointment as a Society schoolmaster. In SSPCK records of 1793, by which time the Society was managing well in excess of 300 schools in Scotland, it was recorded that John Skethway was schoolmaster in Stronsay, employed by the Society at a salary of £6 per year, with the parish expected to enhance his salary with a similar sum. Although that same 1793 record indicated that John had previously been schoolmaster in Kirkwall, this can only be an error as he was appointed
Session Clerk to the Established Church in Stronsay on 2nd January 1753 and must have been resident there at that time, continuing in this role until his death in 1801. John was said to be ‘uncommonly well qualified’ before he took up the salaried post at the school in Stronsay which was recorded as being at Sandiebank. It seems this school was known at the time as the Parish or Parochial School and, although it seems likely that this building would have been in the same spot as the present Central School, it has proved to be extremely difficult to link names of schools to specific sites.
John taught in Stronsay until his death in 1801and was assisted by his son Scollay Skethway in his latter years. Following John’s death, Scollay was to be the school’s headmaster for many years to come. He was still logged as a teacher, aged 74, in the 1851 census, then documented as a retired teacher in the 1861 census, with his death being recorded in 1867 at the age of 90. His career seemed to have been both successful and well received and, at a school inspection in 1824, it was noted that, at the age of 48 he had been in post for 25 years and that all the islanders could read. This last statement may well have been overly optimistic but still gives a good indication that he was doing an excellent job.
Scollay Skethway married Cecilia Scott sometime around 1800 and they went on to have 13 children, the first in 1801 and number thirteen arriving in 1823! Scollay is recorded in the census of 1841 and1851 as a teacher living at St Salvator and then, in 1861, as a retired teacher, aged 84 still living at St Salvator. In the Ordnance Survey Name Book of 1879 St Salvator is described as ‘a small dwelling house built of stone, one story high, thatch roof, in fair repair situated about 200 yards west of St Catherine’s.’ It must have been less than ideal accommodation for Mr and Mrs Skethway and however many of their children happened to be in residence at the time!
Here some confusion sets in as SSPCK records show Scollay Skethway and his father before him are both recorded as teaching at a school at Sandybank, with entries for Scollay there in 1810, when the school roll stood at 36, and again at Sandybank in 1851, which would again seem to point to this being where the present school is today. To further confuse the issue, in 1821 the SSPCK had recorded Mr Skethway as a teacher at St Salvator. Could this simply have been confusion between his home address and the school ?
However the first Stronsay census was undertaken in 1841 and this shows 45 year old Westray man Stewart Logie living at the Parish School with his wife and 3 sons and, presumably, acting as teacher there. By the position of this entry in the Census, this school was near to Wardhill and can surely only have been where the present school is. Was this the same school at which Mr Skethway had been teacher for 40 years? Would the number of pupils at the school have justified more than one teacher and, if not, what of Skethway? There is mention of ‘Scollay Skethway’s School’ but where was it and, if that was indeed a different school, why was he no longer teaching at the parochial school? Or was Scollay Skethway’s School simply a familiar term for the parish school as he had taught there so long?
So, one school or two? Thus far it has seemed that Skethway’s Society school and the Parochial School could possibly have been the same building but then Rev John Simpsons enters the fray with his 1845 Statistical Account of Stronsay and Eday where he records that:
‘In these parishes there are three principal schools, two in Stronsay and one in Eday. Of these in Stronsay, one is the Parochial School, and the other is supported by the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge. This school was established by the Society in the year 1782. And it may be worthy of being noticed, that since that time it has continued in the same family, being taught first by the father and afterwards by the present teacher, his son, who is also an elder in the parish church.’
That leaves little doubt that the Society school was the school where Scollay Skethway and his father before him had taught.
Now, with the waters well muddied, the Secession (later the United Presbyterian) Church must also throw its hat into the ring as it, at some point before 1861 – quite probably well before that date – was also in charge of a school. This couldn’t have been the original 1782 Society school as the congregation only formed in 1801, but could they have taken over the running of the Society school at some point, with this being the second school noted by Rev Simpson?
Looking to the 1879 name book once more the entry for the house of St Catherine’s states that:
‘upon the North West side of the house about a hundred yards, stands an old store house, now used as a school for boys and girls, but not in connection with the school board, the attendance at present is about 30.’
This store was little more than a stone’s throw from St Salvator, the house where Skethway resided until his death 12 years previously, so could Scollay Sketheway’s School have been in this area? Or, as seems more likely, was this little school a separate entity set up due to the newly formed School Board’s inability to make suitable provision for the pupils in the Rothiesholm peninsula? That is just one more question yet to be answered.
If any of our readers have any information or theories about these schools, their teachers or where the schools may have been situated I would be delighted to hear of it by email at ian.cooper56@gmail.com