Schoolmaster – Abingdon on Thames Town Council

James Macdonald Cobban

James Cobban was headmaster of Abingdon School from 1947 to 1970. He is credited with transforming the school from the rather undistinguished institution it had become to one that enjoyed (as it still does) a very high status in the educational world.

Cobban was born in Lincolnshire in 1910. His family was not wealthy, and his education at all stages was financed by scholarships. As a boy, he was so inspired by the headmaster of the grammar school he attended that he resolved to emulate him and become a headmaster himself. He studied classics at Cambridge, achieving high academic honours and a bursary which enabled him to spend time in Vienna and Rome. His teaching career began in 1933, and in 1936 he became master of the classical sixth form at Dulwich College, where he was notable for the success of his pupils in winning university scholarships. During the Second World War, he served in the Intelligence Corps and later on the Control Commission that administered Germany after its defeat. He reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. When he applied for the headmastership of Abingdon School, the references from his military superiors emphasised his skill in training junior personnel.

Cobban came to a school that lacked professional management. It had no bursar and only one part-time secretary. Fees were low, which meant that staff levels were inadequate, buildings dilapidated, and equipment lacking. Working closely with the governors, Cobban began to remedy these failings. A science block was opened in 1950, and in the same year Lacies Court was acquired as school accommodation. Further development came with the years. The syllabus was revised, and examination results, including those for university entrance, improved. Cobban put great effort into maintaining a vibrant school community where sporting and other extra-curricular activities flourished as pupil numbers increased. At his arrival, there had been only 250 pupils; by the time of his departure there were 630.

In his later years at the school, Cobban was deeply involved in discussions and negotiations to maintain the direct grant system by which deserving pupils could have their education subsidised out of public funds. In this he was unsuccessful, and it was shortly before his retirement that the government of the time decided to end such grants. However, in 1981, the new ‘assisted places’ scheme was introduced in partial replacement. Cobban had been the main architect of this scheme, and his contribution was recognised in the following year by a knighthood.

It was as a teacher and educator that Cobban excelled. His teaching style was histrionic, and always kept the attention of his pupils. A humourist, he could defuse a difficult situation by an apposite quotation or allusion and had a great store of jokes. He knew each of his pupils by name. He was concerned with their social no less than their intellectual development, lecturing them on etiquette and good manners, and expecting them to hold their own in conversation with him.

Outside the school, Cobban was always active in the wider community. He was a JP and chairman of the Abingdon sessions while they existed. He was a deputy lieutenant for both Berkshire and Oxfordshire. He was also vice-chairman of the Oxford Diocesan Synod, and a governor of numerous schools and colleges.

His private life was marked by tragedy. In 1947 his two-year-old son fell out of a window and was killed. In 1961, his wife Lorna died in early middle age leaving him with four young daughters to care for. Lorna, although a scientist by training, had taken on the traditional role of a headmaster’s wife, and was sadly missed. His sister Katie gave up her own post as a headmistress to take on the housekeeping and the role. Cobban’s strong religious beliefs helped him through these disasters.

In old age, Cobban moved to Yeovil to be cared for by a daughter. He died there in 1999. A building in Park Crescent, acquired by Abingdon School after his retirement, was renamed Cobban House in his honour.

© AAAHS and contributors 2015

Robert Jennings

It is not every schoolmaster who can retire to great wealth and a landed estate, but Robert Jennings, Master of Abingdon School from 1657 to 1683, did so. Born about 1622, he was the second son of John Jennings, a prominent Reading mercer. John Jennings was Mayor of Reading in 1630-40, but his name disappears from the corporation records after the taking of the town by the parliamentarians in the Civil War. This suggests a strong royalist allegiance, which was shared by his son.

Robert studied at St John’s College in Oxford, matriculating in 1639/40. A fellowship of that college had been the launch pad for the ascent of William Laud, a Reading man, to the archbishopric of Canterbury, and the relationship between Reading and St John’s was close. Robert chose to remain in Oxford throughout the war while it was the royalist capital, taking his MA in 1647/8. But in the purges that followed the parliamentarian victory he was expelled from the university on the grounds that ‘he had borne arms for the king’. He moved to London and in 1649 was in residence at the Middle Temple, but it is not clear that he ever seriously studied or practised law. His activities in the next several years are obscure.

In 1655 there were vacancies at the schools of both Reading and Abingdon. Robert had support from such worthies as Bulstrode Whitelocke, High Steward of Reading, former recorder of Abingdon and now a senior figure in the protectorate government, and from the prominent Laudian Peter Heylin, expelled from Oxford and now resident in Abingdon. He opted at first for Reading, but this turned out badly. The ruling élite of the town was deeply split, and Robert was the candidate of only one faction. The others preferred a St John’s graduate of the post-war generation untainted by royalism, and were able to get an order from the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, in his favour. Robert was dismissed. At Michaelmas 1657, he took over at Abingdon School.

The salary was an ungenerous £30 per year, but Robert seems to have had access to capital. Where this came from is uncertain. As a second son, he would not have inherited his family’s fortune. Nothing is known of his marriage, but it seems likely that it was an advantageous one. The school was at that time located in the area in front of the present Guildhall, with the schoolmaster’s house on the south side of the courtyard. Robert repaired the house and refurbished the school library. He built over a part of the courtyard to accommodate boarders as a profit-earning venture. There were repeated negotiations with the Corporation over money, and by 1678 he was able to make a loan of £400 towards the building of the County Hall.

There is little information on his performance as a schoolmaster, but if, as seems likely, the future Lord Chief Justice, John Holt, was one of his pupils, it must have been at least competent. Modern historians have drawn disapproving attention to his expulsion in 1671 of ten boys from families of religious dissenters, but it was a time of deep religious division. Royalism went together with hostility to dissent. There will have been pressure from other parents and from the Corporation. In fact, the boys may well have been better taught at Henry Langley’s dissenting academy at Tubney. Such schools educated boys for commerce rather than the church, and the curriculum will have been stronger in mathematics and modern languages than in the classics that Jennings would have been teaching.

Robert Jennings retired in 1683. In 1687 or 8, as an Oxfordshire magistrate, he was included in the great survey made by James II on attitudes to granting toleration to Protestant Dissenters and Catholics. His opinions had not changed. His answers were strongly against what the king wanted, and he was removed from the bench.

In 1688 came the revolution that swept James II from the throne, and many English Catholics sold up to join him in exile at St Germain. Among these were the Plowden family of Shiplake Court near Henley. Jennings was able to buy the estate for £5800 plus a £60 per year payment to a Plowden grandmother for the remainder of her life. In 1694, he was pricked High Sheriff of Oxfordshire, but because of his age he arranged for the duties to be carried out by his son James. He died in 1704.

Robert’s son James Jennings (?1670-1739) maintained his connection with Abingdon. He was its MP from 1710 to 1713, and again from 1715 to 1722. Although a Tory, he opposed and defeated the unimpressive son of Simon Harcourt in 1715. He stood unsuccessfully in 1722 and 1734, being defeated on each occasion by a Whig. He died rich enough to leave £4000 in cash to each of his two surviving daughters, as well as the Shiplake estate to his son.

© AAAHS and contributors 2017

Henry Langley

Henry Langley was born in 1610, the son of an Abingdon shoemaker. He attended Abingdon School, and matriculated at Pembroke College in 1629. Pembroke, then newly founded, had close connections with the school. Langley took his BA degree in 1632, and remained in Oxford as a preacher and college tutor. But, as a fervent Puritan, he was opposed to the religiously conservative views prevalent in the university.

The Civil War broke out in 1642, and Oxford became the Royalist headquarters. Langley moved to London, where he took over a parish whose minister had been expelled for his Royalist views. In 1647, after the Parliamentarian victory, he returned to Oxford. About this time the Master of Pembroke College died, and the college fellows moved fast to elect as his successor Henry Wightwicke, a kinsman of one of the founders. But it was Langley who had influential friends and the support of the new authorities. A letter of recommendation said to be from ‘the inhabitants of Abingdon’ was read out in the House of Lords. We are not sure who brought it in, but it must have been intended to influence the Earl of Pembroke, chancellor of the university, after whose family the college was named. Langley was imposed on the college, which he turned into a strongly Puritan institution. But in 1660, with the restoration of the monarchy, he was unceremoniously expelled and Wightwicke was restored.

Persisting in his Presbyterian principles, he fell foul of the new religious legislation and especially of the Five-Mile Act, which forbade former preachers from residing within five miles of any town. He made his home in Tubney and opened a school there for the sons of religiously dissenting families. Langley died in 1679, and, in spite of his religious deviance, was buried in St Helen’s.

William Alder Strange

William Alder Strange, headmaster of Abingdon School, was a great-nephew of John Alder, ‘the lucky cooper’, whose lottery win in 1767 funded his family’s social ascent. William Alder was born in 1813. Most of his school education was at Christ’s Hospital in London, but he returned to Abingdon in time to take advantage of Abingdon School’s scholarships to Pembroke College, Oxford. He matriculated in 1829 and took his B.A. degree in classics in 1833. With only fourth-class honours, his academic credentials were not outstanding.

He started his teaching career as second master at a school attached to the Royal Institution in Liverpool. While there, he also studied for the Anglican ministry, being ordained in 1837. This was somewhat paradoxical, since in 1836 he married Mary Elizabeth Davis, of an Abingdon Baptist family and sister of the artist Louis Davis. In 1840, he returned to Abingdon School as headmaster. The school had suffered from a succession of inadequate headmasters and at this time was quite small, with pupil numbers generally about twenty. Strange proved an effective teacher, liked and respected by his pupils. During his headmastership of twenty-eight years, aided by an expanding market for education, numbers went up into the sixties.

He became well known in the district, developing a local reputation as an occasional preacher at the town churches. In particular, he acted for a time as a sort of unofficial curate at the new church that had been built at Shippon, which could not afford regular clergy. He seems to have been appreciated as an effective parish priest, and when his functions there ceased in 1858 the parishioners clubbed together to give him a valuable gift.

Serious career frustrations had begun in the 1850s. The Pembroke scholarships, which had long been an attraction to ambitious parents, ceased to be completely in the headmaster’s gift; the college now insisted on an entrance examination, and not all the Abingdon candidates passed. In 1860, there was a change in the governance of the school. The old board of trustees – who were the Mayor and Corporation of Abingdon – was replaced by a new board with the long-established Abingdon charity of Christ’s Hospital, now obliged by the courts to follow the provisions of its ancient charter, taking a major role. The purpose was to plan a reform of the school which would move out of the centre of Abingdon to new quarters provided by the Hospital in Albert Park. Strange doesn’t seem to have been involved in the planning.

In 1864-6, grammar schools throughout the country were subjected to a thorough inspection. The report on Abingdon School was highly critical. It supported the move to a new building, and called for a reform of the curriculum to emphasize modern languages, mathematics, and science over the classics. Since Strange’s second master was a classicist like him, one of them would have to go.

Fortunately, there would be no embarrassment. It happened that the current lord chancellor, Lord Chelmsford, had previously been Abingdon’s MP and was open to appeals for help. He had in his gift the vicarage of Bishop Middleham in Durham. It came with a very comfortable income. Strange was made an offer he could not refuse. He left Abingdon in September 1868 and remained in Durham until his death six year later. His remains were returned to be buried at Shippon near those of his first wife. Whether he had been able to repeat his successful ministrations in Shippon in a small northern parish is now impossible to ascertain. He was sufficiently well remembered in Abingdon for his funeral to be a civic event.

Strange was married twice. With Mary Elizabeth he had six children, three boys and three girls. One of the boys became, and two of the girls married, clergymen. The other boys became, respectively, a banker and an opal miner in Australia. The youngest daughter seems not to have married. Mary Elizabeth died in 1856 and in 1860 Strange married Martha Richmond, of a farming family in Drayton St Leonard near Dorchester, who was half his age. There were no further children. Martha was still living as a widow in 1881 but disappears from the records thereafter.

Archive for: Schoolmaster