Robert Edwards Holloway: Newfoundland Educator, Scientist, Photographer, 1874-1904 (review)

Reviewers elsewhere have already called Robert Edwards Holloway: Newfoundland Educator, Scientist, Photographer, 1874–1904 a labour of love, and so it is. Ruby Gough first encountered Holloway when conducting research for her doctoral dissertation, 'An Historical Study of Science Education in Newfoundland' at Boston University in the early 1970s. As Gough writes in an informative Author's Note, Holloway's late-nineteenth-century tenure as principal of the Methodist College at St John's was an oasis in the otherwise barren desert of early science education in Newfoundland. There research rested until Gough was asked to teach a course on science education at Memorial in the in the mid-1980s and thereafter encouraged to write an article on Holloway's contributions to science education. With Holloway now at the centre of her research, Gough discovered that, in addition to being an innovative teacher of science, he was an important school administrator, influential member of the St John's community, and an active amateur photographer. A man of many parts needed to be seen whole.

Robert Edwards Holloway was born at Barton-on-Humber, Lincolnshire, on 30 August 1850. His father, William Holloway, was from 1854 headmaster of the Model School of the Wesleyan Training College. Situated in the teeming slums of Westminster, the college was dedicated to enabling boys and girls to rise above their condition with a progressive curriculum and instilling pupil instructors with a sense of service. It was here that Robert was himself a student and then a trainee teacher. Upon graduation at age sixteen, Robert worked toward a BA from the University of London while at the same time teaching at a succession of private schools. This regime of overwork was characteristic of both father and son, and would lead to the death of the former at forty-six in 1870 and be responsible for recurrent ill health in the latter. The young Holloway's inbred disposition in favour of advanced teaching techniques was solidified by his participation in a six-week course for teachers given by Thomas Huxley in the summer of 1871. 'It was an experience,' Gough argues, 'that would, from that point onwards, influence and shape the young teacher's approach to his career and strengthen his belief in the value of science in the curriculum' (21). Unfortunately, even with a BA in hand, Holloway could not find a congenial environment in which to test his innovative views. He was therefore open to the opportunity presented by an advertisement for a principal for the Wesleyan Academy at St John's. The Academy's Board, in turn, recognized his strengths as a candidate. Thus it was that twenty-four-year-old Holloway found stepping off the RMSCircassian at St John's in June 1874.

Gough's subtitle places Holloway's role as an 'educator' first. When he arrived at St John's, the Wesleyan Academy was one of three denominational academies in the city, the others being run by the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. All received a modest legislative grant but otherwise relied on student fees and donations. The Wesleyan Academy, about to be restyled the Methodist Academy, had suffered high staff turnover and was in need of an energetic leader to build on the modest enrollment of thirty-nine girls and forty-nine boys. Gough is particularly adept at detailing the steps Holloway took to bring the academy back from the brink, establishing a Model School within the academy for teacher training in 1877, constructing new buildings, and upgrading to college status in 1887. Moreover, Gough is moving in her portrayal of a man whose personal life was intertwined with that of the institution. It was at the college that Holloway and his wife, Henrietta Palfrey, whom he married in 1878, resided, where they raised and educated their four children, and where two of the children died in the diphtheria epidemic of 1888. Four years later the...