Bootham School (1823-1923) (review)

BOOK REVIEWS41 Perhaps the Friends' Social Union will become an historic institution. It functions as a rallying point for Philadelphia Friends of both branches. The founding of it was the special concern of our late Friend, Henry S. Williams. He and Charles F. Jenkins set the idea in motion and the first reception and dinner was held at the City Club, Philadelphia, 10 mo. 21, 1924. It is a pleasure to recall that Henry S. Williams lived to attend that very successful meeting which was a harbinger of many good things to come. BOOK REVIEWS Bootham School (1823-1923). J. M. Dent & Sons, London and Toronto, 1926. The centennial history of Bootham School by a number of collaborators is a book which cannot fail to interest anyone who is concerned with Quaker schools in America; to one who has visited York and experienced the abounding hospitality of Friends in the cathedral city, it is a pure delight. Here is a school which seems to the present reviewer to have held firmly to all the spiritual verities of Quakerism, and at the same time to have let the breeze of art and individuality blow freely through it from comparatively early times. William Tuke (d. 1822) is described as "the school's true founder", though the school did not open until the following year and was not taken over by York Quarterly Meeting until 1828. The school has ever since had the oversight of a faithful and tactful committee, but we suspect much of the favor with which Bootham has been blessed is due to the fact that but five men have served as headmasters in a century, and that these have been men of vision and leadership. Bootham is but one of several excellent Quaker schools in England, and the chroniclers of this volume have surely been modest in their claims of distinction. But the record is a fine one, which includes on nearly every page such well-known Quaker names as Rowntree, Harvey, Newman, Clark, Watson, Tuke, Wilson, Thompson, and many others who have made contributions of value to nineteenth century British society. A few quotations will give an idea of the worth of this beautifully illustrated volume: "It goes without saying that the motive behind the deep concern of the early Friends for the education of the Society was a religious one. It was not a mere zeal for general enlightenment such as animated the Radicals of a hundred years later that moved them, but a desire to preserve the rising generation from moral and religious error. They recognized more clearly than their successors have always done that, more than any other body of Christians, the Society of Friends depends upon the education of its members , if the term is interpreted in the right sense, for it at least cannot rely vicariously on the trained minds of a special ministry." 42 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. "If only George Fox had had an ear for music! There is nothing in Quakerism, as there was in Puritanism, to render suspect the cultivation of creative art, or to exclude the purifying and quickening influence upon the young of the study of, and the contact with, all forms of beauty. In this matter the nineteenth century was to do much, at any rate, to make good the defective sympathy of the earlier generations." "The Exhibition of the Natural History Society was one of the year's events. The establishment of this Society and the encouragement of outof -school pursuits represent a great debt which the school owed to John Ford and which were acknowledged to be the unique distinction of Bootham in those far-off days when Greek and Latin composition dominated the public schools." And again, "Bootham School was in the modern study and teaching of Geography a generation in advance of most English schools." Upon the boys in this Quaker school the influence of the Minster, which some Haverfordians have caught a glimpse of from the school cricket field, calls forth this testimony : "We who were at school in York imbibed, perhaps, a considerable amount of culture from the softening influence of York Minster, that glorious architectural relic which dominates our...