1798 – Butler appointed as Headmaster
When Samuel Butler took on the role of Headmaster in 1798 at the age of 24, there were scarcely 20 pupils in the School.
The task of rebuilding the School to something resembling its former heyday must have seemed daunting in the extreme.
However, the Shrewsbury School Act of 1798 reduced the influence of the town authorities and gave Butler greater freedom as Headmaster than his predecessors. He quickly restored a proper academic curriculum, and numbers steadily began to grow. He also instituted regular examinations. These appear to have been a major innovation, and Butler received letters from the Headmasters of Eton and Harrow, enquiring with great interest about his methods.
The curriculum was almost exclusively classical – Latin and Greek – with a little ‘English theme’, geography, history, religion and, from 1817, mathematics. It held no appeal for the young Charles Darwin, who entered Shrewsbury School in 1818 at the age of nine and stayed for seven years, without distinguishing himself academically.
“Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr Butler’s school, as it was strictly classical, nothing else being taught, except a little ancient geography and history…
“Towards the close of my school life, my brother worked hard at chemistry, and made a fair laboratory with proper apparatus in the tool-house of our garden, and I was allowed to aid him as a servant in most of his experiments…. The fact that we worked at chemistry somehow got known at school, and as it was an unprecedented fact, I was nicknamed ‘Gas’. I was also once publicly rebuked by the headmaster, Dr Butler, for this wasting my time on such useless subjects; and he called me very unjustly a ‘poco curante’, and as I did not understand what he meant, it seemed to me a fearful reproach.”
Darwin does also add that a book he read at school, Wonders of the World, first gave him the wish to travel to remote countries, “which was ultimately fulfilled by the voyage of the Beagle”.
Nevertheless, many of those pupils for whom the Classics did hold some appeal achieved notable academic success. At Cambridge, boys whom Butler had taught won many of the top prizes and scholarships at the university. At Oxford (where fewer of his pupils went), Salopians (including Benjamin Kennedy, who later succeeded Butler as Headmaster) won the coveted Ireland Prize every year except one between 1827 and 1833 – two of them while they were still pupils at Shrewsbury. Butler gained a national reputation as a great teacher. “The oracle at Shrewsbury” and “the King of Schoolmasters” were terms used by some of his admirers, and the headmaster of Harrow came to observe one of his lessons.
Darwin was by no means the only pupil who regarded his headmaster less favourably, however, and in Butler’s attempts to establish discipline in a school that had had virtually none under the previous headmaster, Atcherley, he met with opposition not only among the boys but also their parents and the town authorities. In dealing with serious disciplinary issues in the School and in the boys’ behaviour outside it, Butler soon became known as “the flogging headmaster”. He wrote despairingly on 28th June 1817, “I do not know how I can either confine the boys more securely at night or provide effectually for their good conduct in the day. I am at present lost in baffling and uneasy conjecture.”
It presumably cannot have occurred to him that attempts by the boys to introduce sports such as rowing, football and cross-country running as acceptable school activities during this period might have provided part of the solution. But Butler saw football as fit only “for butcher boys”, flogged those caught rowing, and strongly disapproved of cross-country running. It would not be until Kennedy’s tenure as Headmaster that these would be officially sanctioned.
Butler is nevertheless to be credited for essentially refounding Shrewsbury School: rebuilding pupil numbers and re-establishing its academic reputation and national status – recognised in 1832 by a visit of the Duchess of Kent and her daughter, the future Queen Victoria.
On Butler’s retirement as Headmaster in 1836, after 38 years in post, his successor Kennedy famously quoted to him the words of Suetonius: “You found it of brick, but you left it of marble.”