MODERN SCHOLAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 988, 25 July 1958, Page 14

MODERN SCHOLAR

THERE WAS A YOUNG MAN, by H. M. Burton; Geoffrey Bles, English price 15/-. M. BURTON, the son of working "class people in Fulham, attended elementary school, won a scholarship to the Latymer "Upper" School in Hammersmith (an "endowed" school noted for its examination successes), matricu-

lated in London University, then spent the war years — 1914-1918 --in various jobs after early discharge from the army as unfit for soldiering. In 1918, schoolmasters being scarce, he was surprised to get an appointment as a junior formmaster in one of the public schools. In the next years he taught in two such schools and in one "ancient but moribund county grammar school" before obtaining a teacher-training grant that took him to Fitzwilliam Hall, Cambridge, and a B.A. degree. For the next six years he made a precarious living as a sort of junior tutor at Fitzwilliam Hall, and then, "with strangely little effort,’ was appointed Assistant-Director of Education in a rural county. In this job he stayed 15 years: then gave it up for journalism-"the job went sour on me." Such is the outline of this autobiography, which is interesting in itself, but more so because of reflections and animadversions. One of Mr _ Burton’s comments concerning himself and his kind is that the State’s needs for educated minds coincided with .the unconscious desire of children of obscure origins and poor homes to escape from manual toil and poverty, But the State in helping them to escape "ended by robbing us of our attachment to the class from which we climbed without giving us the ability to make ourselves at home in any other." Mr Burton, in emphasising the poverty of his home environment, probably underestimates the value of the genes contributed by his mother. His two older brothers, with not less environmental disadvantages, also rose to important positions. He does, however, conclude "I

had an exceptional mother."

L.J.

W.