Two Remarkable London Schoolmasters
Part One

A while ago, in 2024, I wrote about James and Robert Pirie. James was a schoolmaster, and Robert was his son, and although my main interest was the personal tragedy that befell them, I included some facts about the elder Pirie’s career, much of which he spent at City of London School. As I spent most of my own teaching career at City of London, I felt I had a connection, albeit distant, with the story.

One of his teaching colleagues at this private day school for boys would have been a young physics master by the name of Owen Glynne Jones. The two men overlapped. Pirie was already on the staff in 1879, when the school moved from Milk Street to Victoria Embankment, and Jones was recruited a dozen years later, in 1891.

However, the two schoolmasters were destined to follow very different paths in life. For whereas Pirie worked at the school for many years, and retired in 1903 in his late fifties, Jones had his teaching career cut short after less than a decade. What follows is the young physicist’s story, but it is also that of another colleague, Frederick William Hill, a Cambridge-educated mathematician who would rise in due course to the position of Second Master.

London Welsh

Owen Glynne Jones was born on 2 November 1867 in Clarendon Street in Paddington. His father, David Jones, was a Welshman from Llanegwad in Carmarthenshire. David Jones was a carpenter by trade, as his father had been before him, and the woman he married, Eliza Griffiths, who was also Welsh, was the daughter of a blacksmith from Barmouth in Gwynedd. They raised three sons and two daughters. Owen was the middle child, with an older brother and sister and a younger brother and sister, though his older brother, William, died in 1874 aged only nine.

Although both David and Eliza came from Wales, they had married, in 1863, in London. David was thirty and Eliza twenty-four, and although it is not known why they had moved to England, it is a reasonable guess that they had been looking for improved employment opportunities. As a carpenter, David would not have been short of work at a time when housebuilding in the capital was going on at a furious pace. For her part, Eliza had been taken on as one of three housemaids in the home of a surgeon, John Lavies, who lived close to St James’s Park in Great George Street.

There are few surviving facts about the young Jones family and their life in Paddington, but enough to allow us to piece together a picture of sorts. The censuses reveal that they had a servant in 1871, and a servant and a housekeeper in 1881, by which time David was clearly doing well because he was now a builder with fifty men on the payroll. On a sadder note, though, and again in 1881, Eliza died of galloping consumption. She was only forty-two. A few years later, in 1888, David also died. He was fifty-five and was carried off by pneumonia.

A bright future

We know a certain amount about the early education of Owen Glynne Jones. As a young teenager he was sent to the Central Foundation School in Cowper Street off the City Road, which had been established for the sons of parents who could afford the relatively modest fees, another sign that David Jones was prospering. He did well, especially in science, winning a number of prizes and later graduating to the Finsbury Technical College, which stood not far off in Leonard Street. Like the Central Foundation School, the College was fee-paying, though the sixteen-year-old Jones offset the expense by winning a Holl scholarship, which was worth twenty pounds a year and was tenable for two. His teachers thought very highly of him, and he completed a course in mechanical engineering, mathematics and chemistry with unqualified success.

Armed with a further award, this time a Clothworkers’ Scholarship, Jones registered for a course in engineering at the Central Institution in South Kensington. Again, he won great acclaim for his work, and on completing the course he was kept on as an assistant in the Mathematics Department. The year was 1889, and he was now in his early twenties. He clearly had his sights set on an academic career, for in 1891 he applied for a post in the Physics Department at Aberystwyth University, which would have been a homecoming of sorts for a young man with so much Welsh blood in his veins. However, his application was unsuccessful.

On the other hand, he was successful in his application for the post of Physics Master at City of London School, which he took up in 1891. At the time he was living in a boarding house in Maida Vale, and one imagines that, as a young schoolmaster, he was blessed with only modest means. Probably he had concerns about money, and for a number of years he supplemented his income by teaching evening classes in mathematics and physics at the recently founded Goldsmiths’ Institute in New Cross.

The first of his kind

All this while his scientific interests kept developing, and now that he had achieved a BSc with first-class honours, he was able to start work on a doctorate on the viscosity of fluids. He was still pursuing his research in the late 1890s but for reasons that will become clear he never completed his thesis. However, he was clearly a gifted classroom teacher, and as Claire Elaine Engel recorded in her 1952 book They Came to the Hills, he was remembered by former pupils as an enthusiastic scientist, a natural communicator, and a teacher with a touch of genius.

No doubt Jones was able to enthuse his students at Goldsmiths’ Institute, too. One evening in 1895 he gave a lecture on soap bubbles, which sounds fascinating and eccentric in equal measure. A few years later, in 1898, he gave a lecture at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution the subject of which was not bubbles but, rather curiously, the unreliability of sense-perceptions. It would be intriguing to see a transcript of the lecture, but sadly there is none, and we must take the word of the Hampstead & Highgate Express that Owen Glynne Jones, BSc Lond., was as amusing as he was interesting.

This energetic and talented teacher was certainly in the right place at the right time. The headmaster of City of London School, Arthur Tempest Pollard, had already challenged the pre-eminence of the Classical side of the curriculum by introducing a Modern Side in 1890 to teach modern languages and commercial subjects — James Pirie had already been offering instruction in shorthand for some time — and a year later he went one stage further by introducing a Science Side, a development that accounts for the appointment of Jones as the first physics master in 1891. Science had in fact been taught at the school for some time, but the facilities were limited to a lecture hall and chemistry rooms, and Jones was specifically tasked with setting up a properly equipped physics laboratory. This, one supposes, he did with considerable gusto.

Outside the classroom

Jones was remembered by former pupils as a gifted and dedicated schoolmaster. However, anecdotes were handed down by colleagues on the teaching staff as well, and some are revealing, and even prophetic. There was a legend that he once jumped on the furniture of the Common Room and worked his way round the walls in the manner of a rock-climber, descending to the safety of the floor only in order to traverse the fireplace. Whenever I think of Jones performing this eccentric feat, I catch myself wondering if James Pirie was in the room at the time, and what he and his fellow masters would have made of it.

Another story of a similar kind went as follows. One morning, at a very early hour, Jones went with a friend along the Victoria Embankment to Cleopatra’s Needle, which stood a little over half a mile upstream of the school. They clambered up the obelisk — to most people an object of great historical significance but to rock-climbers little more than a challenging wall of stone — only to be called down by a bobby on his beat. The two men got into a spot of trouble, which Jones’s companion, in his book The Complete Mountaineer, related rather elliptically as ‘the stalwart guardian of the precincts of the Aiguille de Londres’ seeming ‘to think that Colney Hatch would be a more suitable place for our operations’.

Jones’s fellow adventurer was George Dixon Abraham. He and his brother Ashley Perry Abraham, whose father, George Perry Abraham, was a professional photographer, were known as the Keswick Brothers in recognition of their exploits in the mountains of Cumbria, and the photographs they took for the books they published provide an extraordinary record of early climbers, among them the young Welsh schoolmaster who pursued his passion for the great outdoors in the regular breaks from his professional commitments. And it is this other Owen Glynne Jones — the rock-climber — whose remarkable story we must now turn to.

A good companion

It is said that Jones’s passion for rock-climbing first manifested itself in his early twenties when he saw in a shop in the Strand, not far from the school, a photograph of Napes Needle. Another Needle! This one was not on Victoria Embankment, though, but in the Lake District, and the adventure it promised had to wait for the Easter holidays. There may be a grain of truth in the story, but it is just as likely that the first inspiration had been the mountains near Barmouth, his mother’s girlhood home in Wales, where he stayed with cousins. The real point of interest, though, is not how the story started but how it continued, and, of course, how it ended.

Jones would seem to have been a born climber. A former pupil described his Celtic complexion and ‘the blue jowl of a man who could never shave sufficiently close’, but also recalled that although he was of medium height he had the physique of a boxer. He expressed his dedication to the sport in print — his Rock-climbing in the English Lake District, published in 1897, is considered a classic — and he betrayed an almost mystical response to the beauty and solitude of the mountains. He also lectured on the subject, and he regaled the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution, again in 1897, with tales of his climbs illustrated with magic lantern slides. The essential thing in mountaineering, he assured his audience, was confidence not only in oneself but also in the skill and experience of a good guide.

Of course, as well as a good guide, the rock-climber did well to have a good companion, and, as we shall see, Jones’s most trusted companion was his school colleague, Frederick William Hill. But a previous climbing partner, Arthur Milnes Marshall, was killed in the Lake District in 1893. Marshall, who was a professor of zoology at Owens College in Manchester, had been climbing with Jones on Scafell and looking for a vantage point from which to take photographs when he fell from a ridge and died instantly. Jones immediately ran down to Wasdale to organise the recovery of the body. As he did so, and as he slowly came to terms with this tragic accident, he may well have been troubled by something not unlike a sense of foreboding … TO BE CONTINUED