A HISTORY OF FRIENDS' SCHOOL LISBURN

by

Neville H. Newhouse

Friends School, Lisburn was founded - though not under that name - because in 1764 a prosperous linen merchant, John Hancock, left £1,000 for the purchase of land in or near Lisburn on which to build a school for the children of Quakers. This part of his will reads

Item : 1 leave and bequeath to my loving Friends Thomas Greer, John Christy, and my loving kinsmen Robert Bradshaw, and John Hill, one thousand pounds sterling, in trust for this special viz : to purchase Lands therewith and the Rents and Proffits thereof to apply to establish a School within the present bounds of Lisburn Men's Meeting for the Education of the Youth of the people called Quakers, the master thereof to be a sober and reputable person, and one of said people, and the school to be under the Inspection of the Quarterly Meeting of said people for the Province of Ulster.

In making this bequest John Hancock showed himself to be a good Quaker. For ever since George Fox had established a school for boys and girls at Waltham Abbey, and a school for girls only at Shacklewell, the Society of Friends in both England and Ireland had set great store by education. Even so, their schools did not on the whole prosper, the many new ones they opened being scarcely sufficient to replace those which were always closing. As early as 1687 the National Quaker Meeting of Ireland passed a minute telling schoolmasters `not to lay down their schools without the consent of the men's meeting to which they belonged'. The appeal was ineffective. Schoolmasters were in very short supply, and Quakers often `put their children to the care of others that were not Friends', as a minute of 1725 expressed it. John Hancock was one of the many who deplored this state of affairs ; and one of the few who were determined to alter it.

A letter he wrote in 1764 to his friend Thomas Greer shows that the founding of a school in `our poor Province' had been in his mind for some time. His hope was that Friends throughout Ireland would provide a house in Ulster, in which event John Hancock and local Quakers `would endeavour to do the rest amongst us'. Lisburn, he said, seemed `the properest place', first because he had `particular attachments thereto', and second because it was `a soil and situation a school will thrive best in'. Keen though he was to see it established in his day, he knew that his poor health made the hope unlikely. So he ended his letter to Thomas Greer with an obvious reference to the will he had made three months earlier

... my state of health will not allow much solicitation or engagement of mind about it. I leave it to thee - I would rejoice to see it in my day, but if that be not permitted, when my memorial
[i.e. will] shall have manifested the disposition of my heart, perhaps someone may be spirited up to promote it.

Eighteenth Century Lisburn

It was not surprising that John Hancock thought Lisburn `the properest place' for his school, as it was by 1800 greatly admired by many travellers -`esteemed one of the handsomest towns in the kingdom', according to Richard Shackleton, headmaster of the school at Ballitore. It had twice needed rebuilding, once after the '41 rebellion and again after the great fire of 1707 when its reconstruction coincided with its gradual establishment as the centre of the linen industry in the Lagan valley. Its four thousand odd inhabitants occupied, according to John Gough Junior who wrote `A Tour of Ireland 1813-14', an area round the market square which made it `the handsomest country inland town' he had seen in Ireland, one `hardly to be equalled in England' for that matter. There were three principal streets, Castle Street, Bow Street and Bridge Street, Castle Street being particularly impressive with modern, 3-storey houses lining a well-paved clean roadway. The present Railway Street (called in the early 1700's Schoolhouse or Schoolroom Lane and by 1800 Jackson's Lane) was then one of `severall lanes in the town which, with few exceptions, consisted of thatched cabins'. The Quaker Meeting House, also thatched and approached by a long narrow path between gardens, had wonderfully escaped destruction by the 1707 fire. In 1776 it was, the records tell us, `a small, neat building for about one hundred and fifty people, always filled on Sunday'. The areas which by 1900 were the sites of the railway station and the Wallace High School were both, it need hardly be said, unspoiled fields outside the town proper, which was overlooked by Prospect Hill whose slope is now climbed by the Magheralave Road. The road north-west to Belfast ran through `fine houses, plantations, church spires, bleach greens and a great number of neat whitewashed cabins at the road side'. It led to a town four times larger than Lisburn, similarly thriving, and already having the makings of the future provincial capital.

John Hancock, it should be said, had English forebears who had settled in Lisburn before the '41 rebellion. In 1757 he and his brother had inherited considerable family business interests. He married twice and at his early death in 1766 left a 4-year-old son who, when the time came, also handled the business successfully, and had also for a time much to do with the school. By the terms of his father's will he was to remain in Lisburn until he was 8, was then to attend an English Quaker school, and thereafter to be apprenticed to a dependable Quaker, all of which stipulations were duly carried out. So, too, was the setting up of the school, an achievement brought about largely by Thomas Greer, whom John Hancock had named first of the four Quaker trustees chosen to administer his estate and to whom he had appealed in the letter already quoted. Perhaps, John Hancock had 2
written, someone would be `spirited up' to promote the school he so deeply longed to see : `I leave it to thee'. He had chosen his man well. Stubborn and quarrelsome Thomas Greer may have been, but he was a passionately active Quaker, was as convinced as John Hancock of the need for a boarding school in Ulster, and now devoted his considerable energy and skill to seeing it established.

Buying the Land

John Hancock's bequest was for the purchase of lands on which to build a school, and buying land anywhere about Lisburn meant negotiating with the Earl of Hertford whose Killultagh Estates (60 thousand acres of fine land in County Antrim from Magheragall and Aghalee in one direction to Lambeg and Derriaghy in the other) had come to his family from the Conways in 1609. The previous Earl had shown little interest in his Irish land, but the present one, with whom the trustees were to treat, was very different ; he paid occasional visits to Ireland and was much concerned with the good order and development of Lisburn and district.

The trustees interested themselves in 20 acres of land a quarter of a mile to the north of Lisburn in an area known as Prospect Hill. These fields overlooked the town and ran down to Jackson's Lane and the Quaker Meeting House. Presumably the trustees had first satisfied themselves that the tenants would be willing to leave their holdings in favour of John Hancock's Quaker school.

Early in 1776 an approach was made to the agent for the Hertford Estate, and Robert Bradshaw reported to Thomas Greer that he and others `waited on William Higginson Esquire'. The Earl of Hertford was in Lisburn on his own affairs and the Trustees asked his agent to present their written request. There must have been some argument with William Higginson, but eventually the trustees `prevailed on him to go and prefer our proposals which he did about ten o'clock'. After an hour William Higginson came out again to say that the Earl would not entertain the idea since the Quakers wanted the land as `a thing for ever'. The agent therefore returned the paper to Robert Bradshaw in the presence of another well-known Lisburn Friend, William Nevill (the late John Hancock's brother-in-law), suggesting that the trustees should `amend the proposals'. At this, Robert Bradshaw became indignant - Quakers always meant what they said and were not prepared to bargain. He sent a letter to Thomas Greer ending with the words

. . . on the whole we must now quit thoughts of having the school settled within the bounds of Lisburn Meeting. I need not tell thee what a disagreeable task it is for me to write thee in this stile.

Far from `quitting' this scheme, Thomas Greer saw it through within two months of this deadlock. He did so by having the applications made in Dublin. `The Hibernian Magazine' for 1778 records `much Quaker solicitation at Court', and as there is no mention of this in the Society's minute books (in spite of the fact that Friends were very often active in lobbying members of the Lords and Commons), it must have been done privately. A letter to Thomas Greer from John Hill, the only trustee from Lisburn itself and a cousin of Robert Bradshaw, records the fact that John Hill waited twice on William Higginson after 19th April 1766 and eventually got another message to the Earl. It was to the effect that the trustees would soon be in Dublin (almost certainly in order to attend National Meeting), and to ask whether his Lordship would see them there on 20th May about the land on Prospect Hill. The noble Earl returned answer that he was `full and willing' to treat in Dublin or in Lisburn.

The result was that a lease dated 9th June 1766 was signed by the Earl of Hertford in the presence of three Quakers in Dublin, and by the four trustees in the presence of William Higginson in Lisburn. Its main provision was to lease twenty acres of land to the trustees, the lease to be renewed for ever if, within six years, a schoolhouse was built, hedges and `timber trees' were planted, and a straight read twenty-one feet wide, with an additional six feet for ditches, was constructed. The document is long and detailed, and contains such quaint provisions as the one forbidding trustees (the Governors of today) to kill, or allow anyone else to kill, hare, partridge or game on the school lands.

Work on the road began almost at once, as we know from Robert Bradshaw's report that the labourers could not make a living at the rate they were being paid, because the soil had proved to be `strong champion clay with scarce any big stones at all in it'. The men evidently lost much time and energy in fetching the stones for the road from a greater distance than had at first been thought necessary -and `the strong champion clay' remained stubborn until 1964 when the playing fields were re-drained and reconstructed. However, Robert Bradshaw told the men that the trustees would take their difficulties `under consideration', and that if their case was deserving, they would be paid more. `Since then', he wrote to Thomas Greer, `the work goes on apace'- a testimony to the reputation Quakers had gained for keeping their promises.

The original 20 acres had been two pieces of land, one in the possession of James Hunter, not a Friend though connected with the Society, the other possessed by James Mitchell, about whom nothing is known. At least one of them was not completely reconciled to the treatment he received, for another of Robert Bradshaw's reports tells us that in November 1767, just a year after the labourers threatened to strike, James Hunter and James Hogg made `encroachments' on the road to the school lands and planned to build `pillars' to guard what they considered their rightful property. Robert Bradshaw arranged for the trustees to meet in Lisburn to have the matter properly adjusted `whereby the infringements of those refractory persons may be prevented for the future'. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary we may assume that the trustees were successful.

The First Master, John Gough

With the land secured on the lease for ever and the schoolhouse about to be built, the trustees next had to find a master. This was very different from finding a schoolmaster today. For one thing, the universities were not open to dissenters, so that, in the words of London Yearly Meeting for 1760, `the number of able and well qualified teachers amongst us is very small'. In any case, there was at this time a general lack of interest in education even in the old foundations linked with the established church : the lands of the Royal School, Dungannon, for example, were being used more for private profit than for the benefit of its few pupils. And a community which had small interest in educating its children, paid its schoolmasters very little. Usually they supplemented a wretched minimum by making a small profit from boarding pupils and from pursuing a totally different part-time occupation. The Cork Men's Meeting recorded in 1699, for example, that their schoolmaster, Edward Borthwick, was neglecting his work by leaving the management of the school to a boy while he got on with his bookbinding, often using his press in the schoolroom ; about the same time, Samuel Fuller in Dublin carried on a business as bookseller and publisher.

Not surprisingly, the trustees looked to England which had provided Ireland with all her best-known Quaker masters to date - Lawrence Routh to Mountmellick in 1677, Alexander Seaton (student of Aberdeen University and admirer of Robert Barclay) to Dublin in 1680, and after him Samuel Forbes, John Chambers and Thomas Banks. Thomas Greer knew that the task was not easy for already in 1769 he had tried to find a schoolmaster at the request of Richard Shackleton of Ballitore. When, therefore, he learned late in 1772 that William Neville was to make `a long tour of England', he asked him to `make much enquiry about a schoolmaster'. Neville did so, though with little success, writing to Thomas that he had some names, none of which could be recommended as `compleat'. It did not seem to matter, he concluded, since 'I am told thou hast one in view'.

The 'one' in question was John Gough, whose background and credentials were typical of the Quaker schoolmaster of the time. Born in Kendal, Westmorland in 1721, he was the second son of John and Mary Gough who professed "the truth as held by the people called Quakers'. Both boys were much influenced by their mother. James, nine years older than John, described her in his Journal as `an industrious, careful, well-minded woman' who `made it her maxim in her plan of education to accustom her children to useful employment, frugal fare, and to have their wills crossed'. She sent them to Thomas Redbank's Quaker school in Stramongate which had been opened in 1698 (and continued save for a brief closure in 1898 until 1932). They both proved themselves clever enough to take up schoolmastering, and James was apprenticed in 1727 to David Hall, the Skipton schoolmaster for whom his mother had `an honourable esteem'. He was a Quaker of the old sort who would not allow any other than `plain garb' in his `family', as he called his pupils and helpers.

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