Part Six
i the men who brought it to birth

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raat UI

: The Spartan aspect of the Mount Charles Elementary School at St. Austell, Cornwall.
This was the first School Board school to be built under the provisions of the 1870 :
Education Act. It had room for 375 children. And it cost £940 to build. The building a
| has changed little since those days. And it is still in use as a school.

| ...and the birth of white-collar unions ~

| the meeting by the National Exchequer
of the costs of educating the nation’s
l children.

|

That was just half a century after the
following prescient exhortation had
ey appeared in the Flint Glass Makers’
q Magazine: “If you do not wish to stand
as you are and suffer more oppression,
we say to you get knowledge, and in
getting knowledge you get power .
Let us earnestly advise you to educate;
get intelligence instead of alcohol—it is
ji ia sweeter and more lasting.”

. About this time there sprang up, along-
i - side the now well-established and
ae powerful craft unions a number of

ee small but nevertheless vigorous trade
\ unions of non-manual workers. The
a National Union of Elementary Teachers
Vo for instance, had been founded in 1860.

Even within the Victorian Civil Service,

the Post Office telegraphists managed to

set up an Association of their own in

ISS}: and the provincial Post Office

clerks followed suit in 1886. Thirteen

years later railway clerks took the same Members of the Shop Assistants Union, who were
pal step. ) to affiliate to the T.U.C. in 1899,