WEA Key Facts and People
1903 Organisation founded by Albert Mansbridge as means of bringing together University Extension and the Co-operative Movement. “At a completely democratic meeting attended by both of us and no-one else…” his wife Frances appointed him honorary secretary, contributed half a crown out of her housekeeping funds “and the movement was on foot”.
Mansbridge was born in Gloucester 1876 son of a carpenter. Grew up in Battersea, attended board school, gained scholarships which enabled him to attend grammar school until age 14. Then started work as an office boy (in a Cod Liver Oil and Fish Potash Guano Works.) Keen self improver, became Anglican lay reader, boy copyist in Board of Education and eventually a clerk with the Co-operative Wholesale Society.
First years of WEA an amazing tribute to his vision and energy as he enlisted support (from people such as Canon Barnett of Toynbee Hall and the nursery education pioneer Margaret McMillan) and raised money for his idea. By the end of the first year there were 135 individual members, 11 affiliated Cooperative Societies. In the second year the first Districts were founded (South West at Exeter, North West at Manchester), first branch founded (Reading). First Scottish branch in 1905.
Mansbridge worked full time for the WEA from 1906 until he suffered a serious illness in 1915. Midlands District, South Wales Districts established during 1907. First grant of money received from government (courtesy of the then Permanent Secretary Sir Robert Morant ). 1000 people attending each of the WEA London lectures in 1907-9.
1908 first tutorial classes at Longton (Staffs) and Rochdale (Lancs) with R.H.Tawney as tutor. William Temple elected first president of WEA.
First classes for women only – eg Maude Royden teaching Shakespeare to women mill workers at Oldham from 1909.
1910 First WEA summer schools at Oxford – tutors such as A.D.Lindsay and Gerald Collier encountering students such as garment workers Sophie Green (who later became the WEA’s first woman tutor-organiser in Kettering) and Lavena Saltonstall (who denounced the housing conditions of the servants who maintained the University.)
By 1913-14 there were 2,555 affiliated organisations of which 953 were trades councils, trade unions or their branches. There were 179 branches and 11,430 individual members. Will Crooks MP chaired London District, Sir Oliver Lodge Midland District, Arthur Greenwood Yorkshire and Reuben George Western District. Across the country 3,343 students were enrolled in 145 three year tutorial classes organised in conjunction with 14 universities. These were the tip of the iceberg as many more students attended the shorter, informal courses organised by the branches.
1914 WEA founded by Mansbridge in Australia.
1914 and after During the First World War the WEA campaigned against any cuts in education (or relaxation of the rules on child labour – its major bugbear in early years) and for a new educational order when the war should be over. Ex dock-worker, J.M.McTavish, the General Secretary drafted a pamphlet What Labour Wants from Education which was disseminated widely amongst working class organisations. Supporters and intellectual contributors to the WEA at that time included G.D.H.Cole, Alfred Zimmern (treasurer), Henry and Averil Sanderson Furniss (Ruskin College Oxford), as well as Margaret McMillan and William Temple. The WEA campaigned for raising the school leaving age to 15, free education for all and compulsory part-time education to 18. This campaign clearly had an influence on the Fisher Act of 1918. The Ministry of Reconstruction Adult Education Committee which presented its final report in 1919 included 11 WEA members. The WEA was not slow to register a verbal protest against the Geddes economies in 1921 and mount a national protest demonstration in 1922.
1920s/ 1930s Throughout this period the WEA had a widely read magazine, the Highway, and a programme of publishing cheap editions of textbooks on economics and politics. In the 1920s Sir William Beveridge was the Chairman of its Students Bookshop. When Temple resigned as WEA president he was succeeded by R.H. Tawney.
By 1928, its quarter century, the WEA had 16 districts, 459 branches, 11,750 tutorial class students, 19,000 short course students and joint committees with every university. It had formalised its association with the trade union movement (as WETUC, the Workers Education Trade Union Committee) and was deeply involved in the education of trade union members. It was strongly disliked by the Labour College and Plebs League “Gentlemen,” wrote Raymond Postgate to the WEA for Plebs in 1924 “You ask us for a birthday greeting. All we can say … is that we should be much happier to attend your funeral.”
The WEA often in partnership with the National Union of Teachers campaigned for educational reform through the 1930s (eg represented on the Hdow Committee) but with only limited success due to Government unwillingness to spend on education. The Countess of Longford was a WEA lecturer in that period.
1940s The WEA was involved early in plans for Army Education due to the influence of its active members Colonel George Wigg (District Secretary North Staffordshire, later MP for Dudley) and Arthur Creech Jones MP (WEA vice-president) During the war it offered “pioneer” courses to a range of non-traditional groups such evacuees, women’s land army, civil defence workers as well as proposing courses for German POWs which apparently caused some alarm at the Foreign Office. Active interest was taken in post-war reconstruction with many discussion circles focussing on Sir William Beveridge’s plans for a welfare state. Mary Stocks (later Baroness Stocks) succeeded W.E.Williams as editor of the WEA magazine in 1941.
1945 14 members of the Atlee government were tutors, former tutors or members of the WEA executive and 56 MPs were either WEA tutors or former students. The International Federation of Workers’ Educational Associations (IFWEA) was formed in this year.
By its half century in 1953 the WEA had begun to appear a more educationally conservative force cleaving to the forms of teaching and learning that had brought this level of success. “Adult Education – why this apathy?” asked the former WEA General Secretary, Ernest Green. The relationship with the Trade Unions became more distant. Tawney agonised publicly over the falling percentage of current students who were manual workers. Hugh Clegg and Rex Adams reported on new ways to approach Industrial Studies but it was the TUC rather than the WEA who took the lead in developing this.
Education and society were changing in the second half of the twentieth century. Though Asa Briggs was president into the early 1960s WEA successes tended to become less national and more local through the 1960s and 70s. In Wales the WEA attracted tutors and organisers like Glenys and Neil Kinnock, Rhodri Morgan, Ron Davies. Robin Cook was a tutor-organiser in Edinburgh, Roy Hattersley (briefly) in Sheffield. Other post war politicians who have worked with the WEA at some stage in their career include Lord George-Brown, Kenneth Collins, Don Concannon, Baron Graham of Edmonton, Keith Hampson, Helen Jackson, Michael Martin, Oswald O’Brien, Stan Orme, John Prescott, Mel Read, Elizabeth Shields, Rachel Squire, Sir Teddy Taylor. (this list ++)
The Russell Report of 1973 and the Alexander Report in Scotland (1975) both recognised the WEA as having a particular concern with social justice and second chance education for disadvantaged groups and this has been the main thrust of the WEA’s rediscovery of its identity at the end of the twentieth century with the renewed growth of its workplace and community programmes to more than half its total provision.
The WEA’s radicalism was never entirely lost as Sheila Rowbotham and Sally Alexander showed in their women’s history classes through the 1970s. This was also evidenced on a collective basis in the Women’s Health programme developed in WEA North Western District and widely used beyond it. A wealth of targeted and community action projects (Salt of the Earth, Hackney/Centreprise, Portsmouth Local History publications) bear witness to the continuing vitality of the WEA at local level. WEA students in the twenty-first century may be branch members meeting regularly to study subjects of their choice; they may be trades union and workplace learners on Return to Learn courses or they may be travellers, prisoners, women in refuge accommodation, asylum seekers, members of ethnic minority communities.
Currently the WEA has over 600 local branches, 132,000 adult student enrolments per year, teaches in over 2000 locations and works with approximately 1600 partner organisations.