CO885-(20-21) — Page 630

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE

Reference :-

PLLC.O.885

21 PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON

ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC- COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH—NOT TO

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Lord Meath has always been our Chairman, and the following have been added to the Committee at different times :-

Sir Philip Hutchins, as being connected with the India Office and with the League of the Empire. Sir Charles Holroyd, Director of the National Gallery. Dr. H. F. Heath, as representing the Board of Edu- cation, when Mr. Sadler was no longer connected with the Board.

Mr. W. H. Mercer, Crown Agent for the Colonies, whose office has transacted all money business for us, and who acted for me when I was in Australia. Sir E. im Thurn, as having had wide and recent

experience of the tropical colonies.

It would be difficult, I think, to find a committee of more representative men including men directly connected with education, and the fact of their joining the committee and taking part in its work year after year may fairly be taken as evidence of the importance of the work and the interest attaching to it.

The Secretarial work was at first done voluntarily, but after a short time a member of the Second Division of the Colonial Office was asked to take it up and was paid £20— later £25 per annum, on account of this addition to his ordinary official duties. The first paid Secretary was Mr. Hunter; his successor, the present Secretary, is Mr. Noall. The payment was first allowed by the Treasury to be a charge on public funds. Subsequently, as from the 1st of April, 1908, the Lords of the Treasury ruled that the charge could no longer be allowed, and the payment has been made from the subscribed funds which have been at the Committee's disposal. The sum is wholly incommensurate with the work which falls upon the Secretary and with the intelligence applied to the work.

It may be added that from 1st January, 1908, to 31st March, 1911, Mr. Mackinder, who took in hand the preparation of the lectures, was given £4 a quarter to provide for him secretarial assistance.

II.

BEGINNING OF THE COMMITTEE'S WORK.

The Committee began their meetings in January, 1903. The first memorandum which was put before them stated that "the enquiry is intended to be, in the first instance "at any rate, of a purely informal and tentative character." On my initiative, if I remember right.-for I had special facilities for interesting the Governments of the Eastern colonies in the matter-it was decided to turn attention in the first instance to lectures on the United Kingdom for use oversea, to invite a group of Crown Colonies to pay for the preparation of such lectures and the accompanying slides, and to select for this purpose the three Eastern colonies of Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, and Hong Kong, which could well afford a moderate outlay on an educational experiment and whose Governors and Govern- ments were likely to be friendly to an invitation of the kind. The result was the preparation of a "Syllabus of a

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** course of Seven Lectures, illustrated by lantern slides, on a Journey to England from the East. Descriptive of the "United Kingdom and the Defences of the Empire." See Colonial Office Papers, Miscellaneous No. 157, August, 1903, and Miscellaneous No. 174, April, 1905. Syllabus was submitted to Mr. Chamberlain and with his This

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approval was, in September, 1903, sent out to the three colonies already mentioned, the Governments of which were asked whether they would each provide £300 to cover the cost of preparing the lectures and slides. They very cordially agreed, and thus the Committee had £900 at their disposal at the office of the Crown Agents for the Colonies, to whom warin acknowledgments are due for having throughout held all the Committee's moneys and kept their accounts without charge of any kind,

In February, 1904, the Committee, with the approval of Mr. Lyttelton, who had succeeded Mr. Chamberlain, asked Mr. Mackinder, who was at the time Director of the London School of Economics, to prepare the Seven Lectures and manage the entire scheme on their behalf for a fee of £200. The arrangement was carried out. lecture was delivered by him in December, 1904, and at A specimen the end of March, 1905, he reported to the Committee that the undertaking had been completed at a cost of £690, or £230 for each of the three colonies, instead of the £300 which had been granted. The seven lectures were accom- panied by 360 slides, and for the sum mentioned each of the three colonies received 50 printed copies of the lectures, two complete sets of the slides, and two lanterns with apparatus.

On the 13th of April, 1905, a circular despatch was sent by the Secretary of State to all the Dominions and colonies other than the Eastern colonies stating what had been done, suggesting that the lectures might be adapted for other parts of the Empire, and setting out the cost of such adaptation. A copy of the circular was also sent to the India Office, and to the Foreign Office for communication to the Egyptian Government, the initial cost of adaptation in each case being estimated roughly at £100, or £150 including the purchase of books, lantern and slides, and a payment on account of copyright to the Eastern colonies as the owners of the original lectures. The result was that the scheme was accepted for India, for the West Indies, for West Africa, and for Mauritius, and editions were prepared accordingly by Mr. Mackinder and duly published. A statement showing the distribution of the several editions will be found in Appendix E. Some 26,000 slides, in all, have now been sent out by the Committee. Editions were also arranged for Canada and for South Africa, but so far, owing to press of work at home, have not been prepared. As regards the South African edition, I recently spoke and wrote to Mr. Malan, the Minister of Education for the Union of South Africa, while the latter was in this country. The Indian edition was also issued for use in the schools of this country. In Australia and New Zealand the scheme was not taken up. Favourable reports have been received from several of the colonies which have adopted the scheme.

It

may be summed

up

that the object of the Committee, acting throughout with the approval of the Secretary of State, was to provide for use throughout the Empire uniform lectures descriptive of the United Kingdom, and for the United Kingdom lectures descriptive of the different parts of the empire. This object has in great part been carried out, although not wholly as yet, owing largely to the great pressure on the editor's time, which has so far delayed the publication of a Canadian and South African cdition. That the scheme has not been more widely taken up in this country and in the Dominious and colonies concerned is certainly to be attributed in part to the cost

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PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE

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C.O.885

Reference :-

21 PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON

ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC- COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH—NOT TO

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But

of each set of lectures and slides, and to the fact that a voluntary committee with no funds at their disposal for advertisement are not in a position to push such a scheme of this kind so as to make it a pecuniary success. the lectures now stand ready for further developments, and it may fairly be said that much work of a very high order has been done which will not require to be done again, and that the lines have been laid down on which, when the time and the money come, it will be easy to expand.

The account with the Eastern colonies, which was lately closed, is given in Appendix A, and shows that each of the three Governments was credited with £112 8s. 8d., reducing the original grant of £300 to £187 11s. 4d.

The copyright of the original edition was taken out in Mr. Mackinder's name, and subsequently transferred to the Crown Agents for the Colonies in their own names. The copyright of the adapted editions was taken out in the names of the Crown Agents. The following arrangement was made with regard to the edition issued in this country, The books were to be sold by Messrs. Newton in con- nexion with the slides, Messrs. Newton receiving 10 per cent, of the actual sales, Mr. Mackinder, as the author, 25 per cent., and the Eastern colonies fund, 65 per cent.

The cost of a set of slides illustrating the edition for use in this country is £35. Out of this Messrs. Newton pay the Committee a royalty of 12 per cent., of which one-half goes to Mr. Mackinder and one-half to the Eastern colonies fund.

may

It be added that a full set of slides has from the first been kept by the Committee for purposes of reference.

III. THE PRINCESS OF WALES'S FUND. In the last paragraph of Mr. Lyttelton's circular despatch of 13th April, 1905, to which reference has been made above, it was stated “that it is hoped to supplement these "lectures on the United Kingdom by lectures on the "colonies for use in the schools of the United Kingdom.” When the first suggestions of the scheme were made to Mr. Chamberlain, he noted that "if anything is done, it "ought to be a reciprocal undertaking," that the lectures on the colonies ought to be paid for here, and that the lectures on the Mother Country ought to be paid for by the colonies.

When the lectures on the United Kingdom had been completed, except so far as adaptation was required for the purposes of this or that part of the overseas possessions, the committee were anxious to take up the other side of the scheme, riz., lectures on the overseas possessions for use primarily in the schools of the United Kingdom, and secondly, in each other's schools.

Early in 1907, Sir Francis Hopwood, who had recently been appointed Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office, did much to further the object which the Committee had in view by bringing the undertaking to the notice of Her Majesty the Queen, then Princess of Wales, and of Lady Dudley. Under Her Majesty's gracious patronage, a committee, presided over by Lady Dudley, raised a fund amounting to £3,715 188., in addition to the grant by Sir Owen Philipps of free passages to the colonies served by the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company for the artist-photographer whom it was designed to send out at

the

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expense of the fund to collect material for illustrations on the Empire.

Subsequently, in 1910, an appeal to the City companies produced £205, viz., 100 guineas from the Mercers' Com- pany, and £100 from the Goldsmiths, while an application to the Rhodes Trustees produced £500 to be earmarked for Lectures on South Africa. A statement of the accounts will be found in Appendix B.

purpose,

and having

Having this money for their continually in view the importance of uniformity of treatment, the Committee invited Mr. Mackinder to under- take the work of preparing the lectures and the general management of the scheme, and selected an artist who was also a competent photographer to visit the Dominions and colonies, and bring back material for lantern slides, acting throughout under Mr. Mackinder's supervision and instruc- tion, The latter was Mr. A. Hugh Fisher, who had been connected with the Illustrated London News and was a member of the Painter Etcher Society. The arrange- ment with Mr. Mackinder and Mr. Fisher was in either case for three years from the 1st September, 1907.

Mr. Mackinder was to receive a fee of £300 for general management, and £5 'for the authorship of each lecture. Mr. Fisher was to receive £300 per annum, for each of the three years, with travelling expenses and subsistence allowance.

On his first tour, from October, 1907 to June, 1908, Mr. Fisher visited Ceylon, India, including Burma, Aden, Somaliland, and Cyprus. On his second tour, from July, 1908 to the end of May, 1909, he visited Canada, Newfound- land, Weihaiwei, Hong Kong, Borneo, and Singapore, returning through Canada so as to obtain views and photographs of the Dominion in both summer and winter. On his third tour, from October, 1909 to August, 1910, he visited Gibraltar, Malta, Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji. This last tour was to a slight extent circumscribed, owing to the fact that the fund was becoming exhausted.

On the 31st of August, 1910, Mr. Fisher's engagement

came to an end.

On the 4th of June, 1909, Mr. Mackinder gave a lecture illustrated by lantern slides showing some of Mr. Fisher's work, at which Her Majesty was present, but owing to various causes, including the temporary ill-health of Mr. Mackinder, the publication of lectures did not keep pace with the collection of material. It had been contemplated that at least three sets of lectures would be completed by the end of the three years for which the arrangement with Mr. Mackinder had been inade, and more specifically that a course of lectures on India should be completed by the 31st of May, 1909, and another on Canada by the 30th of September in that same year. The eight lectures on India, being the first of the series and requiring specially careful treatment, involved very great labour, and much revision, both official and unofficial. They were not finally published until the autumn of 1910, the copyright of the book and of the slides being taken out in the name of Mr. Mercer, as one of the Crown Agents. It was then decided that these lectures should be followed by three other sets of lectures, one on Imperial stations, including the dependencies in the Mediterranean and the far East, one on British North America, and one on Australasia, that Mr. Mackinder should be relieved of responsibility in regard to these lectures, and that they should be prepared during the current year by Mr. A. J. Sargent, subject to