Strathnaver Museum & Mackay Country Community Trust Moving Times & Museum Tales
Mackay Country Community Trust Ltd.
The Sutherland Technical School
A very influential option for education for boys was provided by The Sutherland Technical School which opened in 1904 and operated until 1968. In the 1950s ‘The Tech’ began to admit girls too for courses such as typing and secretarial but they were not boarders. This school was the idea of Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, and was a pioneering experiment in technical, craft and academic education. The building was specially designed and its building and operation was paid for by the Duke of Sutherland, the Duke of Portland (Caithness) and Andrew Carnegie, by then owner of Skibo Castle near Dornoch. Duchess Millicent’s education project enjoyed support and advice from the Scotch Education Board, Professor R Meldola FRS of the City and Guild of London Technical College, Lord Balfour of Burleigh, Professor Magnus Maclean, Glasgow and the Right Honourable R. B. Haldane, KG, MP, amongst others. In her explanation about the motivations for this school at the ceremony for the laying of the foundation stone in September 1903 Duchess Millicent declares:
“To aspire to be sons of Empire – to learn to think imperially – by the nature of things at the present time, grows to be the platform advice of half our orators.
And within proper limits, good advice it certainly is, provided that the youth of the country can be educated to follow it.
The old days of “a shilling in your pocket and luck go with you, my boy,” are past; a man needs the full equipment of education if he is to hold his own in the neck-to-neck race between peoples and policies today.
The hardest thing to combat is the well worn assertion made by new countries suckled on new systems, that Great Britain is digging her own grave. That she is puzzled by the additions and subtractions of new systems and ideas goes without saying; but to be puzzled is not to be outwitted. It rests with our sons and daughters, the coming generation – those that in this period of difficult if interesting transition we must educate – to prove the fact to the world.”
The losses experienced during The Boer War had caused debate and concern about the fitness of British young men to serve and to fight. Baden-Powell created The Boy Scouts Association in 1908 as a result of his experiences and concerns about the future of the Empire. One reaction to that debate was a new focus on technical and athletic education. This school provided academic and technical education for crofters’ sons from Sutherland and Caithness. Their fees were paid through a Bursary system for which they had to qualify via their elementary school. The Sutherland Technical School was run as a boarding school and had four dormitories each accommodating twenty boys. It was located at Drummuie in Golspie, east Sutherland.
The Tech was a tough and regimented form of education organised along Boarding School and Army lines. It would appear from the research that in its early years it achieved exceptionally high standards of academic and craft based work. The first cohorts of those attending, such as Angus Macleod, Tarbet, Scourie, who was amongst the first pupils arriving in 1904, spoke very highly of the experience.
Its reputation in later decades becomes rather different:
“I think you’d be definitely better to have the school as it is now, there’s absolutely no doubt about that. I mean, people used to run away from the Tech. They’d take off into the hills just to run away to get home. And how they got captured was – the boys that were left were rounded up and told to go up the hill and capture this poor sod, it was just too much for him. And march him back and that was it and we kept an eye on them so they wouldn’t run away again.”
Memories of The Tech
“Well you did eleven plus. And you either went to Dornoch, well the lassies had Dornoch or Golspie because there was MacLeod House in Golspie where the lassies hostel was and that’s at the Dunrobin end of Golspie. It became the boys hostel eventually when the Tech shut down because after the Tech finished and became an annexe of Golspie, it became the trades – a lot of pupils from along this coast and right round the coast would do their third and fourth year in Golspie to go on to do trade or whatever.
When I went there the Tech was where you went to, it was first year to fourth year. They didn’t do O’ levels or anything like that; it was agricultural and tended to be for trades. If you wanted to do O’ levels you had to do them on night school. They did night school in the school and all so you had people, more mature students, coming into the school to do O’ levels. So if we wanted to do O’ levels – and they gave you some amount of encouragement and help within your normal class. It certainly wasn’t set up for doing anything academical, as I say, it was more to do with… the old Tech, the old building, there was an annexe out the back where they had painting and plumbing and all these different trades. They used to have tradesmen come in and do a day a week – they used to come in and do brickwork and subjects like that. But when you went away to school, I was still eleven when I left here to go to the first year and you went and stayed in the hostel and it would be about twenty odd of us in the class, first year, from Stoer, Inchnadamph, all the way round to Melvich. And there was a few from Caithness.
There was the farm. They used to have a lot of hens. When you were in first year, you’d be hauled out of class thinning turnips, ten acre park which supplied all the schools with turnips. So you’d be thinning turnips for a couple of days. Good education. Tattie lifting time you got all out of school to lift tatties, things like that. They had about twenty odd cows and a dairy, there were - we had (Poulag) cows, and they had a reasonably modern milking parlour at that time. So you sort of got involved with that.
The school was run, the whole of the school was run by the pupils and there was a pecking order. When I was there in my first year there would be about sixty pupils that lived in it, and that was in three dormitories. There was twenty odd in the lower dormitory and twenty odd and then twenty-four or something like that in the upper dormitory.
We used to get up at seven in the morning and there was four houses and one house was on kitchen duty and that revolved once a week. So every fourth week you were on kitchen duty and the rest of the time you cleaned, from seven till eight you cleaned the whole school. You looked after the whole place and cleaned it. And then eight o’ clock was breakfast and then from half eight until quarter to nine you cleaned the dormitories and made your bed and did all that sort of carry on. Kitchen duty, when you were in first year your whole hour before breakfast was peeling tatties. You had pans because that was for lunch and for all the day people, whatever, they got fed there and all and then we got fed again then at five o’ clock at night. So a lot of tatties to peel. Good job by second year you started the porridge. That was quite a good job because you were right in the kitchen and a lot of time it could be freezing cold in the wee pantry where you peeled the tatties. But that’s what you did, and then you went to school at nine and you went through your normal school.
The school day finished at four. And you sort of kicked about, football or whatever from four till – five. I think we got fed. Half five. And then you had a bit of time then till seven, prep was seven till nine and then you got a cup of tea and piece made with jam at nine and a piece made with jam would be made at six o’ clock so the jam would be well through the bread by the time you got it! And then you got two slices of bread and a cup of tea. Then you went to bed. Half past nine you were in bed, half past nine until quarter to ten was for supposedly reading the Good Book and lights were out at quarter to ten.
