Margaret Coombs – The Authoritative Biographer of Charlotte Mason

Margaret Coombs Speaking at the 2012 ChildLightUSA Charlotte Mason Educational Conference

June 6, 7, 8, 9, 2012

Gardner-Webb University, Boiling Springs, NC

Near Charlotte, NC

Margaret Coombs at Newtown School Archives

Margaret Coombs is a social historian, researcher and retired mental health practitioner, who has worked in a variety of mental health posts, including community care rights and as a Mental Health Act Commissioner. She is married to an Anglican Priest and has two children, an artist and a theatre director. Through exploring the history of education for parenthood for a post-graduate degree in the 1980’s, she first discovered Charlotte Mason  via the Parents’ Review, listed in the vast hand-written catalogues in the former round Reading Room of the British Museum, where the Founder of the PNEU had studied for her Geographical Readers, around 100 years earlier! Margaret met with Essex Cholmondeley, Charlotte’s first reluctant biographer, at Nynehead in 1983. Finally retiring in 2008, she resolved to research Charlotte Mason’s secret family history in preparation for a new, more accurate biography. Although there is no substitute for visiting the relevant places, significant discoveries have come to light via the Internet and records offices, due to widespread interest in ancestry. The joy of this longstanding research has been the making of many new friends.

PLENARY 1 Charlotte Mason and her Hidden Quaker Heritage.

Following up wide-ranging discussions with PNEU people during the 1980’s and 1990’s, explorations in Dublin, Birkenhead, Liverpool, Carlow, Waterford, Lisburn and Bangor in Wales as well as at Ambleside revealed that Joshua Mason (1780-1859), a birthright member of the Religious Society of Friends and father of 12 was Charlotte’s father, by Margaret Shaw (1818-1858), a Catholic. In exploring Joshua Mason’s life and work during the 62 years before his thirteenth child was born, we now know that his grandfather, John Gough and great-uncle  James, who spent much of their lives teaching in Friends’ Schools in Ireland and England, as well as travelling in ministry, were born to Quaker parents in Kendal, eleven miles from Ambleside. It is pleasing to reflect that, by finally settling in Ambleside in 1892, Charlotte Mason was unwittingly returning near to where her great, great, grandparents, John and Mary Gough had lived, at the turn of the eighteenth century.

Q. Why do you think Charlotte concealed her family background from everyone she knew? Do we have the right to open up her hidden past?

Session 2:  Charlotte Mason’s Early Experiences of   Education.

From about 1854 until 1859, Charlotte Mason was apprenticed as a pupil-teacher at the Holy Trinity National School for Girls and Infants in Birkenhead. Winning a Queen’s Scholarship at Christmas 1859, Charlotte Mason was accepted for Pestalozzian training as an elementary school teacher, at the Home and Colonial Infant School Society’s Training College, in the Gray’s Inn Road, London. Obliged to leave at Lady Day, March 25^th 1861, she was appointed Mistress of the William Davison Infantine School in Worthing, Sussex, where she remained until December 1873.

Q. What do you think were the effects of Charlotte’s early educational experiences on her educational ideas, lifestyle and work?

©  Margaret Coombs 2012

In Gratitude by Rebekah Brown Hierholzer

I miss teaching.  I miss reading books together and hearing 16 different ideas about one passage.  I miss washing 32 muddy feet and socks after recess because “we just had to see what it was like to make bricks without straw.”  I miss the conversations about how to forgive someone after she has called you “stupid.  S – T – O – O – P – I – D!”   I miss wiping tears and praying together for the strength to forgive and to learn how to start over and be a friend again.

I miss teaching.  But I have the best reason to miss it.  Her name is Genevieve Rose and she will be 15 months on Thursday.  She has an older sister and three older brothers but they are 27, 25, 23 and 20 and though they adore her they are on their own now.  As a child I sometimes dreamed it would be heaven to grow up without siblings, but truly it was a rare thought and most of the time I loved living life with brothers and sisters.  I want Genevieve to know the joys and struggles of living life with others and so with every chance we get, we think of every good reason to learn and work and live life with others.

Recently we have begun to gather at the house for a time to work on handwork projects.  Sometimes we all embark together on learning a new craft and trying our hands at it.  Other times everyone brings whatever they happen to be working on.  It was no

surprise to find ourselves, as Charlotte Mason put it, finding the joy in the feel of wood or clay or in handling tools.  It was no surprise to find ourselves delighted in seeing beauty and function take shape and form within our hands.  It was certainly no surprise to find ourselves taking pleasure in a time to talk and laugh and share with one another.  Even recognizing the usefulness and importance of reusing and repurposing for the sake of the environment was not a revelation.

 

But I was not prepared for the connection I would feel with ages past or the craftsman of far away places.  I found myself craving the handwrought not only for its unique beauty and its representation of time and effort, skill and knowledge, but for the way it tied me to the artisan who first birthed the idea of it.  Ts’ai Lun, who presented a piece of paper to the Chinese emperor over 2000 years ago.  Rene de Reaumur, the French naturalist who first used wood pulp to make paper 1600 years later after watching wasps build their paper-like nests of chewed wood.  Perhaps it was an Egyptian who invented knitting during the first millennium; no one knows for sure.  Some say it was the Crusaders who brought the art of stick weaving to Europe, though others claim it originated with the Native Americans.  I have no proof, but I suspect that often there were creative craftsmen creating beautiful and similar works simultaneously in different parts of the world. 

The idea of handwork is often associated with necessity (clothing or tools, for example) yet it is so closely tied to the intellectual and creative aspects of our humanity – or more specifically our connection to the image of the Creator.  The necessary purpose of an object evolves into something else.  Something infused with symbolism and meaning. (My husband, both composer and poet, would argue that communicating that meaning is a necessity as well.)

The intricacies of the pattern on the rug in our living room, the carvings on the Celtic cross in the school room, the story told in the rich simplicity of colored glass we see every Sunday.

I was also not completely prepared for how profoundly overcome with gratitude I would become at the relationships growing between these young girls and my daughter.  She is too young to crochet or join us as we make paper, but she happily plays with yarn, or sorts beads (sort of).  She sits on many eager laps and no one is ever too busy to change a diaper or read a book or just take a tumble on the floor with her.  And she has been the fortunate recipient of many hand-knitted sweaters, hats, and animals.  I almost feel as if she has 9 more sisters.

Though I miss teaching, dreadfully at times, I have been given precious gifts, and for that I am thankful.

© Rebekah Brown Hierholzer 2012