A HISTORY OF NOTTINGHAMSHIRE 



Inquiry Commission, the acting governors of the 

 Magnus Grammar School were very prompt in 

 taking advantage of the new opportunities for 

 improvement afforded by it. The Act received 

 the royal assent on I August. On 6 September 

 the governing body gave notice to the Endowed 

 Schools Commissioners appointed under it of 

 their intention to submit a scheme under sec- 

 tion 32 of the Act. But the scheme, when 

 presented, proved reactionary, and provoked 

 strong opposition from many quarters. It pro- 

 posed to give only three-sevenths of the en- 

 dowment to education, and to dissipate that 

 in trying to run two schools, one of the third 

 and one of the second grade, and to give the 

 suggested governing body, practically a committee 

 of the town council, power to regulate the fees 

 at pleasure and vary them for each individual 

 boy a pleasant method to encourage jobbery 

 and favouritism. The scheme also proposed to 

 limit arbitrarily at pleasure the number of 

 boarders, on which the prosperity of the school 

 depended. The scheme, however, was not in a 

 form to go forward under the Act, and neces- 

 sarily waited until the Endowed Schools Com- 

 missioners could take it up in the course laid out 

 for themselves. Long before that time arrived 

 the commission was abolished and its powers 

 transferred to the Charity Commission, which it 

 had temporarily superseded. At length, in 1877, 

 an assistant commissioner, Mr. D. R. Fearon, 

 was sent to Newark to inquire. At that time 

 the school had increased to 126, of whom 51 

 were day boys, and the quarters of the boarders 

 had overflowed to the opposite side of Appleton 

 Gate. A quaint revival, due to Mr. Plater's 

 High Church proclivities, which even more than 

 any real religious intolerance detracted from the 

 confidence of Nonconformists in the school, was 

 that the boys were made to sing De Profundis in 

 English every Wednesday and Friday evening. 



It was not till 1885 that a draft scheme, founded 

 on the inquiry, was put forth. After long struggles, 

 chiefly with the vicar over the song school, the 

 scheme became law by the approval of Queen Vic- 

 toria in Council, 13 May 1887. This scheme 

 established a new governing body of sixteen per- 

 sons, the chairman of quarter sessions of the 

 Newark division, the mayor and the vicar ex 

 qfficio, five representatives of the town council, 

 two of the School Board, two of the county jus- 

 tices, and one of the churchwardens of the parish 

 church, with four co-optatives, who included 

 Mr. Earp. Owing to the opposition of the 

 town council and the vicar the misapplications 

 of income authorized by the Court of Chancery 

 could not be wholly undone. The scheme de- 

 clared, however, the whole endowment to be 

 educational subject to the payment of three- 

 eighths of the net income, after providing for 

 all expenses of management, for non-educational 

 purposes. Of this amount ^204 was to go 



for church, vergers, &c., 84 for choristers, and 

 150 for the dispensary. But by the time the 

 scheme was made the income from endowments 

 had fallen from ,2,500 a year to 1,350, so- 

 that in the result the school was but little better 

 off than it had been a century before in actual 

 income, and relatively not so well. Some 

 alleviation was afforded by the requirement that 

 tuition fees of 4 to 8 a year should be paid 

 by all boys ; Greek to be an extra at ^3 a year. 

 But one in every 10 boys was to be a free 

 scholar. 



Mr. Plater retired at Christmas 1893 to the 

 living of Kirton, where he died and was buried 

 in 1899. 



The Rev. Edward Spencer Noakes, who suc- 

 ceeded, came from the Perse School, Cambridge,, 

 where he had been head of the modern side from 

 1889. He was of St. Catharine's College, 

 Cambridge, where he took a second class in the 

 Theological Tripos. He developed the modern 

 side, and secured the erection of science labora- 

 tories, an art room, and a gymnasium. He 

 had about 90 boys. A Joseph Gilstrap scholar- 

 ship to the university was founded in 1897 by 

 Mrs. Mary Fletcher in memory of her father. 

 The endowment fund produces some 36 a year, 

 which is hardly enough in these days for more 

 than a prize. In 1902 the representations of the 

 Charity Commissioners in favour of a new site 

 and buildings were taken up in the town. 

 Mr. Earp purchased a new site of some 1 2 acres 

 at the end of a new street called Winchelsea 

 Avenue, and a subscription list was started for 

 the buildings, headed by Mr. B. Tidd Pratt, 

 solicitor, the chairman of the governors, with 

 500. 



Dr. Noakes, who had achieved his doctorate 

 in law by examination, for which he taught him- 

 self in the interval of teaching others, retired to 

 the vicarage of Edale, Derbyshire, at the end of 

 1904. 



The present head master, Mr. Edgar Arthur 

 Menneer, was appointed in 1905. Son of the 

 head master of Torre College, Torquay, he won 

 a scholarship at Rugby School. Then, with a 

 school exhibition and a scholarship at Corpus 

 Christi College, he proceeded to Oxford, where 

 he took a first class in Moderations and in Final 

 Schools in Literae Humaniores. He went as an 

 assistant master to Winchester College in 1899, 

 then to Cheltenham College, thence to assist in 

 starting the Royal Naval College at Osborne. 

 Though Magnus, as we saw, expressly made lay- 

 men eligible for the head-mastership, Mr. Men- 

 neer has the distinction of being, so far as is 

 known, and certainly for the last two hundred 

 years, the first layman to fill the office. He has 

 had also, so far as records extend, the most dis- 

 tinguished academic career of any of the masters. 



In July 1905 Mr. Samuel Reay, the last of 

 the song schoolmasters on the Magnus foundation, 



214 



