The Rise and Fall of Bretton Hall College
James Whiting, General Secretary of the SEA, and ex Bretton Student considers whether Bretton's demise and the struggles at Goldsmiths are about preventing working class access to arts education.
‘Bretton Hall was a beautiful place but odd, because you were completely in the middle of nowhere in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield. You were warned of cabin fever before you went, because it was like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. In a weird way, it bonded you more because you were trapped.’
Reece Shearsmith
Bretton Hall was a special place, aesthetically, educationally and socially. I was there some years before the League of Gentlemen trio but the above quote sums up many peoples’ experience of Bretton. Its isolation and its other-worldliness produced intensity in relationships and consequently, creative outputs. I am writing about it now because I want to set the College’s rise and fall in a political context. I have been a Londoner ever since leaving Bretton in 1978 and as I write the staff of Goldsmiths College, educationally a kind of Bretton of the south, are fighting to defend their jobs and the arts and humanities courses the college is so famous for. The actor Colin Welland went to both institutions.- a strong link.
Goldsmiths is famous for its drama in education courses, its creative writing MA, Art and Design, Black Literature MA and much more. These courses are under threat and have been labelled ‘mickey mouse’ because they do not necessarily lead to massive salaries on leaving. The college has generous entry requirements leading to the recruitment of many more black, working class, and mature students than is the case elsewhere. And that appears to be the rub. Whilst there is a growing number of British actors coming from the private schools sector and/or Oxbridge, courses attracting working class students are under pressure. Is it because colleges like Goldsmiths and Bretton were always outliers in the hierarchy of higher education? They do not have the deep roots in the establishment that an Oxford college does, for example. Or could it be a deliberate ploy to cut off such routes because arts and communication skills in the hands of working-class students present a danger to the establishment?
So the story of Bretton as a College of Education begins in 1949 after the second world war. Viscount Allendale owned the Bretton Estate and the 18th century Palladian mansion. He also owned another estate, Bywell Hall, in Northumberland. His financial interests in coal came to an end when the Labour government nationalised it, so he had no further use for the estate apart from ensuring by act of parliament that the village of West Bretton would remain ‘dry’, after a miners’ brawl. This was in spite of Allendale’s own reputation for drunken orgies at Bretton Hall. No pub exists in the village to this day.
The West Riding of Yorkshire was a huge education authority, that stretched from Sheffield to Cumbria. Whilst not having responsibility for education in the main cities of Sheffield, Bradford, Leeds, and others, it covered smaller mill towns, mining villages and rural areas. The West Riding had built up a reputation for educational innovation and this was considerably enhanced by the appointment of Sir Alec Clegg as chief education officer. He was a pioneer in the development of arts education.
"We (WRCC) decided we must have our own college which would have as the basis of its studies - music, art and drama. We could not build, there was at the time a crippling shortage of money, labour and materials, but we could use and convert existing buildings."
Clegg wrote in 1968.
Astonishingly, looking back, there was the money for the West Riding to purchase Bretton Hall and the estate. This purchase is the very reverse of what later occurred in the Thatcher era when as many public assets as possible were sold off into private hands and would never happen today. Instead then, with a strongly interventionist government and local authorities with clout, the property of an aristocratic capitalist was purchased and used to train arts teachers to work in state education. Bretton Hall College of Education was born.
It was a Labour Government in 1972 which perhaps unknowingly may have jeopardised the college’s future with its rather cack-handed local government act which broke up the West Riding after nearly 100 years. The responsibility for education was handed to ‘metropolitan boroughs’ which were expanded county boroughs taking in their more rural hinterlands. The City of Wakefield took over the responsibility for running Bretton, a much smaller, less experienced and poorer authority. The only advantage was that Wakefield had been the administrative capital of the West Riding so retained some of its assets built up during Clegg’s time, including an incredible drama library which I used when studying.
I arrived at Bretton in 1974 during the City of Wakefield era. The Allendale family had created an oasis. The sand coloured mansion looks down over two man-made lakes and the lush green valley of the river Dearne. Somehow the family had a contrived a landscape where, apart from the decorative follies which abound in the park, there are no other visible signs of human habitation in view. Bretton though sat in the middle of a coalfield and within a few miles were the pit head windings, the slag heaps and the pit villages surrounding the Bretton estate. The college and its grounds featured strongly in Ken Russell’s ‘Women in Love’. The college used all the old buildings. The mansion housed admin offices, a student common room, some teaching spaces and sleeping accommodation for some students. The stable block housed the drama department including an experimental theatre; the kennel block the student union and bar. Money was found too to build a large hall/theatre, teaching spaces, a refectory and student hostels.
I have no exact figures concerning the intake at Bretton so what follows is anecdotal. First, during the seventies there were hardly any black and ethnic minority students. There were however a considerable number of working and lower middle-class trainee teachers. The arts focus together with an environmental studies programme gave the college its unique ethos and attracted students interested in innovation and pushing the boundaries. There was also another group of whom I was one. Privately educated and failed by the sector, I scraped two A levels and was looking for a second chance. I had already decided to give up the first year of a general degree course at North East London Poly. Bretton was certainly a change from the drab streets of East Ham and Barking. There were others like me too; more mature students who for one reason another had come into HE later.
I applied to follow an English B.Ed. I had no idea coming from the private sector of the nature and extent of drama in education in the state sector which at that time was growing incrementally. The place was infused with drama. During the final year of their 3 year drama course the students had to put a on a short play as part of their assessment. Recruiting actors from the student body, together with technicians and designers was the first step. The ‘season’ of plays meant that for two weeks there were up to 20 plays being performed in various studio style venues. Nearly all students were involved as either performers, back stage or as audiences. The plays too ranged from the experimental to the more traditional. I was introduced to writers such Ionesco, Churchyll, Pinter, Bond, Brecht, Wedekind, etc. John Godber, son of a miner, teacher, author, playwright and ex director at Hull Truck emerged from this group having been enthused by a Bretton trained drama teacher at his comprehensive school.
The experience of teaching in the area around Bretton was far from the rural idyll which the college resided in. We were sent on our teaching practices to the pit village primaries, and the large secondaries in Barnsley, Huddersfield. and Wakefield. These were far from easy schools and any complacency soon dissipated. As well as providing arts education for local students it built strong relationships with the mainly working-class schools surrounding it.
Perhaps a disadvantage of the claustrophobic nature of the Bretton experience and the relatively small number of students was the apolitical culture in the student body certainly when I was there in the seventies. The union was taken so seriously that one president suggested putting the funds on a horse of his choosing so that the winnings could be spent on an event. The refined air of the Dearne created a sense of decadence among some students. Politics was beneath them. This was not the case with the education department though, whose sociologists in particular left us in no doubt as to the endemic failings of the English education system regarding working class children.
There is a long list of Bretton alumni which you can google. None of them though followed the now common establishment route into theatre:- a public school such as Eton, a drama school perhaps or a route into the theatre and media through Cambridge Footlights or an Oxford equivalent. The League of Gentleman for example were all state educated. A more significant and unseen impact of Bretton was the fired up teachers it produced thereby passing on enthusiasm for the arts to another generation. John Godber is an excellent example of that. Mark Bishop, a member of the same drama group as Godber, went on to initiate and teach on a drama/media performance course at Salford University which developed working class talent such as Siobhan Finneran and Peter Kay. Perhaps the most influential alumnus was Sir Ken Robinson who left Bretton two years before I arrived. His work gave a clear framework to Arts Education giving it rigour as well as an outlet for creativity. His influence on arts in schools including the ILEA project of the same name was huge and any upcoming curriculum review promoting creativity should revisit his work.
Bretton was not just about drama. During my time there the curriculum changed as Whitehall bean counters decided there were enough arts teachers and Bretton had to diversify. It then offered BA honours in drama plus an Inter Arts programme alongside teaching courses. Art was always a strength too and Peter Murray who led Art and Design education was instrumental in setting up the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. This was a fantastic success and it has kept the wonderful estate open to the public while making a significant contribution to the cultural life of northern England.
It was the Thatcher government’s policies which contributed to the closure for Bretton Hall College. Divorcing education from democratic oversight was the direction. FE colleges were to be set up as separate institutions cut off from the educational ecology of an area. There was a belief too that Colleges of Education were second rate providers of teachers and the policy laid down they should be merged into existing universities or polytechnics. Bretton resisted such pressure as it was an innovative arts college in its own right. The financial difficulties associated with running the college became too large and in 2001 it became the Bretton Hall School of Performance and Cultural Studies of Leeds University which had been validating Bretton’s degrees all along. In spite of commitments made and the fact a new theatre had been opened on the Bretton site three years previously, Leeds decided its new ‘School’ should move to the main campus in the city because of financial issues. Wakefield Council acquired the land again. Bretton closed as a college in 2007. John Godber made a radio documentary about the college and there was an alumni reunion.
Above. The Stable Block and Experimental Theatre now overgrown and empty
The Leeds University website references the history of the School of Performance and Cultural Studies back to Sir Alec Clegg and what it calls the ‘outstanding reputation of teaching excellence’ at Bretton Hall. There are access routes onto these courses but the entry requirement for a drama and performance degree is ABB and in reality I expect much higher. It could be argued that nothing has been lost educationally and the Bretton courses just continue in a new venue. I can be proved wrong but I suspect the culture is not the same and neither is the intake as diverse in terms of social class. There is a crisis now in arts education caused by Tory policies such as the EBAC and the clampdown on so-called ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees. Entries for GCSE and A level in the arts have slumped massively and the pool of available drama teachers is drying up.
No-one set out deliberately to close Bretton. The impact of a utilitarian philosophy of education, neoliberalism, a failure to recognise the value of arts education to working class kids, an assumption that working class kids don’t need or appreciate the wonderful environment which rich kids get at public school or their Oxbridge college, together with ongoing cuts to education, were factors in the closure of Bretton. Many more courses and institutions such as Goldsmiths are fighting against the same forces. Where are the routes for working class kids into the Arts now?
Ironically, with student accommodation etc demolished, the mansion belonging to Viscount Allendale is being transferred away from public ownership again to the Groucho Club whose members form the current arts and media elite.
I sign off in Bretton style with a performance by a West Riding poet Jimmy Andrex called
‘Alec Clegg Still Dreams’ with scenes from the Bretton landscape.
Lovely article it connects with my current research around Peter Slade an external examiner in the 60s. I was TA drama 85-88 and MA Educational Drama 91