ABSTRACT
Nonconformity can have no better exemplar than the Scottish schoolmaster who wrote these words: ‘I shall create a School . . . which shall present a picture of a
community to the utmost limits of its power conceding nothing to the spirit of mere usage.’ [2] This uncompromising statement came from the pen of Hely Hutchinson
Almond (1832-1903). From 1862 until 1903 he was headmaster of a small private school called Loretto, situated on the southern outskirts of Musselburgh, near
Edinburgh. By the end of his life the school was famous. Almond was a Victorian radical and one purpose here is to explore the nature of
his radicalism and its influence on Scottish education. Paradoxically a further purpose is to illustrate his prosaic conventionalism and to demonstrate that he was a wholly orthodox exponent of the fashionable ideological shibboleths of the upper-
middle-class educational system of the period. Due to the enthusiasm with which commentators [3] have recorded his eccentricities, his orthodoxy is in considerable
danger of being overlooked. Almond needs to be rescued from both admirers and critics. He was a complex individual who deserves better than the partial analysis of
friend and foe. This complexity is revealed not only in his curious blend of radicalism and
conservatism, but also in the mixture of realism and romanticism which characterized his theory and practice. He saw himself as an apostle of rationality and preached a Spencerian gospel of scientific living; yet he shared with Richard
Jefferies a splendid but Utopian dream of civilized men as well-fed, well-muscled and well-educated. There is much in the wry observation that Almond endorsed the idyll
of the noble, literate white savage, but foolishly located him in bourgeois Edinburgh! The most important fact in Almond’s life was his contempt for nineteenth-century
Scottish society. He was at odds with his culture and community. The major sources of alienation were the conventions of his time associated with learning, exercise,
clothing and diet. Early in the twentieth century R.J. Mackenzie, Almond’s biographer, summarized the reasons for his disenchantment in the following passage.
