Former Teacher Biographies

Edward Woodford (c.1804 - 1869), Classics Master
 

Edward Woodford, was Classics Master virtually from the foundation of the school until 1850, when he left to become the first Inspector of Schools for Scotland.

He began as a medical student and is said to have been involved in the business of acquiring bodies for the dissecting rooms, perhaps as a way of earning the necessary funds to enable him to carry on his studies. There is a story that on one occasion he had to sleep in a coffin as the only dry place in a mortuary in which he had been locked for the night. Whether this horrific experience caused him to turn to the more sedate study of Latin and Greek is not clear, but it certainly did nothing to diminish his propensity for working at night. He was a man of restless energy who required very little sleep. He was up early in the morning, living off cups of tea or coffee, working at the school printing press to produce a whole series of classical texts and a Latin grammar which became a standard work. Certainly, his present day successors make great use of the photo-copier, but none is so assiduous as to be out of bed so early in the morning. A common fault of classics teachers is that they are often more interested in the structure of the language than in any feeling for the literature.  He did, however, on at least one occasion adopt the surprisingly modern technique of bringing history to life by taking his class out into the playground where he taught them a war game that Roman boys would have played. Needless to say, the game failed to catch the popular imagination and the boys quickly returned to more mundane activities such as football.

One of Dr. Woodford's other accomplishments, if that is the word, was, keeping a pig. He lived in the house at the East Gate and kept the animal in the courtyard until the Trustees instructed him to get rid of it. In addition to Latin and Greek he was also appointed to teach Hindustani - not because of any direct connection with the real Madras, but because in many cases the boys were boarders whose fathers were serving overseas in the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Army and the boys themselves were more than likely to follow them into these professions.

The Madras College Magazine for May 1890 reports:
EDWARD WOODFORD LL.D.

Dr Woodford was Classical Master in the Madras College for 17 years, before the early part of 1850 when he left St Andrews for Edinburgh to enter upon the important duties of Her Majesty's first Inspector of Schools for Scotland. He discharged the duties of that office, aided by various colleagues and assistants until his death, which occurred at his house, 59 G. King Street, Edinburgh, on 6th January, 1869, after an illness of about ten weeks, which, but for his somewhat mature age, would have been described as consumption. He was never very robust, but had a natural toughness of constitution, which, stimulated by his untiring restless intellect, might have kept him living on ten years beyond the Psalmist's term, but for his habitual disregard of the demands of nature for rest and sleep, his night's rest being generally limited to four or five hours. When in St Andrews it was almost a rule with him to be up at 3 or 4 in the morning, drinking tea or coffee, and working with his pen or his printing-press. The age he attained was about 65 years, but the date of his birth as well us his parentage was left obscure. Rumour alleged very persistently that his father was an English baronet and his mother the daughter of a Scotch Duke, and that he was brought up in Aberdeenshire from his earliest years, if not from his birth. Certain it is that he was educated in Aberdeen, or rather educated himself there not without a struggle, the respecters of patrician blood having done nothing or next to nothing for him until he had fought his way single-handed through many early adversities. The turning point towards victory in his early struggle was the gaining of a £20 bursary at a bursary competition at King's College, Aberdeen, probably among one of the early twenties of this century. Before this success he had been a medical student; he had been engaged in some resurrectionist pranks, and on one night or more to which he sometimes made a grim reference he slept in a damp dissecting-room in the only dry place he could find in it, which was a coffin. Another subject that he must have studied enthusiastically was music. He was an excellent performer on the violin, and no classic poetry lighted up his face with so much rapture as his own execution of Scotch reels.

He did a good deal of literary work, chiefly in classical relations. In 1830 he published an Introductory Latin Grammar, which he used as a class text-book in St Andrews and elsewhere, and in 1854 with the able assistance of Alexander Smith of Kilmarnock Academy, an old pupil and assistant, and John Duncan, afterwards D.D. and minister of Scoonie, his then secretary, both admirable scholars, he published a second edition of it. If there be in existence a Latin grammar more clear, precise, terse, reasonable, and non-dogmatic, it has not been my fortune to come across it, and I have an idea that if teachers of classics were a little more zealous to put into the hands of pupils books out of which they could help themselves, it would be better known and more widely used than it is. His next book was an Epitome of Caesar's Commentaries, published when he was in St Andrews, as was also in 1849 his edition of Horace, which was "printed in St. Andrews at the press of the editor." The Caesar was a useless little thing, for of all books in the world few so little require, or can bear abridgement as Caesar's Commentaries. The Horace has been adapted for schools by a process of rather extensive expurgation. I believe the text is very accurate, for the proof-sheets were carefully and frequently read by many pairs of eyes. It is preceded by an "Enquiry into the First Principles of Latin Prosody," which discloses traces of Dr Woodford's education, both musical and anatomical, and indicates what he could do in the way of ingenious speculation and generalisation. This, too, is also made apparent in "Notes chiefly Grammatical," appended to a little book published by him in 1867, containing the " Answers to the Shorter Catechism adapted for readers in a continuous text." A preface to this pamphlet gives some historical details about the preparation of the Catechism at Westminster, and tends to hint that the writer, though a strong Churchman and Conservative, had not entirely escaped the influence of Rationalism.

Indeed it had been fore-ordained that he could not escape; for Dr. Woodford had been born with a passion for reasoning, and for applying logical methods to subjects which in their nature were not amenable to logical treatment. In all he wrote, we can sea the working of a curious sifting, probing, analytic faculty, that kind of faculty which is always strong in great grammarians and philologists. It is a faculty favourable neither to creative thought nor to extensive reading. It cares less about thought itself than it does for the vesture of thought, and it made Dr. Woodford a great grammarian though he was neither an extensive reader nor an original thinker. His little garden, such as it was, was trenched down to the rocks.

As a teacher, Dr. Woodford's chief characteristic was thoroughness. No pupil, who was not grossly careless or densely stupid, could fail to master all the allotted class work, but then the rate of progress was miserably slow, so slow, indeed, as to be tiresome, and to lead to occasional moralising upon wasted time. The results, however, from one point of view were satisfactory, seeing that no competitors for bursaries at the United College competitions were so successful as the Madras pupils in Dr. Woodford's time. As a disciplinarian, he was all that could be desired, keeping good order-without pedantic strictness and punishing very little. His method with regard to any serious infraction of discipline was to make a "terrific row," investigating for days; looking into every mouse-hole for little bits of evidence until every one connected with the business thought ho had come to taste of purgatory before the proper time. Of his classical teaching, the chief defect (not an uncommon one, I fear), was that "Livy's pictured page", the wit and wisdom of Horace, and Virgil's stately poetry never wore the aspect of a literature that had delighted mankind, but of a jungle of genitives, gerunds, infinitives, and first supines, without a flower among them and all bristling with spikes and thorns for the torture of boys. Most of his pupils, had they been able, would have been willing to say with Byron (Childe Harold, Canto IV., stanza 77) :

"Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so
Not for thy faults but mine: it is a curse.
To understand not feel thy lyric flow,
To comprehend, but never love thy verse."

Dr. Woodford was a smart little man with scrutinizing light-grey eyes, a slow, cold, formal manner and an air in which the professor and the patrician were curiously blended. He was known throughout Scotland, and was very widely trusted: by the aristocracy as if he had been one of themselves, by zealous churchmen almost everywhere, by many men who revere Aberdeen as their Alma Mater, but most of all by many poor scholars of both sexes, to whom his ears and his purse were always open. His kindness of heart and generosity were unquestionable, indeed excessive, and will secure for him a title to remembrance after his books are forgotten, as at present threatens to be their fate.

His wife, a daughter of Provost Auldjo, of Aberdeen, more than one if whose descendants have made a name for themselves in Scotland, predeceased him: so, also, did his only child, Harriet, the wife of an Englishman. Captain H. Jennings Bramley, a few days after giving birth to an only son, who is now an officer in the
British Army. The old man had seen many successes, but he was solitary at the end. Though a scorner of sleep he sleeps at last in the Grange (Cemetery, in a grave marked by a monument of grey Aberdeen granite, erected by friends, to all of whom he had been a friend in reality, and to many of whom he had proved a
friend in need.

J. C. S.