Welsh Journals

dockyard apprenticeships. Inevitably, this situation was one factor in the natural tension between the new county education authority and the "Part III" Pembroke Borough Authority (successor to the previous Pembroke School Board), established under the Education Act of 1902. Owen Edwards, Chief Inspector, did not really appreciate or understand the importance of the dockyard class at the Intermediate School. When he called one day in June, 1910, he remarked, "The boys, it seems, do not take to the sea. Some go to H.M. Dockyard but most want to become teachers; they are timid home birds. The sailors come from the Welsh coast. So Geography and Mathematics are given no bias towards the sea and Navigation". (23) His local District Inspector, B.B. Skirrow, was nearer the mark when he reported a few years later, "practically all the boys leave school early to enter the Dockyard or go in for commercial or civil service appointments. Girls become teachers in the main". (24) Indeed, ever since the establish- ment of a Pupil Teachers' Centre at the school in 1902, it was the girls who had opted for teaching and had in consequence remained at the school for the full four year Inter- mediate School course. Between 1899 and 1914 the girls gained 84 Central Welsh Board Senior Certificates and 18 post-Senior Certificates at Higher or Honours level; the comparative figures for boys were 45 and 6. Not that the curriculum associated with the dockyard class was any narrow, vocationally biased affair. H.M. Inspector said in 1914, "the bias of the school is shown in Mathematics and Science work for the boys, which is a strong feature of the school, but the curriculum in the main is a good all round one". From 1912, the dockyard class was organised separately and the two-year course included not only Science and Mathematics but also Woodwork, Drawing, English, History and Geography. In 1918 there were 26 boys in the class. The Chief Inspector of the Central Welsh Board in that year echoed the remark made by H.M. Inspector in 1914 when he observed, "very few pupils go through the full course except the girls who are destined for the teaching profession. The early age at which boys can obtain profitable employment at the Government Dockyard probably accounts for this". (25) Possibly one of the most interesting and distinguished pupils of the Dockyard Class was W.J. A. Davies who took the first place in the dockyard entrance examination in 1906 and second place in the first year apprentices' examination for all the royal dockyards; in succeeding years he took first place for all dockyards in the annual apprentices' examination, won an Admiralty scholarship to the Royal Naval College, and was chosen to play Rugby for England. Even after the closure of the Dockyard in 1926, the school continued to prepare boys for doc- kyard apprenticeship examinations although the successful candidates had now to take up their apprenticeships in the dockyards of the Home Ports. There was undoubtedly a strong bond between the community the school served and the armed services. When dockyard apprenticeships became restricted in the years after the first world war, the Headmaster's annual report chronicled a regular quota of boys successful in Royal Air Force and in Army Tradesmen's entrance examinations. The first Headmaster of the Pembroke Dock Intermediate School, T.R. Dawes, did not remain long enough in the post to have a significant influence on the way the school developed in the first thirty years or so of its existence. Nevertheless, he left his successor a goodly heritage in what the Central Welsh Board's Inspectors described as a "staff highly qualified academically and professionally". (26) Indeed, in T.R. Dawes' time the school was a nursery for future headmasters. The heads of the Intermediate Schools at Tregaron, Brecon, Gowerton, and Cowbridge had all been on Dawes' staff before their