
A
WIDOW'S MIGHT
by Alexandrina Anderson |
Elizabeth
Crichton was determined that her husband's legacy should,
as he wished, be used to benefit the people of Dumfriesshire
and of Galloway. What is recognised as Elizabeth's original
idea - to use his fortune to found a University in Dumfries
- in reality emanated from an intriguing proposal put
forward almost ten years before James Crichton's death
...
Elizabeth invoked the help of local heroes like Henry
Duncan and some of the highest figures in the land. All
were eager to influence her decision on spending her husband's
fortune ...
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RECENT research by the Savings Banks Museum
has uncovered the following information about Dr Henry Duncan's
links with Education:
Henry Duncan believed that the best way to improve
conditions for the poor was through education. He was to become
one of the founders of Dumfries Mechanics Institute and he lectured
there, as well as at the Glasgow Mechanics Institute, on such subjects
as geology, his private passion.
When Henry Brougham, the great champion of popular
education, set up his famous "Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge" ("SDUK") he approached Duncan,
both to write treatises for the Society and to form an auxiliary
Committee for the Southern district of Scotland and the north-west
of England. He also commissioned Duncan to write tracts on such
subjects as bringing up children. These pamphlets were initially
published under the auspices of the "Scotch Cheap Repository"
and were a means of educating the "labouring classes".
The scheme was audacious and likely to counter opposition, because
of what Duncan described as "the terror that still prevails
of the people being made worse by education".
Even before becoming interested in Brougham's SDUK,
Duncan had paid itinerant lecturers to come to his rural parish,
Ruthwell, (1801 population 996) to teach his parishioners the rudiments
of astronomy, natural science and history. He was not dissuaded
by what his son wryly described as "the sluggishness of the
rustic mind, its dislike of novelties and contempt for speculative
learning, [which] gave ready currency to the numerous excuses
".
Henry Duncan was the champion of schoolmasters, always
trying to improve conditions for them, believing that their pupils
would reap the benefits.
During the period he supervised the parish school
the pupils achieved spectacular results. In 1843 the Minister recorded
that all his parishioners over the age of seven years could read
and apart from a few women, all over the age of ten or twelve could
write. To Nova Scotia he sent an Attorney General, to the United
States a senator, to the Emperor of Brazil and the future William
lV, doctors. In Australia an agricultural labourer from Ruthwell
became a member of the Legislative Council in New South Wales. Doctors
and lawyers went to Jamaica. His own nephew, Dr William Henry Duncan,
who was educated in Ruthwell, became Britain's first medical officer
of health.
For almost twenty years, Henry and his brother Thomas
Tudor Duncan struggled to bring a university to Dumfries - the germ
of an idea that is only just maturing two hundred years later.
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