William Thompson Kirkpatrick (10 January 1848 - 22 March 1921) was an Irish teacher and
grammar school
A grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching Latin, but more recently an academically oriented secondary school ...
headmaster
A head master, head instructor, bureaucrat, headmistress, head, chancellor, principal or school director (sometimes another title is used) is the staff member of a school with the greatest responsibility for the management of the school. In som ...
. He is best known for having been the tutor of the two Lewis brothers from Belfast,
Warnie Lewis and
C.S. Lewis
CS, C-S, C.S., Cs, cs, or cs. may refer to:
Job titles
* Chief Secretary (Hong Kong)
* Chief superintendent, a rank in the British and several other police forces
* Company secretary, a senior position in a private sector company or public se ...
. C.S. Lewis, who would later become well known as a literary critic, novelist, and
Christian apologist
Christian apologetics ( grc, ἀπολογία, "verbal defense, speech in defense") is a branch of Christian theology that defends Christianity.
Christian apologetics has taken many forms over the centuries, starting with Paul the Apostle in ...
, lived as a resident pupil with Kirkpatrick from 1914-1917. In his autobiography, Lewis reports that he was significantly influenced by his tutor.
Biography
Headmaster of Lurgan
Kirkpatrick was born to an agricultural family in 1848 at
Boardmills, County Down. He was educated at
Queen's College, Belfast
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in 1865-1868. At first following an ambition to be called into the
Presbyterian
Presbyterianism is a part of the Reformed tradition within Protestantism that broke from the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland by John Knox, who was a priest at St. Giles Cathedral (Church of Scotland). Presbyterian churches derive their nam ...
ministry, Kirkpatrick followed up his college studies with three years of theological training at
Assembly's College, Belfast, the standard place of instruction for ordination into this denomination in Ireland. He also became a grammar school teacher at the
Royal Belfast Academical Institution
The Royal Belfast Academical Institution is an independent grammar school in Belfast, Northern Ireland. With the support of Belfast's leading reformers and democrats, it opened its doors in 1814. Until 1849, when it was superseded by what today is ...
. He was licensed by Assembly's in 1871. Instead of accepting a call to a pulpit, however, he continued to teach. Kirkpatrick's biographer Ian Wilson believes that Kirkpatrick quickly developed a strong reputation for aggressive teaching leadership; at any rate, in late 1872 the young "Inst" teacher put in his name as the prospective headmaster of the newly established County Armagh grammar school,
Lurgan College
Lurgan College is a selective, non-denominational, co-educational 14-19 Grammar School, situated in the town of Lurgan, County Armagh, Northern Ireland.
History
In lieu of the establishment of Lurgan Model primary school in 1863, the town of Lur ...
. After a three-year delay, Kirkpatrick was taken on in January 1876 as the young College's 28-year-old headmaster.
Lurgan at the start of 1876 had only 16 pupils. The College trustees asked their selectee to take steps to ensure the long-term survival of the College. Kirkpatrick aggressively recruited day boys and boarding pupils, and enrollment increased to 73 in 1882. Kirkpatrick was helped in his responsibilities, starting with his marriage in July 1881, by his wife Louisa Smyth.
At full size, the College was able to support a Headmaster couple, two Assistant Masters, and a steward. The staff and Headmaster shared out teaching responsibilities, which centered on drilling the pupils in Latin, Greek, modern languages and mathematics in preparation for university. Despite its small size, Lurgan came to be seen as an Irish grammar school of the first rank, and its pupils collected more than their numerical share of the honours and prizes distributed to Irish students in those days. One of the College's students was the future Belfast solicitor Albert Lewis, who studied there in 1879-1880.
In 1899 Kirkpatrick abruptly departed from Lurgan College. Surviving correspondence indicates that the parting was on less than friendly terms. At some point around this time, Kirkpatrick, who had operated the College on explicitly Christian lines, appears to have ceased to profess his faith. He and Louisa moved, first to Cheshire and then to
Great Bookham
Great Bookham is a village in Surrey, England, one of six semi-urban spring line settlements between the towns of Leatherhead and Guildford. With the narrow strip parish of Little Bookham, it forms part of the Saxon settlement of ''Bocham'' ...
in
Surrey, to carry on a new life as a gentleman-householder who carried out private, one-on-one tutoring of likely, fee-paying pupils.
Tutor at Great Bookham
Kirkpatrick's biographer believes that the independent educator never tutored more than one or two young men at a time. The Belfast solicitor Albert Lewis retained fond memories of his year at Lurgan, but chose an
Anglo-Irish pathway for his sons and had sent them successively to
Malvern College in Worcestershire. Upon learning, first in 1913 and then in 1914, that older brother Warnie and younger brother 'Jack' were not doing well in
public school, Mr. Lewis learned that a place was available at the Kirkpatrick home.
Warnie Lewis, who had not performed well academically at Malvern, was intensively tutored in 1913-1914 for a place at
Sandhurst, in line with the older son's ambition of joining the British colours. These efforts were successful and he was entered into the British army establishment just before the start of
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
. Warnie's departure from Great Bookham in 1914 opened a place for C.S. 'Jack' Lewis, who could in no sense have been considered an academic failure at Malvern but who had not fit in with that College's culture at the time. Kirkpatrick, who appears to have been baulked by the demands of his Headmastership and then by his private tutoring responsibilities from carrying out an ideal tutorial regime, chose to subject the younger Lewis to an unusually intense course of study that combined the so-called
Great Books
A classic is a book accepted as being exemplary or particularly noteworthy. What makes a book "classic" is a concern that has occurred to various authors ranging from Italo Calvino to Mark Twain and the related questions of "Why Read the Cl ...
with
philosophy of all ages up to the present. Part of his goal, which he shared with Jack's fee-paying father Albert, was to help start the likely lad on a course that would create a significant scholar of the 20th century. The other part of this goal, which was conveyed only to Jack, was that his scholarly work would in no sense be Christian. By this time the Kirkpatrick C.S. Lewis saw had become a stern, ex-Calvinistic "rationalist of the old high and dry nineteenth-century type" with a strong bent toward
formal logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premis ...
, and he sought to transmit this worldview to his pupil. At the time, Lewis completely agreed with this position and goal.
Lewis's autobiography, ''
Surprised by Joy'' (1955), conveys rueful comments to indicate the author's disbelief that a good-faith reader could understand his delight at the intellectual training provided by the Kirkpatrick tutorship. Lewis by this time had begun to grasp his own potential powers, and realized (both at the time and later) that a period of intense dialectical training, such as had been provided by Kirkpatrick, had been necessary to nurture them. This was his summary of the intensity of Kirkpatrick's influence:
My debt to him is very great, my reverence to this day undiminished.
In 1916 Lewis sat for a scholarship place at
University College, Oxford
University College (in full The College of the Great Hall of the University of Oxford, colloquially referred to as "Univ") is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. It has a claim to being the oldest college of the unive ...
, and was accepted. He returned to Kirkpatrick in the 1917 winter term to study mathematics in preparation for undergraduate life.
Retiring from the profession of tutoring, Kirkpatrick remained at Great Bookham. He died in March 1921, age 73, leaving behind his widow Louisa and a single son, Louis Kirkpatrick, an electrical engineer. His estate was probated at over £10,000, a substantial sum for the time.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kirkpatrick, William T
1848 births
1921 deaths
Alumni of Queen's University Belfast
Heads of schools in Northern Ireland