didn't intend "to
pay no voluntary rate until she was obliged"!

Matters were getting desperate when Vicar No. 2 arrived, and it soon
became evident that the voluntary system had completely broken down. A
School Board was the only alternative, and, as all the old managers
refused to become members and no one else would undertake the
responsibility, a deadlock ensued. We were threatened by the Education
Department that, failing a Board of parishioners, they would appoint
for the post any outsiders, non-ratepayers, who could be induced to
volunteer. The prospect was not a pleasant one, and on the invitation
of a deputation of working men, I agreed to stand (chiefly, perhaps,
in my own interests, as the largest ratepayer in the parish, with the
exception of the Great Western Railway Company), and others eventually
came forward.

The Board was constituted, and we were rather a three-cornered lot: my
co-warden; a boot and shoemaker in Evesham, with land in Badsey; a
carpenter and small builder; three small market-gardeners and myself.
I was elected chairman, and we obtained the services of an excellent
clerk, who held the same office for the Evesham Board of Guardians--a
capable man, and well up in the forms and idiosyncrasies of the Board
of Education. Our designation was "the United District School Board of
Badsey, Aldington, and Wickhamford." It was not easy to discover the
qualifications of all the members from an educational point of view;
some at least represented the village malcontent section, now getting
rather nervous as to School Board rates. And there was a talkative
section who illustrated the truth of the old proverb, "It is not the
loudest cackling hen that lays the biggest egg," and of, perhaps, the
still more expressive, "It's the worst wheel of the waggon that makes
the most noise." One, at any rate, was definitely qualified--"He
knowed summat about draining!" The majority were conspicuous as
economists in the matter of probable school expenditure, and it
appeared later that two, if not three, of the members were unable to
write their own names, so that sometimes we could not get the
necessary number of signatures to the cheques, when some of the more
efficient members happened to be absent.

Early in our existence as a United Board, one of the economists made a
little speech in which he propounded the theory that "our first duty
is to the ratepayers"; but I could not help suggesting that, as a
legally