Summerhill school has been in the news this month while celebrating its 100 years as an idiosyncratic, self-governing school. It started life in 1921 with the idea that children thrive when they are given maximum freedom to do what they want and be who they will.
Nobody thought it would survive once its head and founder AS Neill died in 1973, but they reckoned without his daughter, the charismatic Zoe Redhead, who took over as head and continues to keep her father’s dreams alive with ferocious dedication. Nobody could be more pleased than I am that Summerhill lives on, but there is one big gap in the history of the school, and that is my grandmother. Neill did not found the school alone.
Lillian Ada Neustatter met Scotsman Neill in the early 1900s when her son, my father, Walter, was a pupil at King Alfred School in London. One day my father brought Neill, his teacher at KAS, home to tea. Neill stayed for four hours, then followed this up with more visits, telling my grandmother his dream of running a school where children could be free and happy, where emotions were not neglected in order to develop the intellect – a contrast to the pupils at the Scottish school where he had been a primary teacher and had been ordered to be the boss and use the tawse.
Lillian had recently been released from Holloway, where she was sent as a suffragette, punished for breaking a post office window after becoming a passionate believer in women’s emancipation. It was a time that had changed her dramatically from the frustrated wife of a doctor (Otto Neustatter) with no way to use her education and musical skills, living in Dresden among women who, she said scathingly, would rather discuss the perfect recipe for apfelstrudel than opera and theatre. She also had an interest in human rights and education. The lanky pedagogue, with his huge square-toed shoes and vibrating excitement, enchanted her.
He, in turn, was very drawn to this woman, described by the writer Ethel Mannin as “one of those rare women who can suggest breeding even when wearing an old jumper, a tweed skirt, brogue shoes. She always contrives to look ‘a lady’.”
My grandmother left Otto to join Neill, determined to bring her fire-in-the-belly belief in women’s rights to those of children. She and Neill rented a space in a hilltop building in Hellerau, Germany – they could not afford premises in England – where they created a schoolroom and living quarters, and took in their first children from different countries. Some had the kind of behavioural difficulties Neill believed – with justification in many cases – that approval and education without punitive authority would help. My grandmother became known to the children as Mrs Lins, a derivative of our middle family name, Lindesay.
It was in Germany, in 1921, that the poet Edwin Muir and his wife, Willa, lived at the experimental school, and she taught in return for board and lodging. Willa and my grandmother became firm friends, while Edwin observed the enduring problem Neill had in getting a balanced range of good teachers: “What the school ended up with was the usual complement of communists, vegetarians and simple lifers.”
It is said my grandmother was not as keen as Neill on letting children be unfettered. One day when Mrs Lins was vigorously cleaning windows – the school being short of funds to pay for help – a pupil, Wolfgang, stood watching and lectured her on the necessity of work as a source of joy. She gave him an old-fashioned retort.
Her old-fashioned education also came in handy. Alongside managing the school, she taught a range of subjects including German and music, which she had studied at the Conservatory in Leipzig.
Over and over in the course of researching a memoir of my grandmother, I heard from the ex-pupils who had been there in her time what a vital balance Mrs Lins’s practical, efficient, mover-and-shaker persona had been to Neill’s ability to construct the dream of Summerhill and inspire others. Gustav Mattson, who spent a couple of weeks studying Summerhill, in Hellerau, its first home, said of my grandmother: “She was a remarkable woman. Neill’s great support and indefatigable co-operator – I don’t think he could have carried through his enormous task without her.”
Michael Boulton was a pupil during my grandmother’s time, and went on to join the Royal Ballet. He told me: “She was a marvellous person. She had a magic all her own.”
In 1924 Summerhill moved to a building in Lyme Regis in the south of England, then to Leiston in Suffolk, where it is now. It did not deviate from the fundamental principles of holding a weekly school meeting where matters of concern, children proving troublesome or breaking rules, and ditto staff, could be brought up by anyone, and all had equal votes in decision making. To Neill, this was the heart of a democratic community.
Children can choose to go to lessons or simply play if they prefer, the idea being that children are naturally curious and most will want to learn once they are ready. (It’s worth saying that many Summerhillians go on to university.)
I was a pupil at Summerhill from 1954–9 and remember how the place has always attracted a remarkable amount of animosity from disapprovers, who seem to fear that somehow this educational outlier is going to pervert and corrupt education more generally.
There seems to be a personal loathing for the school in the words of Maurice Punch, one of the academics who see the school’s ethos as damaging. In 1976, he called Neill’s appeal that of a messiah figure leading a cult, saying: “It’s remarkable how little critical word has appeared on the Summerhill sect. I’d like to raise the question of the extent of Neill’s influence on the children and the degree to which they respond to being a deviant minority.”
Similar figures visited Summerhill in the 1960s, when child-centred ideas were coming into state education, and observing that it was all very utopian but no pupils educated this way would be able to adjust to life in the outside world.
Clearly they had not met – as I have – the academics, scientists, artists, social and humanitarian workers, charity founders, skilled tradespeople and not high-achieving but contented former pupils. Nor did they see the value of Summerhill for pupils such as book illustrator John Burningham, who was sent to 11 schools before Summerhill, where he was, finally, happy.
But the greatest threat has always been the education inspectorate. There were highly critical reports, and a few changes had to be made. Tabloid reporters writing about staff having sex on the front lawn – there wasn’t one – didn’t help. Then, in 1999, Tony Blair’s government decided he could not tolerate this tiny private school. It was given six months to enforce learning or be closed down. A notice of complaint was issued which, if upheld, would have meant closure.
Not if Summerhill pupils could help it. They went to an independent schools tribunal and took over court 40, where they argued the case for their school and won.
This was long after my grandmother’s time, but I have no doubt she would have been there with the pupils, encouraging them to argue they were happy products of a well-functioning school with students who even managed to pass GCSEs.
My grandmother died in 1944, in Wales where the school was evacuated during the second world war. She had a slight stroke and withdrew from the school. Neill wrote to his friend Wilhelm Reich: “My wife is done out now. It is very sad to see one who has been so active become like a child again.”
His tribute of remembrance recognised how valuable the woman he had taken tea with decades earlier had been: “Her memorial will be lived in the lives of many … who were helped by her … encouraged by her … loved by her.”
