Heroic figure who made history alongside Butler’s Bill

27th January 1995, 12:00am

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Heroic figure who made history alongside Butler’s Bill

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/heroic-figure-who-made-history-alongside-butlers-bill
Stuart Maclure remembers the veteran TES editor, Harold Dent, who died this week. Harold Dent, editor of The Times Educational Supplement from 1940 to 1950, has died six weeks after his hundredth birthday. All who care about English education will salute and celebrate his memory. Of course, those achievements belong to an earlier time - he lived to become history even by Kenneth Clarke’s definition.

He was not, in the conventional sense, a great man. He was not grand, had no pretensions. He was kind and good-natured, sensitive but not touchy, immensely knowledgeable but not pedantic, an idealist but a practical one. And, in spite of the hand of chance which brought him to the TES editorial chair at a time of high drama, he was first and foremost a teacher and a man who really cared about education.

I first met him at the end of his time as editor of The TES. I had joined The Times as an editorial trainee and had begun work in the Home sub-editors’ room. There was then a close relationship between the supplement and the main paper. I cannot remember how it came up, but I do recall being asked to do various freelance jobs for The TES at weekends - the first of which was to report the Workers’ Educational Conference at Whitley Bay. (I remember it well because it was freezing cold and extremely disagreeable.) All this was near the end of Dent’s time as editor - by the time I actually joined the paper, Walter James, his deputy since 1946, had become editor.

I only got to know Dent later. His career was extremely varied before he took up the reins at The TES in 1940. He was the son of a Methodist parson. After attending local elementary schools he had a spell at Kingswood School, Bath, the school John Wesley founded for the sons of itinerant Methodist ministers. He started teaching, unqualified and untrained, in 1911 and with a break for war service from 1914 to 1919, continued to work as a schoolteacher till 1931, picking up an external London BA along the way. I never knew the details of his time as the first head of the Gateway School, Leicester, but it ended suddenly.

Then he worked as a freelance journalist for four difficult years, just keeping his head above water. Not much better was the spell of hack work for a publisher which followed. For him the 1930s were a time of trial from which he was rescued when The Times, struggling to keep The TES going amid shortages of staff, advertisements and paper, put him in as acting editor.

Then followed an oft-told tale of heroic activity. With very little help, he and Joan Simon, his assistant, produced a paper each week. Dent was his own reporter, feature writer, leader writer. He travelled the country to keep in touch with what was going on, with the proofs of the next issue in his briefcase to be read and corrected while he waited for cold, slow, trains on desolate railway platforms.

He had an amazing impact on The TES, making it a serious educational paper, in touch with events and opinion. Earlier editors had been content for it to be a journal for the independent schools and the grammar schools; Dent knew that to be influential in national education it had to get to the majority of teachers who taught in the elementary schools. Soon his postbag began to show that this was beginning to happen.

Dent was a strong supporter of the 1944 Act and Butler took him into his confidence at critical times as the Bill was going through - not only to ensure the support of The TES, but also because at this time Dent was writing The Times’ leaders on education too. (This was when, under Barrington Ward, The Times was nicknamed the “twopenny version of the Daily Worker”). Dent seized the opportunities which came his way and The Times duly put its weight behind Butler’s Bill.

He ceased to be editor of The TES at 56. But for another quarter of a century he remained an active player in the education game: professor of education at Sheffield, senior research fellow at Leeds and assistant dean at the University of London Institute of Education. He wrote a major history of teacher training, and countless generations of teachers used his pocket guide to the 1944 Act.

One last personal reminiscence: I recall taking him out to lunch some time in the early 1960s. I cannot remember why, but we got on to the subject of the history of education and how useful it would be if there were a book which collected together the main documents over the past 150 years - Dent even trotted out a skeletal table of contents.

When the book appeared a few years later, I duly acknowledged my debt.

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