The Strike School

Tom and Kitty Higdon arrived to teach at Burston in 1911. They objected to a cold, damp schoolroom and to farmers removing pupils whenever cheap field labour was wanted. Their belief that every child deserved serious education brought them into conflict with a management committee led by rector Charles Tucker Eland and local landowners. An inquiry rejected accusations that Kitty had mistreated children but accepted that she had been discourteous to managers, and the couple were dismissed. On 1 April 1914, 13-year-old Violet Potter led pupils through the village with her accordion, banners and demands for their teachers' return. Sixty-six of 72 children joined. Lessons began under a tent, moved to a workshop and then required a secure building that hostile managers could not withdraw.

The school was created by children, parents, teachers and supporters rather than an education authority. Violet organised the first march; fishmonger George Durbidge helped parents decide to employ the Higdons; Kitty maintained lessons, attendance and standards; and Tom connected education to the wider rights of farm labourers. Families carried much of the risk. Eighteen parents were taken to court for not using the official school, though supporters paid their fines. Some workers lost jobs or vegetable plots, and threats of eviction and damage to property tried to break the protest. Donations from trade unions, Labour groups and members of the public paid for equipment and eventually raised more than £1,250. The purpose-built school opened on 13 May 1917, with Violet performing the opening.

What began as an attempt to restore two teachers became an independent school lasting until 1939. The First World War made rural labour harder for landowners to replace, giving supporting families some protection, while national press attention turned Burston into a symbol. After Eland left in 1920, relations with the official school became less hostile; his successor even helped with religious teaching, and pupils from the two schools competed in sport. The Strike School still taught at least half the village's children around 1930 and accepted pupils from elsewhere, sometimes with free local lodging. It depended heavily on the Higdons. Tom died in August 1939, and Kitty, then 75, could not continue alone. It closed later that year, ending a boycott of more than 25 years.

The small 1917 school survives on Crown Green with its name and foundation stones, one of the few buildings made directly by a school strike. Photographs preserve the first children's procession, including Violet with her accordion, while banners, documents and local family memories identify people who could otherwise disappear behind the phrase 'longest strike'. The green and former official school place the alternative building within the village conflict that produced it. Annual rallies continue each September, maintaining Burston as a gathering point for unions and education campaigns. The building's modest size is part of its evidence: public contributions did not create a grand institution but gave parents and teachers enough independence to keep classes running when official managers, courts and employers expected resistance to collapse.

Burston challenged who had the right to decide what working-class children needed. The committee held formal authority, but parents trusted the Higdons' teaching and their children's experience more than the dismissal process. By sustaining another school, families changed protest from a one-day march into daily work: lessons had to be taught, rooms heated, rent paid and penalties faced year after year. National support connected a village dispute to arguments over rural poverty, child labour, union organisation and democratic control of education. The school did not replace the public system, and its survival depended unusually on two teachers, but it forced the official school to improve and preserved a powerful example of children and parents acting as participants in education rather than passive subjects of it.