Kieran’s Our City, Our Town Article,

Cork Independent, 12 April 2012

Technical Memories (Part 12)

Commercial Education in the City

In a wide ranging speech at the opening of the Crawford Technical Institute on Tuesday, 16 January 1912, Thomas Wallace Russell, Vice President of the Irish Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction Technical Education took the opportunity to comment on the politics of the day and the needs of education in the country.

Russell had been head of the latter Department since 1907. A year earlier in 1906 he was re-elected as an “Independent Unionist”, Tyrone South in the Westminster Parliament one of several candidates referred to as “Russellite Unionist”. He rejoined the Liberal Party and stood as a Liberal candidate at the general election in January 1910, when he lost his seat. Russell does not appear to have contested the December 1910 general election, but in 1911 he won a by-election in Tyrone North, a seat he held until the constituency was abolished in 1918.

In outlining what the new Crawford Technical Institute was building upon, Russell commented on the Cork School of Commerce;

“You have in the first place a School of Commerce connected with this institute. Now if technical education is to be worked on right lines then education ought to have some relation to the industries connected with the place where it is given. I think that it is a great matter for the people of Cork that they have this School of Commerce. You are to a very considerable extent a commercial city, and the youth of Cork if they are to remain here, must to a certain extent receive a commercial education and be educated along commercial lines. On every occasion on which I have visited Cork I have nothing but praise of your School of Commerce. …the education afforded as a complement to that given in the primary and other schools of the city cannot fail to improve the chances in life of those who attend the School.”

Consequent to the opening of the Crawford Technical College and the promotion of scientific subjects, commercial subjects were promoted in the city. Records show that in 1905-6 a total of 88 classes were given in science and commerce under the auspices of the Technical Instruction Committee. In a great Chamber of Commerce publication entitled Cork: Its Trade and Commerce (published in 1919), commercial classes began in Cork in 1908 at the Cork School of Commerce on Jameson Row on the South Mall and these were given to 550 students. The business methods department was particularly well equipped containing the latest “filling systems, duplicating apparatus, specimens of various types of looses leaf ledgers, and other examples of modern saving appliances”.

The typewriting section was well set up with a large number of machines. A special geography room was fitted up, containing maps of various kinds, including special railway and steamship maps, relief maps as well as a selection of charts, globes and show cases illustrating the various processes in different manufactures. The lectures were illustrated by means of a lantern and slides. In the modern languages department extensive use was made of the phonograph and illustrated charts. A select library was attached to the school for the use of the students. Lectures were delivered in the higher courses at the school were recognised by the renamed University College Cork (1908), hence enabling students of the school to obtain a university certificate in commerce.

Courses could be studied for four or five years and comprised: commercial arithmetic, book-keeping, accountancy, auditing, commerce including commercial practice, commercial English, salesmanship, insurance, banking and finance, railways, home and foreign trade, economics, French, German, Irish, Russian, Spanish, commercial geography, commercial and industrial law, company law, shorthand, typewriting, and manifolding (or carbon copying). Introductory course subjects were English, Mathematics and Drawing. In addition to the course of study above, the School arranged each term for a number of public lectures for the citizens.

The Crawford Technical Institute was to add the role of the Cork School of Commerce in the city. Commenting in his opening speech, Russell commented:

“ It is of importance to a young man who has made up his mind to be a clerk in a business house that he should be taught business methods, that he should understand two things in addition to the ordinary work of the office. He will be worth much more to his employer and to himself if he can write shorthand and if he can do typewriting. Both of these accomplishments are absolutely necessary in the business life of to-day – necessary in our commercial offices, necessary in our Government departments. What I would do without a staff of shorthand-writers and typewriters in the Department I do not know. One thing is certain – people would require to wait a good while for answers to their letters; they have been known to say they had to wait a good while as it is…Here, at all events, is one branch of your work which has a bearing upon the needs of the city – on its commercial life and in this respect at least it fulfils the conditions rightly imposed upon all technical education”.

To be continued…

Caption:

636a. Cork School of Commerce as pictured in 1919 on Jameson Row, South Mall (source: Cork: Its Trade and Commerce)