Welsh Journals

WILLIAM GEORGE ASWELL (1845-1918): A NEYLAND HEADMASTER By Simon Hancock That education plays a critical role in the development of individuals is beyond doubt, nor is the fact that together with the church, the local town or village school has long been the cornerstone of community life. This is certainly true of Neyland, where over the course of the last 130 years or so, its schools, both Board or Council and the Voluntary controlled National Schools have largely contributed to making Neyland the town it is today. In the annals of local teaching many names stand proudly out, but the greatest is one who has been largely forgotten by posterity, namely one William George Aswell (1845-1918). As a young man aged about twenty, and for the following forty-six years, he made an enormous and unsurpassed contribution to education in Neyland, first in the British School and then in the subsequent Board and Council Schools which succeeded it. William George Aswell was born at Dymchurch, Kent, in June 1845 and served his pupil teaching apprenticeship at a Weymouth School. He attended the Borough Road Training College, London, from whence he came to Neyland. Under the auspices of the British and Foreign School Society, a British School was opened in premises later known as the Oddfellows' Hall, by Mr Aswell on March 1st, 1865. That morning a mere twenty two children were present, though this number increased in less than a week to over a hundred. Nearly half a century later (1911), it was recorded that in the period during which the school was conducted in this building, upwards of a thousand children passed through it. Writing in 1930, John Griffiths, author of the popular Bubble and Squeak column which appeared in The Pembroke County & West Wales Guardian, claimed how the building was so crammed that there was small wonder that some of the pupils from time to time fainted and were carried out into the fresh air.2 The school of which Mr Aswell was Headmaster, was, in 1871, when John Griffiths joined the school, bamlike. Looking up in the room one could see the bare slates, for there was no ceiling and the windows were about ten feet above the floor. A row of desks down the middle of the room accommodated one class or form at a time.