The Board was constituted, and we were rather a three-cornered lot: my
co-warden; a boot and shoemaker in Evesham, with land in Badsey; a
carpenter and small builder; three small market-gardeners and myself.
I was elected chairman, and we obtained the services of an excellent
clerk, who held the same office for the Evesham Board of Guardians--a
capable man, and well up in the forms and idiosyncrasies of the Board
of Education. Our designation was "the United District School Board of
Badsey, Aldington, and Wickhamford." It was not easy to discover the
qualifications of all the members from an educational point of view;
some at least represented the village malcontent section, now getting
rather nervous as to School Board rates. And there was a talkative
section who illustrated the truth of the old proverb, "It is not the
loudest cackling hen that lays the biggest egg," and of, perhaps, the
still more expressive, "It's the worst wheel of the waggon that makes
the most noise." One, at any rate, was definitely qualified--"He
knowed summat about draining!" The majority were conspicuous as
economists in the matter of probable school expenditure, and it
appeared later that two, if not three, of the members were unable to
write their own names, so that sometimes we could not get the
necessary number of signatures to the cheques, when some of the more
efficient members happened to be absent.
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