Malting House School


The Malting House School was an experimental educational institution that operated from 1924 to 1929. It was set up by the eccentric and, at the time, wealthy Geoffrey Pyke in his family home in Cambridge and it was run by Susan Sutherland Isaacs. Although it was open for only a few years, the radical ideas explored in this institution have remained influential up until the present day. It is now owned by Darwin College, Cambridge where it is used as accommodation.

Creation

came to public attention when he escaped from internment in Germany during World War I. He had travelled to Germany under a false passport but he was soon arrested and interned. The story of his escape and return to Britain was widely published. In March 1918, Pyke met Margaret Amy Chubb; she was intelligent, pretty, and attracted to Pyke's unconventional good looks and wilful unconventionality. They were married within three months of meeting. After the war, Pyke tried his hand at a number of money-making schemes. For a while, he made a lot of money speculating on the commodity market using his own system of financial management instead of more conventional techniques.
Geoffrey and Margaret Pyke had a son, David. Geoffrey Pyke became preoccupied by the question of his son's education. He wanted to create an education that promoted curiosity and equipped young people to live in the twentieth century – an education that would be utterly different from his own unhappy experience. To do this he set up an infants' school in his Cambridge home. Founded in October 1924, the school was funded by Pyke's City speculations. His wife, Margaret, was a strong supporter of the school and its ideas.
Pyke placed advertisements in a number of journals, including the New Statesman and Nature:


Pyke recruited psychologist Susan Sutherland Isaacs to run the school; although Pyke had many original ideas regarding education, he promised her that he would not interfere.
Both Pyke and Isaacs had had unconventional and unhappy experiences of growing up. Pyke's father, Edward Lionel Pyke, was a Jewish lawyer who died when he was only five years old, leaving his family with no money. His mother quarrelled with relatives and made life "hell" for her children. She sent Geoffrey to Wellington, a snobbish private school mainly catering to the children of Army officers; here, she insisted that Pyke maintain the dress and habits of an Orthodox Jew. While there, he was a victim of persecution that instilled him with a hatred of and contempt for The Establishment. After two years at Wellington he was withdrawn, tutored privately and then admitted to Pembroke College, Cambridge to study law. Isaacs' mother died when she was six years old. Shortly afterwards she became alienated from her father after he married the nurse who had attended her mother during her illness. At the age of fifteen, Isaacs was removed from school by her father because she had converted to atheistic socialism; her father refused to speak to her for 2 years. She stayed at home with her stepmother until she was 22.
Besides Geoffrey Pyke and his wife, the other leading figures in the school were Susan Isaacs and her second husband, Nathan Isaacs; and Evelyn Lawrence who arrived two years into the experiment.
In April 1927, the school advertised again:


This advertisement indicated that Ernest Rutherford, Percy Nunn and J.B.S. Haldane had agreed to assist the directors of the school in the final selection of candidates.

Premises

The Malting House was originally exactly that: a malthouse, Oast house, and small brewery owned, in the 1830s, by the Beales family – a well-known Cambridge trading dynasty. In 1909, the then Dean of Trinity College bought the buildings and converted most of them into an Arts & Crafts house and two or three years later the remaining buildings were converted into a small hall to host musical evenings. During the 1920s it was the Malting House School. In later years the house reverted to a family home. The buildings were purchased by Darwin College of Cambridge University to serve as student accommodation, the cost of purchase and conversion being estimated as £1.5M.
Maurice and Sylia Dobb lived in a cottage behind the Malting House – he had a position at Trinity College – Ludwig Wittgenstein was lodging with them at the time, at the invitation of Bertrand Russel.

Operation

In an advertisement for residential pupils, in July 1927, some of the operating principles of the school were explained.


It seems very likely that the form of education was influenced by the ideas of John Dewey and Maria Montessori. In the 1920s and 1930s, John Dewey became famous for pointing out that the authoritarian, strict, pre-ordained knowledge approach of traditional education was too concerned with delivering knowledge, and not enough with understanding students' actual experiences. Montessori's ideas gave rise to the Montessori education which the idea of children choosing the means of educating themselves. The Malting House School fostered the individual development of children; children were given great freedom and were supported rather than punished. The teachers were seen as observers of the children who were seen as research workers.




The school attracted the attention of a wide range of intellectuals. The children came from parents with an academic or professional background who had, in many cases, already achieved eminence in their fields. They included two sons of G. E. Moore, the daughter of Edgar Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian, Philip Sargant Florence. Yvonne Kapp, who described Pyke as "an intimate if entirely unpredictable friend" took her children to the school every day.

Closure

The Pykes, the Isaacs and those around them were dedicated to the teachings of Freud. The ethos of the school was that children should, as far as possible, not have harmful inhibitions pressed upon them. This philosophy extended to permitting the children to express a full range of feelings including aggression and curiosity about bodily functions. The adults also tried to live their lives without reference to traditional, outmoded, norms of behaviour.
The Pykes took Frank Ramsey into their family, taking him on holiday, asking him to be the godfather of their young son. In 1923, Margaret Pyke found herself to be the object of Ramsey's affection and he made sexual overtures to her. In 1924, Geoffrey became infatuated with Susan and before long they began an affair with Margaret blessing and encouraging the relationship – although Nathan was kept in the dark. Margaret eventually turned down Frank's advances. A year or so after it had started, Geoffrey and Susan's affair petered out.
As young David reached the age of six, Pyke extended the remit of the school and expanded its ambition. He supported the school lavishly and employed Nathan Isaacs the school's researcher at large on a salary of £500 per year.
At the end of 1927, Susan Isaacs left the school. It is not clear exactly why Susan Isaacs left, one possibility is that Pyke began to interfere with the day-to-day running of the school but the developing emotional and sexual tangle of relationships between Susan Isaacs, Nathan Isaacs and Evelyn Lawrence may also have been a factor. Evelyn would become Nathan's second wife after Susan's death in 1948.
In 1927, Pyke lost all his money. The Maltings School was forced to close, Margaret Pyke had to take a job as headmistress's secretary; she left Geoffrey although they were never divorced. Already suffering from periodic fits of depression and burdened with huge debts to his brokers, he now withdrew from normal life altogether and existed on donations from his close friends.

Influence

For a short time The Maltings was a critical if not a commercial success; it was visited by many educationalists and it was the subject of a film documentary.
Visitors to the school included Jean Piaget and Melanie Klein.