The 1872 Education Act (Scotland) introduced a range of new duties for teachers, including a formalised curriculum, compulsory attendance up to thirteen, and extensive annual reporting on performance of the scholars by new local school boards, and by His Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI). A national system of teacher training was developing.
The weekly entries in the logbooks of Baligarve Public School for 1880-1925, which are preserved in the Isle of Lismore Museum Archive, give unique insights into how a schoolmaster tackled the challenges of these years, emerging with the respect of the community in spite of his lack of Gaelic.
James Thomson Wilson was born on 10 August 1852 into very modest circumstances in the village of Southmuir near Kirriemuir, Angus. His mother, Elizabeth McNicol, was a linen weaver and, according to the record of his marriage in 1875, his father Robert was a private in the 93rd Regiment of Foot (the Sutherland Highlanders). The 93rd had recently returned to the UK after a prolonged period of service in Canada, and, in February 1854, were posted to the Crimea. As the regiment formed the fated ‘Thin Red Line’ at the battle of Balaclava, it can probably be assumed that Robert did not survive; his wife is listed as a widow in the 1871 census, and she had no further children.
By 1871, James, aged nineteen, was described as an elementary school teacher, still based in Southmuir but, by the time of his marriage in 1875, he was an assistant teacher in Dundee. His wife, Helen Lyell, a boot fitter, came from a farming family in Montrose. Following the existing system introduced in 1846, he would have been recognised as academically promising by the master of the parish school at Southmuir, and, aged around thirteen, entered into a five-year apprenticeship as a pupil teacher. It was a good career move to transfer to Dundee, as there was a well-established normal/sessional school (training college); after the standard year of study at the normal school, he would have been qualified to teach the wide range of subjects and ages that he was to be responsible for on Lismore. His description as a student at the 1881 census indicates that he also benefitted from higher education, although there is no evidence of completion of a degree.
After the transfer of John McGregor Campbell from Lismore to be schoolmaster in Appin
