204 pages (scanned from the original blue cloth binding). Prefaced by a portrait photograph of JCB and a handwritten dedication in a copy sent by Mary Tasker at Christmas 1984 to “Hilda and Elizabeth — The Buckmaster spirit lives on — with love, Mary, Kingston, Ont.” (Hilda and Elizabeth are almost certainly the daughters of Charles Alexander Buckmaster, JCB’s eldest son, and thus Mary’s cousins.) The thesis has eight chapters, five appendices and a bibliography, and draws heavily on the Buckmaster Collection held at Gunnersbury Park Museum — a rich archive of letters, press cuttings and papers assembled by Charles Alexander Buckmaster.
The thesis is the most detailed study of JCB’s life that exists. Tasker places him firmly in the tradition of 19th-century radical autodidacts alongside Cooper, Holyoake and Lovett, and argues that his radical consciousness — formed in the Last Labourers’ Revolt, Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League — underpinned his entire educational career. She makes a strong case that he deserves recognition as one of the founding fathers of science education in Britain.
The primary source is JCB’s autobiography, A Village Politician (1897), which Tasker calls “an authentic social document” but notes is unreliable as a detailed record because of changed names, absent dates and an emotional literary style. The autobiography ends in 1859 with his appointment as Organising Master; he never wrote a sequel, prudently, since many of the people he had worked with were still alive. His Diaries are referenced in Parliamentary evidence but are not extant. The main sources for 1859–1908 are his own publications, evidence to the Samuelson Committee and the Cross Commission, press reports, and the Buckmaster Papers (unindexed at the time of writing) in the possession of Hilary Miller, 22 Milner Street, London SW3.
JCB was born in February 1819 at Slapton, Buckinghamshire — a small, secluded village in the Chiltern Hills, two miles south of Leighton Buzzard, consisting of one street of crumbling two-roomed cottages. The Buckmasters had farmed the heavy clay soil there for over 300 years as independent yeomen. Family tradition held they were gentlemen farmers with a coat of arms granted in the 16th or 17th century, but when Stanley applied to the College of Arms no antecedents before 1915 could be established.
JCB’s grandfather Christopher began the family’s decline, unable to cope with enclosure and the absorption of small farms into large estates. His father Thomas Buckmaster drank away what remained of the heritage, so that by 1819 the family had lost the independent yeoman status. This, combined with the dates of birth, raises the question of illegitimacy. Tasker examines this carefully: the Price family Prayer Book records “John Buckmaster, born 24th February 1823, and Richard Buckmaster, born 12th August 1824” — both before the Slapton Parish Register records their parents’ marriage on 17th October 1824. But JCB himself stated his mother died when he was aged two (November 1822), and his obituary in the Surrey Comet gives his birth as 22nd February 1819. Tasker concludes he was almost certainly born in 1819, and that both boys were born out of wedlock, though she notes (in a subsequent New Scientist letter, 1977) that illegitimacy is “not a proven fact, merely a possibility.”
JCB’s mother was Phoebe Price, from two well-respected local yeoman families, the Prices and the Fontaines; the Prices were Dissenters and Phoebe may have been a Quaker. She died of smallpox when JCB was about two. In the 19th century, smallpox victims were buried at night and as quickly as possible, and a letter from Richard (written in 1883) records the family’s fear that “mother was not dead when they took her to the grave, they hurried her off” — a detail of nightmarish quality for a small child.
After their mother’s death, Thomas Buckmaster made no attempt to care for the two boys; they were left with their maternal grandmother, Susannah Price, née Fontaine. She taught JCB to read through religious texts and hymns and brought him up in the Quaker way of life. When John was seven she was crippled with arthritis and could no longer care for him. He was sent to an uncle in Uxbridge where, in his own words, “the misery and wretchedness of life now began”. Tasker’s account of JCB’s treatment there is harrowing: treated as a household drudge, starved, inadequately clothed, and flogged with a heavy dog whip for no apparent reason. One episode — told by JCB and confirmed by Tasker as having the ring of truth — involved the uncle telling the boy he had drunk poison, calling in the coffin-maker to measure him (3ft 4in by 1ft 2in across the shoulders, 9in deep, three-quarter elm), and informing him he would be dead by morning. He endured a night of mental torture before being told it was dill water and the punishment was “to make a good boy of him”.
After three years in Uxbridge JCB returned to Slapton to work as a farm labourer from the age of ten, earning 2/- a week. At thirteen he was apprenticed to a carpenter in Uxbridge.
Covers JCB’s apprenticeship and early working life as a carpenter. Despite being put to the dirtiest work because of his unpopularity in the workshop, he developed genuine inventive flair — including a mortising tool based on a pump handle principle which he claims was later adapted by American manufacturers. At seventeen, earning only 10/- a week for a 15-hour summer day, his life was at an impasse. He eventually broke free in 1837, walking 50 miles to Andover with his tools sent ahead. Tasker sets this against the background of the technologically backward English woodworking industry, contrasting it with American innovation.
After Andover JCB moved to Tiverton in Devon, where he became deeply involved with the Anti-Corn Law movement and developed his extraordinary gifts as a public orator. Tasker traces this involvement carefully, noting that for JCB, as for many working men of his generation, the Anti-Corn Law League was a political education. He became one of the movement’s travelling lecturers, gaining the skills of oratory and platform management that would underpin his entire later career. Tasker connects the village’s Methodist revival with emigration to America — “contemporaneous with the religious revival, thirty-three men, women and children emigrated to Iowa, U.S.A. This exodus set the precedent for small-scale emigration over the next few years, which claimed Buckmaster’s younger brother Richard in 1842.”
In the early 1840s JCB enrolled at Kay-Shuttleworth’s St John’s College, Battersea, as a mature student training as an elementary teacher. Tasker works carefully through the chronology (which JCB obscures in his autobiography) and concludes he entered before February 1844, when a new Principal was appointed. She describes Battersea in the 1840s as “a suburban village with much of its rural nature surviving” and JCB’s arrival there as a turning point. He proved an outstanding student and was taken on as Science Master.
This covers JCB’s working life from 1845 to 1851, including his post at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight (1845–47) where he was highly critical of the regime and had the opportunity to voice those criticisms when Charles Dickens and Hepworth Dixon visited. He was sacked as a result. He also assisted at the Norwood School for Pauper Children. Tasker traces his early connections with Sir Robert Peel and his involvement with the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was a formative experience and set his course.
The chapter includes significant detail on JCB’s connection with Tamworth School, where Sir Robert Peel authorised him to buy scientific apparatus to the value of £50 (JCB later recalled it as £100) to be publicly exhibited and explained to parents of potential pupils. Twelve boys were picked from the elementary school and given demonstration lessons. Within a year numbers had risen from fifteen to sixty and a specially trained master was appointed. But Peel’s accidental death in July 1850 ended the venture and the school “dwindled into a mere national school.”
The pivotal chapter for JCB’s professional formation. He trained at the School of Mines at Jermyn Street under Huxley, Robert Hunt and Professor A. Hofmann of the Royal College of Chemistry, funded by one of only five training scholarships offered in 1853. He taught part-time at the Battersea Mechanics Institute, the Wandsworth Trade School and the Royal Polytechnic throughout his studies. Of the five scholars, only JCB and Thomas Coomber passed the gruelling final examination; Coomber went to Bristol Trade School as headmaster and JCB into the Science and Art Department. Tasker also covers his appointment as Assistant Keeper to the Food Collection at South Kensington (1857–1859) and his marriage to Emily Anne Goodliffe in 1853.
Tasker gives important detail on Emily Anne’s role: she notes that JCB had knowledge of food science from his work at the Food Collection but “like most Victorian males, no experience of practical cookery.” It was Emily who provided the practical grounding for his later cookery work. The family acknowledged that the words and acts of the cookery lectures were essentially those of his wife.
The longest chapter, covering JCB’s thirty-five year career as Organising Master of the Science and Art Department (1859–1894). Appointed by Henry Cole at the moment the Department was expanding its examination work nationally, JCB’s role was to travel the country explaining what the Department offered. He was paid £2 2s. per promotional meeting attended and £1 1s. per day in Department service; his fees for the International Exhibition were paid by the Society of Arts.
Tasker traces the arc of his career with considerable sophistication: his early years of genuine influence when the Department was growing and his lectures on science drew large audiences; the challenge to his position from Armstrong’s ‘heurism’ movement in the 1870s; the cookery years of 1873–74 which brought him celebrity but took him away from science; his attempts in the 1880s to secure a permanent salary (turned down by the Treasury on 16th August 1884 despite lobbying from Playfair, John Bright and Lord Frederick Cavendish, with A. J. Mundella, Donnelly and Herbert Gladstone also involved); and his final years until retirement in 1894.
The cookery lectures of 1873 are described in vivid detail: JCB lectured from a pulpit on a raised stage with a red medieval-patterned curtain behind him, flanked by two gas stoves, an open and close range and a demonstration table at which an Italian chef and kitchen maids demonstrated the recipes. The lectures were so successful that they received a Royal Visit — JCB lectured Queen Victoria on “The Preparation of an Omelette” and personally created an omelette which the Queen tasted with approval. He became one of the celebrities of the London season, meriting a full-page illustration in the Illustrated London News. But there was criticism too: the high cost of entry excluded working-class women, and one paper suggested “Mr. Buckmaster should leave South Kensington and go down to toss a pancake in Whitechapel.”
Tasker raises the important question of whether the cookery lectures, for all their success, represented a diversion from JCB’s true educational vocation. She notes that cookery “never acquired real educational status, partly because it was, and is, seen as a ‘women’s subject’.”
The chapter also gives extensive coverage to JCB’s involvement in the Paris Exhibition of 1867 (as Secretary to the 5 Juries), his evidence to the Samuelson Committee and the Cross Commission, and his lecture tours — press cuttings from which (collected by Charles Alexander Buckmaster) are preserved at Gunnersbury Park Museum, reference 2796/1.
Tasker’s analytical conclusion. She argues that JCB’s textbooks, though commercially successful and practically useful, were never aimed at advancing the science itself but at helping students pass the Department’s examinations — as JCB himself acknowledged in the preface to the third edition of The Elements of Chemistry. His Inorganic Chemistry reached fifteen editions, was made respectable by G. Jarmain’s “extensive alterations” and was used in Junior Classes at the City of London School.
She concludes that JCB’s major contribution was not intellectual but organisational and evangelical: he brought science to people who would never otherwise have encountered it, and did so with genuine passion and extraordinary energy. His radical political background gave him a democratic commitment to education that distinguished him from most of his colleagues at South Kensington. The tension in his career was between this radical democratic impulse and the Department’s increasingly bureaucratic and examination-driven culture. Tasker’s final assessment is sympathetic: whatever his intellectual limitations, JCB was “one of the founding fathers of British science education.”
Appendix A: JCB’s lectures and public appearances (from press cuttings).
Appendix B: JCB’s publications list (books and journal articles).
Appendix C: Statistics of science classes and students under Department instruction.
Appendix D: JCB’s evidence to the Samuelson Committee, 1868.
Appendix E: JCB’s own publications, used as primary source material.
Richard Buckmaster / Richard Price: JCB’s younger brother (born 12 August 1824, one year his junior) emigrated to Iowa, U.S.A. in 1842 under the name Price (his mother’s family name), identifying entirely with the maternal rather than paternal line. He founded a legal firm in Clinton, Iowa, which in his son’s time was moved to Times Square Building, New York. He eventually became a small-town Mayor. A letter written by Richard on 23rd February 1883, addressed to his brother John but never posted, survives at the Buckmaster Collection, Gunnersbury Park Museum. It is a remarkable document: Richard writes of his deep resentment of their father, his identification with the Price family, and closes: “It is 41 years this month since I saw you last.” A further letter from “Richard Price-Buckmaster” to Stanley, Viscount Buckmaster, dated 10th May 1933, is also at Gunnersbury Park Museum — suggesting that in later life Richard reconnected with the Buckmaster family.
JCB’s mother: Her name was Phoebe Price, from the Price and Fontaine yeoman families of Slapton. She died of smallpox when JCB was about two years old. There was a family tradition, recorded by Richard in his 1883 letter, that she was buried alive — a fear that was unfortunately not irrational given 19th-century practice with smallpox victims.
JCB’s grandmother: Susannah Price, née Fontaine, who raised JCB from infancy to age seven, taught him to read through religious texts and brought him up in the Quaker tradition.
JCB’s father Thomas: Confirmed as Thomas Buckmaster, a drinker who dissipated the family’s assets. By the time JCB was ten and working as a farm labourer, Thomas was living a few miles away at Totternhoe and JCB knew him so little that “had I met him in the street I should not have recognised him.”
The Buckmaster Collection at Gunnersbury Park Museum: A substantial archive assembled by Charles Alexander Buckmaster, containing letters, press cuttings from JCB’s lecture tours (ref. 2796/1), obituary notices (ref. 1273/2), and correspondence. This is the key primary archive for further research.
The cookery lectures: JCB gave 312 lectures between April and October 1873. He was paid by the Society of Arts. The lectures received a Royal Visit and JCB made an omelette for Queen Victoria. There were 144 candidates in the first cookery examination in 1874.
JCB’s salary battle: His attempts to secure a permanent salaried post at the Department were twice refused by the Lords of the Treasury (the second refusal came on 16th August 1884). His supporters included Playfair, John Bright, Lord Frederick Cavendish, A. J. Mundella and Herbert Gladstone. Despite Mundella writing to Herbert Gladstone that if he could help Buckmaster he “will do a good service to a deserving man”, the application was refused.
References cited by Tasker confirm the following items are held at Gunnersbury Park Museum (now the Museum of West London) in the Buckmaster Collection:
This summary compiled for Philip Boys, May 2026, from M. E. Tasker, J. C. Buckmaster 1819–1908: A Study of His Life and Work (MEd thesis, University of Bath, 1974). For private research use only. Not for publication without the prior written consent of the author.