a new type of ratepayers &apos; secondary school began to establish itself in the nineties . not only this , but in London the school board , ever short of good pupil-teachers , found itself at length in friendly competition with the T.E.B in the field of teacher training . there were pupil teacher centres ; and a college in the Greystoke Place building off Chancery Lane began to undertake this work in a manner which the leader of the L.C.C has in more recent times publicly described as illegal . on the same occasion he referred in quite different terms to the T.E.B as taking a wide and generous view of its duties in its first plans for the London day training College . in this field , as in the initiatory stages of various other institutions destined to have a place in the life of London University , the Webb influence may be seen . the two powerful democratic agencies , the two boards , were thus at various points in rivalry with one another for the custom of the teen-agers ; and in several spheres the school board was undercutting the institutions supported by the technical education board , of which Sidney Webb was the driving force . the dominion of the London school board was at length overthrown as a result of a decision of the public auditor , strongly backed by the courts of appeal , that the board had grossly exceeded its parliamentary powers in spending ratepayers &apos; money on evening and continuation work . in the uncomfortable atmosphere created by this challenge , all school boards now found themselves in hazard . their friends had diminished in numbers , but they made up in the vigorous expression of outraged feelings for their growing sense of inferiority in face of onslaughts from tory supporters of church schools and in face of the criticisms of the social engineers playing earnestly with their one and two-tier models in the back rooms of the Fabian society . one embarrassing complication which tested the pliable diplomacy of the Webbs arose out of the membership of the London school board of their reforming associate Graham Wallas , passionately disposed as he was to defend it on the highest grounds of free-thinking principle . this old friendship with a fellow Fabian was for a long while in jeopardy . but Graham Wallas stood fast , whereas in this great struggle most of the school board supporters , with their only staunch reserves in the rallying ground of the susceptible nonconformist conscience , were frequently in disarray because never quite sure whether they had all the hostile forces correctly identified . these forces were numerous enough , and even now after sixty years it is hard to find anyone whose sympathies can be enlisted for them against those who emerged with the battle honours and the consequent good press . the London school board had been a gallant success against many odds from the beginning ( in 1871 ) , when Thomas Huxley drafted the first curriculum reform . and he and his colleagues were succeeded by a line of most able men and women of a quality which would bring outstanding distinction to the London county education committee today were they equipped with such talents . the school board had undertaken to civilize one of the most backward and barbarous and misgoverned urban committees in Christendom ; it had carried through what Dr Lowndes had aptly described as a silent social revolution . in the course of their constitutional development the school boards taught the country for the first time to use the machinery of a ratepayers &apos; democracy - a democracy of women as well as men - and moreover to use it in defence of public principles wider than the restraint of petty corruption . their champions have been few . and all but the ugly name of the schools they administered has passed into oblivion . how far were the Webbs responsible for their demise ? that an ad hoc education authority , with powers limited ( the courts now declared ) to little more than instruction in the three Rs , must be an anachronism was becoming evident to all at the close of the nineteenth century . and it was undoubtedly the administrative triumph of the T.E.B in so completely filling a new set of gaps in education that made the county councils the final take-over claimants , as all-purpose authorities for the elementary and secondary sectors . still , it would be wrong to suppose that the L.C.C and the L.S.B had a war to the knife on their hands . both were dismayed to see the national colouring their rivalry had assumed . the L.C.C almost fell over backwards , repeatedly . it showed no greed for the rich inheritance , with its awful responsibilities , so different in their complexity from those offered by street markets and outfall sewers . whilst this rather ugly chapter in national politics was unfolded , whilst the grinding of axes and the scuffles and squeaks of burrowing intriguers in the higher ranges of administration could often be heard above the sound of the Westminster traffic , the dominant wish of the county councillors in Spring Gardens was that somehow the face of the school board should be saved . matters first came to a head during the absence of Sidney and Beatrice on an extensive tour abroad . Garnett was successful in swiftly adopting a new Whitehall administrative provision which was now used to make the T.E.B the grant-distributing authority for London of national science and art payments . this outraged the school board , for , as Garnett astutely observed , it made his L.C.C board the effective authority for secondary classes . the ball which had been set rolling &amp;hellip; did not stop , he wrote later , until the education acts &amp;hellip; had revolutionised &amp;hellip; administration &amp;hellip; throughout the country . William Garnett and Robert Morant ( who drafted the bill of 1902 and was rapidly promoted to become first permanent secretary of the new board of education ) have shared the same friendly biographer ; and it has long been known that these two men were at the centre of the network of political activity within which steps were taken to ensure that the ball went on rolling . what is much less clear is how far Sidney Webb was responsible for the direction taken by affairs in 1901 and 1902 , and how closely he worked with Morant , with whom he and Beatrice were of course later to quarrel over social insurance . Beatrice &apos;s diaries provide a certain amount of information and give us light on her views . Sidney had little or nothing to do with the incidents connected with the famous Cockerton judgment on the misuse of the school-board fund . but it is certain both that the Fabian tract 106 , the education muddle and the way out ( 1901 ) was essentially the fruit of Sidney &apos;s thinking and that this tract and the lobbying pressures brought to bear by Sidney greatly influenced the drafting of the education bill . tract 106 itself made the case first for local control of education , next for a unified control , and finally for the claims of the large all-purpose authority the form and frame of which existed since 1888 in the county and county borough councils . this important document ( largely penned by Webb ) in which a theory of educational administration is set out and related with the utmost assurance to the principle of the full development of every child &apos;s faculties , is one of the few major texts on the subject which is available for profitable scrutiny by the student of the period . there has been a conspiracy of modesty about Sidney &apos;s real claim to be the father of the bill of 1902 ; and thus perhaps the ancestor of so many of our subsequent achievements and woes . avoiding one counsel of the Fabian tract , that a few of the larger school boards might well be saved for limited purposes because of their superior efficiency , the government came out for their abolition . in fact the argument for Sidney &apos;s paternity for the measure of 1902 is in places weak , and even the word God-father would be unfortunate in the circumstances - though , if the voluntary schools were protected by angels , Sidney for reasons which do him credit was on their side . the idea of using the education bill of 1902 to aid denominational schools came to Sidney Webb before it came to Robert Morant , as Mr Brennan has pointed out . much of the real agony of creation in this tremendous piece of reconstruction was of course experienced by Morant . Professor Eric Eaglesham has now brought this out quite clearly . what can be said is that , after a number of gestures , some friendly , some ambiguous , towards the school board in its hour of crisis , Sidney became confirmed in the belief which he must for some time have privately nourished that a monolithic education authority was appropriate for all areas having county councils , and that London &apos;s county council , which had been omitted from Balfour &apos;s measure as far too tricky a proposition to handle with the rest , ought to go into the bill , as the sole governor of the schools within its area . in maintaining the latter view Sidney was part of an unsuccessful minority , hard as he seems to have tried to make it a successful majority ; and it was thus necessary for the whole process of wire-pulling and lobbying to be repeated when the problem of education in London came before parliament for separate consideration in the following session . but perhaps it was from that preceding summer , when the general bill was fought through many embittered weeks , that Sidney began to lose his assured touch in London county politics . democratic feeling no longer supported him . he got no help from the labour following of Ramsey MacDonald , always a little suspicious of higher education and of the Webbs as promoters of the self-regarding motives of London &apos;s middle classes . Sidney himself was now distrustful of his old party the progressives , and quite out of sympathy with the angry radical dissenters who would gladly have upset the education apple-cart to cheat the Anglicans and of access to the rates . having lost the chairmanship of the technical education board , Sidney failed to get re-elected . it is reasonable to suppose that at this point Beatrice &apos;s views , opposing what she called pure materialism as a national philosophy to be inculcated by school masters , had begun vigorously to assert themselves . certainly they both wished to prevent the animosities and frictions hitherto encouraged by the dual system from becoming more severe or from wrecking the future of secondary education ; and so she for religious reasons and he because he believed in fairness and hated the bigotry of secularists , and because he thought efficiency would be served by having Roman catholic and Anglican schools within the fold of public education rather than outside it , favoured the maintenance of voluntary schools out of local taxation . yet the Webbs had their triumph , and incidentally Sidney lost even more of his radical support , with the shaping of the London education act of 1903 , with which the Unionist House of Commons completed the task of reconstruction . this measure reached its revised and final form only after the party leaders had terrified nearly every vested interest in London by the threat to create a new authority in the shape of a large ad hoc body of nominated members on the pattern of the metropolitan water board , at the same time offering much power and influence in school provision to the recently created metropolitan boroughs . the situation in the spring of 1903 has such a startling topicality in relation to the current proposals of the royal commission on greater London that it is difficult to comment on one without expressing views on the other . the Webbs in any case knew what they wanted , and , although the whole thing was perhaps less of a one-man battle than is hinted at in Beatrice &apos;s diaries , Sidney got his way for London ; and this was a county authority - an authority formally charged with responsibility for all educational activity on the public vote within its boundaries , save the University of course . there was not the least bit of ad hoccery here . it was a triumph for the Webb principle , as currently promulgated at the beginning of the century , of a consolidated all-purpose local responsibility vested in the county ; although it was decidedly against the general trend followed in the management of London &apos;s water , road transport , harbour facilities and so on , which all slipped out of the control of municipal socialism . 