Noise was not the worst of their offences. Many of the school buildings, church, chapel, Roman Catholic, and board, were incredibly bad. In a note-book I have a record of my last visit to Hewitt Street Council School, on a November afternoon in a thick yellow fog. One hundred and forty-three boys in four classes were being taught in a large hall: the windows were shut to keep out the fog, and from eighty to a hundred gas-jets were adding pollution to the poisoned air: thirty-two more boys were struggling for existence in a small and vilely-lighted classroom. Both rooms were on the second floor: on the ground floor india-rubber was stored: on the first floor there was calico: there was only one staircase. If a fire had broken out on either of the two lower floors, hardly a child could have escaped; for the thick smoke mounting upwards would have proved as deadly as fire-damp. After this it is hardly worth noting that there was not a foot of playground; the boys played in the street. And this, remember, was thirty-five years after the formation of the first School Board for Manchester. Two years later, in 1907, the school was closed. Do not suppose that these horrors were confined to Manchester; many less important towns in the district might plead that they had their standards of comfort and decency lowered by the example of their capital. There is a range of hills running from the Scotch border to the Peak, known to geography book writers (but not locally) as the Pennine Range. On the west side of this range lay my division, and from Preston to Congleton there was a succession of large manufacturing towns, differing from one another in some respects, but agreeing in their notions of school building. The root idea was a large main room, having, if possible, a raised platform, or daïs, at one end, and several small classrooms. The main room should be from thirty-four to forty feet wide: it would be admirably adapted for Sunday school, and the superintendent should sit on the platform to direct the storm. The classrooms would hold from twenty to thirty children on the eight square feet allowance of the Education Department: the walls might be lined with cupboards to hold the crockery for tea parties, and the assorted literature of the Band of Hope and other societies; also the Band of Hope’s big drum, and the huge tea-urns. The societies would meet in the main room, and the best classroom would serve for the committee to assemble in. There would be no cloak-room, and no washing-room.