In England also teachers were not well paid, and many were the sons or daughters of 'artisans'. This was the upper rung of the working class, where some parents could just about afford to pay for an extended education for their children beyond the usual school leaving age of 12 or 13. The teaching profession was a means of betterment in terms of respectability, but not in financial reward, at least if the teacher was working (as most did) in the State sector. The typical income for a qualified teacher in a State school in Edwardian England would be around £7 per month, little more than the pay of the firemen on the Titanic. Assistant teachers, who were generally very young and not yet fully qualified, were paid as little as £4. A headmaster, however, could earn £10-£15 a month, depending on the number of pupils in his school. Getting back to the Titanic comparison, that's similar to the pay scales for mid-ranking deck officers.
There was more money to be made (but many less vacancies) in the private sector. Most of the teachers there would have had a comfortable middle class family background and a higher level of education, but were nonetheless socially inferior to many of their pupils. Lawrence Beesley, for instance, was the son of a bank manager and obtained his degree at Cambridge. He became a teacher first at a grammar school and later at Dulwich College, where the children of wealthy parents could obtain an expensive private education. Ben will be interested to know that Beesley's parents could afford to employ two servants, including a nursemaid. I think it unlikely that Beesley himself found teaching to be as lucrative as banking, but in his case it did pay for a 2nd Class ticket on the Titanic. Perhaps a more typical representative of the teaching profession was Hannah Naughton, born into a farming family in County Cork. Her father and brothers worked hard to pay for an education which qualified Hannah to become a teacher. On the Titanic she was traveling to take up a new appointment at a school in New York. And she was travelling 3rd Class.
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