Professional organisations

University of York

Eric Hawkins: One of the foremost figures in language teaching in the 20th century
By Brita and Peter Green

Eric Hawkins Eric William Hawkins was born in Heswall, Cheshire, on 8 January 1915, the second of six children, four boys and two girls. From his mother, a marvellously witty and talented raconteuse, he no doubt acquired his way with words, whereas it was probably from his father, a cabinet maker and wood¬carver with a love for music, that his less well-known manual and musical skills came, skills that found their expression in woodwork, pottery-making and playing the cello.

At school at the Liverpool Institute he came under the influence of a distinguished headmaster, the Rev. H. H. Symonds, of YHA and Friends of the Lake District fame, to whom he may have owed his abiding passion for the Lakes and for walking. It was also at the Institute that his love for languages developed, inspired particularly by a Spanish teacher, who took him to Spain for the first time in 1930. In 1933 he gained an open exhibition at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to read French and Spanish for the Tripos.

His great love for Spanish and Spanish literature took him to Spain repeatedly during the thirties, and on one of his visits in 1935 he met his future wife Ellen. During the Spanish civil war he was active in bringing Basque refugee children over to England and looking after them here. When he came to write his memoirs much later, he called them "Listening to Lorca: A Journey into Language" (1999).

After graduating he took the Certificate of Education at Cambridge, but his career as a language teacher, which began at the Royal Masonic School (1937-40), was interrupted by six years in the Loyal Regiment with service in North Africa and Italy. He was wounded in 1943 and mentioned in despatches in 1945, when he was also promoted to the rank of major. During the whole of the war he was separated from his wife and newly-born daughter, who were in enemy-occupied territory in his wife's native Denmark.

After demobilisation in 1946 he returned to Merseyside to resume his career in education, this time as a housemaster at Liverpool College. In 1949 he was appointed Headmaster of Oldershaw Grammar School in Wallasey and in 1953 Headmaster of Calday Grange Grammar School in West Kirby, also in the Wirral.

Eric Hawkins proved to be an outstanding headmaster. The published history of Calday Grange records his arrival at the school as follows:

"The year 1953 was marked by a number of portentous events. On 29 May, Everest was conquered for the first time: the next day fanfares in Westminster Abbey greeted the coronation of Elizabeth II: less than a week later E. W. Hawkins arrived at Calday, and one feels in the light of future events that the trumpets might with justification have sounded again to mark the beginning of an era of spectacular growth and progress."

In the "stirring years" that followed, the school was in a ferment, with exciting new developments and projects on every front. They were the years of the "battle of the bulge", when school populations were exploding. When the LEA failed to find funds for new buildings quickly enough Eric Hawkins shamed them into action by raising money with the parents' association, then planning and actually erecting a large new pavilion and sixth-form centre with a combined labour force of boys, parents, teachers and friends. In a policy of "opening windows" to the world and engendering a spirit of service to the community, pupils went off to voluntary service in nearby Birkenhead and in distant countries overseas; Nigerian pupils came to study at Calday; the Calday choir gave a joint public concert with a Hamelin school orchestra; sixth-formers and teachers made exchanges lasting a term or more with French and German sixth-formers and teachers (long before the Central Bureau organised post-to-post exchanges). The curriculum was widened with the introduction of general studies, economics, the "new maths", and German or, later, Russian as an alternative first foreign language to French. New combinations of subjects were permitted to break down the arbitrary division between the arts and science sixth forms. Drama and especially music flourished (all first-formers were required to begin an instrument if they were not already learning one). As a result of what the writer of the school's history characterises as "the complete art of headmastering", Calday, when Eric Hawkins left it in 1964, was not only noted for its academic success but above all for "the feel and tone of the body of the school, the live stirring of interest in a multiplicity of things, the good manners and general decency of the mass of the population, and the ever-increasing concern of so many of them with social service of one sort or another".

Eric Hawkins' influence as a headmaster went beyond his own school and attracted the attention of two other distinguished heads, Eric James of Manchester Grammar School and Harry Ree of Watford. When the former became Vice-Chancellor of the new University of York and the latter the Head of its Education Department, they invited Eric Hawkins to a readership (later a chair of language education) as the founder-director of the Language Teaching Centre.

Whilst Eric Hawkins' great influence on developments in language teaching might be assumed to date from his move to York at the beginning of 1965, it had in fact already begun in 1959. In its annual conference that year, the Lancashire and Cheshire division of the Headmasters' Association (IAHM), of which he was an active member, debated the aims and methods of the teaching of modern languages in grammar schools. To resolve the considerable disagreement that was found among members, a working party was called together under the chairmanship of Eric Hawkins. Its 1961 report Modern Languages in the Grammar School attracted widespread attention. It was published in 1963 and reissued in a revised edition in 1966.

The success of many of Eric Hawkins' imaginative ideas was due to the energetic way in which he converted them into action. As Director of the Language Teaching Centre (1965-79) and as Chairman of the Schools Council Modern Languages Committee (1968-74), he was vigorously involved in examination reform, curriculum development, teaching materials production, research into teaching methods, teacher-training and actual language teaching. Listing the major projects which he initiated or influenced is like giving an outline of the history of language teaching in the second half of the 20th century:

In 1971 the Institute of Linguists celebrated its diamond jubilee by establishing a gold medal to recognise outstanding service in the interest of linguistics or the promotion of teaching and practice of modern languages. Eric Hawkins was one of the first recipients. The Audio-Visual Language Association (now the British Association for Language Teaching) made him its first Honorary President. He was also President of the Modern Language Association.

Brilliant as Eric Hawkins' careers as a headmaster and as a language teacher and language-teacher trainer were, they were always subordinate to his main concern of helping children to widen their perspectives beyond the confines which their background, particularly their linguistic background, tends to impose upon them. It was a concern which was evident throughout his writings and it was recognised nationally by his inclusion in a number of major inquiries into education.

From 1963 to 1966 he served on the Plowden Committee on primary education. It was his membership from 1965 of the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants which led him to set up a series of volunteer summer schools in which children of ethnic minorities, and later also slow readers, were given their own individual tutors recruited from sixth-formers and university students.

When the National Congress on Languages in Education got under way in 1976, Eric Hawkins was invited to chair one of the two working parties which were to report to the first Assembly of the Congress at Durham in 1978. Its brief was to study "the priorities to be accorded to non-native languages at all levels of education in Britain". Not surprisingly, the NCLE working party on language awareness, which reported to the fourth Assembly at York in July 1984, also had Eric Hawkins as a member.

Shortly before Eric’s retirement he was commissioned by the Secretary of State for Education, Shirley Williams, to conduct a survey for the Department of Education and Science of educational provision in areas of urban deprivation, and when her successor, Mark Carlisle, implemented her plans for a Committee of Inquiry into the Education of Children from Ethnic Minority Groups, Eric became a member of that. Eric Hawkins' broad concern with education was acknowledged with the award of a CBE in 1973 and, in a tribute written on his retirement, Shirley Williams said, "the range of educational issues to which Eric Hawkins has contributed is a wide one. He is truly an inspiration to us all".

During almost half a century from the genesis of Modern Languages in the Grammar School, with its insight that "the aim of communication ... will help us to define the kind of language we teach and the nature of the tests we use", and his 1984 programme of Awareness of Language giving coherence to all forms of language education in school, Eric Hawkins held the floor in the debate on language teaching in British schools more than any other single figure. That was perhaps because ordinary language teachers instinctively recognised that his ideas were not only exciting in their vision and wide-ranging in their scope but also firmly rooted in practical experience and good sense.

Those of us who worked or studied with Eric Hawkins were all at some stage inspired by him. We were also warmed by the generosity of his personality, his memory for the good in people and amnesia for the bad, his unaffected assumption of a large share of the work and a small share of the credit, his accessibility on the busiest of days, and his great kindness. And we admired what he was trying to do:

"We are seeking to light fires of curiosity about the central human characteristic of language which will blaze throughout our pupils' lives. While combating linguistic complacency, we are seeking to arm our pupils against fear of the unknown which breeds prejudice and antagonism. Above all we want to make our pupils' contacts with language, both their own and that of their neighbours, richer, more interesting, simply more fun." (Awareness of Language: An Introduction, 1984)

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