As a teacher, meanwhile, he seems to have succeeded in catching the attention of the boys, and in winning them over to take seriously what he had to impart. His manner was cheerful, friends reported, but deliberate in expression; he himself reckoned gravity a part of his character. His voice was clear and firm, with a slight northern accent that he would keep to the end of his days. His mind (in good Lockean style), they said, was ‘accustomed to communicate its feelings with a sort of mathematical precision’. Hutton was remembered by his former students with respect, affection, even veneration. One cherished a commemorative medal of Hutton’s august profile to the end of his life. It was never Professor Hutton who got pelted in the street.
If the boys were won round to Hutton fairly rapidly, the staff were a tougher task. Pollock was going from bad to worse. The teaching staff were civilians; so, unlike an officer of the regiment, he couldn’t be court-martialled for disobedience. Reprimand after reprimand had no effect on his attendance or his willingness to deliver the course as the inspector conceived it: just more elaborate, sometimes legalistic excuses. He disputed the rules about where he was supposed to live, and the system by which certain parts of his pay were worked out. He disputed what he was supposed to be teaching and where the boundary lay between Hutton’s subject area and his own.
There was indeed a long-running question as to whether the curriculum should be determined by the Board of Ordnance (which paid for the Academy) or by the teachers who had to deliver it. And there was a more detailed question about how responsibility for the practical parts of mathematics – surveying and so on – should be divided between the Professor of Fortification and Artillery (Pollock) on the one hand and the Professor of Mathematics (Hutton) on the other. In both respects, sane compromises took some time to arrive at, and Pollock made himself increasingly ridiculous. Early in 1774 the inspector wished the more advanced boys to be shown how to take an angle of elevation with a theodolite or quadrant, and asked Pollock either to do it or to lend the instruments to Hutton. He refused ‘in a very haughty and imperious manner’ and added ‘that the Academy is not a fit place to mention those things’. He took to refusing to allow the inspector into his classroom, standing on a technicality in his written instructions.
Hutton as Professor of Mathematics also shared a curricular boundary with the Master of Classics, Writing and Arithmetic: William Green, another difficult character. For three days a week, while Hutton and Pollock were teaching the older boys, Green taught elementary mathematics and writing – and possibly some Latin – to the younger and less able. He received a smaller salary than Hutton and Pollock and taught in theory twice as many hours as they did, so he had some reason for ill feeling. And his duties were subject to repeated redefinitions during the 1770s, the teaching of classics being in part suspended at some periods and the teaching of writing theoretically unnecessary since illiterates were not supposed to be admitted as cadets. Harassed and dissatisfied, Green became irregular in his attendance, and eventually his permission to live away from Woolwich was withdrawn. His performance affected Hutton directly, since if Pollock taught the boys badly they would graduate to the upper academy, Hutton’s domain, inadequately prepared.
In this somewhat chaotic situation, Hutton could have thrown in his lot with the masters: done minimal work, obstructed the inspector and governor in their duty, and hoped to get away with it for as long as he could; although by the early 1770s it was tolerably obvious that dismissal was on the horizon for the erring Pollock. Or he could take the other path.
It wasn’t a hard choice, and indeed it wasn’t a hard task. In a way the situation was a gift to him. Merely by turning up regularly (and he was a punctual man) and actually delivering the nine hours of instruction he was being paid for each week, Hutton necessarily outperformed Pollock and Green – incidentally making them look worse than they did already. They resented it, but they could hardly stop him. The inspector was won over quickly, and Hutton was rewarded with a growing degree of power and influence that went beyond anything in the written instructions. There began the first of a very long series of organisational changes at the Royal Military Academy that reflected Hutton’s priorities and agenda.
Early in 1774 an entrance exam was instituted in consultation with the inspector and masters. Pupils should be ‘well grounded in the first four rules of Arithmetic, with a competent knowledge of the Rule of Three’, as well as some Latin grammar. It’s hard not to see Hutton’s hand in a change that would ensure the boys he had to teach weren’t utterly incompetent in his own subject. In theory the curriculum stood still, but there is no doubt Hutton was adjusting it to suit his notions, and by 1775 his Mensuration was a set text.
And, crucially, by the late 1770s it was at Hutton’s word alone that boys graduated from the lower to the upper academy. For the boys, graduation was a desirable thing in itself: a move from learning basic arithmetic and basic military drill to being taught advanced material by the two professors, introduced to the properly military subjects of artillery and fortification, and allowed to wear the full uniform and sword of the cadet company. Furthermore, promotion within the Royal Artillery and the Engineers’ corps – like the Navy but unlike the Army – was entirely by seniority, which meant that the date of passing one’s exams relative to the other cadets was highly significant, setting to some extent the course of an entire future career. With Hutton’s judgement now vital to the progress of cadets through the Academy, he became in some ways a very important man indeed.
Meanwhile, in 1777, Professor Pollock was pensioned off with an almost insulting fifty pounds per year. He tried to make one final fuss, but the Board of Ordnance wisely refused to be drawn into any argument about the matter.
Soon afterwards William Green brought to a head his resistance to what he evidently felt was an alliance of management and Hutton. He disputed Hutton’s academic judgement and demanded that a Mr Mudge, and certain other boys, be moved to the upper academy despite Hutton having failed them. He stated that they were more worthy than some who had been moved up, that they had solved several questions in algebra that members of the upper academy were unable to understand. He spoke of ‘much injustice’ and named several cadets.
This was a key moment for Hutton at the Academy; if Green’s complaint had been upheld Hutton would have looked absurd and his position would have been scarcely tenable. Perhaps not surprisingly, a board consisting of the governor, the inspector and the new Professor of Fortification and Artillery found ‘that Professor Hutton has done justice’.
After this vindication there was no doubting that Hutton was the de facto academic head of the Academy. In time the Professor of Mathematics ceased to be called ‘second master’ and became the first. There is no further report of questions about his academic judgement, or of challenges to his right to pass cadets from one class or academy to another. The notion that the teaching of mathematics and mathematical competence were at the heart of the Royal Military Academy had triumphed. Green, perhaps surprisingly, was brought round to accept Hutton, and the two worked together with no more outbursts until the older man retired in 1799.
Pollock’s