SUNDAY SCHOOLS IN STRATHKINNESS

For a long time the church disapproved of the idea of Sunday, or Sabbath

Schools, saying it was the duty of parents to teach their children themselves.

ln 1798 the St. Andrews Kirk Session had refused to sanction the setting up of

a Sabbath School in Strathkinness. However, as ordinary schools put a great

emphasis on the Bible, children would have learned a good deal about it,

although not always in a way that we would today think appropriate, with

fear and damnation more prominent in their teaching than love and compassion.

By 1827 the attitude of the St. Andrews Kirk Session had obviously

changed as in that year a door collection for the Sabbath School was taken

and there were many more in later years.

Free Church Schools and Free Church Sabbath Schools were set up soon

after the establishment of the Free Church, and they spread quickly through-

out the country. In 1861, about ten years after the first Free Church Sabbath

School had started in Strathkinness, the Presbytery minutes record ‘a great

increase of scholars’ at Strathkinness. In 1873 the Free Church Session com-

plained about the ‘irregular attendance’ at the Sabbath School and took a

diametrically opposed view from that of the Established Church earlier, saying

‘it is the parents’ duty to encourage the attendance at Sabbath Schools’.

By 1876 there were in the Presbytery twenty-five Free Church Sabbath

Schools with 1406 scholars and 150 teachers. (The Free Church Presbytery

covered a large area extending from Newport and Tayport to Anstruther

and Elie).

One of the causes of complaint made against Mr. Henry in 1906 was that

‘there is only one Sunday School class of nine people and that is taught by

him and there is no Bible Class’.

With the decline of the Free Church generally there was a reduction in the

number of Free Church Sunday Schools and in the number of children

attending them, although even after 1917 when the Strathkinness United Free

Church joined with that in Ceres and services were held alternately in each

place, there was still a Sunday School in Strathkinness with several teachers

and a fair number of children attending it.

It is also of interest to note that when the Youngers came to Mount

Melville in 1901 Mrs. Younger, who was an Episcopalian, had children of some

of the estate workers taken into St. Andrews to attend the Episcopalian

Sunday School there, and later established an Episcopalian Sunday School in

the Youth House which she founded in Strathkinness in 1909.

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