Robert Goodbody Journal

She was a well-qualified minister. I well recollect the provincial school being set up perhaps in 1786, and Ann Shannon's soon after. Mary Ridgeway an eminently good woman and a powerful minister, had been travelling in England and being at Ackworth School admired it so much that soon after she came home, she introduced the great want of education among friends in low circumstances in the women's meeting at a Qy. Meeting, and offered to go into the men's quarterly meeting where she laid her concern with such weight that the meeting took it up and agreed to have a school established, this was the origin of the provincial school. I had this from good authority.

The first school that I went to, perhaps early in 1785 was to Sally Thompson who then had a large school of boys and girls near opposite to where Ann Strangeman lived. She was very good hand at teaching girls good needlework. She taught me my letters and I don't think I quit her school until I could read pretty well. I never was very apt at any other learning. I went for several years after to John Tayler, first in the old thatched woman's meeting house, which was rebuilt in 1787. Anthony Pim was then the tallest boy in the school and perhaps I the lowest. There was then several girls at the school one of which was very kind to me often giving me nice white bread, her name was Mary Shannon a handsome girl. She afterwards had three husbands, the latter and herself still living. I think she must be 80 years old, and probably she and I are the only persons of that large school now living. John Taylor was a great man for flogging and often whipped me for bad writing, which the terror that it put into me, often prevented me from improving in anything. The fact that I think I had a dull capacity, and

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