TACHELLA AND THE DERBY SCHOOL REGISTER
The Derby School Register (1570-1901) Bemrose & Sons, 1902 ,was the work of Benjamin Tachella, an assistant master at the School, who taught Art and Modern Languages from 1887 to his death on 21st January 1914. He was 59 at the time of his unexpected demise, and was born at Glay on the Swiss French border, of Italian parentage. The story goes that he lived in Paris and being a capable swordsman, killed someone in a duel and fled to England seeking sanctuary. He had besides, a somewhat exotic curriculum vitae, with honours in French and German Literature from Dublin University; Diplome Superiore in French Language and Literature from Caen University and was even appointed a lecturer at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
His residences in the town of Derby were in fashionable Hartington Street and finally Friargate, where his wife and family of four, plus a servant, enjoyed a residence of eleven rooms. Either his wealth was inherited or supplemented by tutoring outside his duties as a schoolmaster. He became a naturalised British subject in 1899.
However, it was Tachella’s passion to establish a history of Derby School dating back to 1160 when Darley Abbey was founded with a school attached thereto, that really drove the rest of his career.
In several articles published in the school magazine The Derbeian during the 1890s he advanced his arguments in favour of this remote longevity, which would have established Derby School as one of the oldest in the kingdom. He purchased various pictures and documents hoping to underpin his claims and to illustrate the evolution of the Abbey school from the Middle Ages to an obscure backwater grammar school of the Elizabethan period, from which it then emerged to become the regionally significant public school at which he taught.
Unfortunately, most of his research prior to 1554 – when a charter of Queen Mary enabled the burgesses of Derby to endow a grammar school, (soon after to be located in St. Peter’s churchyard) – can be discounted as wishful thinking and wholly unprovable. A C Leach in the 1907 Victoria County History of Derbyshire began the process of unpicking Tachella’s assertions, and in recent years, the late Joan D’Arcy of the Derbyshire Archaeological Society and a teacher of History at Derby School in the 1980s, in her unpublished outline for a school history, approvingly quotes a scholarly article by Richard Clarke in the Derbyshire Miscellany (Spring 1998) which effectively demolished Tachella’s claims for an unbroken history dating back to 1160. Though Tachella did indeed discover several references to a “Derby School” – or a school at Derby – in the Mediaeval records, he rather fancifully linked them all together in a supposed continuity of existence. One cannot fault his enthusiasm or affectionate loyalty to the school he had adopted and came to revere, but his critical abilities as an historian were unfortunately limited.
Although The Register itself is fairly accurate for the 18th and 19th centuries, the lists of Heads, Masters and Pupils – the sources he used - have almost all since disappeared. There are no registers now extant prior to that of John Hudson, Headmaster from 1843 to 1853.Yet for all its shortcomings, The Register is a useful tool for identifying details of the leading families of Victorian Derby and this is perhaps the real merit of Tachella’s work.
One copy of the Register owned by Frederick S Ogden, (1887-1980) a pupil from 1900 to 1909 who knew Tachella and who later became Secretary of the Old Derbeian Society (1919 to 1950) was “grangerised” by its owner by adding the obituaries of his contemporaries in his own handwriting or by inserting press cuttings, in order to keep the purpose of the Register alive. This particular volume is now in the Society’s archives.
After Tachella’s death, the School organised a memorial fund in May 1914 to raise money to purchase “the very valuable and varied collection of prints, books, pictures etc, connected with Derby School which Mr. Tachella had spent so much time and money in bringing together.” Of this, sadly very little survived the closing of the School in 1989.
Benjamin Tachella is of course, memorialised by The Register itself and by various small Supplements published subsequently, and by his lavish obituary in The Derbeian, which salutes him as “The Historian of Derby School” together with a poem:
“No stranger he, although not English born;
In our affections always high he stood;
No truer comrade Derby School shall mourn,
No worker e’re more zealous for her good.”
Following a service in the chapel, where a stone tablet was later inscribed in his memory, he was laid to rest in Nottingham Road cemetery, where a large headstone marks his final resting place.
