Then it was announced that £400 had been contributed by members of the Board in order to form a scholarship to perpetuate the memory of his chairmanship, and £1000 were added by the Duke of Bedford “in order to mark his sense of the services of Lord Lawrence and of the Board over which his Lordship had presided.” The permanent officers of the Board caused a portrait of him to be painted, which now hangs in the large hall of the Board-meetings right over the Chair which is occupied by his successors. A banquet was given in his honour by his colleagues, at which a tribute to his labours in the Board was paid by Mr. W. E. Forster, then a member of the Government, as vice-president of the Council.
It may be well to cite some brief passages to show the estimation in which he was held by the Board. When the vote of thanks on his retirement was proposed, Mr. Samuel Morley, speaking as “an acknowledged Nonconformist,” said that gentlemen of the most opposite opinions had been able to work together harmoniously, and this result he attributed in a large measure to the character of the Chairman. Mr. W. H. Smith said “the way in which Lord Lawrence came forward had greatly tended to rouse the minds of the people to the absolute duty of providing for the education of the destitute children, not only of London, but of England.” Another member said “his friends out of doors, the working classes, would find fault with him if he did not on their behalf tender their thanks to Lord Lawrence.”
From his reply one significant sentence may be quoted as showing that his Board had been friendly to the Voluntary system of education in the metropolis. “We have in no way trodden upon those who have gone before us, or done anything to injure them, but on the contrary our sympathies and feelings have been in the main with those who have preceded us, and all we desired to do was to supplement the good work which they had begun.”
Lastly, at the banquet Mr. Forster said that “the greatest compliment he could pay to the Board would be to say that the work of the last three years will not be the least interesting part of the history of Lord Lawrence, and will bear comparison with many another passage in that history.”