António Augusto de Aguiar Industrial School

The painter Joaquim Leonardo da Rocha came to this island in 1807, seeking refuge from the horrors that mainland Portugal suffered during the first Napoleonic invasion. His stay here gave rise to the idea of creating a public class (aula) in drawing and painting. Early in 1809 a group of the most distinguished people of this city addressed a petition to the government in Lisbon, setting out the advantages and the necessity of such a class. The then governor and captain-general of the archipelago, Pedro Fagundes Bacelar, not only reported favourably on the petition but also used his best offices to have the proposed class, or school, of drawing and painting established in Funchal without delay.

The class was created by the royal letter (carta régia) of 7 July 1809. It opened in March 1810, and its direction was entrusted to the painter Joaquim Leonardo da Rocha. In the same year this teacher wrote a pamphlet entitled Medidas gerais do corpo humano arranjadas em dialogo, e metodo fácil para uso da real aula de desenho e pintura da ilha da Madeira em 1810, which was published in Lisbon in 1813. It is a small booklet of 14 pages, which our distinguished bibliographers Figanière and Inocêncio Francisco da Silva describe as extremely rare, but which seems to us to have little value from a strictly technical or scientific point of view. The library of the Industrial School holds a copy of this bibliographical rarity, donated by one of the establishment’s teachers.

Shortly after the drawing class opened, the central government sent, on 10 April 1810, a set of Instruções to regulate its operation. These no doubt constituted the class’s founding statute and must have contained the teaching methods or the syllabus of the subjects taught there. We have no knowledge of these Instruções, nor do we know where the class was held or how long it lasted. It may have formed part of the group of chairs that made up the so-called Aulas do Pátio (‘Courtyard Classes’, the public secondary classes held in the former Jesuit college), but we can state nothing definite on this point. We know only that in 1812 L. Rocha obtained an increase in salary as teacher of the drawing and painting class, and that in 1818 he was still alive and living in this city, for in that year he painted a portrait of the 1st Count of Carvalhal (‘oak grove’), which hangs in the Palácio de São Pedro (St Peter Palace).

Although the Funchal Lyceum (Liceu do Funchal), founded in 1837, had a chair of drawing in its curriculum, it was always considered necessary here to have a class in that subject separate from the lyceum (state secondary school). There, workers in particular could acquire the knowledge indispensable to their arts and trades, with teaching geared to the needs of the professions to which they were chiefly devoted. It was in keeping with this aim that the Funchal Municipal Council (Câmara Municipal do Funchal) created and maintained a chair of drawing. In the last years of its existence its teacher was the head of the Council’s technical department, José Maria Teixeira de Agrela.

The need for a drawing school in this city had long been recognised when, by decree of 10 January 1889, countersigned by Emídio Navarro – the minister to whom the country truly owes the creation and development of its industrial education – the Josefa de Óbidos Industrial Drawing School was established in Funchal. Its founding decree stated that its purpose would be ‘to provide instruction in drawing as applied to the industry or industries predominant in the locality’. This foundation had been made in accordance with the decrees of 30 December 1886 and 23 February 1888.

The school was first named after Josefa de Óbidos; under the decree of 8 October 1891, which reorganised industrial education, it took the name of António Augusto de Aguiar. Under this reform, the curriculum of our School comprised courses in elementary drawing (preparatory and advanced classes), architectural drawing (artistic drawing, modelling and technical drawing) and ornamental drawing (ornament drawing, modelling and ornamental composition).

The decree of 5 October 1893, which brought profound changes to industrial education, raised the António Augusto de Aguiar Industrial Drawing School to the rank of Industrial School, while keeping the same name. Workshops for cabinetmaking and carpentry and for women’s needlework were then created. The decree of 14 December 1897 thoroughly reorganised industrial education in our country, and the Funchal Industrial School (Escola Industrial do Funchal) benefited from this reform through the creation of three theory classes: Portuguese language, arithmetic and geometry, and principles of physics and chemistry. These posts, with the exception of the last, which was never actually created, were not filled, however, until early December 1901, and they began to operate in the 1902–1903 academic year.

The law of 1 December 1918 reformed the services of the industrial schools and altered the range of subjects taught in Funchal, which was then organised as follows: the mother tongue, arithmetic and geometry, principles of physics and chemistry and elements of terminology, geography and history, French, general drawing, specialised drawing and workshop practice. It was in September 1889, in a building on Rua de Santa Maria, that the new school was installed; 260 pupils enrolled, and classes began the following October. Its first teacher and director was Cândido Pereira, and the Austrian subject Hans Nowach was a contracted teacher. The former served until the end of the 1903 academic year and the latter until 1895. Nowach was temporarily replaced by the engineering officer Carlos Roma Machado de Faria e Maia, who served until July 1897. From the 1897–1898 academic year until March 1903 the Spanish subject Dom Manuel de la Cuadra, a native of the city of Seville, was a contracted teacher at this School; he died in Funchal on 3 April 1903, aged about 60.

The teachers of this School have been: Cândido Pereira (1889–1903), Hans Nowach (1889–1895), Dom Manuel de la Cuadra (1897–1903), Vitorino José dos Santos (1902), Father Fernando A. Silva (1902), Augusto Pascoal Correia Brandão (1903–1908), Joaquim Porfírio (1909–1910), João Gomes Correia Faria (1911–1912), José Pedro Nolasco (1914–1915), Emanuel Paulo Vitorino Ribeiro (1914–1917), Alfredo Vital Miguéis (1917), Dona Maria Emília Arroja (1919) and Abel Tiago de Sousa e Vasconcelos (1919). Carlos Roma Machado de Faria e Maia, João dos Reis Gomes, Henrique Franco de Sousa and, on several occasions, the workshop master Francisco Franco also served as temporary teachers.

The first director of this industrial school was Cândido Pereira, now a teacher at the Afonso Domingues School in Xabregas, who served from 1889 to 1903; from that year to the present the director has been the civil engineer Vitorino José dos Santos.

As already stated, the reform of 5 October 1893 created the cabinetmaking, carpentry and women’s needlework workshops, whose masters have been Manuel Rodrigues Gaspar, who died in 1900, Francisco Franco, Manuel Dias da Costa and Dona Augusta das Dores Ornelas. The law of 1 December 1918 created the workshop for inlaid work (embutidos) and inlays, which began operating in October 1919 and whose master is Manuel dos Passos Aguiar.

The Escola Industrial Antonio Augusto de Aguiar was converted into an industrial and commercial school by the decree of 11 September 1925, and its courses were organised as follows:

Industrial Section: cabinetmaker, inlayer, embroidery and dressmaking pattern designer, and cutting and embroidery, all of four years; and the Commercial Section: Elementary Commercial Course, also of four years. The decree of 20 October 1931 reorganised these courses, which then became the following: cabinetmaker, carpenter, inlayer, locksmith (later converted into locksmith-mechanic), dressmaking and embroidery, embroiderer, master builder, and supplementary commercial course. The subjects that make up each of these courses are distributed as follows:

Commercial course (four years)

Portuguese, French, English, commercial arithmetic and geometry, commercial geography, communications and transport, elements of commercial law and political economy, general principles of commerce, commercial bookkeeping and accounting, elements of physics and chemistry and of natural history, basic commodity technology, and practical classes in handwriting, typing and shorthand. Supplementary Qualification (one year): in addition to the commercial course, it comprises the subjects of algebra and physics and chemistry, and serves as the qualification for entry to the Commercial Institutes of Lisbon. Attendance at this school has risen considerably year by year, as this brief statistical note on the number of enrolments in the following academic years shows:

1925–1926	215
1930–1931	418
1935–1936	624
1940–1941	900

Besides the teachers Cândido Pereira, who died in Lisbon on 15 April 1935, and Vitorino José dos Santos, who died in Funchal on 1 October 1928, to whom this technical school owes its most outstanding services, its permanent directors have been the teachers Major João dos Reis Gomes, from 1929 to 1939, and Dr Álvaro de Meneses Alves Reis Gomes, since 1939.

In November 1938 the Industrial and Commercial School was installed in the spacious building on Rua das Hortas and Avenida Elias Garcia that had housed the Old People’s Home (Asilo dos Velhinhos), after major repairs carried out there by order of the General Council of the Autonomous District (Junta Geral do Distrito Autónomo), which is responsible for maintaining this secondary school.