Jules Leman

Father Jules Leman C. S. Sp. (30 June 1826 – 3 June 1880) was a French Roman Catholic priest and schoolmaster who was the founding head of Blackrock College in Ireland.

In the 1870s, Leman successfully promoted the use of a system of funding schools in Ireland which had originated in the West Indies.

Early life Leman was brought up in Deûlémont, near the Belgian border in the French Nord department, where his father kept a boarding school for young boys. After spending his early years there, he was educated at a lycée in Cambrai. He was ordained as a priest in 1851.

Career The leader of the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Francis Libermann, appointed Leman as senior scholasticate of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, in which he served as schoolmaster and as sub-director. In 1858, he was appointed as Director of a new training centre for Brothers at Langonnet in Brittany.

The Congregation was offered an empty Carmelite convent in Blanchardstown, and Leman and his companions travelled there, arriving on 28 October 1859. They found that the Irish were still recovering from the Great Famine of the late 1840s and fearing another, so had little or no interest in doing anything for African natives. He also found the standard of education in Ireland lower than he had foreseen, so was persuaded that his students must be trained from an early age and that he should establish a school for boys.

In the 1870s, Leman advocated an educational system for Ireland similar to that then in use in Trinidad. Schools should have internal autonomy and receive public funding based on their results in a shared public examination system. He lobbied the House of Commons for this, and Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Chief Secretary for Ireland, accepted the proposal. Patrick Keenan, Commissioner for National Education, had designed the Trinidad scheme and contacted Leman and his colleague Father Reffé. Keenan planned a new scheme on the Trinidad lines for Ireland, adding some financial prizes for pupils who achieved outstanding results. Parliament accepted the Keenan Scheme in 1878. The new system brought the liberal French curriculum at Blackrock to an end and gave it a narrower programme of studies designed by Keenan.

A shy man, Leman was loved by his boys and widely seen almost as a saint. He died suddenly in 1880, aged 53, and his death was seen as a national disaster.