I was not previously familiar with these people, some inspection shows that William Francis Garrod was an English official late in the Raj (https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2020/02/garrod-family-papers...) as well as a scab (https://blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2019/10/the-general-strike-1...).

I thought it was very innovative that my kids started "writing" in kindergarten using whatever phonetic spelling they could come up with. Interesting to see these children were doing the same thing long ago. Encouraging children to write this way must be more common than I thought, I don't recall doing it when I was a child.

My kid started bilingual school at grade 1. Because his native language is phonetically spelled, it took him a while to understand that English is not. Some spellings he could not shake; my favorite was "peapole" for "people" which persisted into second grade.

I was very annoyed to hear the English teacher (they recruited monoglot English teachers so they wouldn't take the easy path) say "English spelling is hard". The right answer is that "English spelling is only loosely phonetic".