Bluestockings (15 page)

Young women… You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse? It is all very well for you to say, pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have had other work on our hands…
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Role models like Woolf (although she was not university-educated herself ) were undeniably influential in advancing the progress of ‘the undergraduette’, but none worked as hard for the cause as dedicated, ambitious teachers. As we saw in the previous chapter, some schoolmistresses were quite
irresistible, like Edith Wood’s in London, sternly hauling Edith’s reluctant father into her office and convincing him that, contrary to his own impression, he did want to pay for his daughter’s place at college – and so he did.

Florence Rich’s headmistress was determined her prize pupil should try for a university scholarship. Miserly Mr Rich refused to let her sit the exam, saying the journey and administration fees would be too expensive, and that even if Florence were successful, he was not prepared to waste the balance of funds required for life at college. Nothing daunted, the headmistress marched Florence off to Oxford, treated her to an opulent private suite at the Randolph Hotel and, when she duly won the scholarship, demanded of her truculent father that she be allowed to accept it. He capitulated.
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Some parents needed only gentle persuasion. There were ten sixth-formers at Kathleen Edwards’ single-sex grammar school in 1934, most of whom were traditionally destined for teacher-training colleges. But her headmistress had other plans for Kathleen, and suggested the possibility of university to Mr and Mrs Edwards. ‘Neither I nor my parents had considered this,’ remembers Kathleen, ‘but they liked the idea, and so did I, though I knew nothing about universities.’
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Kathleen lived in Walsall, about ten miles from the University of Birmingham; if she lived at home and took the bus to the campus each day, the family could just about afford this unexpected venture. The local authority came up with a scholarship to fill the gap, and off went Kathleen. She flourished.

Another Kathleen, Kathleen Byass from Driffield in east Yorkshire, would never have got anywhere near university had it not been for vigilant teachers throughout her school career. She was a farmer’s daughter, born in 1898, whose primary-school teacher insisted that instead of leaving with her friends at eleven she should be sent to the local grammar
school; her headmaster at the grammar had taught previously at a school near Oxford, and recognizing Kathleen’s potential, he suggested she try for Somerville. Kathleen had not heard of Somerville, and had no idea where Oxford was, having never been further away from home than a day trip up the road to York. After a bewildering interview she was invited to sit at High Table with Miss Penrose, the Principal, and was terror-stricken on being asked ‘and what are your feelings, Miss Byass, on the Turks’ reported treatment of Santa Sophia?’
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Still, she got her university place. So did Mariana Beer from a small village in Cornwall, the first in her family (and the only one of eleven siblings) to go to university. As soon as she heard she had been accepted to read English at Bristol in 1921, her proud headmistress declared a half-day holiday for the whole school.
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When Margaret Atkinson was offered her place at university, she had to decline. It was during the Depression, and without subsidy there was no chance of her parents affording it. She stayed on an extra year at school to try again for a scholarship and, on failing a second time, was assured by her teacher that she should not worry: funding had been found for her after all, and she could go. It was only years afterwards that Margaret discovered the ‘funding’ had quietly been paid by the teacher herself.
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Ideally, the path to academia would be smoothed by teachers and family working together, but occasionally pupils were propelled along against their will. ‘I didn’t want to go to university,’ remembers one disgruntled daughter from Liverpool. ‘I couldn’t be bothered, and I argued solidly with my father for a whole year… I told him it would be a waste of money.’
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Father won – and it was. Another girl rebelled after her doting papa sent her a postcard, when she was tiny,
of Girton College, on which he’d written ‘This is where you will be some day.’
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It was not a very convincing rebellion: she merely went to LMH (in 1912) instead. An academic who had recently relinquished a senior position at a women’s college once told me that she bitterly resented being sent to university as a girl in the 1930s. It straitened her life, imposing expectations she was too submissive at the time – and later too inexperienced – to resist. From matriculation to retirement, she lacked the confidence to leave. She had never really wanted to go in the first place.

Miss Amy Buller was the Warden of University Hall (the women’s hostel) at Liverpool during the 1930s. She maintained that there were only three types of parents: supportive ones, who allowed their daughters to make well-informed choices; domineering mothers who interfered; and fathers reliving their own ambitions through their daughters. The ones who had always coveted a university education themselves were the pushiest, like the man who sent his infant daughter the Girton postcard.

Stella Pigrome’s father had always given the impression he was an Oxford graduate himself; in fact she later discovered he had only ever been on vacation courses, and his insistence on her going to university there in 1934 was a matter of vicarious fulfilment for him, as well as fond ambition for his daughter.
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The three Fredericks sisters, Grace, Julie, and Daphne, were the only children of a Baghdadian Jew living in Shanghai. As an intelligent and ambitious anglophile, he bitterly resented never having been offered a chance to go to university himself. So the three girls were sent to school far away in England, staying with friends or paid guardians, and in due course Grace went to Oxford in 1926, and Julie and Daphne to Cambridge soon afterwards. ‘My father pretty
well ruined himself sending us to university,’ Grace realized. ‘And do you know? I never thanked him.’
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Attending university was compulsory in some academic families. Not that this necessarily made preparations straightforward. When your grandfather, two uncles on your father’s side, five on your mother’s, two aunts, and a brother and sister had all been to Oxford (as in the case of one of my correspondents), the weight of expectation could be hard to bear. Especially if, like this particular young woman, you were not even sure you wanted to go to university at all.
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Dressmaking and cooking were her favourite subjects, with art and music, and when LMH turned her down in 1934, it was hardly a shock. The Society of Home Students refused her too. But the following year, Oxford University was told to build up the proportion of women to men students to an extravagant 1:6. It also formulated a new social sciences course. Trawling its list of recent rejects, the Society of Home Students noticed this young lady, and offered her a place. It would have taken considerable courage not to accept.

Within fifty years of Girton College opening at Hitchin in 1869 with five students, universities all over England were turning scores of perfectly well-qualified young women away, despite the increase in places available. And so alluring was the image of the undergraduette by now that plenty of unqualified young women were applying, too. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool took an astonishingly personal interest in candidates for courses there; in 1918, a mother wrote to him to request advice on how her daughter should apply. After checking the girl’s school record, he sent the following answer:

She is almost at the bottom of the form, and her work in every subject – including those that, as a rule, are taught well in the elementary schools – is weak. I looked through the term’s marks in each subject, and found that she did not reach 40% in any one of them.

It is clear, therefore, that there is not even the remotest possibility of her passing a qualifying examination this summer.

Have you thought of physical training as a possible career? I believe that the qualifying conditions on the scholastic side are less rigorous than in most other cases…
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For young ladies (like this one) patently unfit for academia, there was always the university of life, a virtual establishment celebrated in a long, oleaginous, and anonymous poem, ‘Our B.A.’, in 1893.
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The gist of it is that the most radiant of all girl-graduates must be she who passes the test of Christian piety. Academia’s pinchbeck lustre is worth nothing compared with the sterling qualities of humility, obedience, patience, and forbearance learned in dutiful everyday life. Those whose honours are conferred at the Pearly Gates are more fortunate than any earthly high-achiever.

Meanwhile, for those with the brains and the backing to try for the real thing, there was serious work to be done. The orthodox route to university admission was via school. Teachers identified likely candidates, coached them carefully, crammed them and drilled them if necessary, made inquiries about scholarships and grants, and arranged the entrance exams and interviews. Their support was invaluable – although not always obvious to the candidates in question. Daphne Hanschell was told nothing at all about university by the nuns at her convent until the morning of her entrance exams for Oxford in 1929, when she was given a poached egg for breakfast instead of porridge, and cheerily told not to fret over what lay ahead: ‘the Holy Ghost will fix it’.
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And that’s what happened.

Leeds and Sheffield universities had a reputation for industrial or commercial subjects. You got degrees ‘in making jam,
at Liverpool and Birmingham’.
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London and Manchester were good for the physical sciences and medicine. Those weak at maths tried for Oxford rather than Cambridge. Each applicant was advised to use any influence available from family or friends. Diana Murray blithely arrived at Sheffield in 1933 to read chemistry, physiology, and physics; not only was this her first visit to the university, but she had never had a physics or physiology lesson in her life. None of this mattered, since she was recommended to the university registrar by a friend of her father’s, who happened to be Professor of Surgery at the university. Diana was welcomed in.
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Contacts were particularly useful if you were an overseas student, as in the case of Martha Kempner. She was born in Berlin, and went to school there until leaving ‘because of Hitler’ in 1938. Martha was obviously academic, and anxious to continue her education. Her father (still in Berlin) was acquainted with Oxford’s Member of Parliament at the time, Sir Arthur Salter, who offered to write to the city’s women’s colleges on Martha’s behalf and ask if they might consider her as a student. Three of them replied that they would welcome her application, but not until the following year. Grace Hadow, Principal of the Society of Home Students (later St Anne’s), was about to reply in a similar vein when her secretary recognized Martha’s name. The secretary’s daughter had once spent time with the Kempners in Berlin as an au pair, and been very happy. So Miss Hadow changed her mind. She invited Martha to an interview, then organized for the girl to sit entrance papers in the room she was renting in London. Her puzzled landlady was persuaded to supervise the exam, the papers were posted back to the college, and Martha was immediately accepted.
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Entrance exams – even official ones – were often rather haphazard. During the 1880s, some of the London ones
were held at the Natural History Museum, where the candidates crouched at their desks like prey among the looming dinosaurs. Katie Dixon remembered delicious peach tarts being provided at half time in Birmingham in 1879, and when her contemporary Mary Paley wept with horror at the questions on conic sections in her Cambridge maths paper, the invigilator – Miss Clough herself – was quick to scuttle down the aisle and dab her cheeks.
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Bessie Callender, the farmer’s daughter forced to forgo a scholarship to Girton, refused to abandon the idea of university altogether, and eventually persuaded her father and grandparents to let her try for the local one, at Durham.

In those days Durham held its open scholarship examinations in October during the week before term, so you came up early, sat for the exam., and if successful stayed on. In the autumn of 1899 therefore I arrived with almost all my worldly goods in a massive brown trunk with a rounded top. I dared not unpack, for fear I should not remain.
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Bessie was not expecting there to be many other students in the hostel when she arrived for the exam: university education for women was still in its infancy, and at Durham had only been on offer for the last four years. Perhaps there would be forty or fifty girls, she imagined, and they would live in a large dignified house somewhere in the city. In reality, Bessie was driven straight through Durham to the slums of Claypath beyond, and deposited at a highly unprepossessing house, which was ‘pleasant enough’ when you got inside, but with room for only a handful of inmates.