Bluestockings (16 page)

The scholarship examination took most of the week, and on the Friday night the results would be posted on Palace Green. On Friday, trembling with excitement and anxiety, two of us crept up Queen Street. ‘Yes,’ said the ‘Bulldog’ [university official], ‘the list is up.’ And he took us along to a passage by the lecture rooms. Our hearts in our mouths, we read the list. Both our names were there; we tore back to the hostel, nearly getting run over in the Market Place, and unpacked.
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Perhaps it was a good thing, in Bessie Callender’s case, that there was no time to ponder (or ask the family) whether or not to accept: if you passed at Durham, you were in, straight away. Elsewhere, playing one acceptance against another, or an offer of a place against the promise of a scholarship, could be tricky. Groups of Oxbridge women’s colleges held their entrance exams at different times of the year. It was therefore possible to keep trying every few months in the hope that someone, somewhere, would finally accept you. Barbara Wright understood from her academic parents during the 1930s that not only was she expected to go to university, but she must win a scholarship, too. Time was no object. So she happily settled down to a round of regular entrance exams during the year or two after leaving school, getting accepted each time, but with no award, until Newnham finally came up with the goods.
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Before the Universities’ Central Council on Admissions was developed in 1961, the number of universities to which you might apply was limited only by preference, the expense of entrance exams, and time. Some of them maintained waiting lists, so you might not know where you were going until the very day before term began. The uncertainty was hard to manage. Extracts from the crowded diary of Joan Morgan, living in Halifax during the edgy prelude to the Second World War, reveal how one ordinary adolescent girl coped with the pressure. Joan applied to King’s College in
London, Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool.

5 Jan. 1939. Went to King’s for interview by man & woman for about 5 minutes, and then saw Warden of Hostel – very nice and friendly – gave me application form. Only there about 20 mins. altogether.

18 Jan. Got 1.19 train to Leeds… At University from 2.0 to 6.0. Quite interesting but feet ached…

27 Jan. M.J. and A. Hutchinson [school friends] have to go to Manchester for interview, but [I] haven’t had letter. Shouldn’t be bothered really if didn’t go.

1 March. Waited for post in a.m. Not got in at King’s or Manchester – on waiting list at Leeds & Birmingham. Not heard from Liverpool at all… Everyone else in. Went to tell [the Headmistress] and started crying – silly fool – also in cloakroom – in form room & Biology lab – M. Dawson did as well, though… Letter from Liverpool a.m. ‘I regret to inform you…’ Just feel as if I don’t care now… hell.
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In fact, Joan had been offered a place at Liverpool: it was her grant application that was rejected. So her mother suggested writing to ask if she could still take up the place if the family paid for everything – which would involve considerable financial sacrifice. The answer was yes.

26 April. [Mother] says we may not go for holidays this year & I can’t say a word because lack of £.s.d. [funds] is because of me. Oh, damnation…
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Joan’s interview at King’s sounds like a depressing sort of speed-dating exercise. Surely they might have managed more than five minutes, even if they were certain they did not want her? After all, the trip down from Halifax was time-consuming and expensive. Poor girl, to have been dismissed so carelessly.
Research suggests that pre-war interviewers were not the most socially adept people in the world. Nervous candidates sat in dreary studies for long minutes waiting to be asked something – anything – by a tutor so shy herself that she could hardly bring herself to speak. Such occasions were excruciatingly embarrassing. Daphne Hanschell remembered being deeply discomfited by one of her tutors at Somerville: she was a modern linguist who solemnly insisted on dressing in the style of a northern French matelot, in a blue blouse and a beret with a red pom-pom.
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A female tutor elsewhere wore a cassock, and yet another was never seen in anything but shocking pink. The matelot had a pronounced squint, incidentally, which made it difficult to know whether she was looking at you or not. One university only passed candidates forward for interview (allegedly) if the admissions secretary liked their handwriting;
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an interviewer elsewhere would not accept anyone who did not ‘look clean’.
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If there were a prize for history’s most bewildering admissions interview, it would have to go to Elizabeth Smedley of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She was bidden to the study of Miss Rooke in 1928, after applying to read English:

My interview with Miss Rooke was… agonising. She sat in a dim light, by the fireside, making the shadows of different animals appear on the wall by manipulation of her hands. I was full of carefully prepared brilliant thoughts on Shakespeare etc. and was utterly taken aback on being urged to try and make a rabbit or an elephant appear beside hers.
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Elizabeth was accepted – and must have wondered what on earth she had let herself in for.

6. Freshers

How I ache to get home! And how I ache to stay here!
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Few young women began their university careers in quite as bemused a state as shadow-puppeteer Elizabeth Smedley. The majority of freshers, or first-year students, had a clear (though not necessarily accurate) idea of what academic life would be like, and their descriptions of it were coloured, gaudy or muted, by how far from the truth that idea turned out to be. They hurried home their first impressions in reams of news for parents and friends anxious to hear what was going on in this parallel, exclusive world.

It may not prove so easy to archive the emails and text messages dispatched by today’s undergraduates, or to connect the attenuated and intangible threads of modern communication. But during the sixty-year span of this book, each student’s weekly routine, unless she lived at home, inevitably included solid time put aside for letter-writing. Some documents were extravagantly florid, especially during the Edwardian period. On creamy notepaper complacently embossed with a college crest, adoring parents were addressed in a sophisticated hand as ‘Lambkin-boo’, ‘Dearest Daddie-wee’, ‘My own darling sweetie lovie’. Others had a childlike simplicity about them – ‘Dear Mamma and Dadda’ – and were scrawled blottily on pages torn from lecture notebooks.

Gwendolen Freeman’s letters home from Girton in the 1920s were in the latter category. She found them sixty years
after they were written, bundled at the back of a forgotten drawer, and at first failed to recognize the ‘thin Woolworth’s paper and round juvenile writing’ as her own. Gwendolen was fascinated, on re-reading her letters, to realize how immature she was on leaving home at eighteen. Her mother had packed her off to college as though it were a particularly spartan boarding school, with industrial supplies of woolly knickers and thick-seamed bodices. But someone else had given her a powder compact: essential, apparently, as glamorous undergraduettes were obliged to powder their noses several times a day. She had no idea how to use it. She understood that now her school days were behind her, she was expected to wear her hair up, but it was slippery and disobedient, despite being stapled all over with hairpins. Glamorous undergraduette she was not, and it was worrying.

Infected by the boarding-school idea, Gwendolen, who had rarely been away from home before, began to panic. How would she cope living in such an alien community?

I imagined a women’s college to have rows of suddy washbasins where we should wash in company, as in our school cloakroom. Perhaps the lavatories would be almost public. I was so worried about the hypothetical college lavatories… I was also certain that everybody at college would dislike me and that I should never find friends… I had always been a ‘swot’, and as potential university material, had always been a little apart. Now, I thought, that sense of being an outcast would return.
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Her fears were unfounded: she loved Girton from the very beginning. There were a few rather intimidating glamour-girls, but most of her peers were ordinary young women like her, a little afraid, but enthusiastic and not judgemental. Gwendolen settled in quickly.

It usually took freshers a little longer to get used to the newness of life at university, or – even more difficult to cope with – the familiarity. You could still spot slightly musty spinsters striding or mincing along cold linoleum corridors, just like teachers. Gloss-painted walls echoed the screeches and giggles of excitable girls doing their prep and having emotional crises. Community life continued to be governed uncompromisingly by rules, routine, and obligation. Students were even encouraged to join a local branch of the Girl Guides for healthy recreation, and to clamber into their knickers and gymslips for regular ‘drill’, which was supposed to tone the body alongside the intellect, and to divert energy away from those passionate ‘special friendships’ so characteristic of single-sex establishments. And there was so much work to be done. Where was the novelty, the exhilaration, in all this?

Disillusioned freshers failed to appreciate that universities were not there solely to provide them with novelty and exhilaration. They would find both for themselves in due course. Student opinion never counted for much before the 1960s, anyway. Parents were the important ones: if they were to continue supporting this enterprise, they needed reassurance that their daughters were safe at university, both morally and physically. Knowing the basic routines of college life to be much like those of school gave parents confidence in the system. Until the age of majority changed in 1970, anyone under the age of twenty-one was still legally a child, after all, and the university authorities had an obligation to act
in loco parentis
.

Social intercourse was considered the most perilous activity in which students were likely to engage while away from home. Therefore it was even more strictly controlled at university than at school. Calling cards punctuated companionship,
even as late as the 1920s. They were presented to your college Principal before consulting her, and exchanged between students who planned a social engagement. In the union building in Liverpool, which accommodated meetings of various men’s and (separate) women’s societies, an elaborate ritual was practised between 1913 and 1925, revolving around the stout figures of Mr and Mrs White, employed by the university as male and female chaperones-in-chief. Again, it was heralded by the traffic of calling cards. Then, ‘[i]f men and women wanted to meet, Mrs White sent a message to Mr White (or vice versa), and the meeting took place on the strip of carpet that protected the polished floor between the doors from the two sides [of the union building: the men’s and the women’s], the said doors remaining open during the interview.’
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No risk of any hanky-panky there.

Hanky-panky was a real concern, however. Innocence was the accepted prerequisite of purity, which is ironic given the necessary intellectual curiosity and independence common to so many bluestockings. Parents used to supervising their children’s lives worried that their daughters had only to be presented with the vaguest of opportunities, to plunge inexorably into the depths of degradation. Liberal supporters of university education for women pointed out what a boon it was for them to be living away from home, from the demands and strictures of domestic life, and to have time and space to themselves. But student malcontents found any freedom they enjoyed at college so heavily circumscribed that they might as well have been in the tower with Princess Ida.

Practically, polite society’s policy of not telling girls about anything to do with sex was cruel. It meant the ‘curse’ of menstruation came as an horrific shock, and while sanitary towels, or ‘bunnies’, were provided and disposed of at home
or at school by your mother, matron, or a maid, at college girls suddenly had to manage their periods themselves. For those too embarrassed to go to the chemist for anything personal at all – even deodorant – the prospect was mortifying.

Any contact with boys was fraught with apprehension. One undergraduate, who ‘had only just stopped having dinner in the nursery, rather than with her parents’, was convinced she had fallen pregnant after her cousin kissed her goodnight one evening.
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Few of her friends had the confidence to persuade her otherwise. Freshers at Durham were informed when they arrived that under no circumstances should they use each other’s Christian names in public. Even in private it was only to be done following a ‘proposal’, when a senior student would formally ask for the privilege (and being ‘propped’ by someone one admired was hugely thrilling). In public it was considered reckless: a
man
might overhear (as distinct from a gentleman), and who knew to what dark uses he might put his precious knowledge?

Despite the moral safeguards in place, and physical ones like the broken glass garnishing the tops of women’s college walls like aspic, if parents still fretted about their daughters’ vulnerability during their first few weeks at university, they were welcome, within reason, to come and visit. Mothers travelling alone lodged with the Principal or Warden. But they only stayed long enough to see their daughters comfortably settled in. There was work to be done, after all.

Comfort was a relative term, depending on where you were. Students could take a maid from home to help them settle in to their Oxbridge college, and were allowed to keep horses or pets (usually dogs, but occasionally the odd goldfinch or rodent of some sort). They were able to write in advance and ask their Principal the colour of the wallpaper
in their allotted room, so that matching accessories such as cushions and lampshades could be chosen before they arrived.