Bluestockings (19 page)

Being
there was enterprising enough. As for interest: there was plenty on offer in academic challenge, sports, social activities, relationships, and all the triumphs and disasters of a young university career. This chapter, however, is not about adventure, but shared experience: the mechanics of a bluestocking’s world.

If the bell did not wake you in the mornings, the maid would. Most domestic staff are mentioned only in passing in chronicles of university life. They were not supposed to do any personal service for students; they merely cleaned rooms, and provided coal and jugs of hot water. But it was not unusual for maids to run their allotted ‘young ladies’ a bath in the mornings, or bring them the odd glass of milk or cup of
cocoa. In return, favourites were invited to tea, or asked to dances organized by student associations. Maids’ children were sent presents at Christmas, and collections were taken for anyone known to be in distress. At the residential University Hall in Liverpool there was a popular character called Mary, who ‘had a sailor brother and a parrot to whom she was not at all severe’;
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another Liverpudlian, Margaret the parlourmaid, had literary aspirations. She used to borrow books from the library and, on opening a student’s bedroom curtains one foggy morning, famously commented that the weather appeared ‘very detrimental to vehicular traffic’.
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In any establishment, the cook was a figure of great significance. Certain colleges built up a reputation (then as now) for irresistible menus. St Hilda’s in Oxford was one of them, particularly during the 1930s. After years of school fish-pie and cabbage, the students there were thrilled to find fresh asparagus on the menu, and trifle studded with crystallized violets. At St Hugh’s, a typical autumn day’s meals were detailed by Ina Brooksbank in a letter home in 1917. Oxford water was ‘not fit to drink unless boiled’, she warned, but considering this was wartime, the food was remarkably good. For breakfast there was porridge and boiled ham; sometimes sausage too, or fish-cakes, scrambled eggs on toast, fried eggs or fish; on Sundays, kidneys ‘with lovely thick gravy’. Bread, toast, butter, jam, and marmalade were always on offer. Lunches included a slice of joint or pie, fish, hash, or occasionally liver. ‘Seconds’ followed, of sago, rice or maize pudding, jam suet or pastry, or stewed fruit, and a cup of tea. More tea at four o’clock, with a slice of bread and margarine. Dinner was a three-course meal of ‘soups of various kinds from white to black’; a choice of two main dishes – perhaps stuffed tomatoes or fishcakes, vegetable hash, curried rice, or pork and beans, with two vegetables and potatoes; a dessert of fruit tart, pineapple slices, banana trifle, or
fresh apples and pears. Later on, in students’ rooms, there would be the inevitable communal cocoa, with any cakes or biscuits to be found.

Bad manners spoil good food, as everyone brought up properly will know. And not everyone who was at university
was
brought up properly, according to an anonymous diarist at the University of London. Writing in 1899, she confessed herself appalled by the chaos after breakfast was announced: ‘I felt almost embarrassed when I saw people finishing their toilette down the corridor, but neither they nor the student who went flapping down the corridor in sloppy bedroom slippers and a dressing gown seemed to think they were doing anything unusual.’ At lunch, people strolled from table to table with plate in hand, ‘searching for better puddings’, and ‘[d]inner was a hideous meal, its only redeeming feature was its astonishing brevity! The conversation of the old students amazed me.’
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So dining-hall etiquette was not all evening gowns and Latin graces. At Bedford College, lack of space meant some bluestockings were forced to eat standing up, balancing their plates on the mantelpiece, and everywhere the noise was overwhelming.

Attendance at dinner was one of the ‘rules of residence’ at university: like signing the morning register, sleeping in your own bed, and going to chapel. Only a few exemptions were allowed each term; miss any more, and you were liable for a fine, or suspension. So there was no escaping college food, good or bad. Nor could you avoid regular assemblages of the college population. You could, however, choose with whom (as long as she was female) you enjoyed toasted teacakes on a winter’s afternoon, a picnic lunch by the river, or a treat at the end of a hard-working day, like this student during the 1930s:

One thing I remember with particular pleasure was when we finished [studying]… we used to go down to the Martyrs’ Memorial to buy hot meat pies from a caravan there. It wasn’t there during the day, just in the evening. Two or three of us would go together. It seemed quite an adventure in the dark, and we had to get back by 10.30.
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A descendant of that meat pie van exists in Oxford still.

A student at St Hilda’s in the 1930s considered one of the great pleasures of university life to be the opportunity to drink coffee and smoke black cigarettes with ‘odd fish’. By odd fish she did not necessarily mean eccentrics, but women who were different. Living in a crucible – which every resident student did to some extent – meant more than self-discovery: it meant reinvention. To many young women, especially those frustrated by the parochialism of family and school life, this was the strongest attraction of all. The trick was to avoid regression into domestic anonymity, or intellectual compromise, when the adventure was over. Sarah Beswick’s father was a Derbyshire mill-worker. She was a provincial ingénue when she arrived at Manchester University in 1927 (encouraged not by her parents but by a determined English teacher). The very first meal she sat down to in the refectory opened her eyes. She was alone, until a black undergraduate asked if he could come and join her. She generously – or naively – invited him to sit down, and by the time she finished her meal ‘was completely surrounded by a sea of black faces’. According to her daughter, ‘despite having previously never seen a black face in her Derbyshire life’, Sarah welcomed the company.
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It was a critical point in her life. University turned villagers into citizens of the world, passivity into proactivity, and predictable little girls into strong, surprising women.

Maybe that is what parents were really afraid of. Leaving home has always been a strange journey. The trouble is that women, before the liberating effects of the Second World War, were apt to be marooned on an unfamiliar shore afterwards. Society was not yet ready for female graduates, unless they taught, went into social or clerical work, or married and ignored their degrees altogether. Like pioneer homesteaders in far-flung corners of empire, these early bluestockings husbanded the fruits of their labours for the benefit of future generations. They endowed their daughters and grand-daughters with what they had been denied themselves: an expectation of educational achievement and confidence of success.

Odd fish had their attractions, but nothing meant so much to these university pioneers, nor lasted so long, as friendship. A few episodes of bitchiness emerge in diaries and letters: inevitable, some would say, in any female community. A young lady called Maud gleefully broke the news of her engagement in 1897, and although no doubt roundly congratulated to her face, was derided in private. ‘I must say one would never have expected it of her, of all people; she is such a lump.’
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There was trouble at a drama club when too many prima donnas turned up to rehearsals: ‘About 12.30 I was informed by Miss Burstall that there would be no theatricals as Miss Armistead refused to act with Miss Easterfield who could not be made to look like Galatea.’
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More trouble at the Debating Society when the earnest (po-faced?) secretary resigned, prophesying doom due to the unpalatable facts that the habits of the committee members were unbusinesslike, many of the professors disapproved of their ‘doings’, and they bickered too much.
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An American at Somerville in the 1880s grew exasperated with her sister students: they were too giggly, obviously
suppressed, lacked ‘gush’ (a commodity she perceived to be desirable), and considered calling each other donkeys to be the apogee of wit. ‘You can’t imagine how jolly it seemed to get out of Somerville cloisters for a whole evening and away from all “women’s sphere of action”.’
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These irritations aside, it is obvious that an esprit de corps pervaded college life. University was appreciated to be a communal experience, as well as a period of personal development, and the majority enjoyed it as such. When Beryl Worthing visited Belgium in the course of her studies at Queen Mary College, she was introduced to the Dowager Queen Elisabeth. Next day, Her Highness sent a lady-in-waiting to invite Beryl to tea at the palace. Beryl was astonished when both women confessed to feeling envious of the English girl, and her freedom to work as she wished. The queen would have loved to pursue a career as a concert violinist, and her attendant always wanted to be a professional artist. ‘But our destinies did not allow.’
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A student at Reading just before the First World War loved the ‘zest and comradeship’ she found among the women there; at Leeds there were all sorts of rituals to make students feel they belonged:

One ceremony which seems to have long disappeared was the custom at the end of any social function for everyone present to climb on to the nearest chair or bench and yell as loudly as possible ‘Kumati, Kumati, Kaora, Kaora, Hagi, Hagi, Hai!’ – a Maori war-cry, I believe, adopted as a slogan by the Leeds students.
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Each cohort used its own slang, ebbing and flowing through written records across the country. Letters can be dated by the incidence of certain words. If a tiresome male undergraduate is described as a ‘grim tick’ instead of ‘ripping’, or ‘topping’,
it’s the early 1920s. ‘Lekkers’, ‘brekkers’, and (heaven help us) ‘wagger-pagger baggers’ belong to the previous decade.
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‘Regimentals’ are 1870s underclothes; ‘trollies’ are 1930s knickers; and you ‘throw’ a coffee, instead of drinking it, or ‘fling’ a library, instead of visiting it, in (precisely) 1923.

Groups of friends banded together to play practical jokes on one another (a sure sign of fellow-feeling). ‘Some of us had this need to laugh and be very silly,’ remembered an undergraduette in the 1920s. ‘It was part of the emancipation from the responsibilities of being prefects at school and older daughters at home.’
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Her speciality – not very original – was to go down the streets around college ringing people’s doorbells, then run away.

Katie Dixon was less enthusiastic about japes. One of her friends was addicted to them, relentlessly filching things from Katie’s room and hiding them, or tying her door-handle to the banisters during the night. It was exhausting. Pranksters tended to acquire a reputation, if they went too far, of fecklessness. Once she was stereotyped, it was difficult for any student to emerge again as an individual, and stereotyping was rampant in college society. Between the wars, as well as the generic division (in all its variations) between dumb blonde in high heels and brainy brunette in glasses, every college had its distinct sets. The country set kept terriers, went riding before breakfast on their own horses, frequently got drunk, and had rowdy boyfriends. The religious set were apt to burst into your bedroom, fall to their knees, and pray for your conversion. This was ‘embarrassing at best, and highly trying if one were busy’.
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The sporting set honked at one another and forgot to close their knees when they sat down. Medics smelt faintly acidic and spoke of nothing but dissections and post-mortems. Aesthetes (and ‘aesthete-spotting’ was a recognized pastime in Oxford in
the 1880s) wore weird clothes and looked impossibly aloof. They were also dangerously attractive, male and female, the mere sight of one liable to leave a girl ‘smashed’, or quite besotted. Gwendolen Freeman remembered a particularly charismatic one at Girton, who painted her walls brilliant orange, stained the floor dark brown, and filled her rooms with ‘heaps of valuable things’.
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She had been born in America, this paragon, and travelled widely; she was gorgeous. Miserable Doris (another Girtonian), on the other hand, used to sit all day by the fire, swathed in an unlovely dressing gown, and sniff noisily. She had never experienced an English winter before. Her hot-water bottle leaked. She hated the food. She hated Girton.

The impression left by their writing and reminiscences suggests that, despite a tendency to caricature, most bluestockings not only tolerated one another, but delighted in the company of new-found friends. Domestic intimacies drew them together – such as sewing bees, when everyone would bring their mending to a common room and work on it to music; or hat-trimming and dress-refurbishment sessions, when ribbons, birds’ wings, silken posies were chosen and attached to various garments. It was hard not to be friendly to someone you asked to fasten the blouse buttons down your back, or help you with your hairpins, because you had no maid, mother, or sister present, as you did at home.

Look at any group photograph of women university students, and although not one of them looks younger than about thirty, it will immediately be apparent that fashion played a significant part in their lives. It is as easy to date different cohorts by their dress as it is by their language. A Somervillian declared herself ‘sick of big puffed sleeves and
puckered waists’ in the early 1880s – everyone was wearing them. In the 1890s, sleeves subsided a little, the plumpness migrating to high-necked bosoms. The fashion of the early 1900s was to wear ‘brush braiding’ around the hem of a skirt, to save the fabric from fraying; this (disquietingly) infuriated a male undergraduate at Leeds, who wrote a spiteful little poem about it in the university magazine: