Bluestockings (22 page)

Luckily, it wasn’t long before the Bach Choir turned up for its rehearsal, held in the booming acoustics of the museum’s Gothic hall, and Cynthia was set free. She was never tempted to work so late again.
¹³

As well as being frightening on occasion, work could be
downright dangerous, especially for inexperienced scientists. Rachel Footman, conducting a chemical experiment in a laboratory in 1924, was almost killed:

[A]s the sulphate was dissolved in ether I had to evaporate the solution over a water bath. I was getting on quite well but rather slowly and I wanted to go to a special tennis practice with the men’s University Team, so to hurry things up I lit the Bunsen burner under the water bath… Whoosh!… the whole apparatus went up in flames and me with it. I shall never forget the strange sensation of being entirely on fire, my hair, my overall, a ring of fire.

Rachel lost consciousness, and when she came round in hospital, confidently assumed she had died, ‘seeing all white ceiling and walls and hearing hymns being sung’. In fact a church service was going on in the ward, and the nurses had arranged white screens around her for privacy. She was in agony, and suffered hideous burns to her face, but with care and time, the scars wore off.
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More mundane distractions involved difficult tutors. One ‘used to put newspaper down to save his carpets and in the middle of talking about the woollen industry he’d suddenly leap across the room to shift the newspaper because the sun had moved’. Another would reach for the phone, in the middle of an essay reading, and order ‘four plump herrings and 3 fishcakes’ for tea.
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There could be other interruptions too:

During one tutorial… our tutor, Mlle. Hugon, excused herself because she said she had to change her dress. She had a ‘date’ she said with an African tribal chief. [We] were surprised and not a little amused that she had changed into another dress identical to the one she always wore. Then she went out and, in stately fashion, rode off on her bicycle!
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Not everyone knew
how
to work at university level. Telling a fresher in 1910 to conduct a physics demonstration, without explaining some fundamental basics, was unkind: ‘Dolly had great difficulty… rushing around the lab apparently trying to move faster than gravity – and it nearly led to her giving up – but happily not quite.’
¹⁷
Daphne Hanschell, who went straight to Somerville in 1929 from a small convent school, recalls being utterly nonplussed when her tutor issued her with an essay title (‘The Primitive Sense of Law’), expecting not to see Daphne again until it was written. What did it mean, and where should she start? Barbara Hutton felt similarly at sea ten years later: ‘I found my academic life rather disappointing. Only after most of my time was up did I discover how to search for original historical material, and reading other people’s views was frankly dull. I never dared say anything about this to my tutors, my fault not theirs.’
¹⁸
Not
her fault, nor Dolly’s or Daphne’s: part of a university tutor’s job is, and was then, to equip his or her students for original thought. Poor teaching was a significant factor for those bluestockings who found work difficult, frustrating, or boring.

Perhaps the tutors themselves lacked instruction. They tended to be selected for intellectual prowess rather than communication skills, and are frequently described as shy, aloof, distant, even cold. For much of the period before the Second World War they were required to be unmarried women, or childless widows; they were poorly paid; at Oxford and Cambridge they were not even official members of the university until the 1920s at the earliest. Many swapped straight from student to tutor (like superior sort of pupil-teachers) and so never left academia at all. From their mid-fifties onwards they were either encouraged or obliged to make way for their successors. Little wonder, then, that
some, especially in the ancient universities, felt socially ill-equipped, academically sidelined, and trapped.

Their appearance could be disturbingly eccentric. Undergraduates report being confused by female teaching staff dressed precisely as men from the waist up (as was the fashion at the end of the nineteenth century), with short-cropped hair and a gruff voice to match. Some neglected their appearance altogether. The first Principal of St Hugh’s, Miss Moberley, lacked ‘any conception of either comfort or beauty. She was always dressed in a great many thick black clothes and always wore a black silk apron that seemed a vestigial appendage of episcopacy.’
¹⁹
Miss Rogers, of the same college, was terrifying, according to former students. She was thickset and looked strangely menacing in her soiled clothes, bulky woollen stockings, and heavy boots. She wore the same outfit every day. She was also considered rather mean. When she invited students to tea in the 1920s, she was notoriously stingy with the food. It thus became a tradition that if you were asked to Miss Rogers’ rooms, you ate beforehand. ‘She became wise to this, so when it was time to cut the cake, of which there was always one, she would say “I’m not going to cut the cake, as I suppose you had your tea before you came!”’
²⁰

One tutor conducted interviews with her students entirely in Latin. One murmured into the fireplace. One made and served tea, forgetting to include the tea leaves. One boiled marmalade on her fire during tutorials. One laughed uproariously at her students’ (very solemn) essays; another remained silent for the whole session. One cheerily warned everyone that ‘my mind is going, you know’ before the tutorial began, while another took students on her lap, ‘which, as I was rather tall, and she was rather bony, was embarrassing’.
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Others were exciting and affectionate, of course, and
remained loyal to their students all their lives. Certain names recur in reminiscences with great fondness, and it is clear that inspirational tutors changed lives. The colonial historian Margery Perham, ‘reputed to have shot a lion and published a novel’, was ‘young, energetic, full of vitality and enthusiasm for emergent Africa, none of which qualities impaired her scholarly integrity’.
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One of the most popular tutors was Miss Ady of St Hugh’s in Oxford. She was even approachable enough for student Molly McNeill to risk inviting her to tea one autumn afternoon in 1916 – although not without considerable trepidation:

About 2.30 I started my preparations feeling all the time as if I’d never be ready. I got the fire lit first of all, then I changed my dress, I put on the red tartan and it looked lovely. I thought I should try to appear as decent as possible for Miss Ady. After that I started getting the food ready, buttered the scones and laid the table. Then I tidied up my room, put my suitcase under the bed, it usually stays out for convenience sake, dusted my chest of drawers and altogether got the room to look very nice. I was all ready, kettle boiling and everything, by about 25 minutes to 4, and Miss Ady arrived quite punctually at a quarter to. As soon as she came I infused the tea and in a few minutes we started. She thoroughly enjoyed her tea. She had one scone, one bit of seed cake, 2 penny cakes, and a piece of my birthday cake, which was excellent, and three cups of tea. It was most delightful to see that she appreciated it. Everything did look quite nice and appetising. We also got on magnificently in the way of conversation. I was rather dreading that… She really is a perfect angel, and the cleverness of her is wonderful.
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Molly was pleased as Punch the next day when her essay for Miss Ady was declared ‘almost alright’.

Intense friendships between female students at university
were common, and we shall come across several instances, healthy and otherwise, later in this book. Similar friendships between those students and their tutors, male or female, were not encouraged. This did not stop young women ‘falling in love’ with soulful-looking lecturers like Mr Moulton at Cambridge, who taught maths during the early 1870s. Emily Gibson, one of the first Girtonians, remembered her friend Sarah and herself being thoroughly distracted by Mr Moulton’s ‘dangerous fascination’; she even goes so far as to attribute her early departure from Cambridge, in part, to him (although there is no suggestion anything actually ‘happened’).
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Nor did discouragement prevent certain senior staff taking advantage, cynically or not, of star-struck and often vulnerable undergraduettes. Women’s diaries and reminiscences of the first seventy years of university education commonly talk of ‘pashes’, ‘smashes’, and crushes on male and female tutors, and several make coy mention of having married a member of the academic staff soon after leaving. I have never come across a first-hand account of the developing sexual relationship, while
in statu pupillari
, of an undergraduate and her tutor before 1939 – which should not imply it never happened; just that it was rarely articulated on paper. No one speaks about sexual harassment; perhaps it was unworthy of note in an era of chauvinism and cultivated naivety. Yet one women’s college Principal, when students went to her with worries or problems, used to take them to her bed, for ‘comfort’.
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And it is difficult to believe that there was not considerable stirring in the fusty loins of old-school academics once ‘the ladies’ arrived in their lecture halls. As far as I know, and possibly thanks to those ubiquitous chaperones, they kept continent. After all, if Philip Larkin is to be believed, sexual intercourse only began in 1963. But the inevitable frisson between certain relatively impressionable
girls and their senior (temporary) guardians, of either sex, must have added something to the university experience of both.
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Parents were certainly aware of the impact a traditionally virile college education might have on ingenuous daughters. Their concerns, and those of the academic authorities, meant that pioneer bluestockings were rarely taught biology, let alone medicine, and Classics courses strenuously avoided mentioning
Oedipus Rex
. English literature had its risky moments: a letter in the Liverpool University archives from a Reverend Procter, dated 1927, complains to the Vice-Chancellor (no less) that his daughter has been asked to study Byron’s
Don Juan
for her English course. He strongly objects, and asks whether she will be disadvantaged in exams if she skips it. The Vice-Chancellor courteously replies that while we are right to take exception to the lifestyles of Byron and Shelley, we should not censor their work. University teachers must be allowed to do their jobs in preparing students as conscientiously as possible for their finals. Personally, however, the Vice-Chancellor assures the reverend gentleman that he has ‘the greatest possible sympathy’ with his conviction.

Like reading someone else’s diary, there is an illicit pleasure in eavesdropping on academic reports. These were transcribed by hand in huge ledgers, until the fuzzy violet-ribboned typewriter took over, and one or two university archivists were reluctant to let me see theirs. But provided I maintained anonymity, and did not stray beyond 1939, I was usually allowed access.

They are fascinating: as eloquent about the sensibilities of teaching staff as they are about students. The Warden of Weetwood Hall, a women’s residence at Leeds, could be scathing. She noticed a clear split in the 1935 cohort of
leavers between those with little money, heavy family responsibilities, and an eagerness to take part in the cultural and corporate life of the university, and those spoilt by too much cash and with too little imagination. The former group she encouraged academically, with extra tutoring; the latter behaved with ‘characteristic stupidity… [and] the tastes and sense of humour of the average preparatory school boy’. It is significant, she wrote, that ‘they left nothing behind them, material or otherwise, except two tattered schoolbooks’. A couple of years later, she commented on six ‘very able but psychologically peculiar’ students, and bewailed the modern tendency for undergraduates to be entirely absorbed by their private lives, to the detriment of their work. ‘Sheer mental laziness’ should
never
be tolerated.
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The record books at King’s College London read more like a series of school reports. All the right phrases are there: ‘has ability but lacks application’; ‘weak’; ‘very much improved’; ‘good but must not overwork’; ‘should do well when she gets into the spirit of her work’; ‘able, but the breadth of her interests may sometimes be incompatible with detailed work in all subjects’. Some comments invite questions. What are the stories behind these, for example? ‘Maths… failure probably due to fact that her father was dying during the exam’; ‘Work interrupted by home anxieties’; ‘Work much interfered with’; ‘Rather disturbed by examinations’; ‘Failed all subjects’.
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At St Anne’s, formerly the Society of Home Students, remarks entered neatly into the Terminal Report Book for 1898 are a little more detailed. One tutor habitually damns with faint praise: ‘capable at times of work of good 2nd Class quality’; ‘exceedingly clever, but immature in mind’; ‘has worked steadily, but is much hampered by not knowing any grammar, French or English’ (and those were the subjects
she was reading for her degree). Elsewhere we are advised that certain bluestockings ‘ought to have had a good deal more teaching’ before they came up. One is ‘a hard worker, [but has] not learnt how to work. Wastes time through failing to grasp the essential.’ Again, is that her fault? Another ‘lacks polish and she has a strong tendency to diffuseness’, while her peer is ‘rather puzzling. Has intelligence and a clear head but does not quite rise to her work.’ Finally, there is an overseas student who has clearly overwhelmed her director of studies. She has ‘abilities of a very high standard. Quite remarkable grasp of leading principles and even of niceties and subtleties which a foreigner could not be expected to attempt to understand.’ Clever, female,
and
a foreigner? She was obviously something special.