Bluestockings

by Jane Robinson

  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.16

  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.’17 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.’18 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.19

  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.’20

  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.21

  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…22

  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 1893.23 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’.24 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’.25 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.26

  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.27

  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.28

  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.29

  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.

  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.30

  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.31

  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.32

  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…33

  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.34 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;35 an interviewer elsewhere would not accept anyone who did not ‘look clean’.36

  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.37

  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!1

  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-re
ading 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.2