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.’3 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.4 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.
Rooms in the hostel for King’s College, London, were lavishly and precisely furnished in the early 1920s with the following: 1 couch-bed and bedding, 3 blankets, 2 green rugs, 1 oblong table, 1 chest, 1 mirror, 1 green wardrobe curtain, 2 green window curtains, 1 basket chair, 2 wooden chairs, 1 basket, 1 bookcase, 1 cream net blind, and 1 blue-and-white bedspread.5 By contrast, when girls arrived at Durham in the 1930s, they were advised to bring all their tea things with them (china and cutlery), two pairs of sheets, pillowcases, table napkins, a napkin ring (not silver), face and bath towels, an eiderdown, rug, and easy chair.6 They were liable to share a bedroom. They slept on settees which turned into beds at night, with ‘a well-used 2'' flock mattress over chicken-wire’, dingy with coal dust, and they used one of only two bathrooms available in college. The bathroom floors were of bare concrete with duckboard mats, and they were so cold.7
Gwendolen Freeman was grateful to find her rooms at Girton rather better than she had expected. They were on the ground floor, distinguished by a stern, blank-eyed bust of Gladstone stationed outside the door. Gwendolen felt she owed a great deal to Gladstone. Girton’s corridors were so long, so numerous and uniform, that she relied on the sight of him, standing sentry, to guide her home.
In her first letter home, she proudly drew a plan of her rooms (most students at Girton, as at Royal Holloway, had two). Her study was plain, carpeted in blue, with ‘pale nondescript walls’ and its own little fireplace. The bedroom was more cheery, with flowery wallpaper, a red mat and eiderdown, a large Victorian washstand complete with its old-fashioned equipment, and a curtained-off area for hanging up Gwendolen’s (two) dresses, and stashing the woolly underwear. The windows, strangely, had no curtains; only bars on the outside to prevent the recurrence of an incident involving a ‘tramp’ who, according to Gwendolen the ingénue, ‘once tried to get in thinking it was the work-house’.8
Gwendolen’s first job, the evening she arrived, was to unpack and personalize her suite. Up went the picture-wire and watercolours she had brought from home; she scattered her favourite cushions, arranged the dressing-table set her mother had presented her with, and ceremonially placed a sturdy new mantelpiece clock above her fireplace. That clock, she noted as it belted out the hour, ‘was going to be very useful to both me and neighbouring students’.9
In Manchester’s Ashburne Hall, you were allowed a chair each which, in the early days, you were advised to carry about with you whereve
r you went and were likely to want to sit down. A girl in one of the hostels run by the Society of Home Students at Oxford brought her own chair: it came from her Uncle Jim’s cabin on HMS King George V, and was, like him, a venerable relic of the Battle of Jutland.10 University Hall in Liverpool was humbly furnished with a hotch-potch of donations by local well-wishers. In the 1908–9 session alone, it was given some china for the dining room, various magazines, fruit trees for planting, some concert tickets, cushions, a croquet set, garden seeds, a sewing machine, a mowing machine, novels for the library, and some curtain material – all received with delight.11
An imposing corner of Royal Holloway College in about 1886.
Royal Holloway College in Surrey reclined complacently at the opposite end of the spectrum. Founded in 1883 by a local businessman, in memory of his wife, it carried a £200,000 endowment – equivalent in today’s money to about £9.5 million – and accommodated 250 young women in wings of magnificent bedrooms with separate studies. Its opulence persisted well into the 1930s, when Audrey Orr remembers dressing for dinner each evening and gathering at the chime of the dinner gong (sounded by Pine, the butler) to process through the library and museum into Hall, each student with another – or a member of the tutorial staff – on her arm.12
Freda Taylor had the unusual experience of witnessing her university, Hull, coming into being:
[I]n 1926 I saw the first pile driven into the marshy ground bordering Cottingham Road. On October 11, 1928 I was one of the twenty or so first students waiting for admission on the steps of one of the two unfinished red brick buildings then standing on the same site. There were… eight women at Thwaite Hall (four of them called Kathleen…) under the watchful eye of a female Cerberus, Miss Murray… We were to discover there were almost as many staff as students.13
Settling in here, with the first ever cohort, was easy. The students set their own precedents. Conforming to the customs and strictures of long-established and insular institutions elsewhere could be extremely difficult, especially if, like Beryl Harding, you felt you did not fit. Her family, described as ‘lower middle class’ and mostly ‘clerks and bank officials’, had no interest in academia, nor any knowledge of what life as a student was like. Beryl arrived at Oxford in 1929, propelled there by forceful schoolteachers, without confidence, money, or much hope of happiness.
She disliked the culture of discipline at college intensely. She felt the maids (appropriately known as scouts) were encouraged to spy on students and inform on misbehaviour.
The rules laid down that a student, meeting a young man, had to have an approved companion. The Principal had to give her permission and kept a book outside her door for these requests to be entered. We filled one in, now and then, ‘to keep her happy,’ as we said. Otherwise the rules were ignored. I still think an institution whose rules are held in contempt, is not a healthy one.14
Beryl’s most sickening memory of college discipline involved a friend, Elizabeth, who had been brought up with the four boys of a neighbouring family. Elizabeth had known these lads all her life: they were as close as brothers. One of them, John, was studying theology at Keble College. When his mother visited Oxford one weekend, Elizabeth – eager to show her gratitude and affection – asked her Principal for permission to invite John and his mother to tea in her college room. The mother was welcome, allowed the Principal, but definitely not John. Men were safe enough in company, Elizabeth was told, but John ‘might find his way back again later’.15
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Navigating the choppy waters of college regulation was a perilous business for freshers. Who could anticipate, for example, some of the abstruse house rules at Royal Holloway, issued during the early decades of the twentieth century? No hair to be thrown out of windows; permission to be sought for biking on Sundays; chapel doors to be shut on the fourth strike of the bell, and all students not inside by then to be punished; smoking only allowed in the afternoons in the remotest part of the grounds, and only after 4.00 p.m. in public corridors; no tennis on Sundays; stockings to be worn at all times and in all weather, even on the river; tennis shorts (in the late 1930s) to be no shorter than one inch off the ground when kneeling, and cut in pleats to hang like a skirt; and so on. Transgression, at some point, was almost inevitable, and became a matter of honour to a feisty few.
The system still in use today (in an expanded form) of college ‘godparents’ was designed to support bewildered students. New girls were allotted individual seniors to look after them for the first few days, and give them guidance. Occasionally this worked well, but too often hapless ingénues were abandoned after a single meeting, or even a hastily scribbled note (‘Dear Alison, I hope you are not too frightened…’).16
Nothing mitigated the strangeness or intimidating nature of one’s fellow freshers, who tended to be categorized into types. An undergraduate at Somerville in 1935 decided they were all either As (with more sex appeal than she), Bs (a fair fight), or Cs (the rest):
Group A girls had a comely and bespoken look. They tended to wear suede waistcoats and gold earclips pointing upwards like ivy leaves. Their conversation was of champagne breakfasts and how ideas were more rewarding than people.17
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At Durham, and elsewhere, there were popularly only two categories: ‘the studious sister or the dashing damsel’;18 in other words, clever girls who patently worked too hard to get their beauty sleep, and ‘fast’ ones who were stupid. You called girls you liked ‘chaps’, and those you didn’t, ‘females’.
Meeting chaps and females en masse was even more terrifying than one by one, and mealtimes were particularly alarming. Vera Brittain’s first dinner at Somerville was almost unbearable. Everyone (but she) seemed to be screeching instead of talking, and the noise shrilled around the lofty hall like a siren. Everyone (but she) looked dowdy, dressed in joyless, long-sleeved frocks. The food was dull, the crockery depressing, and the thought of this night after night was unendurable.
Actually, the immature Vera was not intimidated by her peers – they disgusted her:
It required all my ambition, and all my touching belief that I was a natural democrat filled with an overwhelming love of humanity, to persuade me that I had never really felt the snobbish revulsion against rough-and-readiness which my specialised upbringing had made inevitable.19
She was lonely, feeling physically detached and socially isolated. There were plenty of girls who perceived university to be dangerously elitist, educating them – as one put it – ‘out of [their] real class in society’, before spitting them out as misfits and strangers. Others, like Vera, considered themselves too self-contained, too sophisticated (in the purest sense of the word), to relax. Shyness works both ways.
Traditionally, of course, everyone you encounter on your first day at university seems much more brainy, worldly-wise, and self-assured than you. Sometimes they really are: several students remember Gertrude Bell, at Lady Margaret Hall, as the most brilliant woman of her generation. She went on to excel as a traveller, writer, and diplomat; at Oxford she was remarkable as a vibrantly beautiful and intelligent student who achieved a first in modern history after only two years’ study, at the age of barely twenty. Apparently she had corrected one of her own examiners during finals, but with such grace and self-assurance that nobody minded.
It is also a truism that once you have recovered your confidence, you recognize that here is an exhilarating opportunity to make friends unencumbered by the preferences of your family or the confines of your school. To some this was disconcerting: ‘I find it bewildering deciding if I like people by myself. I have been used to them labelled.’20 Others found it faintly distasteful, like Vera Brittain. She had chosen Oxford in 1914 because there, she hoped she might ‘begin to live and to find at least one human creature among my own sex whose spirit can have intercourse with mine’. There was no such creature in her cohort. In the preternaturally academic atmosphere at college, she considered herself unique, ‘one of the “lions” – pe
rhaps the “lion” of my year’. She realized such intellectual superiority was likely to seclude her from her peers, but that was not important. ‘I might be hated by all my year at the end of a term,’ she admitted, ‘but I do not think I shall be, as people here are not jealous & resentful as they are at school.’21 That last comment was somewhat naive.
Unlike Vera, most girls relaxed into the novelty of directing their own relationships, and remember endless evenings fuelled by cocoa, cakes, and helpless giggles in the company of girls from all over the world. Academic work was a duty; being silly in company with other silly people was an unalloyed delight.
Mary Applebey went to St Anne’s in the days when it was the Society of Home Students, just before the Second World War. She was billeted in a hostel with eleven other girls, all of whom became part of the fabric of her future. She lived with one of them for fifty years. The survivors still keep in touch, and their children, and children’s children, treat each other as family. Yet this was a completely random group of people. Mary herself had an academic upbringing: her mother had been at Somerville, and married her chemistry tutor. Of the others, a few were from clergy families; one was a rich builder’s daughter from Birmingham; one was an overseas student from Hong Kong; one a bright, rebellious girl from Wales; another followed a family tradition into Oxford. Two took pass (two-year) degrees, the rest took honours.22 They explored Oxford together, comrades in academia, and their shared experience proved stronger than their disparate histories.
These bluestockings may (to a diminishing extent) have belonged to an academic elite, but socially, culturally, religiously, politically, sexually, even physically, university was open to all comers, provided they behaved themselves and pretended to be tolerably normal. An unsophisticated girl from suburbia or the provinces – like Gwendolen Freeman – was unlikely to have encountered before the lesbians or communists or atheists she would come across at college, and certainly not in an atmosphere of respect and high expectation. She could never have imagined making close friends with people of a different class, religion, or race.
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