Bluestockings

by Jane Robinson

  As for meeting men: an undergraduate in the 1930s maintained that it was still perfectly possible in that late era to go through your university career without conversing with someone of the opposite sex. It would take some doing, though, and for those brave enough to take it, advice was available on how to cope with male attention:

  Don’t run away. This rouses the spirit of the chase. Don’t faint. This rouses the protective impulse. Look him slowly up and down, smiling cynically. This will make him think he’s improperly dressed… However, if you feel you would like to talk: talk about yourself… If he tries to talk, don’t listen. Or change the subject. Either way you’ll stop him; he’ll give up…

  If all else fails… follow the advice of all the sex appeal and beauty experts – and all the advertisements. This won’t leave you any time for meeting men.23

  Not much of this was relevant to freshers anyway: most of them had neither the opportunity nor confidence to discover sex (if they ever discovered it) until their first year was behind them.

  Even though rules and restrictions held women undergraduates in such a tight embrace, students were still paradoxically encouraged to use initiative on occasion, which could be daunting. Being uprooted from the strict routine of family or school life was disorientating. Daphne Hanschell had loved her convent during the 1920s. Bells rang to tell you when to do things, you clanked softly with enamel badges declaring your duties or your place in the school hierarchy, and friends were neatly divided into those on your side, those not. She remembers longing to ask her fellow freshers at university to be on her side on her first day. She was so lonely. Her tutor had told her to go to a lecture, but Daphne dared not ask for directions to the hall, and so missed it. She was supposed to do an essay based on books in the library, but no one explained how to locate them among the miles and miles of shelving, and she gave up.24 Vera Brittain once said that being a fresher felt like being in quarantine; to Daphne, and shy girls like her, it was more like solitary confinement.

  Communication should have been better. Very few institutions took the time – right up until 1939 – to produce the sort of vade mecum its female students needed. They were endlessly being forbidden things, but nobody explained where to go, how the system worked, whom to ask for help. One bluestocking remembers waking at 4.00 a.m. each morning of her first fortnight and being physically sick with loneliness and apprehension. Another nearly died, she says, of homesickness, and sat for hours at a time in her room anxiously wondering what she should be doing. And despite what Vera Brittain said about the lack of jealousy and resentment, insecure freshers were quite capable of sniffing out victims in their midst, like Margery Morton at St Hilda’s.25

  Margery was older than her peers, coming to university in 1914 following three years at the Royal College of Music as a harp scholar, and a year’s cramming at Oxford High School. She was ostracized as a sneak because she already knew the college bursar. She could not reciprocate tea parties because she had so little money and disliked the ubiquitous cigarettes (banning others from smoking in her bedroom). She declined to join Sunday bike rides, because she was church-bred and considered them frivolous. And she weighed twelve stone. ‘I found a shop which sold damaged chocolate – floor sweepings – very cheaply, and made good use of it.’ Her addiction to sugar was considered pathetic and disloyal, in an era of rationing and national sacrifice. Poor girl.

  A little advice on budgeting would have been useful. Few students, before leaving home for university, had occasion to manage their own finances, apart from small amounts of pocket money spent or saved. Now they were suddenly responsible for all the sundries of life, and cutting their coats, as the saying goes, according to their cloth. Even though main meals, accommodation, and tuition fees were covered by parents, and supplemented by scholarships and grants, there were still plenty of expenses left. Fragrant cakes in greaseproof paper were regularly sent in parcels from home, and occasionally new or mended clothes and books, and most students sent home their dirty washing, since the postal service was so swift and cheap. Local laundries proved unreliable and unfeasibly expensive.

  When Kathleen Courtney went to college in 1897, she carefully itemized her monthly payments for her father’s approval. They totalled £1 11s 6d (about £100 at today’s rate), and included 7s for laundry (the costliest single item), 2s for the church collection plate, 2s 6d for stamps, 5s for gloves, 5s for books, 7s 6d for entertainment and club subscriptions, and 2s 6d for miscellaneous bits and bobs. She also paid £2 per term to hire a bicycle.26 Forty years later, Joan Morgan went to Liverpool to read zoology. Her accounts were rather more varied, including ‘tweezers for eyebrows and dissections’, a powder puff, chocolates, nail varnish, toffee, powdered shampoo, and acid drops.27

  No matter how lavish their budgets, few women had any funds left at the end of term. Their first vacation was a welcome chance to replenish the coffers. Before the First World War, young women were not encouraged to withdraw money from a bank account without a responsible male in attendance (although post-office accounts were common), and students were constantly writing home requesting a pound note or two to be sent in the post.

  The fresher’s first homecoming after being away for a term could be awkward. Family dynamics had altered, and expectations changed. There might be jealousy and resentment from siblings forced to make sacrifices, or suspicion from parents unsure what their daughters had become. But usually everyone was eager to hear all about the adventure of university life, while being reassured that their pet bluestocking still loved home best of all. The trouble was, many did not. They preferred their student lives. With more time, as their courses progressed, families adjusted, but some remained fractured beyond repair. Rosemary Vickers had never been particularly happy at home.28 Her parents rowed; she considered her father to be deeply unhappy, and her mother a manipulative hypochondriac. As an only child, Rosemary felt trapped. She had hoped that by going to university (in 1935) she would not only refresh her own life, but give her parents a chance to come to terms with one another in her absence.

  Her first term was the happiest period of her life. She made friends, who invited her to their houses in the holidays, and for the first time ever she felt warmly loved. It was only when she returned home at Christmas that she realized ‘the utter impossibility of these new friendships with my particular background’. How could she bring people home to these dreary, parochial people, still blindly bickering all the time? And if she was unable to reciprocate her friends’ invitations, she obviously could not accept them either. They would lose interest in her and think her rude. ‘Life is poisoned at the very root,’ she wrote miserably in her diary. ‘I’m being educated out of my real class in society and made unnaturally critical of my own parents.’

  It took Rosemary a long time to reconcile her two different worlds.

  7. Women’s Sphere

  You know, Eileen, in spite of going to Manchester,

  you’re really quite normal.1

  Perhaps the most obvious sign of continuity between their old and new lives for every undergraduette – unless they lived at home – was the ringing of bells. At each college or hall of residence, bells measured out the routine with reassuring authority. At Langwith Hall, Manchester, they rang nine times daily during the 1930s: for waking at 7.15 a.m., prayers at 8.00, breakfast ten minutes later, the first lunch sitting at 1.00 p.m., the second at 1.45, tea at 4.00, dinner at 7.30, prayers at 8.10, and a ‘morality bell’ at lights-out. At Leeds there was also a dressing gong before dinner, and bulbs were twinkled on and off a few times at 10.30 p.m. to prepare for ‘quiet time’ at 11.00. Any noise after that meant trouble. Senior students were recruited to police the corridors, and report misdemeanours to the authorities. It was an invidious job no one enjoyed.

  Domestic orderliness was encouraged not only to ensure the smooth running of a college community, but to lend an air of familiarity to a strange environment. There was a certain cosiness about everyone eating toge
ther three times a day, praying together in the chapel, helping each other with dressing, shopping, hair-washing, mending. Coping with the mundane helped settle this rarefied, academic life into a homely context. Be it Durham or Exeter, 1880 or 1930, a woman student’s timetable remained remarkably uniform. On weekdays it would be much as those Manchester bells dictated, with chapel and then work in the morning, exercise and/or more work in the afternoon, meetings of various sorts in the early evenings, and private study after cocoa at 9.00 p.m. (or a cocoa party, of course). There was more socializing and less work on Saturdays; long walks or cycle rides and two bouts of chapel instead of one on Sundays.

  A rather grumpy monitor summons her fellow students out of bed at Manchester University in 1905.

  Conformity was everything. It was achieved (when achieved at all) through a firm mixture of expectation and regulation. Apart from the usual laws about curfews and the making and receiving of visits, litanies of house rules circumscribed students’ behaviour around the country. In Durham, for example, no ‘Dove’, or woman student, was allowed to take her elevenses in a café; at Royal Holloway College the borrowing of teaspoons from the kitchen was forbidden; at Manchester you were not allowed to do the washing-up in the bath; and no Girtonian was permitted eggs in her bedroom. Liverpool insisted hats and jackets be worn at lectures, while Somerville expected you to keep them on at tea. Nottingham was a little more pragmatic: ‘Endeavour to behave in the common rooms as you would in your home. Don’t wear “here-I-come” apparel. Don’t do a day’s work on Monday and then spend the rest of the week admiring it.’2 Stick to the rules, was the universal message, and you will avoid making a fool of yourself and your university.

  There were always going to be rebels and mavericks, especially in academic institutions peopled by thinking women. If the college authorities could not quell them with activity, disapproval, or threats, they were expelled. But the majority of bluestockings accepted this mildly conventual existence with good grace. A measure of physical restriction was a small price to pay for intellectual freedom. Sensible students worked with what they were given. Using imposed structure as an outline, they coloured the picture with originality and flair.

  Katie Dixon, at Newnham in the late 1870s, welcomed the college routine. Every morning, after breakfast, she would go to the sunny library and start work (but never before nine o’clock: a point of honour). If she felt stiff or bilious sitting down for too long, she would wander down to the lecture rooms to stand and read at the lectern – providing, of course, it was not in use. After lunch she played tennis or, in summer, went boating – all ‘white flannels and pink parasols’. Back to Newnham for tea; then evensong at King’s at half-past five, dinner, and perhaps a little more work.

  I remember many a winter evening with a roaring little fire, (that divine cakey coal, you could heave up with the poker) lying in one straight line in my wicker chair, lamp… behind me, a vast lexicon lying on my middle, and a play of Aeschylus or what not in my hands. The silence, the being alone, and knowing everyone else was at it in the same way seemed to give one a great push on.3

  It sounds wonderfully relaxed. Sometimes it is easy to forget that cynicism has not always been in fashion: an indiscriminate sense of wellbeing washes over so many memories of college life. A student in the 1920s confessed to feeling almost stupidly content, the whole time: ‘I was very happy indeed at Girton, and so were most of us, but on looking back I do not quite know why. It seems to me now that we were not very enterprising and that life was not really so interesting as it might have been.’4

  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’;5 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’.6

  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.’ 7 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 10.30.8

  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.9 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.