Teacher training at cambridge: the initiatives of oscar browning (Woburn Education Series)

TEACHER TRAINING AT CAMBRIDGE

The Initiatives of Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes

‘We premise that we are going to say a great deal about slate pencils, primers, and spelling-books. We are aware such details must be very dull, and would be unpardonable, if they were not eminently useful.’ Edinburgh Review, October 1807 ‘Education, in its larger sense, is one of the most inexhaustible of all topics. Notwithstanding the great mass of excellent things which have been said respecting it, no thoughtful person finds any lack of things both great and small still waiting to be said, or waiting to be developed and followed out to their consequences.’ John Stuart Mill, ‘Inaugural Address to St Andrews’, 1867

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The English Higher Grade Schools Meriel Vlaeminke

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TEACHER TRAINING AT CAMBRIDGE The Initiatives of Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes

PAM HIRSCH Faculty of Education and Newnham College, Cambridge MARK McBETH John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY

WOBURN PRESS LONDON • PORTLAND, OR

First published in 2004 in Great Britain by WOBURN PRESS Chase House, 47 Chase ide, Southgate London N14 5BP This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” and in the United States of America by WOBURN PRESS c/o ISBS 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, Oregon 97213–3786 Website: www.woburnpress.com Copyright © 2004 Pam Hirsch and Mark McBeth British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hirsch, Pam Teacher training at Cambridge: the initiatives of Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes.—(Woburn education series) 1. Browning, Oscar, 1837–1923 2. Hughes, Elizabeth 3. University of Cambridge. Faculty of Education—History 4. Teachers—Training of—England—Cambridge—History I. Title II. McBeth, Mark 370.7′11′42659 ISBN 0-203-64268-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67866-4 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-7130-0234-4 (cloth) ISBN 0-7130-4054-8 (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hirsch, Pam Teacher training at Cambridge: the initiatives of Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes/Pam Hirsch, Mark McBeth. p. cm.—(Woburn education series, ISSN 1462–2076) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7130-0234-4(cloth)—ISBN 0-7130-4054-8 1. Browning, Oscar, 1837–1923. 2. Hughes, Elizabeth, 1852–1925. 3. Educators—England—Cambridge—Biography. 4. Teachers—Training of—England—Cambridge—History—19th century. 5. University of Cambridge—History—19th century. I. McBeth, Mark II. Title. III. Series. LF125.H57 2003 370′.71′097444–dc21 2003053537 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

CONTENTS

Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction (Pam Hirsch and Mark McBeth)

x

OSCAR BROWNING (Mark McBeth ) 1

A Formal Introduction to Mr Oscar Browning

2

2

Learning Your Lessons: Impact of Student Life on his Teaching

14

3

Educational Zeitgeist and Pedagogical Influences

28

4

Teaching at Eton: The Greatest Shuffler’ or the ‘Best of Counsellors’

40

5

The Prodigal Don Returns to King’s College

54

6

Cambridge University Day Training College

70

ELIZABETH HUGHES (Pam Hirsch ) 7

The Underground Railway

108

8

The Making of Elizabeth Hughes

121

9

Under the University’s Beneficial Shadow

131

10

Getting Established

149

11

Elizabeth Hughes and the Catholic Students

161

12

Friends or Enemies: O.B. and Miss Hughes

173

13

Dangers and Disappointments

188

14

The Legacy of Elizabeth Hughes

197

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Conclusion (Pam Hirsch and Mark McBeth)

212

Select Timeline

238

Bibliography

241

Index

251

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Photograph of Oscar Browning c. 1890. Photograph of Curzon and Browning. ‘Mid-Term Tea at Mr Oscar Browning’s’ by Max Beerbohm. Anonymous cartoon of Oscar Browning in a tutu. Cambridge Day Training College May 1893; group shot of Browning’s primary students; Education Archives, Cambridge University Library. 6. Cambridge Day Training College May Term 1909; group shot of Browning’s primary and secondary students; Education Archives, Cambridge University Library. 7. Miss Buss and Sophie Bryant. 8. Crofton Cottages, Merton Street, Cambridge (c. 1920). 9. Miss Hughes with group photograph of first students, 1885. 10. Map of Cambridge from the National Union of Teachers official guide to the 30th Annual Conference held at Cambridge, Easter 1899. 11. Permanent building, 1895, later to be called Hughes Hall. 12. Miss E.P.Hughes in The Queen: The Lady’s Newspaper, 26 October 1895, p. 752. 13. Decorated frontispiece of book presented to Miss Hughes by her students in 1899. 14. Photograph of newly converged Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

8 45 60 65 95 96 116 132 136 156 157 158 194 231

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Like the transatlantic romance, writing a book while the two authors are on either side of the pond can be a challenge, It takes a lot of work to sustain the energies of the relationship. Although internet technology makes this sort of venture possible, it changes the dynamic of the two co-writers and the processes in which they engage. Luckily, inexpensive flights and the support of the CUNY Graduate Center—English Ph.D. Program and the City College Humanities Office (thank you Dean Watts) allowed Mark to travel frequently enough to England so that he and Pam could do close hands-on collaboration at her kitchen table and computer screen. (Mark would like to thank the friends Jane, James, Jennifer, Keith as well as the entire Hirsch family, who welcomed and accustomed him to a familiarly Anglophone yet still foreign land. He still wonders why Cholmondley is pronounced Chumley?) Sources of support for this book have been many and various. We thank Desmond Hirsch, the first friend of all Pam’s enterprises, Stephanie Hirsch, for acting as research assistant when needed, and Sophie Hirsch for feeding us and making us laugh. They often patiently endured our ongoing dinner dialogues about what we had worked on during the day and sweetened our efforts with comforting desserts. Wicked Cake really is the recipe for good scholarship. On the UK side, we have many people to thank. Dr Gillian Sutherland at Newnham College, Dr Janet Howarth at St Hilda’s, Oxford, and Dr Peter Cunningham in the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge all showed interest in our project at an early stage. We wish to thank the President and Fellows of Hughes Hall for access to their archival material. We would also like to thank Kester Aspden at Leeds, David Thompson of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, Penny Hatfield at Eton, Peter Kelan at Cardiff, Margaret Osborn at Northampton Diocesan Archives, Anne Thompson at Newnham, Rosalind Moad at King’s College, Karen Morgan at North London Collegiate School, Kath Boothman at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Dr Patrick Zutshi, Godfrey Waller and Jacky Cox of Cambridge University Library and many more. What would scholars do without those colleagues, librarians and archivists who support our endless inquiries? They are indispensable.

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Pam would like to thank the Faculty of Education for granting her a sabbatical term’s leave, and the colleagues who relieved her of teaching for that term. She would also like to thank Delia Pluckrose and Sarah Loveday in Newnham College Tutorial Office for their stalwart support in the twenty-first century during the period of writing up her nineteenth-century research. Another thank you goes to Miyako Okahara Matsumoto of Newnham College for her most helpful translations from Japanese to English. A very personal thank you goes also to Allen Freer, a teacher who taught Pam at grammar school, who is a fine example of everything a teacher can mean to a pupil. At Woburn, we would both like to thank Professor Peter Gordon, our indefatigable editor Lisa Hyde and our patient copy editor Jenny Oates. In the United States, Mark would like to thank Sondra Perl, Eve Sedgwick, Jane Marcus and Joe Wittreich for their guidance through a doctoral dissertation out of which this project emerged. Much of this writing would have never happened without the careful critique of Carl Whithaus, Leo Parascandola, Wendy Ryden and Tim McCormack. Without the loyalty of Tim, Fred Reynolds and the CCNY Writing Center Staff, Mark could never have abandoned his post so often mid-semester to write in England. Chris Rising came to the rescue more than once, and thanks also to Naomi Azuma for her cover design assistance. People consider writing a solitary activity and it is often the case. However, little can compare to the shared exchange of ideas, the careful consideration of a colleague’s word, and the laughter and satisfaction that comes with scholarly collaboration. Mid-way through our collaboration, 11 September broke into our lives; it served to reinforce our sense that dialogue and ‘response-ability’, as promoted by Browning and Hughes, first modelled in classrooms, remain key to problem solving for the future. We dedicate this book to teachers and to students intending to become teachers and to Jane Marcus —thank you for the shidach

INTRODUCTION Pam Hirsch and Mark McBeth

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Cambridge University was showing a lively interest in educational experiment, one involving the science and methods of the classroom and, furthermore, introducing students who normally would not have attended an elite university. We will focus on two educationists, Oscar Browning (1837–1923) and Elizabeth Hughes (1852–1925), who were the principals of the two separate teacher training colleges for men and women. The early initiatives of these two educational innovators started the development of education studies at Cambridge University and, therefore, serve as test cases to examine the relationship between teacher training and the university. Browning and Hughes were both persuasive advocates of the importance of training for teachers. The theories and practices of the classroom were still struggling to establish themselves as an academic undertaking, and the history of teacher training colleges reveals an ongoing process in the professionalization of teaching. Standard texts of the history of education have viewed classrooms and teaching from the outside, emphasizing governmental policy making and administrative structures.1 The way this top-down narrative defines education, although obviously valuable, limits its meaning and its possibilities. By contrast, in this book, we explore and create a history of education through Hughes’ and Browning’s lived experience both inside and outside the classroom. Investigating their idiosyncratic careers enables us to examine how, as educators, they formulated their perspectives on teaching and learning in the context of highly complex educational circumstances. To explore educational history in this way faithfully respects historical facts from the perspectives of those working in the college classroom. Through their letters, lectures and writing, we listen to Browning’s and Hughes’ voices in order to recover not only what they did but also what they felt. We take stock of our characters’ personal and emotional investments in their projects to reveal their passions and desires about teacher training as a way to see what it might say about education in a larger context. Browning has been famously mythologized by Virginia Woolf in A Room of Ones Own as a misogynist, a kind of scapegoat for patriarchal power

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within Cambridge University.2 Yet this makes no allowance for his own marginal position, nor for the fact that he was willing to lecture to Newnham students on history, as well as acting as examiner of the students of the newly founded women’s colleges. His role in relation to women students at Cambridge needs more examination than it has hitherto received. In Cambridge his contribution to education in England was never recognized, for reasons which Mark McBeth will explore.3 Instead, he has been caricatured as a ridiculous figure: ‘flamboyant’, ‘ludicrous’, ‘petulant’ and ‘preposterous’; the adjectives which have most often been applied to him reveal a homophobia that has blurred and distorted any serious account of his achievements. Yet Browning’s role in establishing the Teacher Training Syndicate which would give lectures and examine the theory, history and practice of teaching and award certificates to successful candidates was the founding moment of the Faculty of Education which still exists in Cambridge today. Similarly, in examining Elizabeth Hughes’ role as an influential educationist Pam Hirsch will be drawing on some recent reconceptualizations of the notion of educational leadership. Although women were denied the vote until the twentieth century and therefore were unable to press their cases in Parliament, education was an area of public life where many women achieved a measure of status and authority. As well as their roles in founding and running schools and colleges, these women were skilful at inserting themselves into sites of pressure on government, for example as members of the Social Science Association, and infiltrating the stratum of decision making in between government policy and the schools themselves.4 Their talent for strategic opportunism in seizing that authority in a wide variety of contexts has been demonstrated in two collections of essays: Practical Visionaries: Women, Education and Social Progress 1790–1930 edited by Mary Hilton and Pam Hirsch and Women, Educational Policy-Making and Administration in England: Authoritative Women Since 1880 edited by Joyce Goodman and Sylvia Harrop.5 Elizabeth Hughes was, like all the ‘practical visionaries’ Pam Hirsch has studied, an inspired opportunist, successful in seizing the moment. She was supremely skilful in gaining the support of those who were keen to raise the standard of girls’ education. The establishment of the university colleges for women, Girton and Newnham, which had been established in the 1870s, and the founding of the Teacher Training Syndicate by Browning was the context which made it possible to establish the Cambridge Training College for Women in 1885. An educationist is defined as someone who studies the science or method of education, or is an advocate of education. Both Browning and Hughes fit this bill exactly, and we will examine precisely how these two significant but half-forgotten educationists (separately) set about raising the professionalism and status of teachers. Both of them had the drive and

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ability to found something, to do what no-one had done before, which takes a particular kind of courage and commitment. In this they were similar, yet the historical accounts thus far have alleged that there was no ‘cordiality’ between these two remarkable educationists.6 In this book we test that assumption and indicate both areas where they cooperated and also areas where they did not see eye to eye. We hope in some sense to ‘replay’ the arguments—indicating the shared objectives, but also their differences and divergences. Given their very different personal styles, together with disagreement on some substantive issues, we think that our two writing Voices’ will make this textually apparent. In other words, methodologically, the two writers are not aiming to force the other into agreement, in order to achieve closure, but to leave the text, as it were, open. Inevitably we will explore class and gender issues; for example, what was their commitment to and relationship with working-class students? Hughes, for example used to teach evening classes for working men in east Cambridge and this form of philanthropy has been categorized by feminist historians as a mode of women’s ‘welfare liberalism’. Browning’s relationship with working-class men, however, has always been viewed as problematic. Questions of intimacy between teacher and students have been inflected differently by historians along gender lines. Whereas Hughes’ close relationships with her students have been figured as an unthreatening ‘fantasy of study, privacy, purity and unconditional motherlove’, Browning’s relationships with his students have always come under suspicion.7 Overall, our desire, as researchers, is to take nothing for granted, but rather to unpack primary sources critically in order to arrive at an appropriately nuanced double history. As the early initiatives of these two leaders began the development of education studies at Cambridge University they, therefore, usefully serve as test cases to examine the relationship between teacher training and the university. Their early training programmes foreshadowed the work of the present-day Faculty of Education, so, concomitantly, our exploration of these Victorian educational experiments uncovers the unstable relationship between teacher trainers, the university, and the government of the day. By revisiting the educational perspectives of these two remarkable innovators and recreating their dialogues we reveal important, and often controversial, ideas about the purposes of education. Furthermore, we contend that studies of ideological struggles of the past are as pertinent to educational problems of the twenty-first century as they were in the times of Browning and Hughes. HISTORICAL CONTEXT The narrative of the British educational system is a complex story because it did not develop as an integrated system. Instead, educational initiatives

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were driven by a variety of religious, socioeconomic and political forces. Below, we sketch out a brief and selective (conventional) survey of nineteenth-century British educational history which focuses on those educational developments and policies pertinent to teacher training. Much of this will be familiar to those interested in the history of teacher education, so some readers may want to move straight to the sections on Browning and Hughes. For others, the historical context may help to place the initiatives of our protagonists more precisely. In 1807 the Whig journal, the Edinburgh Review, stated, ‘How far it may be expedient to provide nationally for the education of the poor, against the prejudices of the upper classes, and without any cordial wish to that purpose on the part of the poor themselves, is doubtful—if it be possible.’8 In the early nineteenth century British education was seen as being primarily the responsibility of churches and parents, rather than that of the state. However, for a variety of social and economic reasons, public opinion and perspectives about national education would shift considerably throughout the nineteenth century. In incremental stages, education was transformed from piecemeal enterprises largely run by voluntary bodies to a more integrated conglomerate where the state played a more significant part. Because Great Britain eventually developed a more governmentally regulated educational system for all members of its society, it also needed an organized teacher training programme. This historical survey of British educational initiatives shows first how the nation established a popular educational system and then how this in turn affected the need for teacher training. From a present viewpoint, it may be difficult to imagine opposition to an inclusive national education system, yet in the early 1800s schooling for the working classes was still a contested issue. In the November 1810 issue of the Edinburgh Review, an anonymous reviewer, probably Henry Brougham, discussed public opinion regarding popular education. He wrote: The subject now before us, the extension of popular education, gives rise to two distinct questions. It has unhappily been contended by some persons, that no good can result from promoting the instruction of the bulk of the community. They have even pretended to foresee a variety of evils as likely to originate in the greater diffusion of knowledge; and, combining with their fanciful anticipations of danger, views of past events just as fanciful, have not scrupled to raise apprehensions of anarchy, tumult and revolution, from the progress of information among the people.9 Throughout Brougham’s long life (1778–1868), he led progressive Whig groups, interested in aspects of popular education, whereas Conservatives convinced themselves that educating the masses would only make them

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dissatisfied with their stations in life.10 Brougham contended that if the education of the poor were to be neglected ‘Ignorance-as-Bliss’ could only harm their personal welfare and impede the social and economic progress of England. In 1816 and 1818 Royal Commissions were appointed to investigate The Education of the Lower Order in the Metropolis’. The 1816 Committee reported that they ‘found reason to conclude, that a very large number of poor children are wholly without the means of Instruction, although their parents appear to be generally very desirous of obtaining that advantage for them’.11 This early committee, led by Brougham, collected evidence from educational experts involved with the two large voluntary providers of elementary education, the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church (National Society) and the British and Foreign Schools, run by Nonconformists. Both of these philanthropic Anglican and Nonconformist societies used the monitorial system pioneered by Reverend Andrew Bell (an Anglican) and Joseph Lancaster (a Nonconformist). This system was cheap because the societies only had to pay the wages of a single elementary teacher who conveyed information to a selected group of able pupils. These monitors then reiterated the lesson to their less able peers.12 Middle-class opinion was predominately in favour of the monitorial system; an 1807 Edinburgh Review article praised its thrifty teaching methods, saying: The improvements which Mr. Lancaster has made in education, are, in the cheapness of schools, their activity, their order, and their emulation. The reading, ciphering, and spelling cards, suspended for the successive use of 3 or 400 boys; the employment of sand and slate instead of pen and ink, and particularly of monitors instead of ushers, must, in large seminaries, constitute an immense saving.13 The system was, undeniably, cost-effective and offered poor children some form of teaching, but the rigidly ranked hundreds of children were locked into a factory-like system with only one teacher and the chosen pupils their own age to guide them. The teacher mechanically transmitted information to the untrained monitors who then passed it on to other pupils. The article continued, ‘The extraordinary discipline, progress, and economy of this [Lancaster] school, are, therefore, in a great measure, produced by an extraordinary number of non-commissioned officers [monitors], serving without pay, and learning while they teach.’14 With neither experience, maturity, nor training, monitors could be only minimally effective as instructors, regardless of how inexpensive. When the Brougham Committee reconvened in 1818 to review the progress made in education, it advised that parish schools be subsidized by industry and maintained by rates. However, because the plan gave

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Anglican clergy a predominant position in the educational scheme, both dissenters and Roman Catholics opposed it. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the complex connections between religious affiliation and schooling would remain a central conundrum for British educational provision. Although the recommendations of the Brougham Committee never became law, they nevertheless kick-started a debate about the financial sources of education. As Brougham had written between 1818 and the early 1830s, large numbers of ‘poor children [remained] wholly without the means of Instruction’, and it was not until the Reform Act of 1832 had enfranchised middle-class men that educational reform would again be attempted.15 The industrialists creating the country’s wealth were powerful promoters of the first reform bill. Mill and factory owners who wanted a stable workforce tended to be interested in the education of their workers’ children (even if their motives were self-serving).16 These middle-class industrialists were anxious because studies comparing British education with continental education illustrated how far the British system lagged behind, and those MPs familiar with manufacturing industries recognized that educational systems impacted on the prosperity of nations. In 1833, John Roebuck, following the initiatives of Brougham, introduced a Bill of Education, appealing for ‘the universal and national education of the whole people’.17 Roebuck’s radical bill, outlining an ambitious state education system, was rigorously debated in Parliament but did not succeed. However, a month later a grant of £20,000 was approved to aid the National Society and the British and Foreign School Society to build schools, and so became the first large governmental expenditure on education. The parliamentary debate about this proposed bill had revealed that voluntaryism had failed to solve the problems of elementary education, and this government grant marked a shift in the balance between philanthropic initiatives and state intervention. Further, the Roebuck debate highlighted the need for the training of teachers and Lord Brougham advocated a plan for teacher training schools.18 In support of these ‘Normal Schools’, Parliament voted for a £10,000 grant to be divided between the two major voluntary societies. With these capital grants and the additional funding for teacher training, the seeds of a national universal education system were sown. However, during this 30-year period no significant legislation for elementary education occurred. According to Dent in his account of The Educational System of England and Wales: The story of elementary education in England and Wales between 1833 and 1870 is not one to be proud of; its most pleasing features are the enlightened work of the early inspectors, and the undoubted heroism of many teachers, who, with the most meagre resources and almost complete lack of public support, tamed and taught great

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hordes of children who otherwise would have grown up half-savage and illiterate.19 Yet during this period, there were some major reforms of child labour laws which would subsequently shape educational measures. In 1833 Lord Ashley, better known as the Earl of Shaftesbury, led a commission to investigate the treatment of children in industry.20 The Factory Act of 1833 reduced children’s work hours as well as limited the minimum age at which they could be employed.21 As these industrial regulations were legislated, the possibility of compulsion could be considered, but legally enforced school attendance would not happen for another four decades. In 1843 the Factory Act was revised under the leadership of Home Secretary, Sir James Graham.22 Inspectors reported that the previous legislation was being ignored and, after their evidence was submitted, even more stringent restrictions were put in place. Age limits were revised so children under the age of 8 could not work at all, those aged between 8 and 13 could work no more than six and a half hours per day, and those older than 13 no more than 12 hours a day.23 All children under the age of 13 were obliged to attend three hours of school per day. The implications of this bill were that both employers and parents would be legally responsible for the attendance of children at school. Although MPs agreed to the proposed limits of child labour, predictably, disagreements arose about the mechanisms for school management because of denominational differences. The plan was that new schools should be built through government loans but maintained through the local poorrate. Nonconformists objected that while everyone in the parish would be required to help maintain these new schools, the local Anglican vicar would have overall control.24 As a result, the first version of the Graham Factory bill was defeated but, when the revised (albeit diluted) Act was passed in 1844, the proposed state aid for the provision of schools had been entirely abandoned. Curtis in his History of Education in Great Britain argues that this was the most serious setback that elementary education had suffered so far.25 Prior to 1839, educational policy was under the jurisdiction of the general Parliament but, in that year, Lord John Russell announced that a Select Committee of the Privy Council would be appointed to oversee any parliamentary expenditure made to promote public education. The vote to establish this committee was upheld by a majority of only five votes because Anglican clergy felt that their right to control education was again being usurped. By appointing this committee, Parliament assumed a national responsibility for elementary schooling and initiated the first centralized government agency for education. When, in 1856, the Select Committee of the Privy Council was raised to the status of Education Department, the role of government was forever tied to the politics of

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education. As Curtis confirms, Thus the progress of education became definitely linked with politics, and on many occasions the tendency has been to regard education from the point of view of the policy of the party in power rather than from its relation to the children of the country.’26 In 1839, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, a supporter of education for the poor, was appointed Secretary of the Select Committee and remained active in that office until 1849.27 In 1846, in an effort to improve elementary education by raising teaching quality, Kay-Shuttleworth introduced the pupil-teacher system which was common on the continent.28 The pupilteacher system improved upon the monitorial system, because those same able 13–14-year old pupils were now apprenticed to be teachers. For five years, pupil-teachers taught groups of 25 pupils and received academic instruction from the headteacher after school hours. In this new system, headteachers actively trained their apprentices in the skills of teaching, rather than merely using them to transmit information. Both pupil and headteacher would be remunerated by the state for teaching work.29 This system was principally attractive to working-class pupils attending elementary schools because it offered an educational and professional opportunity that bad previously been unavailable. By the late 1880s and 1890s pupil-teacher centres had been established across the country to offer pupil-teachers more systematic and organized courses of academic and professional instruction.30 The pupil-teacher system improved the quality of teaching, and it was by means of this system that the majority of elementary teachers were trained until 1902.31 But it had its limitations, as the pupil-teachers had to teach as apprentices all day and pursue their own ‘secondary’ education at night. Even then, Conservative opinion held that the elementary teachers were being overeducated for their task.32 Nevertheless, under Kay-Shuttleworth’s plan, those interested in education could assume teaching positions as professionals; teaching could be respected as a lifetime career. KayShuttleworth’s lead was followed by the Church of England, which had opened 22 training colleges by 1845. Key pieces of the jigsaw of a burgeoning education system were being put in place. The Newcastle Commission was set up in 1858, two years after the creation of the Education Department as the administrative instrument of the Committee of Council, and it undertook the first comprehensive survey of English elementary education.33 This commission recognized that the new department was bound to pursue a policy of extending ‘a sound and cheap elementary instruction to all classes of people’.34 The report commented on the shortcomings of teachers in the period, even those who were qualified: Whilst it appears to be proved that the character of the teachers is greatly raised by their training, and that they are altogether a superior class to those who preceded them, it is equally clear that they fail, to

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a considerable extent, in some of the most important of the duties of elementary teachers, and that a large proportion of the children are not satisfactorily taught that which they come to school to lear… Other complaints are that the trained teachers are conceited and dissatisfied. The first we do not believe to be true of the class, the second we admit to a certain degree, and account for it by remarking, amongst other causes, that their emoluments, though not too low, rise too soon to their highest level.35 The Newcastle Report acknowledged that the pupil-teacher system had ameliorated the quality of teaching, but that elementary teachers varied widely in quality. They started to consider whether salary arrangements could be used as a mechanism for raising teaching standards. Following this report, the Vice-President of the Council and Head of the Education Department, Robert Lowe, introduced the Revised Code of 1862, whereby government grants to elementary schools were based principally upon pupils’ performances in an annual examination in reading, writing and arithmetic, a system usually referred to as ‘payment by results’. The Revised Code abolished salaries paid directly to elementary teachers and, instead, paid a single grant to the school managers, who then would allocate wages based on their judgement of teaching performance. This meant that grants could be allocated to schools taught largely by untrained teachers because they would be cheaper than trained teachers and therefore might seem a better business proposition for the managers. Lowe told Parliament, I cannot promise the House that this system will be an economical one, and I cannot promise that it will be an efficient one, but I can promise that it shall be one or the other. If it is not cheap, it shall be efficient; if it is not efficient it shall be cheap…have the greatest hopes of the improved prospects of education, if this principle is sanctioned.36 Lowe seems more interested in cost than quality; a further example would be that there were no more grants for building or improving training colleges. This assault on the teaching profession, via the ‘payments by results’ system, continued, with modifications, for some 35 years. In practice it meant that teachers’ salaries were largely determined by their success in cramming pupils for the annual inspector’s examination.37 As ex-pupil-teachers of ability were likely to do just as well for themselves without college training, the effect of the Revised Code on the teaching colleges was a marked decrease in their applicants and entrants.38 During this period, if teachers with less training could successfully teach to the test, they were still considered by inspectors and administrators as qualified for their positions. In effect, Kay-Shuttleworth found himself

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looking at the destruction of 25 years of progressive ideas about education. He stated: The whole system of public aid has been shaken to its very centre and the Managers of Schools have been discouraged—he emoluments of the teachers have been lessened, and his hopes disappointed. Pupil teachers are therefore scarce, and are easily attracted to other employment. Their education is not well cared for, because it has ceased to be the interest of the principal teacher; their qualifications at the end of their five years’ engagement are much lower than formerly.39 Under the demoralized teaching conditions created by Lowe’s plan, taxpayers could have had their rates reduced, and teachers instructing to the tests could have had their salaries increased, but pupils received neither better schools nor more pedagogically sound teachers. Pupils were subjected once again to a more rote/mechanical means of teaching which drilled them in the techniques of test-taking.40 As we have seen, throughout the nineteenth century, teacher training arrangements were closely tied to social class divisions. Working-class children went to elementary schools, where they would be taught by a schoolteacher who was most likely to be an upper-working-class or lowermiddle-class person, largely trained in the classroom himself. Up to this point, we have surveyed elementary education; now, however, we turn to secondary education and its teachers. We need to remind ourselves that only middle-class students went to secondary schools and that in them genders were separated not only among the students but also among the teachers: men taught boys and women taught girls almost exclusively. The reason that secondary teacher training is divided sharply by gender is because men who had a university education needed no more training to get a job as a secondary teacher. A university degree was sufficient. Women were still constrained by the limited opportunities of higher education overall. Many new secondary schools for boys were established in the 1840s, copying the style of the ancient public schools. The problem with using the public schools as models was that the curriculum (strictly Latin, Greek and mathematics) served as a rite of passage for ‘gentlemen’; it was not much use for sons of manufacturers, tradesmen and industrialists.41 As Crouzet writes, Rich industrialists had sent their sons to public schools early in the industrial revolution, but the influx of third-generation boys only became a torrent after 1850. A growing number of men…passed through these establishments, in order to improve their social status by obtaining a passport to the ‘gentleman’s club’.42

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As a result of this mindset and the tendency of secondary schools to ape the outdated educational traditions of public schools, secondary education for boys stagnated. With the exception of some very good Nonconformist secondary schools, the standards were variable at best, and often very poor indeed.43 Boys’ secondary schools needed trained and qualified masters; such masters scarcely existed as there were no respected training programmes for them.44 Women, on the other hand, for whom there was no university education, had every motivation to acquire what training they could, wherever they could get it.45 In 1848 the Anglican Queen’s College and in 1849 the non-denominational Bedford College were set up to provide training so that governesses could get better salaries. Bedford College developed a full-time teacher training course which helped create a new sense of professional identity for women teachers.46 Unusually, in 1849, the College of Preceptors, which had started off in 1846 with a separate Ladies’ Department, integrated women into the student body. One of the pioneers of education for girls and women, Frances Buss (1827–94), was the first woman to serve on its governing body.47 There was some opposition to the election of a woman but she was strongly supported by Joseph Payne, a stalwart supporter of the education of girls and women.48 Buss briefly contemplated setting up her own day training college for women secondary teachers, before offering financial and moral support to the Cambridge Training College for Women. Because a teaching career was one of the few occupations in which middle-class women could find work, women’s teacher training colleges provided an entrance to further educa tion and to the workforce which otherwise would not have existed.49 For middle-class men interested in becoming teachers, religion was an important factor. Before 1871, only Anglicans could graduate with Oxbridge degrees, and no one considered that these men needed any teacher training because of their university status. The majority of these men came from the old elite public schools who generated their teaching staffs from their own alumni.50 For non-Anglican men unable to graduate from Oxbridge universities (as well as for women teachers) the college of Preceptors was vitally important. Started by a group of Brighton schoolmasters, non-graduate dissenting laymen, the college held lectures on educational matters, and, from 1847 onwards its journal, the Educational Times, promoted the importance of producing competent and responsible teachers for the children of the middle classes. The first of its four resolutions stated that they deemed it ‘desirable for the protection of the interests both of the scholastic profession and the public, that some proof of qualification, both as to the amount of knowledge and the art of conveying it to others, should be required’.51 By applying for a Royal Charter in 1847, the college aimed to provide an officially recognized professional qualification which might become equal to the status of a degree from the ancient universities. However, its failure to enforce a

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universally accepted test of competence meant that this goal was never reached. Although its examinations were not generally respected, and indeed it could have been more accurately described as an examining body rather than a college, the College of Preceptors nevertheless had a pioneering role because it effectively created the academic subject of the Theory and Practice of Education. In 1871 it made Joseph Payne (1808– 76) a Professor of Education, thus establishing the first Professorship of its kind. Payne forcefully argued that the college’s ‘primary responsibility [should be] to make teachers into scholars and scholars into teachers’.52 According to R.W. Rich, the College of Preceptors introduced ‘a principle diametrically opposed to that holding in the State-aided elementary schools. Teachers themselves were to be responsible for maintaining the standard of their profession… In other words what was envisaged was a kind of Teachers’ University.’53 The Taunton Commission Report, published in 1868, surveyed the state of education in Britain with the exception of public schools and workingclass education, as public schools had recently been scrutinized in the Clarendon Report and working-class education in the Newcastle Report. For the Taunton Report, over 800 middle-class schools were inspected and evidence collected to fill 20 large volumes of socio-educational information, the largest inquiry ever conducted in the history of the country. The Commission regarded its brief as finding out ‘whether the results produced [by endowed schools] are commensurate with the means’, claiming that the ‘public has the right to see that they are doing good, and not harm’.54 By raising public awareness about education, the British people, namely children’s parents, became more concerned with the quality of schools, teachers and classrooms. To the advantage of middle-class education, secondary schools from this point would need to make clear what they could offer. The Taunton Commission reported that the unsatisfactory work of schools was caused by ‘untrained teachers, and bad methods of teaching, uninspected work by workmen without adequate motive, unrevised or illrevised statutes, and the complete absence of organization of schools in relation to one another’.55 In other words, it decided that a middle-class school system needed to be reorganized to offer sound lessons by qualified teachers, regulated by supportive and reliable policies. The Taunton Commission therefore devised a system in which schools were given status based on the class of students which would attend them. The middle class had expanded during the course of the nineteenth century and the effect of the Taunton Commission was to tier the secondary schools correspondingly into what sociologists would call upper-middle-, middlemiddle’ and lower-middle-class schools.56 The highest grade, schools teaching a combination of the Classics and modern studies, would prepare students for university. The second grade of school for students up to 16 years of age would prepare students for professional careers in the military,

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medical and legal professions, in the civil service and in business. The curricula of these children of mercantile and trading classes would include English literature, political economy, mathematics and science with some Latin but never Greek. Without the Greek their opportunities to attend university were limited so, for the most part, their schooling would prescribe what professional choices were available to them. The third grade of school for lower-middle and skilled working-class boys to age 14 would teach them Latin or modern languages, English, history, elementary mathematics, geography, and science.57 This curriculum prepared them to be clerks rather than manual labourers. Not only were students categorized by social class, but the perceived social standing of the teacher would also indicate which group of students they were quali-fied (and perhaps permitted) to teach.58 In other words, the system devised by the Taunton Commission would formalize the types of teachers who would be hired to teach at the different grades of schools. In 1868, W.E. Forster, who differed greatly from his predecessor Lowe, was appointed Vice-President of the Education Department.58 Lowe had been primarily an administrator and a politician, who had never claimed to be an educationist. Indeed, when a government inspector went to consult him, Lowe said, ‘I know what you’ve come about, the science of education. There is none. Good morning.’60 Forster, on the other hand, had long been familiar with progressive philosophies about education, knowing many of the major contemporaneous champions of popular education.61 His presence altered the zeitgeist of how educational policies would be handled. In 1870, when Forster submitted the Elementary Education bill, he summed up its goals, stating, ‘What is our purpose in this Bill? Briefly this, to bring elementary education within the reach of every English home, aye, and within the reach of those children who have no homes.’62 Forster’s main ambition was to achieve a minimum of compulsory elementary education for children aged between 5 and 13. The 1870 Education Act provided for school boards to be set up to fill the gaps in the existing system of voluntary schools.63 They were empowered to establish elementary schools, although not empowered to open teacher training colleges. The Act did however succeed in solving the conundrum of the religious issue. The Cowper-Temple clause laid down that in schools ‘hereafter established by means of local rate, no catechism or religious formulary which is distinctive to any particular denomination shall be taught’, and the right of withdrawal from religious instruction on grounds of conscience in all public elementary schools, including those run by the churches, was guaranteed.64 This Act meant that more children were in school, which greatly increased the need for teachers and as a result training colleges started to fill again.65 Also during 1870, the National Union of Teachers (NUT), mostly comprised of elementary and secondary teachers, was formed. The formation of such unions showed a new attitude amongst teachers who

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recognized themselves as not only a professional assembly, but also a political force. As an educated contingent with a growing respect in the public sphere and roots in the working and middle classes, they were a group with whom to be reckoned, with more force to lobby Parliament or exert pressure on the Department of Education.66 As members of professional unions, teachers could share their ideas in conferences, form coalitions, and act as advocates on how educational policies should be shaped. On the surface, the Education Act of 1870 appears to institute universal free compulsory elementary education, but it would be nearly another decade before general compulsion was instituted and even longer for free schooling.67 It was the final two decades of the nineteenth century when a national system of education was established and, as a result, the population of children attending school increased enormously, even though it had been growing steadily for many years. In 1886, The Royal Commission ‘to enquire into the working of the elementary Education Acts’ was set up, chaired by Lord Cross.68 The members were divided as the Majority report continued to support the pupil-teacher system, but the Minority report was ‘severely critical of it’.69 The critics of the pupilteacher centres supported the idea of training colleges, apparently seeing these as providing the possibility of more ‘cultured’ teachers, rather than teaching ‘hacks’.70 It was suggested that training should be extended to a third year, or even longer: We think that there is much to be said for a more extended course of training. As is the master, such is the school, and our elementary teacher would be very different if their training were more thorough, and extended over a longer period, for it is not more knowledge that they need, but more penetration of their minds by that knowledge. In all good education, time is an essential element, and the same knowledge if learnt slowly is generally worth far more than if learnt quickly. Moreover, it would kindle a new spirit in the teacher if the history of education were more studied than it is; the teachers of the present day do not know enough of what has been done by the great teachers of past times, and they would learn much of the science of their profession by a study of its history.71 In advising a more extended programme for teachers, the Cross Report suggests that teaching could be considered a more rigorous academic discipline. The Cross Report did not, however, think it appropriate that the culture of elementary teachers should become overly elevated: It has been suggested that if students were allowed a third year of training, to be spent at Oxford or Cambridge, the benefit would be

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considerable in completing their equipment for the best class of service in their profession. To any such suggestion the objections seem to us, under existing circumstances, to be very great… Such students would be unsettled and unfitted, rather than prepared for their work as public elementary teachers, and this proposal therefore seems to us to be inapplicable to those who are to become teachers in elementary schools. We are, on the whole, of opinion that an additional year of training would be a great advantage for some students, and only hesitate to recommend it from doubt whether it is as yet feasible. But, at any rate, we think that picked students from training colleges might even now with advantage be grouped at convenient centres, for a third year’s course of instruction.72 Some critics of the Oxbridge association feared that the cultural gains that these students would acquire at the university would overqualify them for elementary teaching. A three-year training course was originally provided for by the rules of the Education Department, but so few students were found able or willing to prolong their college life, for whom, nevertheless, extra teaching staff had to be provided, that training was limited to two years. Overall the Cross Commission posed a number of ideas which would open educational opportunities for a larger variety of people. They advised that women should be admitted as inspectors of elementary schoolteachers, and that liberal curricula of science and technical instruc-tion should be introduced and funded. They suggested that children should not be allowed to leave school until the age of 14. Its criticism of ‘payment by results’ would eventually lead to the abolition of this system. Evening schools were also supported which allowed for those older students until the age of 21 to gain the literacy and numeracy skills that they lacked. The Cross Commission laid the foundation of policies upon which a universal compulsory free education could be built and offered to British citizens. As we have seen, the training of teachers for secondary schools developed later than in the field of elementary education. Sir James KayShuttleworth, who had done much to foster the training of elementary teachers, was once more in the vanguard of those pushing for some provision for the training of secondary teachers. In 1875 he called a conference in his own London home for heads of public schools, principals of metropolitan training colleges and some inspectors. In 1877 memorials were sent to influential members of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge asking for their involvement. A scheme was put before Oxford Hebdomadal council in April 1878 suggesting the institution of a training department under a professor or lecturer. An Oxford committee was set up to consider the matter but when its report was presented it lost by a small majority. By contrast, Cambridge responded in 1879 by

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establishing the Teachers’ Training Syndicate, under the secretaryship of Oscar Browning to conduct examinations for student-teachers all over the country to train a professional corps of teachers. Many of the people involved in the Syndicate would later encourage the founding of training colleges in Cambridge. In 1894, the Bryce Commission questioned the efficiency of the Education Department and suggested instituting a Minister of Education. As a central authority for education reporting to Parliament, the appointment of the Minister would make it plain that elementary education could not be dealt with separately from secondary education.73 However, two decades later, Mr (later Sir) Robert Morant, after studying the Cross Report and Bryce Report as well as reviewing foreign educational systems, insisted that the bureaucracy of the British system needed to be reorganized. In 1902, he proposed a bill that created local education authorities delegated to co-ordinate elementary and higher education, or what was described at the time as ‘the ladder from the elementary school to the university’.74 Scholarships were set up for promising elementary students and pupils in denominational schools, who were ensured an education comparable to that provided by local authority schools. Moreover, provisions were made for moderately priced county secondary schools which more parents could afford. The Balfour-Morant bill also made important developments in evening and technical schools. Eventually it replaced the pupil-teacher system with certificated teachers from teacher training colleges.75 This Act also designates an end to the educational history that is relevant to the story we want to tell about the men’s and women’s training colleges at Cambridge. By this time both colleges had become firmly established and had made an impact upon the educational life at the university. NOTES 1. In particular, focusing on policy-making at parliamentary level, leaves out women’s contributions as they were disenfranchised. Mary Hilton and Pam Hirsch (eds), Practical Visionaries: Women, Education and Social Progress 1790–1930 (Harlow, Pearson Education, 2000) is one recent attempt to write the women’s leadership roles as educationists back into the story. 2. See Mark McBeth’s critique in ‘Virginia’s Poppycock: Revising Oscar Browning’, an unpublished paper given at the conference Inroads and Outposts, At Home & Abroad in the Empire: British Women in the Thirties (15 September 2000) City University of New York Graduate Center, NYC. 3. He was, however, decorated by the French government for his work in education, named Officier de l’Instruction Publique and Officier de l’Académie Française. 4. For example, by reporting to Royal Commissions, by serving on them and by serving at local government level on Education Boards. See Jane Martin, Women and the Politics of Schooling in Victorian and Edwardian England (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1999).

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5. Hilton and Hirsch (eds), Practical Visionaries; Joyce Goodman and Sylvia Harrop (eds), Women, Educational Policy-Making and Administration in England: Authoritative Women Since 1880 (London, Routledge, 2000). 6. Margaret Bottrall, Hughes Hall 1885–1985 (Cambridge, Rutherford Publications, 1985), p. 10. 7. J.Marcus, Virginia Woolf, Cambridge and a Room of One’s Own: ‘The Proper Upkeep of Names’ (London, Cecil Woolf, 1996), p.8. 8. ‘Lancaster’s Improvements in Education’, Edinburgh Review 11 (October 1807), p. 71. The Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802 by Sydney Smith and Brougham, as a Whig quarterly. It set the standard for much of the serious periodical journalism of the nineteenth century. It had circulation figures of about 60,000. See Alan Bell, Sydney Smith: A Biography (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 36–7. 9. ‘Education of the Poor’, Edinburgh Review 17 (November 1810), p. 59. 10. He was founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) which issued sixpenny fortnightly numbers on the sciences and the useful arts. They also issued the Penny Magazine and Penny Encyclopedia, A committee checked the material to screen out doctrinal religious matter. They were designed as ‘elementary’ texts, so that they could be understood by all classes of the community, especially people who could not ‘avail themselves of experienced teachers’. Brougham assisted in founding Mechanics’ Institutes. SDUK publications went into the Mechanics’ Institutes where they could be read by many working people. He also founded the Infant School Society which studied and copied Robert Owen’s experimental infant school for children too young to go into factories at New Lanark. Owen was a millowner who established a school which benefited himself as well as his workers. It kept the children safe while their mothers worked and thus helped to keep a stable workforce. Not surprisingly, there was some overlap between the members of the Infant Society and the members of the Abolition of Slavery Association. See W.B.C. Stewart and W.P.McCann, The Educational Innovators 1750–1880 (London, Macmillan, 1967), chapter 4. And Pam Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: Feminist, Artist and Rebel (London, Chatto & Windus, 1998), pp. 6–7. 11. Brougham Report 1816, p. 498. 12. Probably the most famous literary example of this form of teaching is given in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854); the teacher is satirically named ‘Mr M’ Choakumchild’. See also Mary Sturt, The Education of the People: A History of Primary Education in England and Wales in the Nineteenth Century (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967). 13. Edinburgh Review 1807, Vol. 11, p. 65. 14. Edinburgh Review 1807, Vol. 11, p. 66. 15. Brougham Report 1816, p. 498. 16. Those who were enfranchised for the first time in 1832 were overwhelmingly small property owners; about one in five adult men were allowed to vote in England and Wales compared with just one in ten before. Working-class men did not get the vote until the Second Reform Act, so largely had to rely on

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17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

their ‘masters’ to push for educational initiatives on their behalf. Women did not get the vote until the twentieth century. B.Simon, Studies in the History of Education (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1960), p. 164. S.J.Curtis, History of Education in Great Britain (London, University Tutorial Press, 1967), p. 230. Only the model schools of the National Society and the British and Foreign School Society existed for training. Lord Brougham advocated for other training schools to be built across the country in major cities. The £10,000 grant actually forced the Societies to raise further sums through subscriptions so that these projects could be realized. H.C.Dent, The Educational System of England and Wales (London, University of London Press, 1971), p. 20. Sir Llewellyn Woodward, The Age of Reform (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 151. Lord Ashley, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury (1801–85). In terms of education, Shaftesbury supported social reform and was chairman of the Ragged School Union for 39 years. Curtis, History of Education, p. 229. The Act distinguished between ‘young persons’ between 13 and 18 years of age, who should not work more than 69 hours a week; and those under 9, who were not to be employed. This Act allowed children up to the age of 9 to attend day schools, if their parents so desired, and those aged between 9 and 13 were obliged to attend two hours every week. Their schooling was documented and proof had to be submitted weekly to their employers before they could be hired. Four salaried inspectors were made responsible to monitor the schools and assure that these laws were being enforced. Woodward, The Age of Reform, p. 273 n. 1. Sir James Graham (1792–1861) Home Secretary from 1841–46. Curtis, History of Education, p. 240. Ibid., pp. 240–1. Graham suggested amendments as a negotiation to both the Anglicans and the Nonconformists but neither side was willing to concede. In response dissenters opened up schools independent of state aid, including a teacher training college at Homerton, London in 1846. This college moved to Cambridge in 1894 and was destined to converge with the Faculty of Education of the University of Cambridge in 2001. Curtis, History of Education, p. 241. Ibid., p. 248. Richard Aldrich and Peter Gordon (eds), Dictionary of British Educationists (London, Woburn Press, 1989), p. 138. Kay-Shuttleworth (1804–77) Pioneer of English popular education. Kay-Shuttleworth’s experience as a physician of the poor in Manchester heavily influenced his opinion on social issues; he felt that education could help the poverty-stricken out of their squalor. Appointed the first Secretary of the new Committee of the Privy Council on Education (1839–49). In 1839–40 the training college at Battersea opened for elementary schoolteachers and, although it failed financially, became the model for training colleges of its day.

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28. R.J.W.Selleck, The New Education: The English Background 1870–1914 (London, Pitman, 1978), p. 13. 29. See Curtis, History of Education, pp. 242–3. During their apprenticeship pupilteachers received an annual salary beginning at £10 and accruing to £20. After finishing their apprenticeship they went up for the Queen’s Scholarship Examination and if they passed their £20 or £25 exhibition paid for their training college. Those who passed the three-year training school began their educational careers and were to receive proficiency grants as well as old-age pensions for those in 15 years of service. 30. See Wendy Robinson, ‘Women and Pupil-Teacher Centres 1880–1914’ in Goodman and Harrop (eds), Women, Educational Policy-Making, pp. 99– 115. 31. R.Johnson, ‘Educational Policy and Social Control in Early Victorian England’, Past and Present 49 (1970), pp. 96–119. 32. Selleck, The New Education, p. 13. 33. Chaired by Henry Pelham Fiennes Pelham Clinton, 5th Duke of Newcastle (1811–64), MP for South Notts (1832–46) and Falkirk Burghs from 1846 until he succeeded to the Dukedom in 1851. 34. Quoted in J.Stuart Maclure (ed.), Educational Documents: England and Wales 1816–1963 (London, Chapman & Hall, 1965), p. 70; Curtis, History of Education, p. 249. 35. Newcastle Report, chapter 2, pp. 168–9. Lowe rejected its major conclusion that county boards (local authority) should be established for elementary education. 36. Simon, A Life in Education, p. 349. 37. Robert Lowe, 1st Viscount Sherbrooke (1811–92), lawyer and politician, who seems to have been the Chris Woodhead (Chief Inspector of Schools) of his day. ‘An albino, with very poor eyesight, Lowe was a combative figure, a master of epigram and sarcasm.’ See Aldrich and Gordon (eds), Dictionary of British Educationists, pp. 152–3. Indeed it all curiously foreshadows New Labour’s educational policy. 38. Previously government grant had met 80 per cent plus of the expenses of colleges; under the new regime the grant could not exceed 75 per cent and several colleges were forced to close. 39. J.Kay-Shuttleworth, Memorandum on Popular Education (London, Woburn Press, 1969), pp. 29–30. 40. At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, parallel psychological conditions have occurred for teachers under similar administrative and governmental policy making both in Britain and the United States. 41. See for example George Eliot’s fictive account of Tom Tulliver’s severely classical (and unsuitable) education in The Mill on the Floss (1860). 42. François Crouzet, The Victorian Economy trans. by Anthony Forster (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 417. 43. Dissenters, who could not be awarded degrees from Oxbridge, were major creators of wealth in the UK at this time and the dissenting academies they

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44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

founded, e.g. Warrington, were forged on a model more appropriate to boys who would enter the industrial world. Schoolmasters and their assistants received spectacularly bad press in the late 1830s and 1840s, not least in Charles Dickens’ horrific satire of Squeers in Nicholas Nickelby, published in 1838. For example, the Home and Colonial Institute ran some training courses for women lasting several months. Queen’s College founded in 1848 for Anglicans, and Bedford College founded in 1849 for Nonconformists established more thorough-going training for governesses and teachers. See Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, p. 39–40. In 1850, she founded the North London Collegiate School for Girls, Camden Street, London and subsequently a sister establishment for less well-off girls, the Camden School for Girls. See Chapter 7. Buss was as concerned with the training of teachers as he; indeed, when Payne organized a series of lectures in 1872 ‘On the Theory and Practice of Education’ the course was advertised as ‘to be given in connection with the North London Collegiate and Camden School for Girls’, and many of the lectures were in her schools. Wendy Robinson’s chapter ‘Sarah Jane Bannister and Teacher Training in Transition 1870–1918’ in Practical Visionaries examines teacher training for women in the transitional stage from 1870 to 1918. Following the 1902 Act, which encouraged the rise of state-aided secondary schools, the pupil-teacher centres became less popular. Increasingly, a secondary pupil intending to teach could stay on at school until the age of 16 or 17, after which a year could be spent as a student-teacher before going on to training college. After 1907 bursaries were offered to children staying on at school in order to become teachers later. This later start to vocational training was more acceptable to middle-class parents than apprenticeship at 13 (tied in their minds to a working-class model). By 1914 the pupil-teacher system had been almost totally replaced by new teacher training colleges. The ‘Nine’ Schools in this group were: Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, St Paul’s, Merchant Taylors’, Harrow, Rugby and Shrewsbury. See Richard Aldrich, School and Society in Victorian Britain: Joseph Payne and the New World of Education (Epping, College of Preceptors, 1995), pp. 96–7. Aldrich, School and Society, p. 131. R.W.Rich, The Training of Teachers in England and Wales During the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1933), p. 250. Simon, A Life in Education, p. 320. Ibid.; Report of Schools Inquiry Commission Vol. 1, 139. A useful account of the expansion of the ‘middling classes’ is found in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London, Hutchinson, 1987). Simon, Studies in the History of Education, pp. 323–4.

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58. As Gillian Sutherland’s analysis of nineteenth-century education has shown us, a class of students correlated more strongly with socio-economic class rather than by the age of students (as structured today). ‘Education was then stratified not in terms of age but of class…The categories familiar to the nineteenth century were ‘elementary’, ‘secondary’ and ‘higher’…Elementary education was that provided for the labouring poor. Elementary schools could and did include children as old as fourteen. The teaching provided in Mechanics’ Institutes and night schools for adult members of the working classes was also deemed elementary and could earn grants under the government’s Elementary Education Code until 1893. Secondary schools were those provided for the middle classes and could and did take children of all ages from 7 to 20. From such schools a handful of children might go on to the higher education of the universities. Gillian Sutherland, The Movement for the Higher Education of Women: Its Social and Intellectual Contexts in England, c. 1840–80’ in P.J. Waller (ed.), Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1987). 59. W.E.Forster (1818–86) was son-in-law of Dr Thomas Arnold (headmaster of Rugby school) and brother-in-law of Matthew Arnold, school inspector and poet. 60. Curtis, History of Education, p. 255. 61. For example, he knew Robert Owen, F.D.Maurice (founder of the Working Men’s College and Queen’s College, both in London), and in 1850, he married the eldest daughter of Thomas Arnold, reforming headmaster of Rugby. 62. Curtis, History of Education, p. 277; Verbatim Report of the Debate in Parliament during the Progress of the Elementary Education Bill, p. 42. 63. Jane Martin’s book, Women and the Politics of Schooling discusses the women who seized this new public service role. Alice Westlake, for example, served on the London School Board, and was a strong supporter of the Cambridge Training College for Women. 64. Maclure, Educational Documents, p. 98. 65. See Rich, The Training of Teachers in England and Wales, 2nd edn, chapter 7 for a useful discussion of its effects. 66. Sturt, The Education of the People, p. 341; Curtis, History of Education, p. 307. 67. Lord Sandon’s Act of 1876 raised penalties against parents who did not see that their children received adequate instruction in basic literacy and numeracy. Also employ ers could not hire children under 10 and those between 10 and 14 were required to attend school half-time. Mr Mundella’s Act in 1880 finally settled the question of compulsion when School Boards were mandated to frame by-laws concerning attendance. And in 1891 parents could demand a free education for their children, although school fees were not completely abolished until 1918. 68. Richard Assheton, 1st Viscount Cross (1823–1914) educated at Rugby under Thomas Arnold, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Home Secretary from

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69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74. 75.

1874–80 and 1885–86. Before he was raised to the peerage in 1886, he was a prominent Lancashire member of the House of Commons. Elizabeth Edwards, Women in Teacher Training Colleges, 1900—1960: A Culture of Femininity (London and New York, Routledge, 2001), p. 6. Frances Widdowson’s dissertation, Going Up Into the Next Class: Women and Elementary Teacher Training 1840–1914 (London, Women’s Research and Resources Centre Publications, 1980) points out that the long training offered the pupil-teacher a limited opportunity to move into the lowermiddle-class. This opportunity for social mobility attracted intelligent working-class girls, and, by 1914, nearly 75 per cent of all elementary schoolteachers in England and Wales were women. Cross Report, part 3, chapter 5, pp. 87–8. Ibid., part 3, chapter 6, p. 97. The minister would be assisted by a permanent secretary and advised by an Education Council, comprised of 12 members, one-third of whom were chosen by the Crown, one-third by the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Victoria and London and the rest by experienced educationists. A six-year term would be designated and arrangements made so full councils could not retire on the same year. With the Board of Education Act of 1899, this central authority was created to supervise the educational affairs in England and Wales. This central authority assured that the national education system could remain intact with less (although not complete lack of) interference from political initiatives. Curtis, History of Education, p. 319. The 1902 Act has sharply divided historians of education. Left-wing historians, including Brian Simon, regard the 1902 Act as a wrong turning that effectively reinforced the social divisions between elementary and secondary education. See R. Aldrich (ed.), A Century of Education (London and New York, Routledge/Falmer, 2002), p. 10. Curtis, on the other hand, regards it favourably as helping to establish a unified system of primary and secondary education, which provided ‘a new chapter in the history of English Education’, p. 319.

OSCAR BROWNING Mark McBeth

1 A FORMAL INTRODUCTION TO MR OSCAR BROWNING

In June 1923, Oscar Browning sent his nephew, H.E.Wortham, a letter ‘on a most important matter’ for which he entreated his ‘earnest attention’. Lord Laytmer, Browning’s lifelong friend, as well as his executor and legatee, had just died and Browning informed his nephew that Lord Laytmer had his personal papers because ‘he wished to write my life a duty which I hope you will now undertake…as always been a subject of controversy which is now as fervent as ever, and the truth ought to be told, which cannot be till after my death.’1 Oscar Browning was born on 17 January 1837, in what he describes as ‘one of the blackest fogs ever known in London’.2 Because of the inclement weather the attending physician and nurse arrived late and complications with the delivery arose. The sole survivor of a twin birth, Browning relates the nearly mythical story of his arrival after the announcement of his brother’s stillborn death, ‘When I appeared on the scene some time later the doctor was about to treat me in the same manner. But the nurse, who was then present, cried, “That child is not dead, give it to me,” and with a hearty blow she made me squeal….’ The two significant details of his birth —the doctor’s inattentive neglect and the inscrutability caused by the fog— became consistent themes to Browning’s character: he often felt that he was overlooked and he sensed that the events of his lifetime—a ‘subject of controversy’—should be made clear. His career as an educationist long over, and his personal documents stored in his deceased friend’s bank, Browning feared that his life, work and accomplishments would be forgotten. He appealed to his nephew not to allow his memory to disintegrate into dust on a London vault shelf. Not being an inconspicuous character, the stories and legends about Oscar Browning have grown in much the same way that the man’s waistline accrued to enormous proportions throughout his life. Often the narratives are inflated and confusing if not downright contradictory. Attempts to discern who Oscar Browning was remain equivocal. The ‘truth [that] ought to be told’ about this corpulent and contentious figure could never be easy to find for biographers. When writing his 1983 biography of Browning, lan Anstruther commented:

A FORMAL INTRODUCTION 3

The complexity of Browning’s character seems to be just as difficult to understand today as it was a century ago to those who knew him. He was blessed with talents of a high order—intelligence, charm, wit, stamina, a gift for friendship and a genuine love of youth—which ought to have given him real success in his chosen profession of teaching. At the same time he was cursed with equal and opposite defects—conceit, sloth, narrowness, insensitivity, a genius of upsetting people and an unpleasant homosexual appetite. Over and over again these got him into trouble and stopped him achieving the prizes his talents deserved. The needle on the balance swings back and forward violently between good and bad, and the problem for the biographer which these contradictions pose is formidable.3 Like many of the writers who have described Browning’s life, Anstruther vacillates between flattery and critique. If his writing is a barometer of how Browning’s flamboyant character has been perceived, then we can see how unstably and unpredictably his life could be recorded.4 For example, A.C. Benson, a fellow master of Browning’s at Eton College, portrayed him as ‘very bleary-eyed, and fearfully tubby’. During a Browning dinner party, Benson in a fit of boredom once counted his elderly host’s use of ‘I’, reaching a count of 1,260.5 In the following scene, Benson illustrated his colleague’s self-indulgent manner, writing: O.B. drifted slowly up, like a porpoise and talked dreamily about himself and how bored he was in the evenings—and (a wicked lie) how he played piano duets with a great pianist now at Cambridge. O.B. is an execrable performer, how he bangs a few notes of a piece and those wrong. Yet the man has genius somehow about him; and a warm heart, though overlaid with egoism.6 As both Benson and Anstruther reveal in their descriptions of this crooning, attention-grabbing oddball, it was impossible to be unfazed by Browning. People who met the man often remained torn between their impressions of the gluttonous, egotistical lecher who irritated them, and the warm, intelligent gentleman who intrigued and charmed them. Taking a more hostile stance, Virginia Woolf represented Browning in A Room of One’s Own as a leading perpetrator in the ‘struggle with fathers’. She cheekily introduced ‘Mr. Browning’ as ‘a great figure’, and referred to him as an example of the ‘very low opinions’ which men hold of women. In her speech to the students at Girton and Newnham in 1928, she alerted them to the opposing forces they faced as aspiring women scholars. During that speech, she began her character critique of Browning: I will quote, however, Mr. Oscar Browning, because Mr. Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at one time, and used to

4 OSCAR BROWNING

examine the students at Girton and Newnham. Mr. Oscar Browning was wont to declare ‘that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man’. After saying that Mr. Browning went back to his rooms—and it is this sequel that endears him and makes him a human figure of some bulk and majesty – he went back to his rooms and found a stable-boy lying on the sofa—‘a mere skeleton, his cheeks were cavernous and sallow, his teeth were black, and he did not appear to have the full use of his limbs… “That’s Arthur” [said Mr. Browning]. “He’s a dear boy really and most high-minded.”’ The two pictures always seem to me to complete each other. And happily in this age of biography the two pictures often do complete each other, so that we are able to interpret the opinions of great men not only by what they say, but by what they do.7 Woolf ’s ‘two pictures’ of Browning—his crass, inexcusable remark, coupled with the emaciated boy-child lounged in his parlour—illustrated him as a misogynist patriarch, yet one who was diacritically marked by his homosexual desire. Browning becomes in this version, not only a womanhater, but also a predatory paedophile. For Woolf, as well as postWoolfian feminist critics, Browning was not so much represented as an (albeit faulty) individual, but collapsed into an all-encompassing depiction of masculinist power and oppression.8 Woolf ‘s misleading portrait of Browning attacked him morally, using his homosexuality as a rhetorical device to convince her audience of his depravity. But she reveals only half the story and, in the end, what does Browning’s sexuality have to do with his role in women’s education? However unsavoury his behaviour may have been, how does it mitigate against women’s learning? Woolf needed to underscore his ostensible sexual activities to bolster her argument and to persuade her readership of Browning’s sordid character. Hers was an ideological vendetta against Browning. Woolf wrote, ‘Let us suppose that a father from the highest motives did not wish his daughter to leave home and become writer, painter, or scholar. “See what Mr. Oscar Browning says,” he would say….’9 She repeatedly evoked Browning’s name in a litany of anti-feminist claims; but how justifiable are her accusations? She had obviously read Wortham’s biography of his uncle and drew many of her argumentative sources from it.10 Yet Woolf ‘s rage seems somehow more personally directed at Browning rather than the patriarchal system in which he allegedly participated. One must question why Browning, specifically, provoked so much antipathy in Woolf. Did her father, Leslie Stephen, evoke Browning when once Virginia requested schooling and he refused her? She could have directly lambasted her father or chosen the many Oxbridge men whom she knew to fulfil the patriarchal roles needed to prove her point. Why Oscar Browning?11

A FORMAL INTRODUCTION 5

Woolf does not seem to grasp Browning’s own marginalized position within the Oxbridge milieu. He was an outspoken Fellow at King’s College and wielded a certain amount of influence, but he gained the respect neither of his university colleagues nor did he rise to any esteemed position within the university. Although a prolific writer of historical works, most of his colleagues considered Browning a sloppy scholar of history (for the most part true) and the more informed and better written scholarship he did on the history of pedagogy was not at Cambridge a respected subject; writing about teaching was not considered viable academic work by his more traditional peers. On a number of occasions at Cambridge, Browning was overlooked for high status positions. Perhaps the most disappointing rejection occurred in January 1895, when he applied for the post of Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. Browning had directly and forthrightly contacted Lord Rosebery, the Prime Minister, to request the position. Lord Rosebery, however, chose Lord Acton, a colleague whom Browning admired and, subsequently, congratulated graciously when he took the position. Still Browning could not contain his disappointment and blamed jealous colleagues and unseen enemies for conspiring against him. The satiric journal Punch lampooned Browning’s missed appointment in verse, writing: The History Professorship— Who’ll from the PREMIER get the post? Here’s Mr. OSCAR BROWNING, one Whose name is chosen from the host. But should Lord R. o’erlook his claim. Oh! will O.B. be wildly riled, In fact, will OSCAR BROWNING then Develop into OSCAR WILDE?12 The writers of Punch publicly mocked Browning’s failures as well as alluded to the reasons for his rejection, namely his sexual proclivities (not to mention the escapades of other characters in the verse). This satiric verse suggestively underscored events that otherwise could not say their name.13 Woolf judges Browning on selective interpretations of biographical sources as well as Bloomsbury hearsay, rather than on the facts of Browning’s daily work at Cambridge. She ‘knew’ him only from secondhand knowledge and, precisely because she did not have access to the archives, library records and letters that were available to male scholars, her depiction of this admittedly brash and contentious personality remains a one-dimensional and uninformed picture of someone who was much more complex.14 The sources that might have dissuaded Woolf from drawing a caricature of a villainous Browning are the letters, accounts and records that were written during Browning’s teaching career.

6 OSCAR BROWNING

Endless letters from colleagues and students thanked him for his attention to their scholastic endeavours. Student accounts of their tutor’s unconditional support remain testimonials to Browning’s efforts to teach all of his students. And journals and ledgers from his student debate societies leave evidence that Browning was a much more liberal and progressive man than his detractors claim. Archival materials, which I present below, debunk the feminist myth that Browning disparaged women’s educational benefits as well as being antagonistic to women’s political issues. After years working within the homosocial environments at Eton and King’s, Browning’s teaching abilities and instincts naturally drew him to teaching young men; however, in considering Browning’s supposed hostility to women students, one should not discount the women he taught in University Extension courses, the university classrooms he opened to women when other lecturers refused, the letters of support he wrote for women studying at Miss Hughes’ college, the efforts he made to aid women’s education at Cambridge, and the thankful recognition he received from its proponents.15 If his sometimes knee-jerk remarks indicated his discomfort in women’s company rather than antagonism towards women’s education, his consistent actions in helping his fellow educators in the advancement of their education should be regarded as considerably more significant to his overall reputation. During his years at Eton, Browning was the Secretary for the Windsor and Eton Association for the Education of Women whose object was to ‘give a sound, practical education in the higher subjects to all classes of women. The instruction will be especially adapted to those who are finishing their School course, or who are preparing in any way for the profession of teaching.’16 Although Browning made disparaging remarks about the quality of women student’s scholarly work (no doubt spurred by a critical remark about his abilities as an examiner), he certainly was not an opponent of their educational advancement.17 Browning championed the education of all who had been made outsiders by antiquated educational systems, both at the secondary level and then later at the university level. The annals of his teaching career reveal an entirely new perspective to the already complex portrait of Oscar Browning. The stories from his students tend to show Browning’s more redeeming qualities. O.B., as they affectionately called him, was a devoted tutor to his students, and they often gave testimony to his dedication as well as his quirkiness. T.P. O’Connor, former student of Browning and later Member of Parliament, recounted a bicycling tour he had once taken with his tutor: He [O.B.] rode a tricycle and once, accompanying him on a bicycle with funereal pedallings, while he discoursed of Turkish baths and Grand Dukes, and Taormina and English history, I observed that he stuck fast in a muddy place, and prepared to dismount in order to

A FORMAL INTRODUCTION 7

shove him out of it. But he obligingly told me to do nothing of the kind, for some casual youth was on the path beside his enmired tricycle, to whom he said: ‘Charlie, old boy, give me a shove. Ha! Ha!’ ‘Charlie old boy’, with his face ashine with smiles, gave the required push, and O.B. rejoined me, as I swooped and swerved along the road in order to go very slowly. 18 As this student cycled round the chattering O.B., he absorbed the quirky, entertaining non-sequitors of his tutor and received an impromptu lesson on wheels. When Browning retold this same story of this summer excursion, he explained how they were retracing a Napoleonic trek through the Alps on the way to Venice. ‘From Trevico it was a short run to Mestre, where I put my tricycle in a gondola and was rowed to Venice.’19 In my version of this travelogue, I imagine the student smiling at the water’s edge as the struggling gondolier balances the roly-poly, huffing-puffing Browning and his three-wheeled vehicle on the slender, shaky vessel. Browning boasted, ‘I was certainly the first Englishman who crossed the Alps on a tricycle.’20 How this student, as well as his peers at Cambridge, must have enjoyed this eccentric tutor, who was always either in an uphill struggle or rocking the boat. This unorthodox tutor opened up his students’ worlds, to stimulate their curiosity and to provoke them constantly to re-evaluate how their learning could occur. O’Connor had preceded his bicycling story, by saying, ‘But who could resist this smiling, good-natured, exuberant man—interested in everybody and in everything, ready to pour forth his immense range of knowledge and to display his indefatigable good nature to everybody, Royalties included, and, as will presently be seen, not even serving boys excluded?’21 Browning was first and foremost a teacher to all whom he encountered. As whimsical as he may sound, Browning took his students’ education entirely seriously, but he did not believe that learning and pleasure need be mutually exclusive. If anything to Browning, pleasure and learning were synonymous and, if he could instil this ideal in his charges, they would only desire more knowledge and more enquiry. Browning once wrote: The mainspring of education is stimulus, the exciting of interest, but the necessary condition precedent of stimulus is discipline. The chief object of the training of a teacher is to secure discipline, discipline resting not on fear or the threat of punishment, but on kindly influence, which makes disorder impossible, because disorder would be the interruption of a genuine pleasure…the influence of the heart has taken the place of pompous pretence and of hard austerity, or of hectoring and bullying. The pupil does not fear, he likes and he sometimes loves.22

8 OSCAR BROWNING

Figure 1 The distinguished, albeit eccentric, Browning devoted his entire life to the education of young men, and to the advancement of liberal educational ideals, Although posthumously he is accused of a variety of personal defects, his students’ accounts depict a far more amiable and supportive portrait. Reproduced with kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge.

A FORMAL INTRODUCTION 9

Browning believed in educational tenets such as ‘discipline’, but he reconfigured how they were to be achieved by the teacher. According to him, in a classroom where there is an ‘influence of the heart’—where emotional need and intellectual rigour are both attended to—the students find a balance of hard work and enjoyment that perpetuates their desire to learn. This philosophy became a key element in the way he would instruct his students. His own background and style of instruction would become a model for the way he proposed teaching to be done. On his uncle’s teaching philosophy, Wortham reported that Browning’s ‘one working rule was that the stupid boy did not exist. If any seemed stupid, the fault lay in [the tutor] for not having found the exact spot in which their minds were assailable.’23 Browning came to the classroom with standards and expectations for his students, but he likewise knew that an instructor must be accountable for the knowledge, learning environment and exercises that would fulfil students’ learning needs. Browning’s student experiences and his subsequent role as teacher in the classroom influenced his student-centred pedagogical beliefs. Although raised in a privileged milieu and himself having attended the finest schools in England, Browning was not unfamiliar with the tribulations that students face even in the best schools. Regardless of his social status and the cultural capital his education afforded him, he never lost sight of the radically democratic view of education he envisioned for all of his students and how that could be best achieved. Browning wrote: The real advance in education lies in the reverent and loving watching of each human soul, the guarding it from all influences which may confine or distort its growth, and the surrounding it with all the food it asks for the support of its daily life, that by the gradual progress of individual development it may arrive at a mature character which will find the world in which it lives in accord and harmony with its aims and aspirations.24 Browning sees the project of education as more than disseminating facts; he recognizes it as the potential growth and improvement of individuals (and, as a result, possibly society). Likewise, Browning’s work in the classroom and in his later teacher training college shows us how a teacher can create productive learning situations within the confines of restrictive educational policies and educational administrations. Although forces within the colleges where he worked were not always conducive to his students’ learning needs, he found ways to resolve his students’ problems thus securing their successes. His Bildungsromans if you will—allows us to see the influences and experiences which would inform his eventual teacher training initiatives. Moreover, Oscar Browning’s life in British education, both as student and teacher, may better enable teachers to reflect upon their own perspectives of education, specifically issues of pedagogy.

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NOTES 1. H.E.Wortham, Oscar Browning (London, Constable, 1927), p. 1. 2. Oscar Browning, Memories of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge and Elsewhere (London, John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York, John Lane Company, 1910), p. 3. 3. lan Anstruther, Oscar Browning: A Biography (London, John Murray, 1983), p. 189. 4. Browning proclaimed his descendants to be one of the oldest families in England, coming originally from Friesland and then settling in Gloucestershire in the fourteenth century. His father, a London spirits merchant, owned a distillery in Smithfield Market and Browning recalled wandering as a child through the huge vats. His family lived in a home by London’s elegant Regent Park but, soon after his birth, the family (arguably because of financial difficulties) moved to Windsor where Browning remembered the pageantry of the Queen’s daily cavalcade passing his windows. His taste for all things regal was no doubt nurtured in these early memories and would contribute to his later reputation as a snob and aristocratic namedropper. Little did he then know that a major part of his life would be spent a short distance across the River Thames in the cobblestoned thorough-fares of Eton. Browning claimed that, as a scholar, he ‘had always been destined for Eton [College]’ where his brothers had also attended, and in total as both student and then tutor, he would spend 20 years within its venerated halls. 5. David Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise: A.C.Benson, The Diarist (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 135. 6. Ibid., p. 120. 7. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957), P. 55. 8. For further critiques of Browning’s alleged misogynist behaviour see Jane Marcus, ‘Taking the Bull by the Udders: Sexual Difference in Virgina Woolf— A Conspiracy Theory’ in Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington &. Indianapolis, IN, Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 136– 62 and her book review of Ian Anstruther’s biography Victorian Studies 28:3 (Spring 1985), pp. 556–8. 9. Woolf, A Room, p. 55. 10. Woolf ‘s account of O.B. in A Room of One’s Own relied on two main sources: Browning’s Memories of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge and Elsewhere and the Browning biography by his nephew, H.E.Wortham, published a year previous to Woolf’s feminist lecture. Perhaps her numerous friends and acquaintances from Cambridge suggested she read about the infamous Cambridge character. At any given Stephen family reunion or Bloomsbury gathering, Woolf assuredly heard gossip about Browning. Her cousin J.K. Stephen and her friends E.M Forster and Lytton Strachey were all students who worked with Browning. J.K.Stephen had often lampooned his former tutor in the Cambridge undergraduate magazine Granta and, strangely enough, Browning enjoyed the attention, however disparaging.

A FORMAL INTRODUCTION 11

Well aware of her cousin’s severe opinions on women’s issues, Woolf no doubt associated J.K.Stephen’s previous mentor as a guilty party in the educational moulding of young patriarchs. From these biographical resources and the Cambridge lore of her intimate acquaintances, Woolf pieced together Browning’s persona, creating what I would call the stunt double and scapegoat for patriarchal hegemony. The Arthur’ story is borrowed from Wortham’s book but, in contrast to Woolf ’s narrative, Wortham distinguished O.B. as a rescuer of Arthur rather than his lecherous suitor. When creating her Browning narrative, Woolf decontextualized the story she quoted from Wortham. In the original story, he recounts: Oh…that’s Arthur… He’s been a stable boy at Chantilly and was shamefully misused. They starved him to get his weight down and then beat him because he lost his strength. Finally, they threw him out. I found him destitute in Paris, and the only thing I could do was to bring him back with me. He’s a dear boy really and most high-minded.

Obviously, O.B.’s initiative for helping this boy was his desire. But should that desire be cast as decisively villainous or altruistic? With the ‘Arthur’ story, it is easy to sexualize O.B.’s intentions because of the power relationships between Browning and Arthur. With heavy-handed rhetoric, Woolf construed this narrative, making Browning a Caligula approaching a chaise-bound nymph.

11. In lieu of the men in her immediate circle such as E.M Forster or Lytton Strachey, I would suggest that Woolf chose Browning because he was himself an easy target of patriarchal oppression. In the eyes of his conservative colleagues, the caroling, tricycling Fellow of King’s was a buffoonish eccentric. The ‘queer’ old O.B. could easily be put on the pillory block of Woolf ‘s rhetorical argument without raising too much opposition; Cambridge University history remembered Browning as an odd, cantankerous don and his contributions could be easily dismissed. Nonetheless, Browning signified for Woolf an iconic figure in Victorian Academia. He had, after all, acquired all the scholastic pomp and circumstance of Eton College and King’s College and, then, dutifully returned to become a member of their instructional staffs. According to her he was an eminent Victorian at Cambridge, and held a prominent position in nineteenth-century elite educational circles. He symbolized the privilege, power and British cultural capital for which those educational institutions stood and from which Woolf, like many women in England, had been excluded. 12. Punch 108 (2 February 1895), p. 60. We would like to thank Peter Raby for drawing our attention to this quotation. 13. During the summer of 1894, the Marquess of Queensberry had stepped up his public fury about the relationship between his son, Douglas and Oscar

12 OSCAR BROWNING

Wilde. The following October Queensberry’s first son, Viscount Drunlangrig, was killed in what was said to be a shooting accident. Unofficially, the death was rumoured to be a suicide relating to a blackmail scandal which would divulge an alleged relationship between Drumlangrig and Lord Rosebery, the Prime Minister. At a moment so steeped in tragedy and rife with intrigue, Lord Rosebery would hardly dare to appoint an ostentatious character like Browning to such a high-profile post. In short, Mr Oscar Browning’s uncertain reputation preceded him. Beyond Browning’s insecure standing as a scholar, Rosebery could not be implicated in the hotbed of homosexual circles —even if only by a circumstantial hiring at Cambridge. Mere guilt by association would deter him. Whatever power and influence Browning may have had at Cambridge was at best dubious, if not completely undermined, by the social context in which he was living. 14. Woolf ’s own biographer, Hermione Lee, reports that ‘Virginia Woolf spent most of her life saying that the idea of biography is—to use a word she liked —poppycock.’ (See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London, Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 4. In ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Woolf herself questioned, ‘[W] hy is it so difficult to give any account of the person to whom things happen? The person is evidently immensely complicated… people write what they call “lives” of other people; that is, they collect a number of events, and leave the person to whom it happened unknown.’ See Virginia Woolf, A Sketch of the Past’ in Mitchel A.Leaska (ed.), TheVirginia Woolf Reader (New York, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1984), p. 10. After what seems a firm conviction about the tenuous value of biography, one would assume that Woolf would be not only a cautious reader of personal profiles but, also, a wary author of them as well. Browning cannot be so easily placed into the patriarchal camp in which she has placed him; his ‘allegiance to fathers’ must be reviewed in a much more charged context than Woolf and her disciples have considered. 15. Accompanying the letters he received from Elizabeth Welsh, then Head of Girton College, a printed note stated: Dear Sir, As members of the Staff of Girton College and Newnham College we feel that we may claim to represent the past students, and we wish to express, in their name, our deep sense of gratitude to the Committee for promoting the admission of Women to Titles of Degrees. We recognize that they have given their time, their thoughts and their energies to a cause in which we are closely interested, and that they have made many sacrifices in supporting it. We owe much to the University, and our sense of the value of the ties which bind us to it has been deepened by the generous zeal which many of its members have shown for the highest educational interests of women.

This formal thank you note was signed by the leading women educators of his time, including Katharine Jex-Blake, Eleanor

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Sidgwick and Blanche Athena Clough (née Ann Jemima Clough). King’s College, Cambridge (OB Welsh). 16. ‘Windsor and Eton Association for the Education of Women’, King’s College, Cambridge (OB 3/7). This document further reads: ‘Effort for the Education of Women having been continued in Windsor during the last three years with great success, it has been thought desirable to attempt to establish the movement on a wider basis, and to make it more generally known.’ Members of the committee were: HRH Princess Christian, Hon. Mrs Wellesley, Hon. Mrs Ponsonby, Hon. Mrs Eykyn, Mrs Goodford, Mrs Ellison, Mrs Oliphant, Rev. the Vicar of Windsor, Oscar Browning, Esq. 17. Wortham states that Browning once said that the ‘impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man’ (Wortham, Browning, p. 187) Wortham’s account however is not congruent with the letters of support Browning wrote for women students whose papers he had marked with Firsts. Furthermore in a letter, Henry Sidgwick asked a casual favour of Browning, ‘Money-Coutts [later Lord Laytmer] signed the memorial last year in favour of Degrees to women, but this year has remained unresponsive to the appeals of the Committee. Could you write him a persuasive letter and get him to come up and vote on the 21st?’ (King’s College, Cambridge (OB Sidgwick)). This would be an odd and pointless request to someone antagonistic to women’s education, and Henry Sidgwick was too close a friend of Browning’s not to know his opinions. 18. Daily Telegraph 8 October 1923 (Obituaries) Educ Arch CUL. 19. Browning, Sixty Years, p. 305. 20. Ibid. 21. Daily Telegraph 8 October 1923 (Obituaries) Educ Arch CUL. 22. Oscar Browning, The Importance of Training Teachers’, a lecture delivered at the Summer Meeting, Cambridge, 3 August 1906. CUL Cam.d.906.13, pp. 2–3. 23. Wortham, Browning, p. 57. 24. Oscar Browning, ‘On Science Teaching in Schools’, Chemical News and Journal of Physical Science, 17 (22 May 1868), p. 243–4.

2 LEARNING YOUR LESSONS: IMPACT OF STUDENT LIFE ON HIS TEACHING

In 1910, Oscar Browning published Memories of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge and Elsewhere in which he offered his autobiographical account of a student’s life both at the secondary and university levels in nineteenth-century England. With his educational life—both as student and later as teacher—we may better envision the culture and classrooms in which Victorian students learned and their teachers taught. Furthermore, it is no coincidence that when Wortham’s biography of Browning was first published in 1927 it was entitled simply Oscar Browning, while its reprint in 1956 was called Victorian Eton and Cambridge —Being the Life and Times of Oscar Browning. Browning’s educational life gained greater meaning as it became historically more remote. Browning’s memoirs and subsequent biography are not only records of his own life but also exemplify the worlds of those two privileged educational institutions. In these accounts we can see how his student experiences of public school and university remained with him throughout his life as an educationist. He reflected upon his life at school to ameliorate his teaching skills and, as a consequence, he was able to enrich the learning experiences of his students. Later in life, Browning would reflect upon how his Eton schoolboy days affected his teaching, stating,‘[W]hen I was a house master… my principal desire was that every pupil of mine should have an experience as different as possible from what my own had been when dependent on the bounty of King Henry VI.’1 In this next section, I highlight Browning’s educational development, showing how his own experiences of schooling affected his teaching style and career. The young Browning attempted to enrol at Eton a number of times, but could not pass the oral entrance exam which was given on the cobblestones beneath the Clock Tower. Browning recollected: The examination was conducted by the Provosts of Eton and King’s, the Fellows of Eton, and two representatives of the Fellows of King’s called Posers, either because they posed you with questions you could not answer, or because they placed you in the list. I cannot remember how many years I tried and failed.2

LEARNING YOUR LESSONS 15

Feeling the pressure of examination, the young Browning, as any impressionable student might, despaired at his educational failure. The acceptance into the college and the high stakes it meant for any position of prominence within British society must have been palpably felt even by 9– 14-year-old boys who were eligible for entrance to Eton. At the hallowed entrance to Eton College, testing was literally and figuratively a gatekeeping device—a process of trying and failing that could induce self-doubt in even the best student. This rite of passage into Eton would be the first of many challenges that would enlighten Browning about how students learn to face failure and recover from its disappointments. After studying under the tutelage of his older brother who had previously attended Eton, Browning was eventually elected for college in the summer of 1850, but would begin in 1851 when a vacancy amongst the scholarships became open. At 14 years of age, the oldest that a student could be to enter Eton under its statutes, Browning began his emblematic educational career of nineteenth-century upper-middle-class boyhood. As a Colleger, Browning was chosen as a scholarship boy under royal foundation and one might guess that this would be the most fortunate opportunity in education. Of course, this funded position came with certain privileges, but as Browning illustrated it came with disadvantages as well. Considered England’s most elite public school, Eton was founded in 1440 by Henry VI to educate poor boys as clerics. By the time Browning arrived there in the mid-1800s, the school had survived numerous rises and declines in popularity, problems with its foundational support, and a lack of confidence in the education it was providing.3 Its history shows that even the most elite institutions struggle with issues of educational reputation. In his Memories of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge and Elsewhere, Oscar Browning explained the structure of the school. He wrote: When I went to Eton in 1851 the Eton Collegers consisted, as they still consist, of seventy boys living by themselves, to distinguish them from the rest of the school. They formed the nucleus of the school under the foundation of Henry VI; and to them the Oppidans, or town boys, came as an accretion, although they now form the larger part of the establishment. Eton College is one foundation with King’s College, Cambridge, when they numbered seventy members, partly Fellows and partly scholars, varying inversely with each other. It was a magnificent system for the endowment of research. An Eton Colleger went in due time to King’s, if there was a vacancy for him, and became a Fellow, took his degree without examination, and remained till the end of his days with increasing income and dignity unless he married or took a living.4

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In this passage, Browning colours the ancient school in rose-tinted hues and proclaims the advantages that existed in having the appanage between Eton and King’s. He would, however, reveal a darker side to the Eton portrait. Although an Eton education could open doors to British society, its initiation rites of entrance exams, learning expectations and living conditions could be a harrowing challenge. Browning wrote: The Collegers were supposed to be boarded and lodged gratuitously, but the food was so poor and the accommodation so insufficient that additional arrangements had to be made at the expense of the parents. The life in College was so coarse and brutal that, notwithstanding these advantages, parents would not send their sons there, and for many years it was not full. Before my time reforms had taken place. New buildings had been erected, a master resided in College to look after the boys… At the same time things were still very bad.5 Much of the mismanagement and financial problems were a result of the system by which college funds were raised. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, public figures had criticized the way the Provost and Fellows squandered funds that should have been reinvested for school maintenance and capital improvements.6 Instead of using funds to care properly for boys and the maintenance of buildings, monies often found themselves in the pockets of masters. Card elaborates: The consequences were that the Provost and Fellows were very rich, but that the College was not—indeed Fellows could argue that they sometimes bad to put back money to balance the College accounts. The College’s income, about £20,000, was a bigger endowment than most other schools’, and it did cover the board and lodgings of the seventy Scholars, the provision of services in the Chapel, and the maintenance of the College buildings. It did not, however, provide anything else towards the running of the School… Nor were funds available from the College to finance any desirable investment projects such as the building of new schoolrooms.7 The people who suffered most from this financial misappropriation were the students—especially the Collegers—who had to attend overcrowded classrooms and live in the poorly maintained buildings. Eton originally housed the Collegers in Long Chamber, a barrack-like dormitory notorious for its overcrowding and lack of adult supervision. Remembering his experience of Long Chamber, Edward Thring, the headmaster of Uppingham, stated,

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Cruel at times the suffering and wrong; wild the profligacy. For after eight o’clock at night no prying eye came near till the following morning; no one lived in the same building; cries of joy and pain were equally unheard; and, excepting a code of laws of their own, there was no help or redress for anyone.8 Ironically, the Collegers, or scholarship boys of Eton, could be considered the select group of the school; they were chosen by competitive competition and, by all indications, should have been treated as the crème de la crème. In contrast, they were for the most part neglected and left to their own devices. Although Long Chambers had been closed since 1840, when Browning arrived a decade later, Eton still lacked comfortable living conditions and the necessary attention of masters for the upbringing and safety of its students. Of Browning’s early impressions of Eton, Wortham reports: His earliest years at Eton were the most unhappy. He was delicate, small, ill-fitted for the life in College. Though a Colleger’s bills were very little less than an Oppidan’s, the Collegers were badly fed and their accommodation was exceedingly rough. The only apparatus for washing consisted of a number of enameled basins in a trough, at each end of which was a cold-water tap. The windows in the room were broken. The towels were deliberately drenched by the firstcomers. Oscar Browning, who had a Roman passion for the bath, used to recall how he had often been kicked at by his tutors for being a ‘dirty tug’, when the reason was merely due to the absence of the ordinary appliances of civilized life. At 7:30 they went into school, cold and unwashed.9 As a schoolboy in the 1850s, Browning wrote in his journal, ‘Bah, I hate Eton’, a sentiment that was justified by the poor treatment of Collegers.10 The young Browning’s negative reaction to Eton underscores the unhygienic and spartan conditions of a poorly maintained school, and illustrates how, during this period, boys suffered bitter conditions, while they were to be learning. Beyond the lodging, meal-times were likewise disdainful, especially for younger boys. Again referencing Browning’s private journals, Wortham explains: Breakfast was not till nine, and the famished boys were obliged to keep hunger at bay by buttered buns and coffee at Joe Brown’s. Even when nine o’clock came the smaller boys, as fags, had first to look after their masters. Since they had to be in school again at half-past nine, little enough time was given them to consume the bread-andbutter which constituted their meal. Dinner was at two…A whole

18 OSCAR BROWNING

sheep was provided daily for the Collegers’ dinner, a relic of the time when the College rents were paid in kind. When the turn of the younger boys came, the breast was the only portion of the animal left, and on this unattractive and innutritious fare they had to make their one square meal of the day. It was washed down with small beer, ‘often flavoured with salt by waggish bullies’.To add to the amenities of this dinner in Hall, there were not enough plates to go round and they had to struggle for knives, forks and glasses. It is not surprising that O.B. (then known as Bosque) used to get up from the table as hungry as when he sat down and, as he tells us, in a much worse temper. To the bad feeding at Eton he attributed his Napoleonic lack of inches.11 Rather than a royally endowed school, this educational situation sounds more like a Dickensian orphanage. It is hard to imagine the elite Etonian having to whimper for more gruel. If the value of education was espoused as imperative for these future leaders of the Empire, little thought was put into how the living conditions they endured affected their ability to learn. Those masters in charge did not seem to consider how hunger and physical discomfort would affect their students’ classroom performance. According to many who survived these unsavoury meals and unfavourable habitation, their quality of everyday living directly affected their learning. When officials for the 1861 royal investigation of public schools interviewed Browning, who was then a master at Eton, he recalled: When I was in college six years ago, the dinner was so badly served that I can quite believe that a delicate boy would not get enough to eat. Matters are now much improved, the head master or his deputy always dines in hall, and order is well preserved. I think that there is still much room for improvement; that more variety of food might be given, with the addition of a second course, and that this would require not so much an expenditure of money as care and supervision.12 Browning confirmed that improvements had been made at the college primarily because masters and tutors were more involved. The presence of the headmaster or his deputy ensured that boys would conduct themselves well at the table, and that the preparation of the food would be acceptable since they themselves would be eating it. Students were also expected to abide by certain dress codes which were anything but conducive to a student’s comfort or sense of dignity. In recording Browning’s early Eton experience, Anstruther explains: Small, shy and unathletic, he was not happy in his first years, the more so doubtless for being a ‘Tug’. This was the slang name given to Scholars who, under the Founder’s Statutes, were forced to wear a

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woollen gown, making them undesirably conspicuous and setting them apart as socially inferior.13 These tug gowns were still being used at Eton when Browning returned there to teach. In fact, while giving evidence to a Royal Commission in 1860 as an Eton master, Browning would suggest that the ‘tug’ gowns, which had placed him apart from his fellow students, be discontinued.14 Having experienced the adverse attention that the woollen shift brought him in his college days, Browning preferred a dress code that placed boys on equal footing, as well as other measures that would create a greater sense of camaraderie among his students. According to a historically accrued set of rules, the vestments, colours and hats that one wore at Eton could designate one’s rank in the college hierarchy. Students needed to understand the underwritten codes if they were to fit in and before they could proceed with the regular curriculum they had quite a few other lessons to learn.15 School customs that may have created a certain sense of bonding amongst a group of boys also stratified those young men into a certain rank and file. During Browning’s teaching career, as we will see, he worked diligently to create an environment in which students worked in a sense of collaboration rather than divisiveness. Another off-putting aspect of the public school system which Browning criticized was ‘fagging’. Fagging was a self-imposed supervisory system which students put in place because they were often left on their own recognizance by their masters. As a result younger, weaker boys were often subjected to the whims and bullying of older, stronger students.16 Under a more dictatorial fagmaster, a young boy’s time could be completely consumed by their orders to fetch beer and to warm toilet seats, thus leaving less time for the schoolwork for which they were enrolled at Eton. In less critical terms, authors describe this peer rule of order as a bothersome but fairly innocuous custom of public-school living, one which they claim could be ‘a useful, character-forming aspect to this system’.17 Some authorities believed that this system of control and discipline benefited Eton boys.18 If these boys were eventually to be placed in leadership positions in Britain and abroad in the colonies, fagging offered a taste-test of a social system in which subordinates learned their place in society. Arguably, the younger boys may have also yearned for the attentions of their older peers because they missed the intimacy of family and close friends and received no substitute from the masters around them. Yearning for the ties of family, they may have turned to their fagmasters regardless of how woefully their needs were met. In the place of an in loco parentis model, was a model of in loco fratellis. In this morass of educational chaos, Browning found salvation in his tutor, William Johnson Cory.19 In one of his early Eton diaries, Browning called the learning accommodations that Cory provided for him (and other students) ‘the paradise of my tutor’s room’.20 While most educational

20 OSCAR BROWNING

aspects of Eton were stunting students’ progress, Cory offered a needed refuge within the hardships of Eton. But what about this tutor set him apart as a beneficial force? Why did students, not just Browning, feel so attached to this tutor, whom Hollis, in his historical survey of Eton, calls the ‘most remarkable, the most influential and probably the best remembered Eton figure of those days’?21 Cory was an extraordinary presence in Browning’s educational life and it is impossible to understand Browning’s intellectual and pedagogical development without including a brief discussion of Cory’s influence. In 1845, William Johnson Cory was hired as an assistant master at Eton and became well known as the tutor who altered student-teacher relationships, instituting unorthodox teaching practices at a bastion of staid pedagogical tradition. His practices revitalized the classroom and students’ interests. Cory, however, was not so confident about his abilities to manage a classroom of boys, fearing that he would not be able to uphold discipline as needed. After much deliberation and advice from his family, he finally decided to accept a tutoring post at Eton. He wrote to his father, stating: I see clearly that I have no right to become one of Hawtrey’s assistants unless I resolve to do all I can for every pupil. I have not the least reason to suspect myself in the way of donnishness with pupils. I am rather afraid I should be too familiar in school, where one is among strangers who require something of that exercise of discipline which a regiment or a ship’s crew require.22 Ironically, his anxiety about his relationships with students, in this early letter, became his major contribution to education at Eton. It was the less formal interchange that be developed with students that changed how he would teach them. Part of his pedagogical aptitude, as Cory himself perceives it, was the ability in ‘gaining influence over the minds of people more ignorant’ than himself, and ‘being able to enter into other people’s interests’.23 Left as a testimony to his teaching legacy, Cory composed a guide to teaching in his personal journal, entitled ‘Hints for Eton Masters’. He wrote this teaching manual in 1862, and it was later published in 1898. It began, ‘If you see a boy with a long back lounging at dinner or at lessons, do not force him to sit up; but give him something to support his back.’24 At first glance, his opening would seem an almost cliched reference to the lounging student, but it is no mere coincidence that Cory framed his pedagogical advice with a metaphor about student ‘support’. His entire brochure and teacherly approach revolved around offering students the unconditional and unpunitive assistance they needed.25 Cory’s ways of interacting with students resisted the typical disciplinary roles that teachers were expected to assume with their charges. Hollis also

LEARNING YOUR LESSONS 21

acknowledges how Cory introduced an ethics of care: ‘The older genera- tion had thought that relations between masters and pupils neither could be nor should be other than predominantly disciplinary. Cory introduced almost a cult of friendship between master and boy.’26 Cory not only attended to the boys’ classroom needs but also to their emotional needs, which former students such as Browning had lamented having been ignored at Eton. But this was a role many masters were not prepared, or willing, to take in the classrooms nor in the lives of the boys outside their classroom. Cory was one master who thought the in loco parentis position was important to his students because it was a way to nurture a pupil’s development. Cory’s personal desires and professionalism, however, eventually became suspect. Hickson explains that the ‘source of his influence was ultimately the cause of his undoing—the intimate and impassioned rapport he had with his pupils’.27 Although it is never substantiated, Cory’s eventual dismissal from Eton was because of an ‘indiscreet letter’ to a student that was intercepted by the boy’s father and reported to the headmaster.28 In narrating Cory’s scandal, most authors insinuate deviousness and intrigue on his part. Hickson provides a more level-headed and, in many ways, more believable version in relation to Cory’s character: Legend has it that a father discovered an excessively passionate letter to his son [from Cory], but in the many letters that survive there is no evidence that Johnson ever attempted to seduce any of his protégés. A more plausible explanation for his resignation was that someone discovered a letter in which perhaps he had been too frank in his criticism of another tutor. In any event somehow his position was compromised and lacking allies in the staff room he was compelled to leave.29 If Hickson’s depiction is true, then Cory was guilty of comforting another teacher’s student who was less understanding of the student’s needs. He was pedagogically critical of his fellow teacher, no doubt advocating the student’s position. Cory, as a traitor to his fellow tutor, was expelled, swiftly and quietly. His belongings were removed within an evening. At Eton someone said, ‘One day he was with us—the next day he was not,’30 The story was hushed up, and William Johnson Cory was eliminated from Eton history. No physical trace of William Cory was left at Eton, but his pedagogical spirit lived on in the teachers who emulated him. Even as an octogenarian, Browning recollected in a letter to Sidney Colvin about his then-deceased mentor, ‘I went to Eton in 1851 at the age of fourteen and I was in the division of William Johnson, who was also my tutor, in my opinion the greatest genius who ever gave himself to the education of boys.’31 Oscar Browning’s good fortune in having been the student of William Johnson Cory was the first step in his pedagogical journey. Cory’s

22 OSCAR BROWNING

influence was to have a lasting effect upon Browning’s learning and subsequent teaching. As Christopher Morris reports in Kings College: A Short History, Browning ‘partly modeled himself on Johnson and thereby was to hand on Johnson’s torch to many later generations of Kingsmen’.32 It is easy to see how Cory influenced Browning as a student, and infused the young man with an everlasting model of good teaching. Browning finished at Eton, with a disappointing fourth place in examinations. Both he and his tutors no doubt had expected more of him in his final year at Eton, but, even his beloved tutor, Cory, criticized him for his complacency. Nevertheless, in July 1856, his gowns were ‘ripped’—an Eton tradition signifying a student’s completion. He was relieved to leave the college where he had made no great successes nor great failures and ready to begin his new life at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was offered one of the foundation’s guaranteed openings for Eton graduates. In this arrangement, he feared he was leaving Eton only to be among Etonians at university once again, risking the insularity that the Eton/King’s link could produce. He also feared that his social standing amongst his peers would remain the same. Anstruther writes, At King’s he was thought to be rather a prig—he was somewhat aloof and independent—but as all Kingsmen were Old Etonians, forming a select and exclusive group from which he always wished to escape, he did not expect to be very popular.’33 Browning was able to avoid the cliques engendered by the Eton/King’s connection, and his four years at King’s were more successful than his years at Eton. He became the President of the Cambridge Union, and was invited to be a member of the intellectual enclave of the Apostles’. His experiences and social encounters with the similarly spirited men he encountered at Trinity College would prove stronger than the intellectual stagnation which he.had feared. With his new acquaintances, he avoided what could have possibly been a hackneyed educational experience, and ‘he found men, particularly those who came from Trinity such as Henry Sidgwick and George Trevelyan, who made him feel he was likeable and normal, who thought him both amusing and intelligent’.34 Browning had found a community of peers who shared his interests and were to inspire his intellectual pursuits and revelled in his newfound intellectual enclave at Cambridge. He recollected: After all, the best education given at the University is that derived from fellow-students and not from books or lectures. It is the clash of mind upon mind, the free intercourse of young natures eager to know the truth about the world in which they have to live, and ardent to spend their lives in redressing wrong that gives its real value to an academical training. Instruction I received at King’s, education was given me at Trinity. Here I found a cultivated society, devoted to intellectual aims, respecting each other and themselves, courteous, affectionate, and dignified… I aimed at principles of action in life,

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which were hard to carry out in practice. In this respect King’s was a continuation of Eton, but at Trinity I met with friends who seemed to be living without effort the life which I had always desired to live, but had hitherto found impossible. I remember one evening in my first term passing under the clock-tower of Great St Mary’s when this feeling came upon me with overmastering force. I called out aloud, Then I am not wrong after all’, and often in the many years I have spent at Cambridge the recollection of this moment has come back to me, and I have known that it was an epoch in my life.35 In this passage, Browning revealed a new sense of self that he developed while at Cambridge, one inspired by the collaborative interaction of his peers. During his epiphany, Browning indicated a sensibility of how learning most productively occurs—‘the clash of mind upon mind, the free intercourse of young natures eager to know the truth about the world in which they have to live’.36 From his contact with like-minded peers who shared similar social perspectives, Browning was able to connect how his educational pursuits could have an impact on a broader social welfare. Amongst the closest friends he met at Eton was Trinity graduate, Henry Sidgwick, subsequently an educational reformer and supporter of women’s education at Cambridge; Sidgwick was one of the founders of Newnham College, the first women’s college established in Cambridge. Of his lifelong friend, Browning wrote: During the fifteen years that I spent as a master at Eton, he was my constant adviser and friend, visiting me at first every term and then at longer intervals…Afterwards, at Cambridge, I consulted him on every important matter, and never failed to follow his counsel. In pursuance of a solemn pledge made to him, I remained for eighteen years Principal of the University Training College. Friendships such as these are only met with at the University, and are the best products of those institutions.37 Sidgwick remained a friend and fellow educational reformer of Browning throughout their entire lives. He discovered at Cambridge a coterie which would support his intellectual pursuit and a scholarly space in which he could also thrive. He concluded his memories of Cambridge, saying: I am not sure whether such intimate, indeed such passionate relations exist nowadays between bodies of young men; they certainly do exist between individuals. I have taken pains to find out, and my conclusion, a doubtful one of course, is that the heart of the University does not now send out these companies of comradeship,

24 OSCAR BROWNING

bound by a sacred, inviolable and life-long tie, with the same regularity as was the case fifty years ago.38 The student life that Oscar Browning experienced during his years at Eton and King’s remained a constructive source when he became a teacher. Having been a recipient of one of England’s finest and most privileged educations while also enduring the tribulations of schooling, he developed a vision of how schooling should be approached. He clearly recognized how the scholarly cultures of Eton and King’s transformed his educational life in both harmful and beneficial ways and, throughout his teaching career, strove to create an educational ambiance in which he felt students would be inspired and, as a consequence, succeed. NOTES 1. Browning, Sixty Years, p. 16. 2. Ibid., p. 12. 3. See various histories of Eton and public schools: Tim Card, Eton Renewed (London, John Murray, 1994); Christopher Hollis, Eton, A History (London, Hollis & Carter, 1960); Edward C.Mack, Public Schools and British Opinion, 1780–1860 (New York, Columbia University Press, 1939); Richard Ollard, An English Education, A Perspective of Eton (London, Collins, 1982); Vivian Ogilvie, The English Public School (London, B. T.Batsford Ltd, 1957). 4. Browning, Sixty Years, p. 15. 5. Ibid., pp. 15–16. To elucidate Browning’s explanation further, 70 boys, known as Scholars or Collegers, were educated and boarded for free while 100 more, Oppidans, lodged in the town of Eton but received the same education. Based on the corporate structure of the William of Wykeham’s foundation at Winchester, the Founder created a link between Eton College and King’s College at Cambridge whereby students could be guaranteed available places at King’s after they had completed their studies at Eton. This appanage between the two schools created a strong incentive for young Eton Collegers to do well, yet has been criticized for the insular community of scholars it engendered. This insularity was further exacerbated because many graduates of King’s were afterwards hired as Eton masters, thus completing the potentially stagnant cycle of scholars. Browning, in fact, completed this cycle. 6. See further explanation of this difficult system in Card, Eton, pp. 3–10. 7. Ibid., p. 5. 8. Ogilvie, The English Public School, p. 124. In one infamous case of 1832, a ‘Jew’, as a new Eton student was called, was tossed in a blanket by the Fifth Formers. The young Rowland Williams was dropped, his head grazing the edge of a sharp surface. He was literally scalped, his hair and scalp hanging from his neck by a small piece of skin. Fortunately, neither skull fracture nor concussion occurred; he suffered only the pain of sewing his scalp back on

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9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

and its natural process of healing (Christopher Hollis, Eton, A History), p. 232. Wortham, Browning, pp. 19–20. Ibid., p.19. Ibid., p. 20. ‘Public Schools and Colleges [Clarendon Report]’, Reports from Commissioners: 1864, Sixteen Volumes Contents of the Fifth Volume. SER 9026. Oriental and India Office, British Library, London, p. 145. Also found in ‘Report to Her Majesty’s Commissioner.’ Vol. 1 Report. London, George Edward Eyre & William Spottiswoode, Printer’s to the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty. For Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1864; Eton College Archives, Eton. Anstruther, Browning, p. 14. ‘Public Schools and Colleges [Clarendon Report]’, p. 178. At Eton traditional conventions of dress and composure were both officially and unofficially enforced as Shane Leslie’s fictional account of an Eton boy The Oppidan confirms. Upon arrival at Eton, Peter, the novel’s main character, is baffled by the peculiar customs of public school dress code and lingo. He realizes that he has much more to learn than declensions in Latin and Greek. The novel’s narrator explains:

Clothes are important at Eton. They have been built up by tradition. The side-pocket came in with pegtops, the top-hat with the House of Hanover, overcoats with the severe winter of 1865. Sweaters were once the privilege of Pop and the Victory boat. They were allowed to the common herd after a boy nearly died of a chill. The Victory sweater survived with its blue border on the person of the ninth man in the Monarch, Ninth of the Ten as he was entitled. In two days Peter had learnt a good deal though not nearly all. He had not set foot one yard down town before he realised that boys only walked on one side of the street, and that to walk on the left side to Windsor was as odd an action as standing on one’s head. Mimetically he had begun rolling up his trousers and unbuttoning the last button of his waistcoat. He observed that umbrellas must remain unrolled except in very exalted hands. The first time he turned into New and Lingwood’s to have his hat lushed by old Solomon, he learnt that his narrow silk band must instantly be replaced by a thick band of mourning for his late Majesty King George the Third.

Leslie’s character realizes that ‘he was surrounded by many pit-falls of taboo, by unwritten laws, which had to be sought or guessed, by customs, which were stronger than the Ten Commandments but, unfortunately for new boys, not recited on Sundays’. See Shane Leslie, The Oppidan (London, Chatto & Windus, 1922), pp. 30–1. 16. Card, Eton, pp. 18–19. 17. In Eton Renewed, Tim Card described the fagging system, writing:

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[F]agmasters, who were those in and above the Middle Fifth [the oldest boys in the school] did have control over their fags (those in Remove or lower). Fagging had developed as an exchange of services, something like the feudal system in which the young performed tasks for their seniors in return for protection from bullying and help in need. Some fagmasters took this [as an agreeable] responsibility… But most fagmasters enjoyed the power and privileges of fagging without giving any return. Fags would prepare and serve breakfast and tea, and run messages. They were literally on call (pp. 18–19).

18. In Public Schools and British Opinion, Edward C.Mack condones the ‘prefectfagging system’, which according to him was ‘most often considered the educational instrument on which the formation of English character depended’. He writes: This system seemed to embody most perfectly the educational principles, which appealed to conservatives…Consequently, [the average upper-class Englishman] found particularly to his taste those aspects of English life which he felt combined freedom with authority. The prefect system in the Public Schools appeared to embody just this combination. It seemed to give—and in fact to a great extent it did give—a boy the opportunity for self-discipline, for the management of his own destiny, at the same time that it subjected him to a powerful discipline, which changed from that of direct force at first to that of the indirect pressure of custom and public opinion later on (p. 185).

19. Although while at Eton, this tutor was named William Johnson, he later changed it. I will for simplicity’s sake refer to him as Cory. 20. Faith Compton Mackenzie, William Cory, A Biography (London, Constable, 1950), p.19. 21. Hollis, Eton, p. 276. The letters of Cory’s students and colleagues, and the accounts of his biographers confirm that no one did more to transform student/teacher relationships than William Johnson (Cory). In King’s College, A Short History (Cambridge, King’s College, 1989), Christopher Morris writes, ‘[Johnson] was an inspiring teacher, perhaps the most inspiring Eton ever had’ (p. 43); Richard Ollard, in his An English Education, confers (however skeptically), ‘No one did more to transform [Eton] than William Johnson Cory. Cory in his life and in his writings gives the most lucid, the most articulate expression to the ideas and standards for which, rightly or wrongly, Eton has been admired’ (see Ollard, An English Education, p. 59. 22. William Johnson Cory, Extracts from Letters and Journals of William Cory (Oxford, Printed for the Subscribers, 1897), p. 30–1. 23. Ibid., p. 30. 24. William Johnson Cory, Hints for Eton Masters (London, Henry Frowde Oxford University Press Warehouse, 1898) p. 1.

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25. In his pedagogical guide, he illustrated example after example of how teachers should react to student issues of laziness, stammering, good penmanship and inspiration. Student curiosity and how to arouse it were major themes of much of his thinking and, subsequently, of the thoughtful teaching of those tutors who followed his pedagogical lead. Later in Hints, Cory urged: ‘If you wish to kindle a latent spark of inquisitiveness, and perhaps set some outsider running on a new track, make a sudden digression from Sophocles or Thucydides, into a book about some physical science. Perhaps a boy will ask you to lend him the book, and it will open his mind, a mind that does not open to the whispers of the old Muses’ (p. 7). This gifted teacher understood that not all students would be interested in the classical curriculum demanded of them at Eton. Construing verses and studying noun declensions and verb conjugations could be tedious work. Cory, while not ignoring classical studies, introduced subjects such as science and French within his lessons to ‘open minds’ and to get the unengaged student ‘running on a new track’. 26. Hollis, Eton, p. 277. 27. Alisdare Hickson, The Poisoned Bowl. Sex Repression and the Public School System (London, Constable, 1995), p. 59. About Cory’s rapport with students, Hickson elaborates: He encouraged boys to visit his rooms after school hours and to borrow any books they fancied from his extensive library. Then when he had wished the final lingering boy good-night, he would set about writing poetry or letters late into the night to those he felt needed consoling or reassuring. He was indefatigable and his perseverance earned him a certain status among the boys. He bewitched them with delightful eccentricities, sometimes wearing three pairs of spectacles one on top of the other, charmed them with his generosity and inspired them with his teaching (p. 59).

28. For more extensive explanations, see Card, Eton, p. 65 and Anstruther, Browning, p. 60. 29. Hickson, Poisoned Bowl, p. 59. 30. Mackenzie, Cory, p. 61. 31. Oscar Browning, letter to Sidney Colvin, 1 January 1918. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York City Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 32. Morris, Kings College, p. 43. 33. Anstruther, Browning, p. 17. 34. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 35. Browning, Sixty Years, pp. 38–9. 36. Ibid., p. 38–9. 37. Ibid., p. 41. 38. Ibid., p.45.

3 EDUCATIONAL ZEITGEIST AND PEDAGOGICAL INFLUENCES

Beyond Cory’s pedagogical influence at Eton College, what else influenced Browning’s attitudes about teaching? Before looking at Browning’s teaching career, it is important to understand the cultural and intellectual influences of his day, and how they informed his educational approach. The world of nineteenth-century British education is paradoxical. On the one hand, elite educational traditions were ingrained to the point of stagnancy yet, at the same time, new ideals about schooling and pedagogy were proliferating. Browning’s pedagogical position makes for an interesting vantage point from which to view this educational scene because, while he taught in the most elite educational institutions of his time, he also had an alternative vision of teaching which resisted and subverted the status quo. How did Browning’s teaching philosophy compare or contrast to the pedagogical zeitgeist of his day? To understand how Browning formulated his ideas about pedagogy, in this chapter, I will examine some of the discourses of nineteenth-century educational ideals and how they were inflected in pedagogy. This brief survey of nineteenthcentury educational philosophy helps place Browning’s own ideology within that framework and indicates how these ideals may have informed his teaching. In a series of essays written for leading Victorian journals from 1854 to 1859, Herbert Spencer addressed the relationship between education and society.1 Debates had been brewing around a national education system as well as the quality of classroom practice, and Spencer underscored how a nation’s educational system could reflect the nature of that culture. He wrote: There cannot fail to be a relationship between the successive systems of education, and the successive social state with which they have coexisted. Having a common origin in the national mind, the institutions of each epoch, whatever be their special functions, must have a family likeness. When men received their creed and its interpretations from an infallible authority deigning no explanations, it was natural that the teaching of children should be purely dogmatic.2

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Later compiled into his book Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical, his treatises questioned accepted tenets of nineteenth-century schooling and suggested that the country may want to take a closer look at its educational system to decide if it mirrored the values the nation wished to reflect. Spencer asserted that with ‘the increase of political liberty, the abolition of law restricting individual action, and the amelioration of the criminal code, have been accompanied by a kindred progress towards noncoercive education: the pupil is hampered by fewer restraints, and other means than punishments are used to govern him’.3 He stated,‘To prepare us for complete living is the function which education has to discharge; and the only rational mode of judgement of any educational course is to judge in what degree it discharges such function.’4 According to Spencer, established ideals of education—curriculum, teaching methods and school discipline—should no longer be accepted merely for the sake of tradition. Education would need to be re-evaluated for how it served students facing different challenges from those confronted by previous generations. Holding like-minded values about education, John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and promoter of popular education drew similar connections between culture and learning. In his 1867 ‘Inaugural Address’ at St Andrews, he appealed to educators, stating: Education, moreover, is one of the subjects which most essentially require to be considered by various minds, and from a variety of points of view. For, of all many-sided subjects, it is the one which has the greatest number of sides. Not only does it include whatever we do for ourselves, and whatever is done for us by others, for the express purpose of bringing us somewhat nearer to the perfection of our nature…it comprehends even the indirect effects produced on character and on the human faculties, by things of which the direct purposes are quite different; by laws, by forms of govern-ment, by the industrial arts, by modes of social life; nay even by physical facts not dependent on human will; by climate, soil, and local position.5 Individuals developed intellectually both inside and outside the classroom and, if schooling were to be successful, it would need to attend to these cultural forces. Mill highlighted the social implications of learning, especially in the advent of great technological changes. Browning was acquainted with both Mill, with whom be corresponded, and Spencer, whom he met in George Eliot’s parlour. He was also an educational theorist in his own right and wrote both books and journal articles which recorded the history of teaching and discussed the ideals and movements of his own era. In his History of Educational Theories he acknowledged the effects of technology and new industry upon education, writing:

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[The world] moves on its way heedless of individual exceptions. The perfectly educated man may find no place for himself in the economy of things. If we murmur at this the world replies, ‘The fault is with you; with all your science you cannot educate as I educate.’ Consider the new industries of the last fifty years, what necessities have been created by railways and telegraphs. The skill of a pointsman, an engine-driver, or a telegraphist requires qualities and knowledge which probably did not exist before the present century. They have been produced by no school, taught by no master. As Persius says, the belly was their teacher; the necessity of making a livelihood formed them into these moulds. So, then, we have this antagonism between the individual and the world. The individual requires something for the full satisfaction of his being; the world requires something else, and will have it. What are we to do? Are we to give the highest education possible irrespective of practical needs, or are we to give up education altogether, and let the world do which it will with its own?6 Browning also knew that there was an important connection with the world outside of school. This passage suggests that traditional education must pay attention to the movements of the outside world as much as the outside world must pay attention to the purposes of schooling. What all three of these educationists underscore is the interrelationship between culture and schooling—how they interact and affect each other. They also suggest that the liberal education devised by universities and the school that prepared students attending them should bear in mind the links between a changing society and the education deemed appropriate for that society. (Arguably, the new redbricks were doing that, but Cambridge and Oxford steadfastly clung to tradition.) Mill warns, ‘Whatever helps to shape the human being; to make the individual what he is, or hinder him from being what he is not—is part of his education. And a very bad education it often is; requiring all that can be done by cultivated intelligence and will, to counteract its tendencies.’7 (Mill would also claim more pointedly in this address that ‘Youths come to the Scottish Universities, ignorant, and are there taught. The majority of those who come to the English Universities come still more ignorant, and ignorant they go away.’8) In nineteenthcentury England, many progressives feared that while European nations (and Scotland which paid more attention to European philosophy than England) were creating systems of education which met changing societal needs, England languished complacently in its educational traditions which no longer served students. These educational perspectives countered some deeply seated beliefs held by the educated classes as well as with the general public opinion. Because of the reticence of the rich (because of misguided fears) and the indifference

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of the poorer classes (because of workaday survival), popular education seemed to have a doubtful future in Britain. As an 1808 Edinburgh Review had reported, ‘How far it may be expedient to provide nationally for the education of the poor, against the prejudices of the upper classes, and without any cordial wish to that purpose on the part of the poor themselves, is doubtful—if it be possible.’9 Similar anxieties about British educational attitudes had been expressed in an 1810 critique in the Edinburgh Review, which exposed troubling perspectives on education which, according to an anonymous writer, had been ingrained in the British mindset from prior centuries. The author lamented the prevalent views about the value of popular education that still resonated in his own time. To frame the origins of this educational mindset, the author cited the eighteenth-century economic philosopher, Dr Robert Mandeville. Mandeville ‘reasoned’ that education for the poor would only frustrate them because it would make them wish for things that were beyond their station. His 1714 ‘An Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools’ claimed: To make the Society happy and People easy under the meanest Circumstances, it is requisite that great Numbers of them should be Ignorant, as well as Poor. Knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our Desires, and the fewer things a Man wishes for, the more easily his Necessities may be supply’d.10 Believing that educating the poor only left them discontent, Mandeville wished to keep the ignorant Shepherd and Ploughman securely in their social place as a way to avoid any social disruption. According to the Victorian reviewer who cited Mandeville, the views of this eighteenthcentury philosopher were still shared by many in the nineteenth century. The reviewer further commented that his contemporaries still feared that education not only made the poor discontent but perhaps also made them dangerous.11 In his debate, he argued: The subject now before us, the extension of popular education, gives rise to two distinct questions. It has unhappily been contended by some persons, that no good can result from promoting the instruction of the bulk of the community. They have even pretended to foresee a variety of evils as likely to originate in the greater diffusion of knowledge; and, combining with their fanciful anticipations of danger, views of past events just as fanciful, have not scrupled to raise apprehensions of anarchy, tumult and revolution, from the progress of information among the people.12 According to his commentary, the long shadow of the French Revolution still loomed in people’s minds and, in the opinions of those who could make change, an unschooled British citizenry was a more manageable social

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group; in sum, ‘the education of the poor would be hostile to subordination’.13 This review argues to the contrary that ‘the evils which are now not unfrequently occasioned by the daily press, are owing entirely to the ignorance of the community’.14 This early-nineteenth-century debate revealed the burgeoning conflicts about education and marks a point when the purposes of education would become a growing discourse in Britain. It would not be a short-lived discussion. Even at the end of the century the argument that education only made the poor discontent could still be read between the lines of public discourse. After the 1859 Parliamentary report submitted by Robert Lowe which reduced educational funding (see Introduction), another writer for the Edinburgh Review reported: So is it also desirable that the poor should earn twice as much as they do, and that there should be no such thing as a hard day’s work for a poor day’s pay. But are these things attainable? We fear not. We will go a step further, and affirm that the six years’ schooling, if it be but efficient in quality, and carefully adapted in kind to the future wants of the child, will give nearly, if not quite, all the elementary instruction which we can give to that class of children, by means of public money. Is it not enough to teach the essential elements of instruction? It puts the child in possession of the most needful attainments, and it places all others within his reach; and this we hold is all that the State is bound to do, or to aid others in doing.15 Although couched in the rhetorical concern for the poor, this statement regarding State funding still limits the education for ‘that class of children’ and not unlike Mandeville in the 1700s ultimately prescribes what position they would hold in society.16 In the late 1850s and early 1860s, while educators like Spencer, Mill and Browning were voicing the problems of education, educational policy makers were deterring governmental educational initiatives that would have offered the possibilities of schooling to a larger group of British citizens. These policies would not only delineate what class of people would receive educational benefits, but also gave a stamp of approval to certain types of pedagogical practice. Their implemented system of ‘payment by results’ limited the pedagogy that teachers applied in the classroom. Because rote memorization, memorizing rules, non-discursive lectures and ‘cramming’ seemed to result in better student scores on exams, teachers were more likely to rely on these methods to increase their salaries. Students gained little from this type of teaching but, for those who were responsible for reporting educational progress, high test scores were easy, and allegedly meaningful, statistics to collect and cite, proving their ‘efforts and achievements’.

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Countering these predominant views of education, nineteenth-century educational philosophers began to rethink how education could reshape society. In 1866, a year before J.S.Mill delivered his address at St Andrews, he had reported to the Royal Commissioner for Inquiry into Schools on educational endowments. He concluded in that report: With a view to correct the extreme deficiency of due qualification in the teachers… It would be highly important that training schools should be established for teachers, where they should learn, not only the things they will have to teach, but how to teach them; for which purpose these training schools must of course be connected with schools of the ordinary kind, where the art of teaching may be practically acquired. It is evidently proper that the restriction, in many foundations, of the office of schoolmaster to persons in holy orders, should be abolished… And it is also right that certificates of fitness for the office of teacher should be granted, after examination, either by the Universities (that of London included) or by examiners appointed by the Committee of Council. I would add a recommendation that on the first appointment of teachers, the principle of competitive examination should be introduced as far as practicable, and that in their subsequent promotion a mode of examination should be resorted to, which might, if possible, test the results of their teaching in the schools where they had already taught.17 What J.S.Mill proposed in 1866 basically outlined what Browning would administer as teaching training programmes later in the century. What Mill had foreseen as important university involvement in teacher training a quarter of a century earlier, Browning would at last realize in 1891 as the Cambridge University Day Training College. Mill placed a great deal of importance on pedagogical studies because he knew that without qualified teachers there could be no qualified students. He furthermore believed that a special relationship should exist between teacher and students, one which attended to the student’s social conscious as well as to the student’s lessons. This type of teaching would ideally model a certain social ideal which made students independent thinkers and not passive recipients of knowledge. Education, if properly implemented, was in Mill’s words: not to tell us from authority what we ought to believe, and make us accept the belief as a duty, but to give us information and training, and help us to form our own belief in a manner worthy of intelligent beings, who seek for truth at all hazards, and demand to know all the difficulties, in order that they may be better qualified to find, or recognise, the most satisfactory mode of resolving them. The vast

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importance of these questions—the great results as regards the conduct of our lives, which depend upon our choosing one belief or another—are the strongest reasons why we should not trust our judgement when it has been formed in ignorance of the evidence, and why we should not consent to be restricted to a one-sided teaching, which informs us of what a particular teacher or association of teachers receive as true doctrine and sound argument, but of nothing more.18 Mill’s ideal of model teaching resisted an authoritarian model, and describes exactly the teacherly position Browning adopted and practiced throughout his teaching career. Although many of the nineteenth-century educational theorists were opening up new debates regarding learning, few of them worked in classrooms, dealing directly with students’ problems. They offered muchneeded theoretical basis to educators, yet teachers then needed to apply their concepts practically. A study of Browning’s classroom work in the context of nineteenth-century educational theory highlights how liberal theories of education impacted on pedagogy and infiltrated the classrooms of working teachers. Browning, who believed in the utility of theories of education, likewise understood that without practical application theories meant little. He advised, ‘It would be well if schoolmasters could adopt the plan of describing their cases of education as methodically and accurately as a doctor describes his cures. In this way a mass of information might be collected which would be of the greatest service in forming a true theory of education.’19 For Browning, pedagogy was not a dull discussion of ‘slate pencils, primers and spelling-books’, but, crucially, it was about human thinking and meaning-making. Students gain pleasure from learning when they seize ownership of their education; if they are allowed to explore the questions that interest them and discover how facts relate to their lives, they are more likely to retain them. For example, the nineteenth-century object lesson was to offer pupils this practice of observation. Children were provided with objects from home or nature which they then studied, observed and described—a process which Spencer claimed establish [ed] [in a child] a habit of exhaustive observation’.20 He warned, however, that in many instances these object lessons were misused because teachers relied on manuals which ‘contain[ed] lists of facts which the child is to be told respecting each of the things put before it’.21 According to Spencer, the object lesson implemented in this manner only defeated the purpose of the lesson. However, students who are allowed to observe an object and then follow their own inquiries would learn a useful skill. ‘In manhood too, when there are no longer teachers at hand, the observations and inferences required for daily guidance, must be made unhelped; and success in life depends upon the accuracy and completeness with which they are made.’22 Spencer

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advises educators that students must feel what we now call agency in their learning experiences if their education is to be useful later. He declares: To tell a child this and to show it the other, is not to teach it how to observe, but to make it a mere recipient of another’s observations: a proceeding which weakens rather than strengthens its powers of selfinstruction— which deprives it of the pleasures resulting from successful activity—which presents this all-attractive knowledge under the aspect of formal tuition—and which thus generates that indifference and even disgust not infrequently felt towards these object-lessons. On the other hand, [to allow a child to explore what they know about an object] is simply to guide the intellect to its appropriate food; to join with the intellectual appetites their natural adjuncts—amour propre and the desire for sympathy; to induce by the union of all these an intensity of attention which insures perceptions both vivid and complete; and to habituate the mind from the beginning to that practice of self-help which it must ultimately follow.23 Spencer’s view mirrors how Browning defined his idea of the ‘best teaching’. Browning wrote: Indeed, the best teaching and the highest form of education are imparted in such a way that the pupil is unconscious of the process. The greatest merit of the teacher is to secure his own effacement. His greatest honour is when the pupil thinks that he has learnt everything by his own unaided efforts.24 In Browning’s view of teaching, knowledge was not deposited into the vacant student, but was drawn from them by their own critical and problem-solving abilities.25 The character-type of Browning’s model teacher contrasts hugely from the egotistical and self-absorbed personality that normally caricatures Browning. If he was over-bearing with his university colleagues (leaders of under-represented groups often are), he relinquished his sense of self in the classroom so that his students could gain their own. Because of his constant concern with improved teaching, Browning kept himself well informed of his contemporaries’ pedagogical thoughts and advances, and deliberated with his colleagues how they might best be implemented. Moreover, the writing he did for educational journals and his two books on the history of pedagogy—History of Educational Theories and Aspects of Education—popularized the subject of pedagogy.26 His History of Educational Theories was reprinted frequently up until 1905, and was distributed abroad both in the United States and in continental Europe. Browning’s book offered teachers and scholars of

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pedagogy a volume on a subject that was often ignored within the academy. He felt that the dialogue between theories of pedagogy and the practices of the classroom was absolutely essential for educational success, and he drew upon his knowledge of teaching to express his stances upon education. His introduction to the History of Educational Theories began: The history of Educational Theories may be of practical use to teachers in two ways: it may show what is the historical ground for retaining existing practices in education or for substituting others; and it may, by telling us what great teachers have attempted, and what great thinkers have conceived as possible in this department, stimulate us to complete their work or to carry out their principles under easier conditions.27 In his book, Browning did not merely report on the perspectives of past educators, but used their ideals to espouse a vision of teaching he condoned. It is evident that Browning’s personal interpretation plays an important part in the presentation of his materials. For example, when summarizing the aphorisms of the humanist teacher Ratich, he recounted: Learn everything without compulsion. By blows and compulsion studies become hateful to young students. It is also against nature. Boys are beaten because they do not remember what you have taught them, but if you had taught them properly they would have remembered it. Now they have to suffer for your negligence. To carry this out farther, Ratich proposed to divide the duties of teaching and punishment. The teacher must do nothing but teach, discipline belongs to the scholarch. The pupil must conceive no dislike for the teacher, but love him more and more.28 His direct address to his teaching audience (‘you have taught them’ and ‘your negligence’) in the second-person reads less like a review of historical facts and more like advice. The information he catalogued may have been the pedagogical ideals of these historical teachers, but Browning chose them and their tenets as a way to convey his own message about teaching practices. Browning gained a favourable reputation for his pedagogical work among his progressive contemporaries. In 1875, John Ruskin wrote to Browning, saying, I am sure that the views you hold on all subjects relating to the education of higher classes of our youth are brightly and liberally, but not rashly, extended beyond those which have too long checked, if not thwarted, the best spirits among our public schoolboys, and left

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youths of the highest genius undiscovered for want of timely sympathy.29 In Time and Tide, Ruskin wrote about the two kinds of teachers: Take the desire of teaching—the eternally unselfish and noble instinct for telling to those who are ignorant, the truth we know, and guarding them from the errors we see them in danger of—there is no nobler, no more constant instinct in honourable breasts; but let the Devil formalise it, and mix the pride of a profession with it—get foolish people intrusted with the business of instruction, and make their giddy heads giddier by putting them up in pulpits above a submissive crowd…a company of the blind beseech-ing those they lead to remain blind also.30 Whilst lauding a noble profession, Ruskin also warns of the licence that educators might take in the ‘pulpits above the submissive crowd’. Of course, the role of teachers was important in the classroom; their inexperienced students needed the guidance of their expertise. Browning had seen the improvement in teacher-student relationships, had seen as he described it, ‘the influence of the heart [which] has taken the place of pompous pretence and of hard austerity or of hectoring and bullying’, and wanted to ensure that this change of heart amongst his teaching cohorts continued. In the following section, we will see how Browning’s classroom practice and teacherly attitudes reflected the liberal pedagogical stances of his day. The way in which he designed his curriculum, conducted his tutoring and related to his students truly epitomized the ideals of his teaching philosophy. The combination of his philosophy and practice would then inform how he planned to prepare students for the profession of teaching. NOTES 1. These essays appeared between 1854 and 1859 in the Westminster Review, the North British Review and the British Quarterly Review. Francesco Cordasco reports that, ‘When difficulties appeared in the publication together as “a tolerably complete whole”, Spencer authorized their publication in America where they were published by D. Appleton & Co. in 1860.’ See ‘Introduction’ to Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1963), p. iv. 2. Spencer, Education, p. 97. 3. Ibid., p. 98. 4. Ibid., p. 31.

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5. John Stuart Mill, ‘Inaugural Address at St Andrews’ in J.M. Robson (ed.), Essays on on Equality, Law and Education (Toronto, Toronto University Press; London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 212. 6. Oscar Browning, An Introduction to the History of Educational Theories (New York, E.L. Kellogg & Co., 1888), pp. 9–10. 7. Mill, ‘Inaugural Address’, p. 217. 8. Ibid., p. 220. 9. ‘Lancaster’s Improvements in Education’, Edinburgh Review 11 (October 1807), p. 71. 10. Bernard Mandeville, ‘An Essay on Charity and Charity-Schools’, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 287–8. Mandeville also stated:

The Welfare and Felicity…of every State and Kingdom, require that the Knowledge of the Working Poor should be confin’d within the Verge of their Occupations, and never extended (as to things visible) beyond what relates to their Calling. The more a Shepherd, a Ploughman, or any other Peasant, knows of the World, and the things that are Foreign to his Labour or Employment, the less fit he’ll be to go through the Fatigues and Hardships of it with Cheerfulness and Content (p. 288). 11. Paradoxically, Mandeville would influence the doctrines of nineteenthcentury utilitarians, whose initiatives greatly affected the educational reform of that era. If Mandeville was against popular education, his philosophical successors would reformulate his thoughts to the advantage of education. 12. ‘Education of the Poor’, Edinburgh Review 17 (November 1810), p. 59. 13. Ibid., p. 62. 14. Ibid., p. 64. 15. ‘The Report of the Committee of Council of Education, 1858–59’, The Edinburgh Review 225 (January 1860), p. 182. 16. This educational glass ceiling recalls the scene when Jude Fawley recites the Articles of his Belief in Latin for the mixed crowd of uneducated workers and Christminster (read Oxford) undergraduates. Although the undergraduates do not understand one word he rehearses, they applaud him, ‘Good! Excellent Latin!’ Jude in a drunken fury claims, ‘I don’t care a damn for any Provost, Warden, Principal, Fellow, or cursed Master of Arts in the University! What I know is that I’d lick’em on their own ground if they’d give me a chance, and show’em a few things they are not up to yet!’ (Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (Ware, Wordsworth Editions, 2000), p. 102–3)). His scholarly aspirations are never fulfilled because of his working-class background. 17. John Stuart Mill ‘Educational Endowments—A Letter to The Secretary of the Schools Inquiry Commission’ in Robson (ed.), Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, p. 214. 18. Mill, ‘Inaugural Address’, p. 186. 19. Browning. ‘Science Teaching’, p. 243. 20. Spencer, Education, p. 135.

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Ibid., p. 132. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 135–6. Johann Friedrich Herbart, The Science of Education, Preface by Oscar Browning, (Boston, MA, D.C. Heath, 1900), p. vi. For a contemporary perspective on this form of pedagogy, see Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Myra Bergman Ramos (trans.) (New York, Continuum, 1987). Browning, History of Educational Theories; Oscar Browning, Aspects of Education (New York, Industrial Education Association, 1888). Browning, Educational Theories, p. 5. Ibid., p. 66. Browning, Sixty Years, pp. 221–4. John Ruskin, Time and Tide and Munera Pulveris (New York, Macmillan, 1928), pp. 44–5.

4 TEACHING AT ETON: THE GREATEST SHUFFLER’ OR THE ‘BEST OF COUNSELLORS’?

Originally planning to study for the bar after he completed his degree at Cambridge, Oscar Browning instead returned to Eton College in 1860 as an assistant master. Teaching at Eton had an obvious draw for him as the ancient college had always been attended by the sons of aristocrats and peerage. Coincidentally upon his return rumblings amongst parents and governmental leaders were beginning to be heard about public school education, and Eton was at the forefront of the parliamentary inquiry. Browning himself provided evidence to the committee. The Clarendon Report, as it was commonly known after Lord Clarendon who chaired the committee, investigated issues about the ancient foundations. The inquiry into the elite schools indicated that perhaps England was willing finally to re-evaluate its tradition-bound education. The investigation was spurred by critical letters submitted to popular journals of the time. In 1860, a letter from Paterfamilias’ to the editor of the Cornhill Magazine complained that only the brightest boys at Eton ever learned anything as they no doubt would anywhere they attended. Other less gifted students left knowing little. He blamed the deficient education on bad teaching: Nor were these unsatisfactory results surprising, when the system and the staff of the school were critically examined. The Harchester [alias for Eton] tutors are all Fellows of one small and not very distinguished college at Oxbridge [King’s College, Cambridge], which possessed a sort of vested interest in Harchester. They came thither as masters, not because anybody believed them to be clever men, or because they were supposed to possess any natural or acquired aptitude for teaching, but solely as a matter of pounds, shillings, and pence… The profits of a master at Harchester were known to be great; and the Fellows of [King’s] college, had, according to their seniority, a prescriptive right to that position, if they pleased.1 Profiteering instead of educating was this author’s rallying cry, and he suggested that inspection of the ‘great schools’ be conducted:

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Compulsory inspection of our great schools is, I imagine, out of the question; but I would ask whether a voluntary system could not be supplied which should place at the disposal of such schoolmasters as chose to avail themselves of it, accredited government inspectors, who, being hired, should repair to a school, examine its system and its pupils, and report formally and publicly upon both.2 As a result, in 1860 a four-year study of the nine major public schools— Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, Saint Paul’s, Merchant Taylor’s, Harrow, Shrewsbury and Rugby—was undergone to inquire into the Nature and Application of the Endowments, Funds, and Revenues belonging to or received by the said Colleges, Schools, and Foundations; and also to inquire into the Administration and Management of the said Colleges, Schools, and Foundations, and into the System and Course of Studies respectively pursued therein, as well as into the Methods, Subjects, and Extent of the Instruction given to the Students of the said Colleges, Schools, Foundations.3 This long-winded passage of bureaucratic jargon meant that the nine elite, normally untouchable, public schools were subjected to close governmental and public scrutiny; their finances, administrative systems, curricula and teaching methods were being investigated, for which they would now need to be accountable. Complaints had also arrived from Oxbridge that young men were arriving to university unprepared for the academic standards of higher education.4 Eton was particularly disparaged as it was mentioned that ‘the public schools send also (and in this Eton has a certain preeminence) the idlest and most ignorant men’.5 Although the Clarendon Report submitted in 1864 exposed the inadequacies of the public schools, it would be internal reforms that would predicate improvement. Browning, as a young housemaster at the beginning of his career, must have been made aware with the intensity of these proceedings, and influenced by the debates that arose as a result of them. According to the evidence reported to Her Majesty’s Committee, one of the major problems of the public schools was overcrowding of classrooms. In his biography of Browning, Anstruther described the ambiance of these overtallied classrooms: Formal lessons were held in the classroom, the classes being known as Divisions, containing sometimes one hundred boys whom no master could possibly control… Browning had eighty boys in his Division when he returned to Eton in 1860…youngest was eleven, the eldest sixteen. In these Divisions the master’s task was not to teach but only to examine. He would hear work previously set—so many lines of Latin or Greek—and then, as the period came to a close, set

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some more for the following period. Every boy was supposed to prepare them, but only a handful ever did so.6 It is not only the sheer numbers of boys present in these divisions but the range of age of boys who would arrive with different levels of abilities and knowledge. There would be no way to accommodate—to teach—the differing needs of the students in this educational scenario. The tedium of this ‘construing’ for both master and pupil must have been unbearable, and it is no wonder that the huge numbers of boys who were not up for examination were unruly. Beyond the chaos of the classroom, masters worked an inordinate amount of hours with little time for reflection upon their teaching. During the Royal Investigations, Browning was questioned, ‘About how many hours a day do you consider your work lasts?’ He responded, ‘With my full number of pupils in the winter halves I am occupied nine or ten hours a day’ to which he added: there is too much responsibility of teaching on the tutors. I think that the tutorial influence ought by no means to be diminished, but at present there is hardly any work a boy does in school that is not first done by the tutor… there is no subject which is definitely taught in the school, and allowed to be taught in the school, for which the tutor considers that he is not responsible. That is an overwhelming responsibility on the tutor. I think that is the cause of our being too much worked.7 Apart from the classroom work that masters did, they also did individual tutoring with students outside the classroom. Yet Browning speculated that the ten hours of work that masters did could be reduced if some actual teaching instruction could happen in the classroom. Browning elaborated: I think that the remedy would be to make the schoolwork more real and more systematic, and we ought in the first place to have a thorough revision of the subjects taught in the school, to see that they are suited to the ages of the boys; then I think it would be better to make the lessons longer; to make them an hour instead of threequarters of an hour. For myself, I do not see the good of having ‘construing’, though there is a great deal of differences of opinion on it. I think if certain subjects were set beforehand and were taught thoroughly in school, it would take a great deal of responsibility and work off the tutor. The regular school work takes us a great deal of time, and costs us a great deal of hard work.8 Browning hints that not only is classroom construing a great deal of work but for very little return in the quality of work that students do. Instead of

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endless drilling and examining, he proposed instead a classroom in which students’ abilities are considered and teaching geared to their needs.9 Every boy at Eton had a classical master with whom he studied throughout his school career. During the informal sessions in the pupilroom, students prepared their classwork under their tutor’s guidance. Often in the case of gifted tutors like Cory or Browning, official work was secondary and they covered any number of topics which in the end provided boys with a better education than the fixed and limited curriculum. For Browning, tutoring students offered the opportunity ‘to excite the appetite for knowledge which may have been dulled by application to the regular studies’.10 As an educator, Browning’s forte was, like William Johnson Cory’s, in his pupil-room but, also like Cory, Browning’s close relationships with his charges would be misunderstood. To some of his colleagues Browning was clearly a gifted teacher who inspired students while others felt that his unorthodox relationships with students and divergent teaching methods threatened the stable traditions and sterling reputation of Eton. Browning was constantly sought to support the intellectually gifted student and was often accused of favouritism. Yet if Browning responded strongly to the sparkle of genius in certain students, he acknowledged it often. The proliferation of student stories about Browning’s welcoming hospitality indicate that he invited many to share in his world. Admittedly, however, one student stood out as his particular favourite. On 20 July 1874 Browning received a doleful letter from George C. Curzon, an Eton pupil in whom he had taken a special interest: My dear Mr. Browning I must write a parting letter to you, although I hope we may soon be again permitted to communicate with each other. I can’t say how distressed I am to think that I am prevented from seeing you and all through the unkind, ungentlemanly and obstinate conduct of my tutor whom I detest the more I see him. But I must thank you with my whole heart for all the unestimable good that you have done me; for you have always been open to me as the best of counselors and you have opened my eyes to the company by which I am surrounded, and have warned me against evil companionship. I don’t know how I shall get on without being ever allowed to see you. I had a long walk with Morris yesterday afternoon and he is very kind and jolly to me. I am so sorry that I have been the innocent cause of all this trouble for you, but I attribute it all to my tutor. Please thank Mrs Browning and Miss Browning for all their kindness to me and you know how grateful I am to you for yours. I wrote a very long letter yesterday evening to my father who I am sure takes a right view of the case, asking him to write at

44 OSCAR BROWNING

once to the Head Master, and call upon the latter to revoke his unjust decision; he cannot know how much harm he is doing by separating you from me. At any rate even if we are prevented from intercourse here, I hope there will be no obstacle to our communication in the holidays. I will return you to day the books you have so kindly lent me. Again I must say how very distressed I am about this and it has put me quite in low spirits. I suppose this is the last letter I must write you this half, unless my father effects our reunion. I am so glad that Mr. Stone, Mr. Cornish, Mr. Ainger etc. all take your part and Morris said he would ask Edward Lyttelton about it. I send you this under cover to Morris. Believe me ever Yours affectly, George N.Curzon11 In this letter, Curzon (later Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India) is upset because Hornby, Eton’s headmaster, had ordered that he and Browning cease from seeing each other. Browning had taken a special interest in the boy, recognizing his intellectual aptitude and, no doubt, also finding the handsome youth attractive. Browning made Curzon’s acquaintance when he was taking another master’s division and he recognized how scholastically gifted the boy was. Since Wolley-Dod, Curzon’s actual tutor, was reputedly unintellectual, Browning was determined to mentor this young, impressionable protégé. In most cases, this was not unusual at Eton. Many boys who showed athletic promise were coached by an athletic master. Why should an intellectually gifted boy not be coached by a qualified tutor with scholarly strengths?12 Beyond his intellectual work with Curzon, Browning also attended to his moral welfare. When a fellow housemate of Curzon mentioned to Browning that Curzon was associating with some questionable company, Browning chose initially not to interfere. However, not trusting the insight of Wolley-Dod, he finally wrote to Curzon’s father, the 4th Baron Scarsdale. As to moral dangers, Browning felt that with an attractive as well as clever boy like Curzon he should warn and advise him. Here ‘moral danger’ goes beyond the minor offences of boyhood—mischief, slothfulness, or adolescent arrogance (for which Victorian texts also use the terms ‘moral danger’ and vice); because Curzon’s marked good looks and personal charms are underscored, the danger presented itself as one of sensuality. Browning evidently deemed Curzon’s sex appeal perilous to the naive boy’s social welfare at Eton, and had warned him of evil companionship. Obviously, to be so vigilant about this predicament, Browning likewise had to note, however subconsciously, the boy’s attractiveness himself. In the end, Scarsdale advised his son to seek Browning’s advice and thus their lifetime friendship began.

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Figure 2 After Browning had been dismissed from Eton in 1875, he and the young Curzon travelled to Milan where they had this photograph taken in 1878. In 1902, Curzon, as Viceroy of India, would welcome his old mentor and friend in regal fashion to the colonial court. Although Curzon received a certain ‘favouritism’ from his zealous tutor, many students recorded O.B.’s careful attendance and nurturing. Reproduced with kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge.

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While Curzon’s father seemed pleased with Browning’s moral guidance, Curzon’s tutor was rankled. Wolley-Dod accused Browning of meddling with and of doting on his pupil. One afternoon, after Curzon had suffered an injury while playing cricket, Browning took him on a carriage ride to console him. Infuriated Wolley-Dod wrote to Browning: I strongly object to your taking Curzon out for drives without leave from me or the Head Master, to your writing to him by post, which you have done several times, when he is only two doors off; and most of all to your doing his verses for him, as I have suspected several times, and as he admits in the case of his iambices this week. I think the whole case is one which justifies an appeal to the Head Master, and I have accordingly made one, specifying the points on which your dealings with Curzon seem to me objectionable.13 According to Wortham, all of these objections were unfounded because Browning had received permission to take the incapacitated boy on a drive and had, as any good tutor would, ‘helped’ the young scholar with his iambics. Curzon was clearly attached to Browning which indicates that Wolley-Dod lacked the intellectual appeal which would satisfy this bright young man, and perhaps all his pupils. Finally, completely unnerved by Browning’s attention to his charge, Wolley-Dod complained to the headmaster, Dr Hornby. The irritated tutor challenged Browning, arguing that he just paid too much attention to Curzon—what could be more objectionable to a tutor who had to prove his worth to his students and their parents? The young Curzon, as indicated in his clandestine letter to Browning, was not impressed by Wolley-Dod and, perhaps exaggerating, ‘detest[ed] him the more [he saw] him’. Furthermore, Curzon’s father, Lord Scarsdale, found nothing disturbing in his son’s relationship with Browning and was grateful for the supportive tutor’s care. Was Wolley-Dod concerned that Curzon, a pupil of high British lineage, and therefore an asset to his house’s reputation, might be transferred? Would Curzon’s parents recognize the better care their son might receive under Browning? During the ‘scandal’ , Lord Scarsdale, Curzon’s father, contacted Browning: Dear Mr Browning I exceedingly regret this very unpleasant complaint of Mr. Wolley-Dod’s, with reference to your conduct towards my son George – I am fully aware of your warm feelings and keen desire that he should grow up a manly, true pure minded lad—and though it is possible that your notice of him may have tended to annoy his tutor, I give you full credit for acting from the purest motives, and I do not wish the kindly relations between you and my boy to fall through. I quite believe that you were instrumental in rescuing George from companions of more than doubtful repute, and that

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your sole desire and object has been to elevate and improve his character. I have had a kind letter from Mr Hugessen on this matter, (for he too takes a warm interest in George) & I can only hope no further unpleasantness may ever occur on this head—thanking you for so full an explanation of the circumstances. Believe me Yrs very truly, Scarsdale14 In his letter, Scarsdale thanks Browning for his attention to his son’s welfare. However, underlying this story is a social anxiety—the ‘doubtful repute’—which seems to worry the adults about the Eton boys, but to which Browning is also implicated in his actions towards Curzon. This unspoken but omnipresent anxiety pervades the letters and discussions that surround Browning’s eventual dismissal. Wortham writes that when Browning arrived in Hornby’s office after being called there by the headmaster, Hornby greeted him by remarking, ‘So I hear Mr. Wolley-Dod has a good-looking pupil.’15 Sensing the innuendo, Browning retorted, ‘Do you mean to say that you have allowed any master to tell you I took notice of a boy because he was goodlooking?’ To which the headmaster ambivalently rejoined, ‘I don’t know, I am sure.’16 Hornby’s equivocal response is indicative of the typically noncommittal positions he would take upon important issues at Eton. Yet his nuance seems carefully chosen in this incident. What exactly does ‘I don’t know, I am sure’ mean? ‘I don’t know that I am sure’ could possibly indicate that Hornby himself doubted his position in the matter. This is unlikely. ‘I don’t know but I am sure’ would, however, show how Hornby publicly avoided such an accusation, but privately was certain that Browning was less than reputable. The charged statement left a lot to be interpreted and even more to be gossiped about. Hornby later rescinded his innuendo, writing, I want only to say first that in speaking of Curzon as an attractive boy I did not wish to impute any motives to you, only to point out that in a public school appearances must be taken into account, and that, independent of a tutor’s expressed wish, there is good reason why such an intimacy as seems to have arisen between you and Curzon should not continue… I think that I ought to say that the habit, which if I am not mistaken you have formed of entering into very confidential talks with many boys (not your pupils) about the character and conduct of their schoolfellows, seems to me to be a very dangerous one and to do great harm without really effecting anything for what, I believe, you have as your object in such

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intercourse, the eradication or diminution of gross vice in the school.17 Finally, Hornby ordered Browning that ‘all intercourse should now cease between him and Curzon’, emphasizing that ‘nothing short of this will do’.18 As a result, any relation between the master and pupil would no longer be a public spectacle at Eton but, in addition, this prohibition meant that a pupil would lose the careful presence of a reliable tutor and guide. Although Browning and Curzon were forbidden interaction during the school year, it is telling that a few years later Lord Scarsdale would send his son on a European expedition with the Eton master.19 The father did not underestimate the positive influence of his son’s educational role model. Nor would Curzon forget the positive influence Browning’s guidance had upon him. When returning to Eton after their trip, Curzon wrote to Browning: Your letter was such a delight to me. We were very great friends before our tour—but if I may say so, we are still greater now; and the absence from your society short though it has been has shewn me how much I value it. It was a cruel contrast exchanging your genial confidence for the dissatisfied and suspecting reception accorded to me by Stone [his tutor]: and I am afraid I don’t like the man. The masters here are full of inquisitiveness about our tour and beset me with questions.20 When Curzon sent him this letter, Browning had already left Eton three years before; however, his former colleagues still harboured some resentment and envy about Browning and Curzon communing on a European holiday. Curzon’s letter revealed the contrast be felt in his tutorpupil relationship with his reticent teachers at Eton, and his more supportive rapport with Browning. If one interprets Browning’s reactions to his students through orthodox views, he becomes, as Hornby alleged, a ‘sinister influence’ at Eton College and yet, if interpreted through a lens of progressive pedagogy, he becomes a dedicated (perhaps doting) and fully accessible mentor to students. Could Wolley-Dod, or Hornby for that matter, fulfil this latter role? It took a certain personality and a particular pedagogical know-how to give so generously to students; neither of Browning’s colleagues had this gift. Undoubtedly, Browning’s attraction to his young protégés surfaces, but then so does his devotion to them as learners. Did Hornby’s trepidation regarding Browning lie solely on his purported immoral conduct, or is it because Browning likewise challenged the foundation of Hornby’s educational beliefs? Specifically in a homosocial environment such as an all-boys public school, Browning’s tutor-pupil relationships were earnestly

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scrutinized; but, on the other hand, the boys were attracted to loving teacherly companionship. Wortham writes: Ever since he had been at Eton he had thrown open his library and his house to any boys who cared for literature, music or art, and he did so the more willingly because he felt that some counter-balancing influence was required to that exercised by masters over boys who were not their pupils in games.21 Hornby refused to recognize Browning’s pedagogical energies and their benefit for Eton students. He was suspicious of the type of teaching activities Browning propagated: his classroom practices were unusual, his musical soirées unorthodox, and his relationship to students unheard of. No doubt Browning’s tutoring reminded Hornby of the strange pedagogical methods of William Johnson Cory, who had been sacked a few years earlier. Without men like Cory and Browning, education and the way it was conveyed could remain in traditional mode without disruption. But under the influences of the dim educational promises of Wolley-Dod or the stultifyingly conventional methods of Hornby, pupils lacked enlightening approaches to teaching. How would they gain the cultural capital that only dedicated, generous teachers were willing to offer? Browning and his pupils desired each other’s company because of the lack of cultural and intellectual appreciation they were receiving elsewhere in the school. Many of Browning’s actions aggravated his superior, Dr Hornby, including Browning’s predilections for musical and theatrical performances, his invitations of other masters’ boys to his house, and his constant meddling with affairs that the headmaster considered none of his business. Wortham devotes over 50 pages to the escalating troubles between Eton’s headmaster and the college tutor. Hornby took the final step when Browning neglected an administrative detail regarding the number of students in his hours, and then argued with what he considered the minor infraction of administrative protocol. To Browning’s argument, Hornby angrily replied: You are the greatest shuffler I have ever met. You shuffle in everything you do. Your character is known to the Governing Body. You neglect your work. Why don’t you read Madvig’s Latin Grammar? You lecture to ladies; you examine here and there; you give musical parties on Saturday evenings. Why don’t you stick to your work? No one every treated me in a straight-forward manner who did not find me straightforward.22 Hornby accused Browning of shirking his duties because he was not using conventional methods of teaching his boys—methods of recitation and rote practices. Furthermore, he was introducing lessons on modern history into

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the boys’ education that Hornby found frivolous.23 What Browning was doing was playing to the interests and strengths of his students to inspire their learning. As far as Hornby was concerned, Browning’s subject matter, his pedagogical methods, his music, his teaching of ladies, and his outside pedagogical pursuits were all diversions from the ‘work’ he should have been doing. As a teacher, Browning appears to be enjoying his craft: his experimental lessons, his extra teaching, his musical evenings, his engaging topics; for the more conventionally minded, this all sounds like too much pleasure to be ‘real’ acts of teaching. After a series of arguments between the headmaster and his employee, Browning received the following letter on 16 September 1875: Dear Browning, After our conversation yesterday you will, I think, have expected some communication from me. I have purposely put off writing for a whole day, that I might not, in a very serious matter, act hastily or under any feelings of irritation. I must remind you that, in the interview which you sought with me yesterday, you charged me with prejudice, unfairness and constant persecution in my dealings with you; and you tried to justify your recent breach of well-known rules, which I am bound to enforce, on the ground that you believed that some of your colleagues had broken them. Such a plea hardly needs an answer; but I must remind you that, in your case, particular attention had been called to your violation of the rules last winter—that you had in consequence received a reprimand, and very definite instructions in writing as to your future course. I believe that your colleagues will be found to have kept within the regulations; but if there has been any violation of them (and I shall at once proceed to investigate this), it cannot in any way justify what you have done. For two or three years, hardly a schooltime has passed in which I have not been compelled to undertake the very painful task of calling you to account for neglect of work or violation of rules. I feel that I have carried forbearance, in your case, beyond the limit which I ought to have observed in strict duty to the school. I have done so because of the extreme gravity of dismissing a master from Eton, especially one of your age and standing, and because I tried to indulge the hope that your conduct might yet be such as to make this extreme measure unnecessary. I feel, however, that after recent events, and after our conversation of yesterday, it is not possible for me to feel that confidence in you which is absolutely necessary to our working together, and to my entrusting you with the important duties which belong to an Eton master. I must therefore give you notice that your mastership will terminate at the end of this schooltime. Yours sincerely, J.J. Hornby24

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Allegedly, Browning was dismissed because of a breach of administrative regulations: he exceeded the maximum number of students allowed to board in his house. Usually a letter requesting a waiver of this rule was sufficient to circumvent this regulation, but this time Browning had forgotten the correspondence, and the infringement was a convenient and, apparently, sufficient reason to sack a 15-year veteran tutor. Headmasters had the official jurisdiction over such peremptory decisions. Beyond the official statement of dismissal, rumours spread about O.B.’s moral misconduct. The pedagogical/desire plot thickens. Browning chose not to take the case to court, which could have easily turned into a precursor of the Oscar Wilde trials. Instead, in his usual exaggeration, Browning inflated the issue, found a supporting parent with peerage, and finally involved Parliament, in the end, to no avail. After 15 years of dedicated service to Eton, Browning was dismissed on a technicality of administrative protocol. What underlies this seemingly rash dismissal is a story of a teacher’s progressive pedagogy, student-teacher boundaries, and an insouciance towards formality in his relations with students. Browning was removed without honour from his Eton post. William Johnson wrote to H.E.Luxmoore, another tutor: I believe the departure of Oscar Browning will be resented by scores of kindly, intelligent young men to whom he has freely given all that he had to give of those good things of the mind which the old routineers thought should be reserved for Masters of the Arts… I daresay among these boys will be a few sweet-hearted enthusiasts: they are the people that used to be starved at Eton. Happily, there are plenty, no, a fair sprinkling—of young teachers who so far resemble B. as to make themselves, the best part of themselves, known to the lads: that is the new art or growth in schools. It is, I think, not less than a critical change in education, though, being unconnected with creeds, it has not yet found its biographical historian.25 Cory has his own arguments with Browning’s conduct at Eton, but he lamented the actual departure of Browning because he saw it as symbolic of the diminishing ranks of gifted teachers and, therefore, productive pedagogy at Eton. He worried about the mere ‘fair sprinkling’ of a pedagogical tradition that Browning himself bad started at Eton, what be calls a new art or growth in schools. One of the ranks of these gifted teachers was A.C. Ainger, who wrote to Hornby, opposing Browning’s dismissal. Hornby, refusing to relent to satisfy Ainger’s or anybody’s dissent, responded: My dear Ainger, I am sorry for Browning, but I could not possibly say that I do not think ill of his character. I have not charged him with immorality in the ordinary

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sense of that word. His own admissions have proved evidence enough against him as regards want of truthfulness and this through his statement omits and distorts things in his favour as far as possible—public opinion is clearly dead against him already. What would it be if the whole truth were known? A pension is utterly out of the question. I do not want to press hard upon a man in trouble but I cannot help Browning in the way you suggest. The more I say I am afraid the worse his case would be. I have said as little as I could help saying and nothing of any doubtful kind of which I had not full proof. Yours very truly, J.J.Hornby26 First Cory is discharged, then Browning: Hornby was slowly but surely ridding Eton of its ‘dangerous’ element of progressive pedagogy. Hornby did not care if their classroom practices were successful; he only cared that British public-school teaching traditions be observed and upheld, regardless of their effectiveness. Even if he could not expunge progressive teaching completely, he would give due warning to those who believed they could be extravagant in its practice. In September 1875, after 15 years of educational service, Oscar Browning was relieved of his mastership without pension. His mother and sister, who had helped him run the most popular house in Eton were also punished by being rendered homeless. Although stunned by his dismissal from Eton, a year later he returned to King’s College, Cambridge, to resume his guaranteed position of Fellow at the College. Fortunately for the undergraduates at King’s College, Browning would not forsake his new style of teaching because of this major setback in his career. His belief in sound pedagogical practice would serve the undergraduates at King’s College as it had at Eton for 15 years. In his Memories of Sixty Years at Eton, he writes of a teacher’s influence, The skill of the tutor was shown, not by superimposing new knowledge, but in the…bringing to birth knowledge already generated in the mind of the pupil, and yearning to be born.’27 Browning’s reputation as a progressive pedagogue would further grow at Cambridge and expand into educational endeavours never conceived of before at the ancient university. NOTES 1. ‘Paterfamilias to the Editor of the Cornhill Magazine’ Cornhill Magazine 1, 5 (1860), p. 609. 2. Ibid., p. 615. 3. ‘Public Schools and Colleges’, p. 2. 4. The Clarendon Report called upon university professors to ascertain the quality of incoming scholars to the universities. See pp. 23–7 for details.

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Ibid., p. 25. Anstruther, Oscar Browning, p. 20. ‘Reports from Commissioners’ (1864), p. 179. Ibid. Browning’s alternative to the traditional method of cramming knowledge into students brings to mind Montaigne’s dictum: Savoir par coeur n’est pas savoir: c’est tenir ce qu’on a donné en garde à sa mémoire. (To know by heart is not to know at all: it is to hold what someone has given you to memorize. (http://www.proverbes—citations.com/ montaigne.htm.) Browning, ‘Science Teaching’, p. 243. Unpublished correspondence from George Curzon to Oscar Browning, (20 July 1874) Oriental and India Office, British Library (F 112/327 [33]). See Anstruther, Oscar Browning, p. 62. H.E.Wortham, Victorian Eton and Cambridge: Being the Life and Times of Oscar Browning (London, Arthur Barker, 1956), p. 101. Anstruther, Oscar Browning, p. 64–5. Wortham, Victorian Eton and Cambridge, p. 102. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 103–4. Ibid., p. 106. Wortham reports that Curzon was moved out of Wolley-Dod’s house, and transferred to another tutor’s house, Stone, who was considered more congenial than Wolley-Dod. (See Wortham, Browning, p. 102.) Anstruther, Oscar Browning, p. 80. Wortham, Victorian Eton and Cambridge, p. 112. Ibid., p. 121. Anstruther, Oscar Browning, pp. 82–3. Wortham, Victorian Eton and Cambridge, pp. 123–4. Mackenzie, Cory, p. 89. Wortham, Victorian Eton and Cambridge, pp. 144–5. Browning, Sixty Years, p. 69. Browning’s nineteenth-century ideals about teaching paid homage to ancient pedagogues such as Plato and Aristotle, but also were the precursors to contemporary educational theories, such as those of Paolo Freire who resists the model of teaching students as empty vessels. Critiquing the type of teaching which Browning also opposed, Freire wrote:

The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to ‘fill’ the student with the contents of his narration—contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance.

5 THE PRODIGAL DON RETURNS TO KING’S COLLEGE

One year after his discouraging dismissal from Eton, O.B.returned to his fellowship at King’s College, a lifetime guaranteed position granted to all who graduated as Fellows of the College. Because most of the King’s contingents were former Etonians, they would have been aware of the gossip surrounding the Browning/Hornby clash. Some must have had misgivings not only about the Eton hearsay but also about Browning’s reputation as a contentious colleague. Anstruther presents a dismal picture of the overall King’s attitude about Browning’s return: The College was a small, closed community with only a handful of resident Fellows who kept its affairs to themselves, entertained each other in the evenings, and had no desire to welcome newcomers. Any arrival was bound to upset them. Browning’s appearance, with his reputation as an extremely difficult colleague—worst of all a ‘violent reformer’—caused them the greatest anxiety.1 Anstruther is correct that Browning would help lead reforms of King’s and, logically, some of the more staid members of that community would be resistant to change. Others, however, were ready for needed transformations. Regardless of people’s wary sentiments beneath the surface, on the evening of Browning’s arrival at King’s, a champagne reception was held and, generally, he was welcomed back to Cambridge by the well-wishing party of Kingsmen. Browning’s biggest hurdle now was finances; his salary had fallen from approximately £3,000 per year to the £300 which he received from his Fellowship. At a tenth of his previous income and, no doubt, still feeling responsible for supporting his mother and sister, his lifestyle would need to alter considerably. He resolved to lead a more ascetic life, rising early and devoting himself to his scholarly work. (In the end, however, his gregarious spirit undermined his capacity to live like a scholar, although it could be argued that he redefined what scholarly living could be.) Shortly after his return, Browning started an undergraduate history lecture for which he only received fees from the students who attended; however, by the end of the term, he was offered a lectureship paying £150 a year. These funds

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were granted by a group of friends under the aegis of John Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History. Professor Seeley wrote to Browning officially that ‘a number of persons, either old Etonians, parents of Eton boys, or those engaged in education elsewhere, had made a subscription to show their sympathy with him in the trying circumstances in which be had been placed, and their appreciation of his value as a teacher’.2 If his friends and colleagues recognized his teaching qualities, they likewise realized the potential reforms for which he would rally at King’s.3 Browning arrived at a moment when a Royal Commission had been appointed to investigate the state of King’s College’s affairs, and he wasted little time in voicing his opinion about reforms he thought should be made. In a private document distributed to Fellows of the College, he stated his ideas regarding how the college should reform its statutes. In this pragmatic and critical document, Browning outlined the necessary changes he imagined for the college’s advancement.4 He defined the administrative roles of the Provost, the Vice-Provost, the Deans, and the Bursars, suggested ideas for the government of the college, commented upon fellowships and scholarships, and advised about the division of funding between the college and the university. Among his more bold claims, Browning suggested that the Provost’s salary be reduced and that his living accommodations be smaller, Assuredly, this advice irritated his associates as Anstruther confirms: O.B.approached this problem [of university reform], and the several others to which it was allied, with common sense but a lack of diplomacy, setting out his views in a pamphlet with all the concealed edge of criticism so easily attached to the written word… These ideas were all good, and in later years, many were adopted. Yet at the time, they gave extreme offence to many of his colleagues.5 Browning’s forward thinking prophesied how the university would eventually evolve, but Cambridge authorities were resistant to change and, no doubt, bristled at those who suggested doing so. Beyond the content of his document, Browning’s tone verged, as Anstruther comments, on condescension. Discussing King’s insular position in relation to the rest of the university, Browning nearly scolds his colleagues: Our College, although one of the richest in England, has, in its past history, done very little for the education of the University. Even now it does not do much, only three of its resident members give lectures which are open to undergraduates of all colleges, whereas we profit largely by the teaching offered to us outside our walls.6 Throughout his manifesto, Browning made constant references to Trinity College, hinting at its educational superiority. As one of the sister colleges

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of King’s within the Cambridge University system, this comparison slighted his colleagues, affronting their allegiance to King’s and putting their scholastic capabilities into question. Browning concluded his suggestions with a hopeful rallying cry and attempted to convince his fellow Kingsmen of the honour of participating in reform: If the results of the present Commission are as beneficial as those of its predecessors, the University will be animated in the future by a life and activity of which at present we have little idea. We ought to esteem it a privilege that we are permitted to take part in this work, and that it has fallen to our generation to inaugurate a new order which may be fraught with benefits, not only for the nation, but for the world at large.7 The ‘privilege’ Browning proposes must have chafed the inflexible members of the King’s party. They did not want to share his vision of how the college could produce even more successful national leaders because his approaches would depart from traditional teaching behaviours. Browning, perceiving a certain influence that Cambridge graduates had upon national matters, saw a much broader cause and effect which university reforms would have in England. If England was to remain an influential international force, the education received at Cambridge would be an important contributing factor. What is most interesting about Browning’s reform policies is how he framed his recommendations in terms of the needs of students. In this document, imagining the mindset of a young man choosing a college, Browning mused: A young student hesitating as to which college he should choose would prefer King’s (1) because it would be ready out of its large resources to help him in any line of study which he might adopt; (2) because it would provide him with the companions most congenial to an industrious and able man; and (3) because it would furnish him in its resident Fellows with a fullness of intellectual experience and encouragement which he would in vain look for elsewhere. A college which chose for itself a task like this would be doing the most valuable work which could be expected of a place of education, however highly endowed.8 Browning understood that to envision what university reforms should be, one must consider the circumstances of the students; to do that, one must assume the student’s perspective. Unlike many administrators, who might have devised an administrative system and then thought how students would be forcefully moulded into it, Browning conceived his

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administrative structures from the place of the pupil. After all, the education of students is the primary goal of the university and to design a school without considering student need would be futile. Deliberating upon educational administration, Browning placed his students’ welfare at the centre of policy making. He knew that a college system which did not support students’ abilities to learn would be a pointless effort and, ultimately, fail in a university’s intent. His attention to students would be Browning’s hallmark, and it attracted many of the undergraduates at the college and the university. In Kings College: A Short History, Christopher Morris reports: Sheer ebullience, genuine kindliness, widely-ranging enthusiasms (not least for Mozart long before he became fashionable), combined with Rabelaisian humour and with an emotional gravitation (almost wholly sublimated) towards young men, made him almost the ideal bachelor don. At his best, before indolence and a kind of self-parody took over, he could be an exciting and encouraging teacher. In the words of one pupil, he ‘enthused you with the importance of history and the inevitability of getting a first, if you were at King’s…he talked to you about Napoleon, Dante, George Eliot and the latest language he was learning’.9 Because Browning’s interests went beyond the fray of the standard Latin and Greek studies so inculcated in university education, undergraduates seized the opportunity to study under him. They recognized the fresh content that he offered them (such as modern history, contemporary literature and modern languages), and the innovative methods by which he conveyed that knowledge. Soon after he rejoined King’s, Browning formed the Political Society, a debating group which met once a week (this society still exists today as the Historical Society). During these seminar-like meetings, a reader presented an essay or speech that would then be discussed amongst its members, after which they voted on a pending question prompted by the presenter. In the society regulations, one can recognize the professional standards that were expected of its members yet, also, a flexibility that took into account the frequently overburdened lives of students.10 Browning knew how to induce students to take their work seriously, to create a collaborative community conducive to inquiry, and to accommodate the educational interests of its young members. His Political Society was not to be a chore for students to attend, but a venue in which they would enjoy each other’s camaraderie and value each other’s inquisitiveness. The society’s longevity is a testament to its thoughtful structure and thriving scholastic culture. The debate topics of the Political Society ranged from communism to separation of colonies to women’s suffrage. The pressing questions of the day spurred the discussions, and this investigation of real-life events

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attached to undergraduate studies inspired young men. Their university education and the efforts they applied to their studies were made pertinent to the important events touching them daily. On 10 February 1879, A.Strachey read a paper asking, ‘Should women have votes in parliamentary elections on the same footing as men?’11 The group split their decision but, in the end, the anti-suffragists ruled. Among the naysayers was J.K.Stephen (Virginia Woolf ’s anti-feminist cousin), but this was not surprising. On the side of pro-suffrage, however, was Oscar Browning, a more surprising vote considering the disparaging view that Virginia Woolf took of this Cambridge don. Personally speaking, Browning’s more liberal voting is less interesting, however, than the way in which his opinions are often contradicted by those of his more conservative students. In many cases during these Political Society meetings Browning’s votes opposed the majority of the group. His opposition is significant when one considers that during the time he was President of this Society he did not try to dissuade his students from their (misguided?) assertions. Browning thought carefully about his conception of this Political Society and his stance upon his own role within the undergraduate group. In Sixty Years, he explained: When I was contemplating the establishment of the Society, I wrote to my friend Reginald Brett, now Lord Esher, to ask his advice. He was rather opposed to my scheme, as he thought that it would be almost impossible for the President of such a Society not to dominate it, and he was afraid that this might impair independence of thought amongst his pupils. Throughout the whole of my Presidency I did my best to avoid this, and encouraged a habit of disagreement with the attack upon the President’s opinion, which I considered extremely wholesome, and I was never more happy than when I found myself in a minority of one.12 Like most good teachers, he participated, debating and voting in these meetings, yet he did not force his ideas upon those present and allowed his students the freedom to voice their own opinions. However misconceived he might have viewed their thinking, he supported their right to voice and uphold their viewpoints. He was the ‘authority’ of the group because of his greater educational experience, but he was not an ‘authoritarian’. Perhaps Browning could have been more forceful in his persuasions, urging his protégés to espouse more liberal views. However, if he took this approach, instead of modelling a free-thinking system in which multiple opinions could be heard, the standard patriarchal structure would remain in place and again be the prototype for these future leaders. No matter how unpalatable Browning might have found his young men’s ideas, he spurred them to analyze their ideas and justify their reasoning, thus reassessing their own thinking and subjective positions.

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Browning did not invite other dons to these meetings because he wanted to ensure the freedom of his students’ voices. Partially, one guesses that he wanted to retain the company of these young men for himself, but he also wanted to avoid the overbearing diatribes of established, degreed professors who might drown out potential student ideas. He knew that to stifle the vitality of students’ debates and to limit how they explored and formulated their ideas would only impede their intellectual development. This conscientious tutor recognized how vital it was to students that their ideas be considered significant and attended to, not by pandering or condescension but with intelligent, genuine response. Students needed their peers and their mentors to take them seriously. He clarified this point in Sixty Years: Indeed, although I have always been a democrat and a radical, I do not think that I ever influenced the political opinions of my pupils in that direction, certainly not by the discussions of the Political Society. My object was not to inculcate a certain set of opinions, but to encourage the free, intelligent and rational discussion of all opinions’… I was justified in calling the Political Society a Seminar, but it was very different to the Seminar as understood in Germany. There a student writes and elaborates a paper, full of other people’s opinions, to which his attention has been directed by his professor, with very few opinions of his own. The discussion proceeds, always under the control of the master and at the end, the professor sums up, stating, ex cathedra, what really is the truth on the subject, from which no one is expected to differ.13 Browning’s pedagogical methods involved exchange of ideas between group members whose contributions were evaluated and debated by a jury of their peers. These carefully conceived environments induced students to engage fully with what they were learning within that productive, unstifling organization. In the way Browning structured this learning environment, students took responsibility for their research, their presentations, and the questions they were to discuss. They had agency in their learning and, because they were made accountable, they wanted to fulfil the expectations (and the high standards) of the group. They asked their own questions, explored the options, and discovered on their own how issues could be discussed in the midst of varying opinions. Underlying this problem-solving environment and the mental exercises it generated, students considered their ideas and their processes of knowing the world in relation to a social group. Instead of the Ptolemaic view of the universe in which their own perspective (or the sole perspective of a lecturing don) remained central to a subject, this ‘seminar’ made possible a multiplicity of outlooks; learning was no longer

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Figure 3 At Browning’s ‘perpendiculars’, students were invited to mix with the artists and intelligentsia of the day. Even outside the classroom, Browning stimulated his students’ interest and intellectual growth. Reproduced with kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge.

a unilateral moment from teacher to student, but a multivalent sharing of ideas and, thus, a richer learning experience. Furthermore, Browning continued, as he had at Eton, to hold evening functions which became known as ‘perpendiculars’ (evidently for the standing and mingling that occurred at them). One student, Desmond MacCarthy, described these socials: O.B.’s at homes (Sunday evenings) were amazing affairs, and the first one I attended, soon after coming up, was something of a shock to me, aged seventeen. Entering, I caught straight in the face a blast of native air from off the heights of Intellectual Bohemia, a country of which I was to become a denizen. I sniffed; I did not like it. It made me cough, a cough of bewildered decorum. Imagine two large rooms lined nearly to the ceiling with dusky undusted books (there must

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have been about ten thousand of them), and with a little bedroom beyond, of which guests were equally free; big tables with a schoolfeast litter of cups and cake on them, syphons, whisky bottles, glasses, urns, jugs of lemonade; the air blue with tobacco smoke; a great hum of conversation—though quite a number of men were standing about not talking to anyone. Such an aquarium of strange people I had never yet seen. In one corner a man, whom I recognised as a famous metaphysician, was being badgered by a couple of undergraduates, ‘What did he, what could anyone mean by the Unity of Apperception?’ In an armchair an elderly peer, who had evidently enjoyed the College wine in the Common Room, was slowly expounding politics, with the help of a cigar, to a circle of squatting young men; standing by the fire a Tommy in scarlet uniform was shaking into the flames the spittle from the clarinet he had just ceased playing; here and there, seated on the floor, were pairs of friends conversing earnestly in low tones as oblivious as lovers of their surroundings… Presently the piano began in the room beyond, and we went in to watch our host trolling out Voi che sapete with immense gusto. At the close of his performance the clarinet-player gave him a spanking, which I thought a most undignified incident.14 Music, culture, intellectual conversation…what could be more stimulating for the education of these young men? They were to understand that the learning they did in the classroom was truly part of people’s everyday lives. These social gatherings gave them the opportunity to discuss their ideas in less formal circumstances and with the wide range of acquaintances Browning hosted. It likewise proved to them that the dry, staid image of the Academy could in fact prepare them for the social life of the world. For the Victorian era, Browning’s friends and acquaintances were considered the more alternative set—often crossing the normative boundaries set by their society.15 Imagine a young Victorian undergraduate hob-knobbing with John Ruskin, Walter Pater, or George Eliot on a Sunday afternoon. In this setting of art and culture, the society of learning, as normally conceived, did not have to be unglamorous, mind-numbing, nor rigid; it could be entertaining as well as informative and intellectually stimulating. What these soirées did further was to strengthen the bonds between these students. A compatriotism among students would arise out of these gatherings. During the rest of their scholarly week, they could recall the dialogues that they had in O.B.’s rooms, surrounded by books, artwork and interesting people, and they could continue to explore what they had discovered there. Perhaps the ‘aquarium of strange people’ who Desmond MacCarthy recorded in the above account eventually became less ‘fishy’ to him; after students’ initial surprise of such an unaccustomed forum, they must have been intrigued by the less suppressed social possibilities. Their

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ideas about the world must have been opened up and refashioned by the seemingly ‘undignified incidents’ they witnessed in O.B.’s salons. In his The Cambridge Apostles, W.C.Lubenow encapsulates Browning’s role at King’s College and the impression the odd don left upon students: [I]f the authorities in Cambridge, like those at Eton, could barely tolerate him, Browning made his mark on the young. According to Nathaniel Wedd, ‘the general union of youth and age was presided over by a man of genius, Oscar Browning’. To forge the union between youth and age, O.B. founded the Political Society for the discussion of historical questions. He threw his rooms open for ‘athomes’. He became the treasurer of university societies such as the Union and the Footlights. Clubs from which dons were barred amended their constitutions so that O.B. could be admitted. Browning was tremendously popular, and, as one undergraduate put it, he ‘had the voice of youth overwhelmingly on his side’.16 Browning invested fully in his efforts to educate students by involving himself in not only their formal learning but in their extracurricular life as well. In his involvement, they sensed how much he cared for them and their achievements at school. Because of his omnipresence at Cambridge, Browning became a frequent subject of students’ public expression. During the years he was at King’s College, images and stories about him frequented the pages of Granta, a Cambridge University undergraduate magazine. In fact, out of the 270 editions of Granta over its ten-year period, there was only one issue in which O.B.’s name did not appear. This one issue was, according to its editor, an experiment to see how the publication’s circulation would be affected in the popular don’s absence.17 In many cases these cartoons and commentaries portrayed Browning as a buffoonish caricature. Part of this mocking has to do with his appearance and eccentric behaviour as Anstruther (viciously) noted, but more has to do with his good nature at the students’ teasing.18 The founding of Granta was attributed indirectly to Browning. He had lunched with Murray Guthrie, a Cambridge undergraduate (later Member of Parliament and Alderman of the City of London). During their meeting, Browning explained that he was offered funds to begin a newspaper discussing university matters, specifically education and university teaching. After Browning had revealed Granta as the name for his proposed newspaper, apparently Guthrie quickly appropriated and registered the title for his own undergraduate paper which would spoof all matters that occurred at Cambridge.19 Browning lodged a complaint against the paper, accusing that his newspaper title had been purloined. In the 8 February 1889 edition of Granta, Guthrie as editor responded to Browning’s complaints under the heading ‘A Question of Title’:

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We have been somewhat acrimoniously attacked by Mr. Oscar Browning and others for having issued our Review under the name of The Granta. We have said what we thought right on this subject in our last issue, and we have no desire to add a word that might embitter the controversy. But we venture, in that spirit of generous courtesy which is, perhaps, our most marked characteristic, to make a few suggestions for the assistance of Mr. Oscar Browning and his colleagues. The literary and educational world is still waiting in breathless suspense for the new paper, to be ‘devoted mainly to University and Educational matters’; but the paper cannot come forth apparently, because it is still waiting for a name. It would not do, perhaps, to issue it without a definite name as the ‘Blank Review’. A distant allusion to concealed oaths might be found lurking in this title; or a captious sporting reader might seize the opportunity for a mild joke by declaring that, after going from cover to cover, he had drawn blank everywhere. It would be uncomfortable to have the name justified in this irreverent manner. Perhaps the ‘Light and Leading Journal’ would suit better. But the ingenuity of the wicked might pervert even this. To be dubbed the ‘Lead and Leading Strings Review’ would not be dignified, especially if the first word of the name were pronounced like the metal. Why not ‘The Tricycle?’ Here you have the emblem of modern progress combined with a delicate allusion to the exploring trips of the Editor on the Continent of Europe. Still, this name might lead to much misapprehension, and ‘Dry Cycle’ occurs far too readily as an inconvenient parody. After giving this important matter our most earnest attention, we can only think of two feasible recommendations. Let Mr. Browning call his new paper either (1) The Nebular Journal’, or (2) The Take-it-for-Granta Gazette’. The second seems to us by far the better of the two. Its merits are so obvious that we need not dilate upon them. Its appropriateness cannot be questioned; and we, therefore, recommend it in all humility to Mr. Browning.20 Guthrie’s sarcastic rejoinder not only mocks Browning’s accusations but simultaneously demeaned the proposed subject matter of his original project—education (really, university teaching). The sardonic titles of The Nebular Journal’ and ‘The Take-it-for-Granta Gazette’ indicated a general consensus about discussions of education: a discourse of pedagogy was not worth discussing because it was something that everyone ‘knew’ and, therefore, only stated the obvious. The ‘nebulous’ subject of learning was taken for granted because among privileged learners, education, and its social habits, had become such an assumed given of existence that they forgot the difficult obstacles which learning posed, especially (but not exclusively) for those less fortunate. Years of teaching both the elite and the underclasses kept Browning aware that people’s ability to learn should

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not be assumed—it was not essentialist—but that it was provided (socially constructed, if you will) through the concerted efforts of pedagogical practice. Conscientious educators structured learning situations which encouraged students’ achievements. Guthrie’s decidedly flippant commentary on the discourse of learning, teaching and educating exemplified a laissez-faire attitude to pedagogy, a widespread notion which Browning would struggle against his entire life. In the end Browning conciliated with the editors of Granta and would contribute to its pages in later issues. As already mentioned, he was written about frequently in its pages, both as a butt of jokes as well as in more reverent tones. In the 3 May 1889 issue, he was featured in the weekly running column Those in Authority’, which announced, ‘Mr Oscar Browning is not so much one Don as the epitome of all Cambridge. Indeed, so various are his abilities, so wide apart lie the fields in which his abounding energy revels, that it seems almost presumptuous to attempt a description of him in three columns.’21 The author added: Recognizing that between Dons and Undergraduates custom has fixed a great gulf, he [Browning] embarked upon a gallant effort to bridge it over; and Undergraduates who were admitted to his intimacy discovered, with some surprise, that a short coat was not necessarily incompatible with an elevated intellect, and that a man might walk arm-in-arm with them, slap them upon the back, or even proceed to the extremity of digging them in the ribs, and yet remain a Fellow of his College.22 Evidently, Guthrie’s awareness regarding relationships between dons and undergraduates had been awakened by Browning’s pedagogical influences. Guthrie noted the affection Browning exhibited toward the undergraduates which sometimes was considered undignified yet, for the undergraduate, redefined his relationship with his tutors and how he could express himself in the context of schooling. This student, and many others in O.B.’s correspondences, remarked about the rapport they developed with this out-of-the-ordinary don.23 In the end, O.B.enjoyed the various attentions (both compliments and jibes) he received from his students, more so than from his colleagues who often criticized his unorthodox behaviour and with whom he had little patience. Unlike the reactions he had toward collegial critique, O.B. condoned student work created at his expense. Browning was far from offended by these often less than flattering depictions and, instead, was tickled by how he inspired his young pupils. One student composed the following verse for him:

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Figure 4 Often a target of public satire, Browning appears in this sketch as an awkward ballerina. If this drawing of O.B. in theatrical drag alludes to his ‘queer’ nature, it likewise exhibits the driving force behind his indefatigable personality. Even though Browning bristled at the criticism of his colleagues, he was extremely good-natured when students mocked him. Reproduced with kind permission of the Provost and Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge.

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O, be obedient, O.B. To Nature’s stern decrees, For if you don’t you soon will be Not one but two O.B.’s24 When this poem too often appeared misattributed in the newspapers, he wrote from his retirement lodgings in Rome to the Sunday Times editor in London: Sir,—As my birthday comes round each year I am always reminded by the Press of an old epigram about myself, always wrongly spelled and attributed to the wrong author… The authorthor of these lines was not J.K. Stephen, but a friend of mine, who afterwards became headmaster of a mixed school. Oscar Browning Pallazzo Simonetti, Roma, Feb. 2.25 Even if out of sight in Rome where he had retired, he did not want to be out of mind. But oddly his note to the editor is not to complain about the overwrought appearance of the deprecating verse, but that his student was not given due credit. Student-centredness was forever in Browning’s thoughts. Among the more humorous belongings in the Keynes Papers is a cartoon of the elderly gentleman arrayed in a tutu and performing an awkward arabesque. The illustrator’s scribbled signature makes him unidentifiable but the caricature is clearly Browning, and the dancing figure could have been easily insulting to Browning, especially with its feminizing implications. What is interesting about this depiction is the assertive, fist-like rendering of the hands and the forcefulness of the facial expression. The illustrator seems to say that if this don could be taunted for his flamboyance, he could likewise be commended for his force of will. If we may assume that it was an undergraduate who took comical liberties with the portrait, we can say that students discerned his eccentricities as well as his driving force. For Browning, these personal traits cannot necessarily be extricated from each other since his obsessions and creative approaches to solving problems were considered part of his quirkiness.26 Like most forceful leaders, Browning’s strong will and innovative spirit would cause as much irritation as it did admiration. It was also these personality traits which would be the catalyst for his next progressive endeavour at Cambridge. NOTES 1. Anstruther, Oscar Browning, p. 81. 2. Wortham, Victorian Eton and Cambridge, p. 164 3. Ibid., p. 167.

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4. Oscar Browning, ‘Considerations on the Reform of the Statutes of King’s College, Cambridge’ (1877) Cambridge University Library Rare Books Room. Cam.c.877.17. 5. Anstruther, Oscar Browning, p. 91. 6. Browning, ‘Considerations’, p.11. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 2. 9. Morris, Kings College, p. 50. 10. Political Society Minutes Ledger, Oscar Browning Papers, King’s College Modern Archive, Cambridge. In the political ledger, the following rules were inscribed: That this society be called the Political Society That its object be to promote the scientific discussion of political questions That this society meet every Monday at 9 p.m. That the number of members be limited to twelve That members be elected below the rank of M.A. That no member be elected except unanimously That each discussion be opened by an essay or speech That no member be expected to write more than one essay in each term That each member expresses his opinion in turn in an order to be determined by ballot That two subjects for discussion be proposed by each member in turn, one of which be chosen for debate a fortnight later That any former member of the society may be elected an honorary member, at any meeting, by the unanimous vote of those present That honorary members may attend any meeting of the society, on signifying their intention to the secretary, or the President That members of the society, during the last term before their Tripos, [honours degree examination] be excused regular attendance. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Political Society Minutes Ledger. Browning, Sixty Years, p. 238. Ibid. Anstruther, Oscar Browning, pp. 88–9. In the salon of George Eliot, Browning met Herbert Spencer (writer/social progressive) and Madame Bodichon (artist/suffragette/education patron); abroad he encountered John Addington Symonds (the apologist for ‘sexual inversion’); in London and at Cambridge, he affiliated with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde (aesthetes/sexual renegades); in East London, he corresponded with Canon Barnett (social reformer). Although Browning had a reputation for snobbery and obsession with aristocracy, he likewise associated with a set of people who were re-envisioning social possibilities in the nineteenth century.

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16. W.C.Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 302. 17. Anstruther, Oscar Browning, p. 112. 18. Ibid., p. 113. 19. F.A.Rice, The Granta and Its Contributors 1889–1914 (London, Constable, 1924), p.5. 20. Murray Guthrie, ‘A Question of Title’, Granta, 1, 4 (8 February 1889), pp. 2– 3. 21. Ibid., p. 9. 22. Ibid., p. 10. 23. Regardless of his good rapport with students, Browning was not immune from the malicious barbs of Granta as well. In the 18 January 1890 issue, the following note poked fun at the idiosyncratic tutor when he was spied at the circus’ freak show. The paper reported:

It is well known in electrical circles that positive attracts negative, and the converse of this fact was amply illustrated the other day at Barnum’s. A wellknown and popular King’s Don was seen gazing with a look of infinite yearning at the dwarf exhibited at Olympia. He was all unconscious of a dark mysterious figure watching him with a similar earnestness from a convenient corner. It was the owner of the ‘Greatest Show on Earth’, wondering how to secure the Greatest Contrast. (Granta, ‘Circus’ 137.)

This voyeuristic scene put Browning under the covetous eye of the circus’ ringleader, who recognized how the bulbous figure could compliment his sideshow. Browning’s girth and quirky character would always take the brunt of student jokes (as it has with subsequent writers). O.B. even became the primary answer for a Granta weekly acrostic: ‘This is a don more talkative than stable,/And these, of his, we cut when we are able’ (Granta, ‘Double Acrostic’ 16). Answer: B—R—0—W—N—I—N—G (Granta, ‘Solution’ 16). Browning’s ‘circus’ appearance and ‘three-ring’ activities at Cambridge warranted the odd O.B. as much affection from students as it did taunting. In the same way that he condoned dissenting voices in his Political Society, he accepted the opinions that issued forth from student publications, no matter how disparaging. In his opinion, if future leaders were to take positions and espouse them in civic life, they must practice those skills publicly at college. 24. Letter to the London Sunday Times, 12 February 1922; Cambridge University Library Rare Books Room, UA Educ 27/2. 25. Ibid. 26. F.A.Rice reports that in a Cambridge Union meeting during a discussion of the society’s laundry problems, Browning, the Union Treasurer, remarked, ‘I may say that I share the hopes and aspirations, the disappointments and

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disillusionments of the washerwomen of Cambridge’ (see p. 26). Browning sides with the working-class women in the Union discussion and is mocked in verse because of it: The Union Treasurer’s chair ‘e fills with grace; The dining-room betrays ‘is calculations; ‘E’s inspected all the laundries in the place, An’‘e “shares the washerwoman’s aspirations”; ‘E’s a daisy, ‘e’s a ducky, ‘e’s a lamb, ‘E’s a deal the dearest don of all the bunch! ‘E’s the only one as sends a telegram To invite a Foreign Royalty to lunch. So ‘ere’s to you, Oscar Browning, in your rooms in stately King’s, We wish you ‘ealth and ‘appiness, an’ other pleasant things; We gives you your certificate, an’ if you want it signed, Just come an’ ‘ave a pipe with us, whenever you’re inclined. (See Rice, Granta, p. 26.)

The rhyme scoffs at Browning’s claim to be a proponent of workingclass rights while entertaining royalty and aristocracy in his rooms, who soiled the linens over which the laundry women would toil. The poem also mimics the vernacular accent that many of these women would use. Its clipped initial consonants, common to some workingclass dialects in England, imitates the women’s voices who would rarely be heard (or listened to) at Cambridge. According to this sarcastic bard, Browning’s support of the working class was provisional if not hypocritical.

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On 12 June 1878 a group of Oxbridge educators, representing the newly formed Teacher Training Syndicate, released the results of the circular they had gathered. They had questioned leading educators of the nation whether ‘it [would be] expedient that measures should be taken by the university for the preparation and examination of Teachers’.1 The results of their survey suggested that an interest existed, and they recommended to the Senate ‘that lectures should be given, and an examination held by the university on the theory, history and practice of Teaching, and that certificates of proficiency should be given by the University on the results of the examinations’.2 To the Senate, they reported: [The circulars] find a decided preponderance of opinion in favour of some kind of University action in the theoretical part of the training of teachers; with regard to University action in the practical part of the training they find less agreement.3 Most respondents to the circular thought that the universities, and specifically Cambridge University, could contribute to the intellectual underpinnings of teaching, but that they could not be involved in the more practical aspects of classroom work. Perhaps pedagogy through a history and theory of education could be peripherally linked to university scholarship, but not classroom practice. Knowing the sort of resistance they would face to a fully-fledged teacher training programme, the committee members advised that lectures on theory and history of education be offered but, for the time being, that there would be no practical training. They stated, ‘On the other hand [we] do not think it desirable at present that the University should undertake the training of teachers in the practice of their profession.’4 In all likelihood, many of the members of this committee believed that the university should be involved in the practical aspects of teacher training as well but knew that they could not yet muster the necessary university support for such an endeavour. One faction of the university resisted the idea of pedagogy as a field of study, while another more radical faction realized the great social good that could result from teacher training. The

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latter believed that teachers could make an impact on the social and intellectual fabric of England through progressive, democratic teaching methods. Comprised of such progressive thinkers, this committee introduced the first steps in a programme that would inevitably grow into a grander teacher training scheme but, for the time being, they proposed a certificate which would attest to the ‘competence in teaching up to a certain standard’.5 Wisely, these Cambridge men began slowly by setting up a course of lectures and a mode of examining, perhaps thinking that they could then expand at a more accelerated pace towards full-scale training once the foundations were put in place. In his memoirs, Browning further explained: The University decided to take two steps: to establish lectures on the Theory, History and Practice of Teaching, and to set up an examination in which certificates or diplomas should be granted in these three subjects. Public opinion with regard to the training of teachers has changed since 1879. At that time chief stress was laid on theoretical training, and training in practice was considered subordinate. It was, however, pointed out that if we gave our successful candidates a purely theoretical certificate, and they proved to be incompetent teachers, the reputation of the certificate would suffer. We therefore established a practical certificate by the side of the theoretical certificate, which was not, however, compulsory, so that we might say, in the case of a holder of a certificate who was not a successful teacher, that he or she did not hold a certificate in practice.6 Although Browning and his colleagues could not at the beginning implement a full-scale training programme, complete with both theoretical and practical training, they would find ways to justify the value of their teacher training and to stave off the inevitable attacks they anticipated from their critics. In fact, it was their work that was changing public opinion about teacher training. Browning would be at the centre of this university enterprise, first as the Secretary of the Teacher Training Syndicate (TTS) and later as the Principal of the Cambridge University Day Training College for Men (CUDTC). Browning’s educational background, his extensive teaching experience, and his pedagogical scholarship made him the natural candidate to lead the teacher training schemes which Cambridge would commence in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Instead of the pupil-teacher system which was falling out of fashion with the rise of good secondary schools, the TTS envisioned a training scheme in which those wanting to teach would study the theories and practices of education among the intelligentsia of the ancient universities, thereby having an opportunity to expand their intellectual horizons (and, consequently, those of their students). TTS strove to ensure that the

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standards of teacher training were visibly raised and that therefore their certification would become a nationally recognized and valid measure of teacher professionalism. The TTS began inspecting training schools across the country who wanted to be associated with this university-based programme. Furthermore, the TTS would convince headmasters and local educational leaders of the importance of such a certificate and persuade them to employ exclusively those teachers who gained their teacher training qualification. The ‘First Annual Report of the Senate of the Teachers’ Training Syndicate’ reported that their teacher training programme was making considerable progress. Lecturers in history, theory and practice of education were appointed and their classes were well attended. Mr Bell, the Chairman of the Head Masters’ Conference Committee assured that 35 schools recognized the syndicate’s teacher training certificate and intended only to hire teachers who held the accreditation. Students were beginning to take the examination and passing in sufficient numbers to make this a possibility. Furthermore the report stated: The Syndicate believes that it has evidence that a great interest is felt by teachers throughout the country in the action which the University has taken in this matter, and that the sphere of its operations is likely to be largely increased.’7 As they noted, the Syndicate was not only providing a piece of paper to certify teacher proficiency, but also validating the career of teaching itself. If Cambridge University was willing to train teachers, it meant that those who chose this career path certainly could be considered members of the professional class. Knowing the developing desire of young teachers for such an opportunity, they were also already predicting the expansion of their ‘sphere of operations’. In an 1884 address to the Social Science Congress in Birmingham, Browning proposed that the British educational system was failing because of the ‘deficiencies in secondary education’, and questioned ‘how many men of genius or of remarkable talent [were being] lost to [England] through want of opportunity’.8 Browning continued his argument, asserting that it was impossible to improve the educational system of England unless, firstly, the quality of teaching was raised. He stated, ‘We hear a great deal at the present time about over pressure at schools. Be assured that in nine cases out of ten, overwork is merely another name for bad teaching.’9 Browning laments that even though Cambridge had been training teachers in the syndicate for six years very few headmasters of secondary schools encouraged their assistants to pass the examination or convinced undergraduates preparing to be teachers to take up the exam. The profession of teaching was still not being taken as seriously as some other newly respected careers. Browning questioned: Yet why should teaching be the only occupation in which no preparation is needed? The special training which is given to

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clergymen, to lawyers, to doctors, does not of itself fit them to be expert practitioners, but no one now dreams of devoting himself to the practice of these professions unless he has undergone some theoretical training to prepare him for the work. The state registration of teachers is a crying want, and one condition of this registration should be an evidence that some professional training had been undergone.10 It would be another seven years before the Cambridge University Day Training College (for elementary teachers) would be founded (and 13 years before a secondary department was added to the CUDTC), but Browning was already rallying for teaching preparation for everyone in the profession regardless of whether they had received a university education. The courses and examinations implemented by the Teachers’ Training Syndicate filled a gap in this lack of teacher training and would foreshadow the women’s and men’s teacher training colleges that would emerge at Cambridge in the following two decades. In an 1892 edition of the Journal of Education W.W.Jackson explained the early efforts and development of Cambridge teacher training: Day Training Colleges at the Universities have been sanctioned by the Education Department, not because the Universities have urged a request for them, but because the teachers themselves have desired their establishment. They are due, in fact, to the same cause which has produced most of the educational reforms of the last few years, the force of the opinion of those best qualified to decide, supported in this instance by the sympathy and help of members of the Universities. The desire of the teachers to connect themselves with the Universities first found expression at Toynbee Hall and its liberal and far-sighted Warden, the Rev. S.A. Barnett. In 1885, at the suggestion of Mr. Barnett, the Master and Fellows of Balliol College invited a number of teachers of elementary schools to spend their summer vacation in residence at that college. About fifteen men availed themselves of this invitation. In 1886 this invitation was renewed by Balliol and Exeter Colleges, and has been repeated in subsequent years by Jesus, Merton, Wadham and New Colleges. The number of those who have come up to Oxford in this way has been as many as seventy or eighty in a single year. On each occasion courses of lectures have been arranged for the teachers, and definite work has been done. These visits, although they could not in any sense be said to impart an university training, no doubt have done much to prepare the way for the training of teachers at the Universities. They have given the teachers, who visited Oxford, a feeling that they were welcomed here, and admitted to a share in the associations of an ancient University, and they have stimulated the desire of the teachers

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to obtain the advantages of an University training. These visits also have afforded many members of the University an opportunity of forming acquaintances among the teachers, and of satisfying themselves of their fitness to receive such a training. Early in 1887 an association had been formed, also under the auspices of Mr. Barnett for promoting the training of teachers at the Universities and University Colleges, and had been joined by several residents at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as by persons of influence and position in London, and by a number of teachers. In the same year the Education Reform League took up the question; and on May 21st, 1887, a numerous and important deputation waited on Sir W.Hart-Dyke, the Vice President of the Committee of Council on Education, to bring before his notice the desirability of making arrangements for enabling teachers to obtain some form of University Education.11 Jackson elaborates upon the evolution of these teacher training programmes from the early projects of the Teachers’ Training Syndicate to the final inception of the Day Training College. The types of courses in theory (and eventually practice) of teaching would not only prove the value and interest in this educational endeavour, but would also pilot the work that would need to be done to prepare teachers in their classroom positions. Jackson’s article recounts the numerous advocates of teachers’ education both inside and outside the universities. Their efforts would finally come to fruition in 1891 at Cambridge.12 On 21 March 1891, Browning submitted an ‘Application to the Committee of Council on Education for the Establishment of a Day Training College in Connection with the University of Cambridge’. It read: The Teachers’ Training Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, in accordance with a Grace [university resolution] of the Senate passed March 12, 1891, request the Committee of Council of Education to allow the establishment of a Day Training College for Elementary Teachers in connection with the University.13 Browning was a key figure in the founding and successful initiation of this progressive Cambridge initiative. In August 1891, the Education Department announced its sanction of the opening of the Cambridge University Day Training College. Although the Senate had given a ‘Grace’ to this proposal, it was still withholding absolute endorsement; University of Cambridge authorities remained reluctant to support this radical endeavour. Browning recorded in Sixty Years: Henry Sidgwick and myself met in London and discussed whether we could venture to open the College without the final orders of the

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University to that effect. ‘Do you dare?’said Sidgwick. ‘I dare if you dare’, I replied: ‘Then we both dare’, rejoined Sidgwick, and the College was declared open.14 Sidgwick’s and Browning’s double dare began the Cambridge University Day Training College (CUDTC), commencing a plan that would continue past the First World War and eventually evolve into Cambridge’s Education Department.15 The Day Training College (DTC) Browning proposed was not a college in the usual Cambridge sense as the educational historian, Peter Searby, explains: Its students matriculated through the university colleges, or as nonCollegiate undergraduates and, thus, were not truly day students. Cambridge DTC students (like the ones at Oxford started a year later) came to read for university degrees, and the lesser qualifications taken by some at ‘civic’ DTCs. They also took professional courses and the government teacher’s certificate while reading for the Tripos, spending three years in Cambridge in a ‘concurrent’ pattern of training. Teaching for the Tripos was arranged through colleges and faculties as for other undergraduates, and professional work by the DTC.16 To be pedantic therefore a ‘Day Training College’ was a misnomer: its students were neither ‘day’ students (they resided on site), nor was the ‘College’ an authentically sanctioned college such as Trinity, King’s or, for that matter, Girton or Newnham. However, unlike the women of Miss Hughes’ Day Training College, Browning’s young men would gain degrees. They would gain, if successful, the full prestige of a Cambridge degree. Browning and Sidgwick were anxious to commence the CUDTC, but other members of the University Senate were appalled that the establishment of this Day Training College was proceeding so quickly. A. Caldecott, St John’s representative in the Senate, complained at the expedition of the procedures, claiming: The Senate have [sic] to vote tomorrow, at extremely short notice, upon a proposal that a Day Training College for Masters in Elementary Schools should be established by the University. It arises from the action of the Education Department in offering Grants to any such Colleges as may be set up in connection with the Universities or University Colleges. Hitherto, all the Training Colleges have required from their students residence within the College walls: but the Government have accepted the recommendation of the last Royal Commission on Education that encouragement should be given to non-resident Training Colleges also. Hence this proposal on the

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part of our Syndicate for training Teachers. There are a good many points to be considered about the proposal, and the hurried way in which members of the Syndicate are pressing it through is highly inconvenient and indeed, somewhat disrespectful to the Senate. Many questions arise which are not to be settled off-hand, but which in the middle of the term there is no time to fairly consider.17 If the Cambridge University intended to drag its feet about the CUDTC, Browning and supportive colleagues like Sidgwick did not. Browning was appointed the CUDTC’s Director, later Principal, from its beginnings in 1891, and would remain in that role until 1909. He was the leading influence on how the CUDTC would be shaped, deciding its curricula, coordinating and supervising the examiners of classroom teaching, soliciting funds and support from the university and sympathetic colleagues, and personally tutoring students who desperately needed it. He tutored them in elementary classics in which many of them had little knowledge. He introduced them to the life of the university and included them in the cultural activities which he had always hosted for the traditional (elite) students of Cambridge. The success of the CUDTC students, who were unaccustomed to the life of the university, could be attributed almost solely to Browning’s efforts. The elite status of Cambridge University was important to the new teacher-training college; however, the Cambridge University Day Training College for Men (CUDTC) was inspired by activities occurring beyond Cambridge’s authority. Samuel Barnett, later Canon Barnett, had in 1884 founded Toynbee Hall, named in memoriam of the Oxford progressive political economist, Arnold Toynbee (incidentally the man who coined the term Industrial Revolution). This East London social project devoted itself to improving the poverty-stricken conditions of London. Toynbee, who died a year before the Hall opened, supported the early efforts of the university extension programmes which educated working-class adults at Oxbridge.18 Following Toynbee’s vision of ‘active citizenship’ in social work, Barnett invited university men from Oxford and Cambridge to come to Commercial Street in the Whitechapel (still today one of the poorer quarters of London) to live and work with the people of that neighbourhood.19 Canon Barnett believed that if class divides were to be bridged, people of diverse financial backgrounds would need to interact. In the history of Toynbee Hall, Briggs and Macartney report Barnett’s tenets regarding this interaction between different classes of people: Relationships would be reciprocal. ‘Nothing [that] can be learnt by the University is too good for East London’ and the university settlers would justify their presence by ‘having something to give’. Yet [the Oxbridge under-graduates] would learn too, for it was ‘by living in

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East London that Arnold Toynbee fed the interest which in later years became such a force in Oxford’.20 In this social interchange, the Oxbridge undergraduates or professors would have to recognize that they did not have full authority in the learning dynamic. Their educational expertise was acknowledged as representing cultural capital, but the residents of East London brought another type of contribution to their Oxbridge peers. Toynbee Hall would be a venue in Victorian life where ideas and opinions between the classes could be freely interchanged, and an alternative model of social exchange would be enacted. In parallel, while Oxbridge undergraduates were working in the poorer neighbourhoods in London, an agenda was set to bring working-class men —mostly from East London—to Cambridge and Oxford. Toynbee Hall would solicit funds from the local guilds and other educational benefactors to sponsor gifted East London boys at Oxbridge. At the beginning funds were limited but, for those young men attending the CUDTC, both Browning and Barnett rallied to increase sponsorships as the college grew. On 4 February 1892, Canon Barnett contacted Browning, inquiring: Dear Browning, C[ou]ld you send me any printed papers ab[ou]t the pupil teachers at Cambridge such as I c[ou]ld show people who might help with scholarships. Ever, Saml A Barnett.21 Five months later on the back cover of the August 1892 Toynbee Record, Toynbee Hall’s newsletter/report, its members read ‘An Appeal to University Men’: The Warden of Toynbee Hall is engaged in an attempt to give a certain number of Pupil Teachers a chance of receiving their training at Oxford and Cambridge. We would appeal to those of our readers whose University course has been the foundation of their life’s fortunes to help in the work. The cost of training at either of the Day Training Colleges at our Universities exceeds the cost of the ordinary training by about £25 per annum. University men, who have reaped, perhaps carelessly enough what pious benefactors have sown, have an opportunity in the case of these pupil teachers of rendering to others what has been given so freely to them. By clubbing together to provide £25 a year for three years, groups of men, who could never afford to found a scholarship, may send their scholar at once to college, initiate and enjoy his successes, raise the whole tone of elementary education, and through their teachers help to ‘educate our masters’. Let us at any rate start one here at Toynbee. Residents at Wadham and Balliol, and Residents and Associates of Toynbee might easily start a scholarship of £25 a year. An average of half-a-crown a year each man would do

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it. Some could give a great deal more. But more scholarships are needed.22 A year later, the Toynbee Hall Ninth Annual Report of the Universities’ Settlement in East London recorded: The Teachers’ University Association has identified itself during the past year with the appeal which the Warden first issued in August, 1892, for funds to create Pupil Teachers’ Scholarships, by which a certain number of scholars might be enabled to receive their training at Oxford or Cambridge, instead of at one of the Day Training Colleges. The appeal was especially addressed to old University men, and pointed out that those who have ‘reaped, perhaps carelessly enough, what pious benefactors have sown, have an opportunity in the case of these Pupil Teachers, of rendering to others what has been given so freely to them. By clubbing together to provide £25 a year’ (this being the cost of the University in excess of that of the Training College), ‘for three years, groups of men, who could never afford to found a scholarship, may send their scholar at once to college, initiate and enjoy his successes, raise the whole tone of elementary education, and through their teachers, help to “educate our masters”,’ About £385 has been raised, including subscriptions for three years of £150 from the Drapers’ Company, of £75 from the Fishmongers’ Company, of £25 each from Mr. Joseph Cropper and Mr. R.O.Moon, and of £5 each from the Rector of Exeter College, Mr. E.W.Brooks, Mr. A.Berry, and Mr. F.D. Mocatta. Donations of £5 were also given by the Teachers’ Association (Metropolitan Centre), Mr. J.C.Bailey, and Mr. T.H.Nunn.23 These additional funds raised by the Drapers, Fishmongers and private donors supplemented the minimal funds that Browning and his colleagues had cajoled from their university sources. If monetary resources were limited for this venture, the energy behind this slowly growing programme certainly was not lacking. Money for a university education would constantly remain an issue for the CUDTC student—a financial burden which was not normally a worry for the traditional Cambridge undergraduate. In 1901, even after the college had established itself at Cambridge and its students should have had more access to university scholarships, students still struggled. Charles Fox wrote to Browning: Dear Mr. Browning, I am in great difficulties at present and desire your help. I hope you will not think me presumptuous, but you are the only person in Cambridge to

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whom I can frankly explain my troubles and from whom I am sure of getting sound advice. The fact of the matter is that owing to lack of funds I am afraid I shall be unable to complete my course. As you are aware I took up Mental & Moral in order to qualify myself for a post in a Training College. I thought that the CUDTC might employ me if I could secure your recommendation. If you remember we had a talk over the matter in your rooms at the end of the May Term. Failing this I thought that Mental & Moral would qualify me for work in other Training Colleges. But now I have come to the end of my tether. I want to complete my course and take the Tripos. During my last two years at Cambridge I coached and so was able to keep myself afloat. The pupils however have dropped away and my scholarship of £50 can at Christ’s only carry me part of the way. I would feel very grateful indeed if you could find me something to do in connection with the Training College or in any other way so that I may be able to finish the next two terms at Cambridge, and so take the Trip. If you are in London and could possibly make an appointment so that we might talk over the matter I would be greatly obliged. I could then explain my position to you much more clearly than I am able to do in a letter. Please answer as soon as possible for upon yr answer depends my subsequent behaviour and time is short before next term. Hoping you are well and with best wishes for the New Year. I am Sir, Yours Respectfully C.Fox24 Fox’s plea was not unfamiliar to Browning, and, as principal, he found many ways to alleviate his students’ financial burdens. In this particular case, he employed Fox at the college and, eventually, Fox would become Browning’s successor as principal of the college once Browning retired. Browning also lobbied the university for financial support and worked with outside resources to supplement the minimal university funds. Despite university indifference to the Day Training College students, Browning and his collaborative efforts with Toynbee Hall would allow the early effort to survive at least on a shoestring budget. These early CUDTC students came from humble backgrounds, and were likely to be the first of their families to receive a higher education let alone attend Cambridge University. Not only did they differ in social class from their fellow students at Cambridge, but their educational experiences contrasted significantly from their Cambridge peers. Most of the traditional Cambridge students came from public schools where, since the age of nine, they had studied Latin and Greek in readiness for Oxbridge entrance. The CUDTC students entered with little or no knowledge of these ancient languages and so had to make up quickly for their educational

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shortcomings. These CUDTC students were expected to fulfil the same requirements as other undergraduates (the first ‘Little-go’, the Cambridge qualifying examination), plus the curriculum and training for the teaching certificate. With no prior classical education, these students had double duties, fulfilling the requirements of their Tripos studies and their teacher training simultaneously. Because these students lacked the experience and know-how of university life, they faced a greater challenge than their privileged college contemporaries who had been acculturated to such academic demands. Furthermore, the stakes were higher for them because whatever social mobility they would be allowed relied on their success at Cambridge. They were representing their communities and, undoubtedly, felt a social pressure to succeed. In a critical essay addressing the particular challenges of these new students at the Cambridge University Day Training Colleges and the similar programme starting at Oxford, George W.Gent warned: It is only one pupil teacher in a thousand that one could advise reasonably and rightly to go to Oxford or Cambridge; and that not because of any intellectual deficiency—for in knowledge the best candidates for the Queens’ Scholarship compare favourably with undergraduates – but because the social environment, the standard of living and expenditure, and the code of intercourse generally have, in the case of the pupil-teachers, been so different, that to introduce these young men suddenly into the comparatively free life of a University would be to expose them to serious risk of deterioration.25 Gent began his argument by acknowledging the social disadvantages that these unaccustomed students would confront. His argument seemingly makes the case that such socially disenfranchised pupils could never achieve the standards expected by the universities. He continued: It is, however, somewhat unfortunate that so high-sounding a title should have been bestowed upon these [day training] colleges, because, as will be seen from what I have said, the Universities do not propose to do a great deal out of their own resources for the new class of students. The chief part of the expense of keeping terms at Oxford will fall upon those whom it is designed to train, and herein will lie the great danger lest the whole plan should fall…the colleges cannot be expected to do anything; and of private beneficence there is as yet no sign.26 He questions the value of such a small venture, and wonders why the universities should be bothered. Yet suddenly his tone shifts: Gent suggests that the Day Training Colleges, if they are to be realized at all, should have the full and unadulterated support from the Oxbridge universities.

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Do I despair of bringing Oxford and Cambridge into touch with the training of elementary schoolmasters? No, I only think the results of the proposed Day Training Colleges at those universities, will be so small as to be practically valueless. What is wanted, I think, is a more boldly conceived and more comprehensive plan. For instance, as the students who are invited to come to Oxford and Cambridge will be ‘resident’, why should not the Education Department treat them as it does all other ‘resident’ Training College students, and pay seventyfive per cent. of their expenses, of course with the due guarantees against over expenditure?27 Gent suggests that if this important educational venture were to be successful it would need financial backing from the university. How could pupils possibly achieve if they were constantly worried about how their tuition and board were to be paid? He turns the arguments of the DTCs’ opponents on them, making clear that it would not be the fault of these students nor the training colleges’ initiatives but the obstinacy and stinginess of the institution which would cause their demise. Gent craftily redresses university teacher training to locate the problems where they were more viably situated. He lays out the criticisms that Browning and his fellow educational reformers had to dispute. Throughout the years that he acted as the Principal of the CUDTC, Browning would consistently reiterate that the problems of university teaching training were systemic, and not those of the under-prepared student, as usually touted. In an 1898 presidential address, he said: Many prophecies were made which have been happily falsified by the result. It was said that it would be impossible for students to carry on the two branches of work side by side, that at best they would only be sham University men, living by themselves, not belonging to Colleges, and not taking part in the ordinary University pursuits. It was said also that it would be difficult to found a College worthy of the name without the collection of a large sum of money, to provide buildings and to pay teachers. We have no endowment of this kind, but we exist and we grow; our students take good places…they belong to Colleges, they row in College boats and play in College football teams, and they leave us with a measure of University spirit which will last them through their lives. We believe that we have been a success, and we assert confidently that we have not been a failure.28 As Browning claims, many of the initial trepidations about the CUDTC students were unfounded and not justified. In part, the success of his students and the CUDTC can be attributed to Browning’s untiring efforts both in the management of the college and their individual tutoring.

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Although his students recognized Browning’s class status within British culture, they also noted his lack of prejudice. One former student later wrote to him, describing his recollections and those of his fellow CUDTC graduates: I am sure you would have laughed heartily had you overheard us from behind one of those cliffs peculiar to Mumbles. Like three learned doctors, we thought that we were quite qualified to compare the dons we had met at Cambridge. Though the O.B. did not come out unscathed from the ordeal, yet we three agreed that the O.B. was the best friend we had ever made. He certainly deserved the appellation ‘man’. We fully appreciated the fact that, though you were born a gentleman and had the best education that England could offer you in your earlier days, you never tried to damp that spring of sympathy which man in affluence naturally has for man in adversity. How many are those parvenus who inhibit this natural-spring of sympathy in order to appear aristocratic! A great part of your success as Principal of the Day Training College is undoubtedly due to the paternal sympathy you extended to the students individually.29 At a university where condescension could have easily undermined the development of working-class students, Browning taught unconditionally and without regard to class. About the working-class members of his college, he wrote: It was a new and fruitful enterprise to send out every year a number of well-trained and distinguished University men to be elementary schoolmasters, and incidentally our college was a most efficient machine for providing a first-rate University education for exceedingly poor men. Many of our students had not cost their parents anything for their education since they were fourteen or fifteen years of age, and it was an unspeakable pleasure to me, who had spent my boyhood and early manhood in the society of the gilded youth of England, too often unconscious and unheedful of the advantages they possessed, to be connected with men of a more virile and self-denying type. Nothing struck me more in my intercourse with these young men than their great force of character and their strong individuality. Their success in their profession has up to the present time been remarkable.30 Unlike many writers of his day, who spoke of education ‘s ability to ‘tame’ the ‘roughness’ of the working class, Browning used no disparaging rhetoric to describe his working-class students. He neither denounced their backgrounds, nor made excuses for flaws that they, like all students, may have had. He recognized the particular positions and problems of these

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university students and accommodated the ‘efficient machine of learning’ to their productive means. Canon Barnett also recognized his open-mindedness and would consult Browning on various issues concerning the education of his working-class constituency. Once, seeking Browning’s advice, he inquired: Dear Browning, What do you think of H.N.Ferrers as a lecturer on History. I know he has a good degree and reputation but what do you as a man who addresses audiences of working people think of him. Has he much sympa thy—a ready utterance—a latinising manner? We want to start a man…in centers of working populations and must have the right man.31 Knowing Browning’s ease with this marginal student population, Barnett wanted the empathetic don to assure him that this lecturer would neither be too tedious (‘a ready utterance’), nor overly academic or priggish (‘a latinising manner’). He, along with Browning, recognized that students in working populations had particular classroom needs which must be accommodated by those who would instruct them; to ensure their successful learning they ‘must have the right man’. Having only worked among the elite of Oxbridge student populations, some professors were not prepared to adapt their teaching to the special needs of these students. Their pre-conditioned manners of teaching would not allow them to comprehend why these students arrived without certain prescribed knowledge, nor could they appreciate the particular strengths and intelligence they brought to their new educational forum. In all sorts of ways, the traditional Cambridge and Oxford professor was under-prepared to serve a new breed of university entries. Overall, Cambridge remained tight-fisted with funds and accommodation, the provision of which the CUDTC needed in order to grow. Another clear example of the university’s lack of interest in the CUDTC was that it failed to provide the college with any offices, and in the early days all its administrative and tutoring activities took place entirely in Browning’s rooms at King’s College. Searby gives a useful account of how the DTC developed: At first the college had no premises of its own, but it acquired some rooms in 1898 and modest headquarters for teaching in the shape of Warkworth House, an unpretentious Victorian villa, in 1904. The college began with three members of staff, none of them full-time; besides Browning, there were Sedley Taylor of Trinity, who taught music, and J.W.Iliffe, Master of Method; he was headmaster of the Cambridge Boys’ Higher Grade School in Paradise Street. Two years later Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson became another part-time member of staff, to teach elementary classics—very necessary

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instruction since undergraduates had to pass Latin and Greek in the Previous Examination. In 1905 the number of staff had risen to ten. Browning was of course still Principal. He had three full-time colleagues: S.S. Fletcher and F.G.Blandford were respectively the Master and Assistant Master of Method, and R.L.Archer an assistant lecturer in education. Five men taught music and drawing part-time, and Iliffe’s successor at the Higher Grade School, J.Wallis, helped too.32 If the CUDTC were to survive, it would have to rely on the generosity, creative initiatives, and will of its founding members as well as the creative management of its principal. Wortham recorded: Everything [about the CUDTC] had to be created. The College was formless and homeless. It had no funds and the Principal’s salary was £10 a year. But if it lacked everything else it was not without idealism, and Mr. H.G.Wilson, the first student to enter his name on the College books, has remarked how O.B. was ‘indefatigable’ in everything appertaining to the College, of which the head-quarters were his rooms in King’s. Here he coached the three students, who for the first year of the existence of the College made up the number of its pupils…it was a new experience for him to be brought into contact with the undergraduates who had worked their way through the elementary schools to become pupil-teachers, and he has recorded the pleasure their ‘virile and self-denying’ qualities gave him in comparison with Etonian and other public-school boys. The students were naturally poor—many of them passed through the University on £60 and £70 a year—and their force of character and strong individuality impressed this connoisseur of young men.33 Browning fully devoted himself to the progress of these students because they so badly needed his help. As he had done with so many of his privileged students, Browning once again opened up his rooms to provide a comfortable learning environment. As mentioned previously, these working-class men arrived at Cambridge with little or no Latin or Greek and, for many, this lack of experience with ancient tongues designated them as ineducable in most academic eyes. Not Browning. Depicting the early students of the college, he reminisced: The students came up knowing no Greek and little Latin. As the NonCollegiate Board could hardly be expected to provide special lectures for them, the Principal, or Director as he was then called [Browning speaks about himself in the third-person here], had to throw himself into the gap and to teach elementary classics and history. In this

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manner we got our men through satisfactorily, and as I have said above, they have all done well.34 Browning assessed the special learning disadvantages his students faced, and found pedagogical solutions to resolve their problems. As he had always believed, no person was ineducable. He taught all of his students equally and with the same respect, but likewise differentiated his teaching to their learning idiosyncrasies. In some ways, Browning’s rooms were an advantageous venue for the CUDTC. His King’s College residence overlooked King’s Parade, and as F.M.Cornford advised in Microcosmographia Academica, his satirical account of how the university really works: Remember this: the men who get things done are the men who walk up and down King’s Parade, from 2 to 4, every day of their lives. You can either join them, and become a powerful person; or you can join the great throng of those who spend all their time in preventing them from getting things done, and in the larger task of preventing one another from doing anything whatever. This is the Choice of Hercules, when Hercules takes to politics.35 One can imagine Browning spotting from his window an influential leader of Cambridge emerging from the Senate gates and his hastened waddle down his staircase and on to King’s Parade to greet the unsuspecting recipient of Browning’s inveigling. University administration may have approved Browning as principal because they thought that the position would keep him quietly busy and out of university affairs; however, what they did not count on was his passion for this teacher training college, nor his unflagging drive to keep the CUDTC solvent. Teaching and the student-teacher relationships that make teaching productive obsessed Browning; the subject recurred constantly in his writing, speeches, and daily actions. In 1902, 12 years after the CUDTC was founded, Browning began a journal for the college. He named the journal Maia, the Greek word for ‘midwife’, which alluded to the Socratic method of teaching which he sanctioned. Browning introduced the journal, explaining: As all Training Colleges have domestic journals, it is necessary that the Cambridge University Day Training College, which has now passed the tenth year of its existence, should have one also. It will be useful as a notice board of arrangements, as a record of events, as a link between past and present members of the College, and as a notification to the world that we exist. Perhaps our name requires some explanation. To call ourselves the Cambridge University Day Training College Journal would be impossible, and an abbreviation

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such as CUDTCJ would be neither intelligible nor euphonious. MAIA is a simple, well-sounding name, and it may mean a great deal. In a time when the Heuristic method of teaching, first invented by that eminent pedagogue Mr. Squeers, holds the field, we venture to oppose to it the Maieutic method, invented by that still more distinguished pedagogue Socrates. Instead of finding things outside ourselves, we venture to suggest that it is more profitable for other people to find things in us, and whatever may be the presiding genius of Heuresis, there can be no doubt that the patron of Maieusis is Maia.36 Under the supervision of Browning the CUDTC combined the study of pedagogical theory and history with classroom praxis to create fully rounded teachers who faced their own students both with the foundational ideas of education and efficient methods with which to teach them. Beyond the lectures in educational history and theory they attended, each CUDTC pupil-teacher practised in a primary school, where college examiners visited to observe their classes. Amongst the many letters to Browning which recorded these observations, one reads: Dear Principal, I have heard the following lessons this week— Jan.14th Barritt 10–30 British V.Grammar Hyde 11–20 East Road V.Geography Watnaugh 3–20 British I.Geography [more of the same scheduling continues] As you can see from this list, I have been mainly hearing Primary men this week. Two of the weaker men were in school, Hyde and Watnaugh. Hyde’s chief fault is that he is very dull, and Watnaugh’s that he has not resource. Hyams is good in a lesson such as Arithmetic which keeps him to the point, but in a lesson which gives an opening for narrative tends to become discursive. Barritt keeps the attention of his class, and teachers well, but he was not always judicious in his selection of materials. I heard one lesson from Tiddy to-day. His modulation of voice and general attitude of being at home with his class has improved since I heard him a fortnight ago, but it appears to me that he has not much resourcefulness in the arrangement of his lessons… Yours very sincerely, R.L.Archer37 Archer’s classroom observation report highlights the pedagogical qualities which the CUDTC deemed essential for teaching. They were not just concerned with the knowledge the teacher could offer, but how that information was conveyed. Teachers were judged on the materials they chose, but were also evaluated on their classroom manner.

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In a conference address he gave to the Association of Principals and Lecturers in Training Colleges under Government Inspection in 1898, Browning explained the curriculum which was to prepare teachers in proper methods of pedagogy: The plans of work which we organised for them was as follows:—(1) to attend the lectures on the History of Education delivered by Mr. Courthope Bowen on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, (2) to attend the Criticism lesson given for the benefit of the Primary students each Monday afternoon, (3) to attend a Criticism lesson on Thursday afternoons confined to secondary students, (4) to attend lectures once or twice a week on what is called School Management, which includes the building of the school house, the arrangement of the class room, and the elementary principles of school hygiene.38 This teacher training curriculum covered a full range of issues that educators would need for successful teaching. These CUDTC lessons were administered concurrently with the students’ other normal university studies and, thus, the CUDTC students sustained an extremely rigorous course of study. Some of Browning’s contemporaries (including Miss Hughes as we shall see) disagreed with the notion of concurrent training, believing that students could not possibly handle the workload. S.S.F. Fletcher, the CUDTC Master of Methods, publicly argued with Browning because he believed the teacher training should follow the main university work consecutively, doing the general university requirements before tackling the teacher training. He claimed: Those who have to work for a degree as well as do the training college work labour under great difficulties. They feel they cannot do justice to both, and they have to let one or the other give way; one or the other has to suffer or the student has to work beyond his strength. That, I think, is undoubted, and I think it is one of the points Mr. Browning did not mention.39 Browning, however, always upheld ‘concurrency’, reasoning that the interpenetration of academic study and classroom practice offered students a rich and fruitful experience. If a CUDTC were an active student himself at the same time as he worked with pupils in the classroom, be would be far more likely to identify with his class’ learning difficulties. Being university students, while simultaneously preparing classwork for pupils gave these training teachers an intuitive sympathy with their classroom charges. In fact, for the Training College students, concurrency did not appear to be a problem because they usually passed both without difficulty. Presumably,

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this success was largely due to the close and careful attention that Browning and his colleagues gave to their students. To fulfil the teaching curriculum, CUDTC students had to undergo observations of their teaching methods called Criticism Lessons. Browning described this process: As this address may come into the hands of some who do not fully understand what a Criticism Lesson is, I had better explain the manner in which we conduct it. A subject having been chosen, careful notes of lessons are prepared which are submitted to the Master of Method, and if approved of by him the lesson is given on those lines. The notes contain a careful analysis of the course to be followed in giving the lesson, the questions to be asked, and the information to be written on the blackboard. Copies of these notes are in the hands of the class, but the teacher is not allowed to look at them whilst giving the lesson. This prohibition has to be modified in practice for beginners. When the lesson has been given the pupils go out, and the students remaining behind are invited to criticise the performance of the teacher in a certain regular order laid down by the Master of Method.40 To arrive at a substantive evaluation, not only was the Master of Method involved in the observation and critique of the teacher, but the students of the classroom were as well. Again Browning did not fail to ignore the opinions and voices of those he considered most important in the classroom interaction. Browning further explained how the students’ opinions were elicited: [The students] first have to consider the selection of the matter, its quality, its quantity, its relevancy and its accuracy. They then proceed to the method adopted by the teacher, following the five Herbartian steps – preparation, presentation, systematisation, application and recapitulation. The next points are the questions asked in the lesson, their form, sequence and value; then the illustrations used in the course of the lesson, and finally the use of the blackboard. The last division of criticism concerns the relation of the teacher and the class: (first) the sympathy, tact and power shewn by the teacher, his manner, language and tone, the position in which he stood, whether, for instance, he had his hands in his pockets; then the attention, activity and order shewn by the class, and lastly the benefit they received from the lesson. Finally the students are invited to estimate the causes of the success or failure of the teacher. Notes on these various matters are taken by the students in a book specially prepared for the purpose during the progress of the lesson.41

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During the late nineteenth century, concerns about making evaluation ‘scientific’—quantifiable and pragmatic—predominated. Browning’s description of the Criticism Lesson represents a pragmatic manner of recording the teaching performance. Yet even in this detailed report of a teacher’s classroom actions, Browning does not overlook the teacher’s demeanour and its effect upon class members, clearly interpersonal skills remaining an unquantifiable measure. Not only had his student-teachers to be knowledgeable about their chosen subjects, but they had to be aware of how their teaching style influenced their pupils’ learning capabilities. It was not enough for teachers to know their topic, they had to be able to convey that information in an efficient way to their pupils in the classroom. When developing the CUDTC, Browning was careful to set specific guidelines about teaching quality: Unless the lesson is so well known to the teacher as to be given without effort, he will not be able to devote the whole of his energies to observation of the class, to the direction of voice and manner, or to practise resource in dealing with the emergencies of the lesson. The teacher will have prepared careful notes of the lesson which he has to give. He will take care that it fits in with what the class already knows. He will use previous knowledge as a basis from which to start, but he must be careful to add materially to that knowledge. He must not attempt too much, he must consider exactly how much he will be able to expound clearly in a lesson of the prescribed length, and how much he can be sure that the children will carry away with them. Here arises a difficulty. The teacher may have prepared his lesson as an orator prepares his speech, but it may be a speech to which the audience does not care to listen: it may be a lesson which does not harmonize with the direction which the minds of the class are following, for every class has a mind of its own. Here the highest qualities of the teacher come into play. How is he to deviate from his own fixed plan so to meet the mind of his class without abandoning altogether what it is desirable that he should impart. A lesson must not be a mere lecture, or interest will be lost. It must be accompanied with questions: the questions must be distributed over the whole class, and not confined to one or two eager boys. A good and wellprepared lesson is often spoiled by the absence of questions. The questions must be in the right form, so framed as to find out knowledge and also give knowledge by forcing the pupils to draw conclusions from premises… But undoubtedly the highest kind of teaching is found where the class, kept in constant activity, asks questions arising spontaneously out of interest, and where these questions are answered by the teacher briskly and kindly, without interfering with the scheme of the lesson. To solve this difficulty perfectly requires a consummate teacher.42

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Browning gives careful and sound advice to his trainees about class-room practice, including demeanour, quality of speaking voice, and legibility of handwriting on the blackboard. His meticulous attention to detail arose from his understanding of the importance of classroom tone and technologies (here, technologies referring to classroom acoustics and blackboard techniques, equivalent to today’s classroom computer technologies). He took his role as principal very seriously with these upcoming teachers because he took the performance of quality teaching so seriously. The most controversial moment of the CUDTC occurred in 1897 when Browning proposed that it be expanded from training elementary studentteachers, to include those training to be secondary teachers. Browning’s CUDTC colleague, S.S.F.Fletcher, clarified the uniqueness of this particular venture at first: But our College differs from all other Training Colleges in having a Secondary as well as a Primary Department, and in training both classes of students together, so far as practical work is concerned. At least it did so differ, but our example is being gradually followed by other Day Training Colleges, and what was at first denounced as a most mischievous innovation, sure to defeat its own purpose, now promises to become the rule. When, about four years ago, a demand arose for the practical training of Secondary Teachers, and the question was taken up by the University of Oxford, it became necessary for Cambridge to move, and our Syndicate determined most wisely that instead of entrusting this work to a separate organization, they would make it a part of our existing system. Many reasons may be urged for this, but two may be mentioned: first, that training is one and indivisible, and that the essential differences between Primary and Secondary teachers are small in comparison with what is identical; and secondly, because in the present condition of English education, it is extremely difficult to find an efficient Secondary School in which secondary teachers can be trained, and to obtain the consent of Head Masters to their admittance. The secondary students attend the main criticism lesson once a week together with the primary, elements of practical teaching, in which they are often extremely deficient, in the primary school, and, when they are sufficiently advanced to be received by a secondary Head Master, they practise in a secondary school.43 Although Fletcher explained the combined structure of the college and its advantages, he did not convey why the mutual training of primary and secondary teachers was such a significant issue. Secondary teachers included those who would work in England’s public schools, such as Eton. Normally, secondary teachers had (as Browning

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had) taken degrees at Oxford or Cambridge and then were employed in teaching positions with no formal pedagogic training. Most assumed that their experience in classrooms at college and their high-level of tertiary education would suffice for their teaching capabilities. Having studied and taught in a public school, Browning was well aware that this was not the case and knew of the poor teaching which could take place there as a result of inexperienced masters. But beginning a secondary school branch of the CUDTC posed some problems. Browning explained: It is at present claimed that secondary teachers should be trained largely if not principally, in secondary schools. I can say from practical experience that it is extremely difficult, indeed well nigh impossible, to obtain admission to secondary schools for that purpose, or to use them beneficially. Many, if not most, secondary schools are badly organized and are conscious of their defect in organization. The masters employed in them are similarly conscious of their want of training and of their other defects, and are unwilling that these faults should be perceived by others. The discipline of the classes is often not such that apprentice-teachers can be indiscriminately admitted to them, and parents would probably object to their children being taught by any except the regular teacher. Also the system of teaching in secondary schools differs from that in primary, I do not say to the advantage of the former.44 Few of the public school headmasters would co-operate in this endeavour, feeling the training of public-school masters was pointless. Furthermore, many critics faulted the CUDTC for mixing the primary and secondary teachers in the same lessons, feeling their teaching experiences were not similar. Browning, however, knew that good pedagogy was not dependent upon the level of education one taught, but the teaching skills one took to that level. Browning knew that primary and secondary teachers’ classroom experiences would be much the same and he strove to achieve a consistency in their teaching habits. Browning was no stranger to subversion; he knew that if he trained primary school teachers to be eligible for secondary school teaching positions, headmasters could be pressured to send all applicants to training programmes. Browning explains: The examinations were always extensively used by women, but the male candidates were sadly deficient in numbers. The Head Masters, who had especially asked the University to undertake the scheme, and who approved of every detail of it before it was passed, took no adequate means to induce men to gain the certificate. Indeed, the numbers of men remained insignificant until the members of the Primary department of the Cambridge University Day Training

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College began to take the examinations instead of the Government certificate…The only way of compelling secondary schoolmasters to be trained is to let trained students from the Primary Training College pass freely into the Secondary schools. They will show the superiority of trained over untrained teachers, and it will end by Head Masters refusing to accept any as members of their staffs who have not been trained.45 Browning had seen the value training had played in the secondary education of women, but needed to manoeuvre ways to increase the number of men who would do teacher training—specifically upper-class men who would be candidates for secondary school positions. He had seen the poor teaching performance of colleagues at Eton and wanted to remedy the situation. Furthermore, Browning recognized that these two groups of studentteachers would come largely from different socioeconomic backgrounds and felt that their diverse experiences would complement each other and their skills of dealing with students. He asserted: The two classes of students sit on the same forms and, as they are all members of the University, there is gradually growing up amongst them a sense of comradeship and even of fraternity which is certain to become stronger as time goes on. They recognise that each has much to learn from the other. Further, the experience which I have had of seeing the two classes of students together, doing the same work, has given me a respect for the pupil teachers’ system which is so commonly decried by modern progressive educationists.46 Browning structured his teacher training college, not on rank or educational status, but on the sound methods and theories of classroom practice. All students, whether practicing elementary, secondary, elite public or popular grammar schools, deserved this pedagogical know-how from their teachers. In ‘Professional Training for Teachers’ Fitch concluded: Meanwhile, it behoves everyone interested in real educational improvement, and in obtaining for the public teacher a higher status and greater opportunities of influence and usefulness, to consider seriously whether some, at least, of the expedients by which the professional skill of the elementary schoolmasters and mistresses have been so largely increased might not be adopted with advantage by their brethren, who though dealing with scholars of a higher social rank, and using as their main instruments of education subjects of a somewhat different kind, have yet in the main the same phenomena to deal with, and the same need for skill, study, experience and intellectual insight in dealing with them.47

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Sir Joshua Fitch confirmed Browning’s stance, and later Browning would use his influence to persuade critics of the importance of secondary school training. As proof of the necessity of this training, Browning depicted the inefficient teaching of the secondary students when they first arrived for training: Our secondary students, although they attended the Monday Criticism lessons, were reluctant to teach before their primary brethren, and confined themselves to their own lessons on Thursday. It was curious to see what mistakes they made. At first they could not get a class in or out of the room; then their subject matter was all wrong, either too easy or too hard, either too much or too little; then the questions were put in a wrong form, for it is extremely difficult to acquire a proper art of questioning. Also, they did not know how to stand at the blackboard, or how to use it intelligently. They wrote with their backs to the class, while the boys were making faces at them; they were quite unable to teach without notes. The class departed, having learnt very little, either because they had been taught nothing which they did not know before or because what they had been taught was over their heads. But the teachers rapidly improved under training. Interest, even enthusiasm was excited, and each week shewed a marked advance.48 If properly instructed, a teacher could improve his (or her) methods. In this passage, Browning conveyed the complex dynamics and the subtle skills that a gifted teacher needed to create a constructive learning situation. Teaching was not (nor is) a simple task that can be taken for granted. Instructors must arrive in the classroom with much more than mere knowledge from books. They must have the sensitivities to assess their students’ learning problems and the insight about how to resolve them. In 1903, Mr Scott-Coward came to inspect the progress of the college. Durnford, the Chair of the Committee, who met with the inspector recorded: [The inspector] said that it was some years since he visited the College for the Purpose of inspecting it. He derived very great satisfaction from his present visit. He saw all round a very steady and marked progress. There was a certain grown-upness and manliness of mind, especially in teaching; the teaching exhibited manliness, independence and resource. The students were no longer the hobbled boys of the ordinary elementary teacher type. They were real members of the University. The whole aspect of the College showed a marked and most satisfactory improvement. This was observable in their manner and style of dress, in their approach to each other and to those in

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authority and in dealing with their classes. In all these relations they exhibited courtesy and dignity. He had been very much impressed.49 This inspector’s observations can be viewed also in the continuing series of pictures taken each year of the CUDTC students. The May 1893 group photo pictured a small group of students, Browning centred among them. Their scuffed shoes and rumpled unmatching jackets and pants showed a lack of self-consciousness that, as the inspector noted, marked them as the ‘ordinary elementary teacher type’, (See Figure 5.) However, by 1909—the year Browning retired from the CUDTC—the over 60 men photographed exhibited a polished demeanour, their upright postures and pressed, tailored suits presented the epitome of gentlemanliness. (See Figure 6.) The inspector also added: that the first criterion of teaching is interest, seriousness and belief in the work. All the men showed they were engaged in the serious business, which they tried to do with sincerity. This was also shown by the great sympathy which existed between the teacher and the taught. The notes of lessons were for the most part, good: they were not too long, were to the point, and were arranged in logical order. Some of the Notes were extremely well done: three or four of them were of very high merit indeed. In the quantity of matter taught, here and there mistakes were made, but on the whole the amount of matter was not in excess, and difficulties were adjusted to the capacity of the boys. Here again, the results were very satisfactory. Also in language the great majority were satisfactory, and in asking questions. All the illustrations were to the purpose. The blackboard was well used, with excellence, rapidity and accuracy. He was very much pleased with all that was done in that direction. To sum up the average teaching comes well up to the highest level which is found elsewhere. The Training College has solved the problem of combining difficult academic studies with effective professional work.50 These CUDTC participants had not only gained the cultural capital to revise their social standing, but they had also gained the self-confidence to present themselves as qualified and skillful teachers. Browning’s lifelong dedication to progressive pedagogy and his democratic pursuit of education were apparent in how he administered the Teacher Training College. He left a legacy of teaching that was unique and thoughtfully directed. Describing the influence Browning had on this school, Searby elaborates: Oscar Browning left his unique mark on the study of education in Cambridge. His enthusiasm was largely responsible for the inauguration of the lectures in 1879 and of the Day Training College

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Figure 5 This group portrait of an early group of CUDTC students shows the ‘scuffed and wrinkled’ character of the working-class men who initially attended the teacher training college. Many of his CUDTC students remembered how Browning welcomed them with a ‘spring of sympathy’ into the privileged environs of Cambridge. Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

twelve years later… His attitude [about teacher training] rested less on abstract theory than on his sense of human unity and the need to bring different sorts of men together.51 Under Browning and his colleagues’ tutelage, these working-class men were educated and, as a result, could re-enter society with better credentials and prospects than they ever could have achieved without their university education. Many of them returned to their working-class communities to teach, despite critics who had warned that after receiving an education

Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Figure 6 In this 1909 photograph, Browning appears for the last time with his ‘beloved’ CUDTC students. In this group picture, one recognizes the growth of the college and the development of its young men. A certain tenor of ‘courtesy and dignity’ prevails which Browning had perpetuated at his teacher training college.

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many of these Cambridge graduates would want higher-paying positions instead of teaching. (Again the opinion that they would be unhappy out of their social station shows itself.) Evidently this did not occur. To these critics, Browning responded: A third charge made against us is that we train, not for primary but for secondary schools, and that in a few years our pupils will have passed away from the profession of elementary teachers. To this I can give a most emphatic denial. Not only is our leakage extremely small, little more, I think, than ten per cent.; but there is an enthusiasm amongst our students for the career of Elementary Teacher which forbids us to think that any large number of them look forward to be emancipated some day from elementary work. Of course if a good man finds it difficult to obtain a desirable post in a primary school there is small blame to him if he accepts a post in a secondary school, and there is in some quarters a prejudice amongst School Managers against University trained students. Our students go from their tripos work and their University surroundings, to the routine of elementary teaching with cheerfulness, and even with joy. Let me mention three cases. One student after taking a second class in his tripos, went to teach little children of the first standard in a Board School in the Waterloo Road. I have a photograph of him in the midst of his pupils, and he looks like Pestalozzi amongst the orphans of Stanz. From this, I am happy to say that he was promoted this year by public competition to be Principal of an organized Science School at a considerable salary. Another went from us to a racing centre, where he found the little boys all making books instead of reading them. He introduced University football into their minds and habits with the most beneficial results. A third, on taking his degree, accepted a wellpaid post in a secondary school, but he finds it so distasteful from its luxury and unreality that he is giving it up to return to elementary work.52 Browning’s anecdotes attested to the dedication his students had to pedagogical pursuits. Moreover, although they might have gained the educational capital that an Oxford or Cambridge degree allotted, their roots were not forgotten and their contributions began to change the British social fabric. Browning relied on pedagogy—the art and science of teaching—to alter the possible courses of his student-teachers’ lives as well of the pupils whom they would teach. Whether they be the ‘gilded youth’ he educated at Eton and King’s or the ‘Virile, self-denying types’ he taught in the Cambridge University Day Training College, his educational philosophy and pedagogical style remained a consistent factor in the learning equation. Policy makers could set all of the standards they wanted or implement all of

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the exams they chose, but without sound and informed instruction, students would inevitably fail. Browning’s close and caring rapport with students bolstered their confidence at school and thus helped ensure their academic achievements. In Sixty Years, he warned: Education, as a science, is hardly recognized by the university, but if the University is to retain its position as the summit of the educational ladder, it will have to be so recognized. The training of the mind, of the character of the whole man, which is the scope of all education worthy of the name, can only be effected by the closest intimacy with those who are to receive it.53 Browning’s counsel, arguably largely ignored by the university until the end of the twentieth century, was nevertheless felt by the lucky students who encountered the teachers whom he sent out into the teaching world. One can imagine how these new teachers would approach their students with the same care and nurturing that they had received from Browning. As William Johnson Cory had shared his pedagogical knowledge with Browning at Eton, so O.B. now disseminated his classroom expertise to the future British educators in the CUDTC. The inattention of historicists to this early day training college at Cambridge parallels the lack of interest that Browning noticed regarding teacher training during his time.54 In a speech he delivered to a meeting of the Day Training College, he stated: In discussing the advantage which teachers derive from training, should we not rather throw the burden of proof on the opponents of training, and call upon them to show why, of all occupations and professions, teaching should be the only one which can be successfully exercised without previous training? The teacher’s is one of the most difficult and subtle of occupations, and certainly one of the most important, but it has been one of the most despised and neglected.55 The obscurity of his early teacher training programme can be partially accounted for by the Academy’s disparaging opinions about the significance of teaching and teacher training. Browning’s often distraught comments about university’s disdain for pedagogy showed his passion about the act of teaching and his courage in facing up to those who tried to diminish its importance. After 16 years as Principal of the CUDTC, Browning submitted his final report to the university. It is worth quoting him at length because his own words describe the development and achievements of his beloved training college:

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The Cambridge University Day Training College was opened in October 1891, with three students… Our first students left the College with a degree in June, 1893, and between this date and June, 1907–14 years—140 students have left the College. Of these 23 gained first classes in Triposes, making 15 per cent.; 38, second classes, making 25 per cent.; and 44, third classes, making 28 per cent.: 37 took the ordinary degree, 24 per cent.; leaving 12, or only 8 per cent., unaccounted for. So much for the academical work. As an evidence of the adequacy of their professional training, the following figures may be cited: of the 140 who have passed through the College, 4 are dead. Of the remaining 136, 130, or 95.6 per cent., are doing educational work, and only 6, or 4.4 per cent., are engaged in noneducational work as clergymen or journalists, if this can be called non-educational work. Of the remaining 130, 119, or 87.5 per cent., are actually now doing educational work covered by the obligation imposed by the Board of Education as Teachers in Elementary Schools or Training Colleges, Inspectors or Sub-Inspectors, Directors of Education or Teachers in State-aided Grammar Schools; 9, or 6.6 per cent., are engaged in Elementary or Higher Grade Schools; 22, or 16.2 per cent., in Training Colleges or Pupil Teachers’ Centres; 6, or 4.4 per cent., are engaged as Inspectors or Directors of Education.56 However tedious Browning’s statistics may be, they do prove the achievements of his students as well as show the diverse educational positions they would fill. One can see how the progressive philosophy of the CUDTC was disseminated across the developing British educational system, and the impact that it may have had. At nearly 70 years of age and after devoting a lifetime to education, Browning recognized the CUDTC as his crowning glory. Arthur Benson, his longtime colleague and not always favourable critic, dined with the aged don, who had suffered a series of professional disappointments. In 1903 Browning, after writing 20—not so acclaimed—books applied to Cambridge for a D.Litt. but was denied. Benson reports that in the midst of his bitter complaints and egotistical accusations about the rejection, he suddenly exclaimed, ‘Well I have given my heart to King’s & my life & energies to the work of the College—& it fulfils all my dearest hopes; it is full of keen, enthusiastic young men, and growing daily before one’s eyes— one can well afford to sink one’s own personal disappointments in the happiness of that!’57 If he could find no solace among his peers at Cambridge, he consoled himself with the success of his students. If his scholarly accreditation could not be fulfilled he still had his training college. Regardless if the university acknowledged his accomplishments, those at the CUDTC would appreciate his efforts. Or so he thought. His syndicate colleagues had decided that Browning’s work for the CUDTC had reached its end. In the spring of 1909 Browning had fallen

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ill with pneumonia. His increasingly bad health and his increasingly difficult demeanour had convinced them that Browning should retire and be replaced. During his convalescence, the Syndicate met under the chairmanship of Walter Durnford and it was decided that Browning should be made redundant. Browning received a carefully worded letter from the Vice Chancellor, commending his past service and his ‘energy and resourcefulness, the knowledge based upon large experience, the unstinting diligence’ he had dedicated to the administration of the college. The Vice Chancellor then ‘reluctantly’ requested that he submit his resignation.58After various letters from colleagues gently urging his decision, Browning conceded. Walter Durnford was appointed as the Acting Principal of the college and W.G.Bell as the Secretary of the Syndicate; Browning’s roles were subsumed and his active life at Cambridge ended. He wrote to Bell later, stating: I hope the College will prosper. It is bad enough to be removed from a work on which I expected to spend the remainder of my health and strength, which I loved with a passionate devotion—to see it perish in incompetent hands would be an additional pang. But I must not conceal my opinion that the machinations which brought about my dismissal, with which I hope you had nothing to do, are the vilest tissue of treachery and intrigue which ever stained the annals of the University. The Vice Chancellor’s letters are excellent, but he was misinformed. I had no difficulties in the management of the Training College, excepting what were made by those who were anxious to get rid of me. There has been no change of any moment in the government of the College, the Syndicate has always been the Governing body, they have only substituted a committee of themselves for a committee containing extraneous elements, doing what Oxford has always done and what Cambridge might have done. The University, so far as it cares about the matter, supposes that I have resigned from ill health, and perhaps it is as well that it should do so. But it might become necessary for me to publish the facts, and then the whole business would be treated with disgust.59 Whatever bitterness Browning felt toward the university was assuaged by the reaction from his CUDTC students. He recounted: When the students learned at the end of the summer term 1909 that I had resigned the Principalship of the College they were much surprised and shocked, as they had seen me only a short time before taking part in a College photograph. They immediately subscribed out of their slender means for a testimonial in the shape of an illuminated

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address, which was presented to me at my house at Bexhill by a deputation of students.60 Their testimonial read: The present students of the Cambridge University Day Training College, desiring to record our appreciation of your work and our regret at your departure, present this address to you, as Principal, on your retirement. We feel that recognition is due from us as the last generation of teachers, who will be able in the future to look back with reverence and affection to the world-famous name of O.B. as their friend and Principal. In all our work at Cambridge we have derived constant support and inspiration from your kindness and warm-hearted sympathy, and the memory of this will be the most treasured possession that we carry away from Cambridge. The College owes you a double debt as Founder and Guardian, and it is a matter of common knowledge that the astonishing progress made in numbers and achievement since our foundation is due to your wise statesmanship, untiring energy, and educational foresight.61 If he was wounded by the acts of his colleagues, his students’ words must have at least been a healing consolation. Since he had no further duties at Cambridge and not wanting to be merely a dining Fellow in halls, Browning decided to retire to his home in Bexhill-on-Sea. From there he would continue to correspond with the college administrators and offer his advice, however unsolicited. In 1913, Browning left for an 18-month holiday on the continent but, because of the breakout of the First World War, he remained for the rest of his life in Rome.62 He wrote: I left everything behind me, books, plate, linen, flowers, land, indeed everything that I possessed, including some objects of considerable value, which I never saw again. My land I sold not badly, my books, after a painful experience of warehousing, I presented to the Public Library at Hastings, for which I believe they are very grateful. It included a large library of classical music, which I am told they find of great use.63 At the age of 76, Browning relinquished everything—his property, his homeland, and a culture in which he had been thoroughly educated and steeped. He began his final memoir, stating: I have lived in Rome now continuously for more than ten years, and it is probable that I shall die there, because I never leave it. I came here because I found myself alone in the world. My sisters were dead,

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my contemporaries were nearly all dead, Montague Butler and Sir George Trevelyan perhaps the only ones remaining. I had three places of abode in England, Cambridge, London and Bexhill, and I knew that I owed money in all and never felt sure that I was living within my income. I…determined that I would go to Italy and live on half my income.64 This final memoir was published in 1923, and this would be his final words to the world at large.65 On 6 October 1923, Oscar passed away in Rome with his Italian ‘family’—his ‘mama’ and her two children, Ettore and Rosina. In the last moments of his life, he asked his housekeeper to send away her young daughter, while her son held his hand as he passed. He spent his last breath by a boy whom for Browning must have represented all the young men to whom he had dedicated his entire teaching life. In the conclusion to his first memoir, Browning had asserted: My time was spent almost entirely with the undergraduates; indeed, it seemed to me that a College teacher, who had a high conception of education and desired to live up to it, must devote himself exclusively to the young men under his charge. Education, as a science is hardly recognized by the University, but if the University is to retain its position as the summit of the educational ladder, it will have to be so recognized. The training of the mind, of the character of the whole man, which is the scope of all education worthy of the name, can only be effected by the closest intimacy with those who are to receive it. As remote and obscure as his name may be within educational history, Browning’s words still resonate. Whatever reputation this intriguingly odd man may have accrued since his death, he remains a model representative of British educationists. NOTES 1. ‘Report of the “Teaching Memorials” Syndicate’ (12 June 1878) CUL Educ Arch 1/6 ix. The committee members included E.Atkinson (Vice Chancellor), W.H.Bateson, B.E Westcott, B.H.Kennedy, F.J.A. Hort, G.D. Liveing, James Stuart, G.F.Browne, H. Sidgwick, Oscar Browning, B.E.Hammond, W.E Heitland, H.S.Foxwell. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Browning, Sixty Years, p. 259.

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7. ‘First Annual Report to the Senate of the Teachers’ Training Syndicate’ (13 July 1880), CUL Educ Arch 1/7 ii. 8. Oscar Browning, Address on Secondary Education delivered at the Social Science Congress, Birmingham, 1884.’CUL Cam.c.884.8., p. 7. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., pp. 14–15. 11. W.W.Jackson, ‘Day Training Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge’, Educational Review, 1 (January 1892), pp. 136–42; British Library, pp.1187.id. 12. Jackson (and subsequent historians of these teacher training initiatives) have highlighted the efforts of Oxford when, in fact, Cambridge began its teacher training college a year prior to Oxford. 13. ‘Application to the Committee of Council on Education for the Establishment of a Day Training College in Connection with the University of Cambridge’, CUL UA Educ 27/2. 14. Browning, Sixty Years, p. 262. 15. Peter Searby, The Training of Teachers in Cambridge University: The First Sixty Years, 1879–1939 (Cambridge, Brookside Resources Centre, Cambridge University Department of Education, 1982); Homerton College Library, Cambridge. 16. Ibid., p. 15. 17. A.Caldecott, The Proposed Day Training College in Cambridge’ (4 March 1889), CUL UA Educ Arch 27/2. 18. Alon Kadish, Apostle Arnold, The Life and Death of Arnold Toynbee 1852– 1883 (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1986), p. 174. 19. Ibid., pp. 7–9. 20. Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 9. 21. Canon Samuel Barnett, ‘Letter to Oscar Browning’ (4 February 1905) CUL UA Educ 3/1–3/9. 22. Canon Samuel Barnett, Appeal to University Men’, Toynbee Record 4.2 (August 1892) Toynbee Hall Archives, Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel, London. p. 133. 23. ‘Ninth Annual Report of the Universities’ Settlement in East London, Toynbee Hall’, (London, Penny and Hull, 1893) London Metropolitan Archives. A/Toy/ 5. 24. Charles Fox, ‘Letter to Oscar Browning’ (1 January 1901) Cambridge University Library Manuscripts Room, UA Educ 3/1–3/9. 25. George W.Gent, ‘On the Proposed Day Training Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge’, Educational Review 2 (1891), p. 194; British Library Manuscripts Room P.P.1187.id. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., p. 195. 28. Oscar Browning, ‘Presidential Address’ to Association of Principals & Lecturers in Training Colleges under Government Inspection, (December 1898), CUL Cam.d.899.13. 29. Searby, Training of Teachers, p. 26. 30. Browning, Sixty Years, p. 263.

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31. Canon Samuel Barnett, ‘Letter to Oscar Browning’, (Undated), CUL Educ Arch 3/1–3/9. 32. Searby, Training of Teachers, pp. 16–17. 33. Wortham, Victorian Eton and Cambridge, p. 210. 34. Browning, ‘Presidential Address’, pp. 4–5. 35. F.M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica, Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician (reprint) (Cambridge, Main Sail Press, 1993), p. 41. 36. Oscar Browning, ‘Introduction’, Maia: Journal of the Cambridge University Day Training College 1 (October 1902), CUL UA Educ 27/2, p. 1. 37. R.L.Archer, ‘Letter to Oscar Browning’, (17 February 1905), CUL Educ Arch 3/1–3/9. 38. Browning, ‘Presidential Address’, p. 15. 39. Searby, Training of Teachers, p. 29. 40. Browning, Tresidential Address’, p. 15. 41. Ibid., p. 16. 42. Browning, ‘Importance of Teacher Training’, pp. 4–5. 43. S.S.F.Fletcher, ‘Day Training College’, Maia: Journal of the Cambridge University Day Training College 1 (1 October 1902), CUL Educ 27/2, p. 3. 44. Browning, ‘Presidential Address’, p. 22. 45. Browning, Sixty Years, p. 260. 46. Ibid., pp. 20–1. 47. Sir Joshua G.Fitch, ‘Professional Training for Teachers’, Educational Review 3 (January 1892), p. 122. 48. Browning, ‘Presidential Address’, pp. 16–17. 49. W Durnford, ‘DTC Minutes’ (15 May 1903), CUL Educ Arch 2/1. 50. Ibid. 51. Searby, Training of Teachers, pp. 1–2. 52. Browning, ‘Presidential Address’, pp. 8–9. 53. Browning, Sixty Years, pp. 331–2. 54. Compared to the relatively numerous publications on Oxford’s contributions to working-class education and, despite the CUDTC’s effects upon the Cambridge University community, Browning’s training college has gone virtually unnoticed. Although it is mentioned in the biographies of Browning, the main Cambridge library holds only a brief pamphlet about the school by P.J. Barnwell, and the library at Education Faculty contains a short, but highly informative pamphlet by Professor Peter Searby, former chair and historian of the education department. Hidden away in the University’s Rare Book Collection, Barnwell’s rather sketchy document presents some basic facts about the Training College (P.J. Barnwell, ‘The Cambridge University Schoolmasters’ Training College 1891–1938’ (CULPrinters: Printed at the Cambridge University Library, 1981) Cambridge University Library Rare Books Room, Cam.c.981.16.) (For Searby, see note 15.) 55. Browning, The Importance of the Training of Teachers’, p. 1. 56. Browning, Sixty Years, p. 264. 57. Anstruther, Oscar Browning, p. 172. 58. Wortham, Victorian Eton and Cambridge, p. 282. 59. Oscar Browning, ‘Letter to W.G.Bell’ (26 October 1909) CUL Educ Arch 29/1/1.

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60. Browning, Sixty Years, p. 205. 61. Ibid., PP. 265–6. 62. Even in his final years as the First World War was waged, Browning continued teaching soldiers who were stationed near Rome. He wrote: My little ‘bit’ in this [war-time] task consisted in teaching Italian to a small party of Naval Telegraphists, who were connected with the wireless station at Noumana. Their society brightened up my summer months (Browning, Later Years, p.217).

For Browning, teaching remained a contributing occupation as well as a pleasure until the very end of his life. Along with his music and the languages he continued to learn, his continued teaching seemed to sustain his sense of well-being. About the young English soldiers he taught Italian, he continued: I had already learnt, in my work at the Cambridge Training College, the charm of common English boys, and any appreciation I may have had of them was deepened by my present experience… I never come across this class without feeling that they are the backbone of England, and I wish that our public schools could produce anything like them. (Browning, Later Years, p. 271.)

His convictions that there was no boy too stupid, nor lowly, nor poor only strengthened, as he grew older. As an equal and opposite force in the learning process, O.B.’s students constantly revitalized in him a need to learn more. During his long life in education, he never stopped learning from his students. 63. Oscar Browning, Memories of Later Years (London, T.Fisher Unwin, 1923), p. 163. 64. Ibid., p. 9. 65. One moment when Browning did feel recognized was in 1898 when Curzon became Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India. The elderly teacher visited his student with much pomp and circumstance in 1902, where upon introducing his former don to his first wife, Curzon proclaimed, ‘Whatever I am, my dear, I owe it all to Mr Browning.’ (This scenario is recorded both in David Gilmour, Curzon (London, John Murray, 1994), p. 14 and in Browning, Later Years, p. 66). After his visit, Browning had purposefully contacted Lord Curzon, to solicit a KBE. Making light of the request in his biography, Anstruther writes: The idea of O.B. being made a Knight was a joke that no one except himself took seriously. When he did get given an honour, once again everyone laughed except O.B. himself. In the Birthday Honours List for 1923 he was created an

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Officer of the Order of the British Empire—in other words, he was made an OBE. (Anstruther, Oscar Browning, p. 184.)

Even the Viceroy of India could not have Browning knighted. Anstruther mocks the then 85-year old man for being so pleased with his award, writing, ‘He received it formally at the British Embassy from the Charge d’Affaires, and felt as pleased as a child with a new trinket. He wrote and thanked George Curzon for his part in the matter. It was, he told him, ‘a splendid ornament in admirable taste’. What Anstruther overlooks is Browning’s pedagogical service—both at the level of preparing statesmen at Eton and Cambridge, and also, in his role as Principal of Cambridge University Day Training College, offering education to the less privileged.

ELIZABETH HUGHES Pam Hirsch

7 THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY

When studying the history of women’s education several things become immediately apparent. As early as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft had pointed out that women’s exclusion from education was no accident, but part of a deliberate construction of women’s dependency. Once educational inequalities were removed, other gender inequalities would disappear. This argument was believed not only by the Victorian middle-class women who were struggling for educational equality, but also by the men who offered entrenched resistance. Indeed, the fear that women, when given the same education as men, would prove more-than-equal was precisely the fear which fed conservative resistance. However, men of a more liberal persuasion, helped with a variety of educational initiatives to benefit women. For example, in 1848 with the support of some of the lecturers at King’s College, London, Queen’s College, an Anglican establishment under the aegis of the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution (GBI) was founded. In similar fashion, in 1849, Bedford College was founded by Unitarian women, and was loosely attached to the non-denominational University College. Despite the name ‘college’, these were to all intents and purposes secondary schools, taking girls from 12 years old and attempting to educate them so that they could make careers as governesses or as teachers for girls’ academies.1 Elizabeth Jesser Reid, a stalwart of the British Anti-Slavery campaign, echoes its rhetoric when she wrote of the founding of Bedford College: ‘my dearest wish is that the whole proceeding may be an Underground Railway, differing in this from the American U.R. that no-one shall ever know of its existence’.2 Several of the women who went to Bedford and Queen’s went on to be significant figures in the education of girls and women and in the suffrage movement. Barbara Bodichon, the co-founder of Girton College, Cambridge had attended Bedford College; from Queen’s emerged some remarkable headmistresses: Dorothea Beale, the founder of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Frances Buss, the founder of North London Collegiate School. Bedford and Queen’s planted the seeds of ambition for higher education of women, as well as began the impetus of a movement that would eventually change the mindset of society concerning women’s ability.

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However, to achieve such a societal shift, women leaders would need to arise to challenge such embedded ideologies. The women who emerged as leaders were intellectually able and they also tended to come from families with a history of entrepreneurial acuity. If the women had fathers or grandfathers who had been successful in business, these women would often ‘inherit’, by observation of a successful model, the instinct for identifying a niche in the (educational) market, and moving into it. They were also skilful, as good leaders are, at recognizing leadership potential in others, and promoting it.3 To understand how and why Cambridge Training College for Women came into being (and Elizabeth Hughes was chosen to take on the role of first principal), it is necessary to look at other women working in the field, ‘to see what kind of collective social and intellectual profile might be constructed of the women—and the men—who wrote and spoke, organized and raised money, and created and served institutions for the secondary and higher education of women in nineteenthcentury England’.4 The three decades before the establishment of the Cambridge Training College (CTC) in 1885 was a period of intense activity on many fronts including a series of commissions on education for all classes, Education in the nineteenth century was stratified not as it is now, primarily by age, but by social class. Thus elementary education was the education provided for the working class and included children as old as 14.5 The Newcastle Commission on Popular Education published in 1861 for the first time invited women to give their expert evidence in a written circular. Barbara Bodichon, who had founded a progressive coeducational elementary school in London, where, unusually, social classes were mixed, took the opportunity to deplore the lack of properly trained women teachers for girls’ schools, and (thinking of middle-class girls) blamed fathers for not investing money to educate their girls because they assumed first that their daughters would get married, and, second, that education was no use to a married woman. As usual she placed the ‘problem’ of girls’ education within a wider feminist analysis: I believe the laws and social arrangements affecting the conditions of wives in England, to be one of the causes why good teachers cannot be found for girls’ schools, and why girls’ schools deserve the bad character the Rev. J.P. Norris [HMI] so truly gives them. I believe that, until the law gives a married woman a right to her own wages, and an independent legal existence, some control over her children, and social arrangements admit a woman’s right to more liberty of action, that the education of girls will be miserably neglected.6 In the early nineteenth century both day and boarding schools for girls existed of widely varying standards, but they were private ventures which came and disappeared according to the fortunes of the people

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running them. Nevertheless, the 1851 census counted 67,551 women teachers of all types and many of them sought such forms of training as they could achieve.7 By 1864 there were 18 government-funded colleges open to women in England for elementary teachers, and a small section of women intending to become secondary teachers trained there. But these colleges were not seen as ideal for training secondary teachers.8 In terms of influencing the urban gentry of the need for improvement in girls’ secondary schools, a significant forum for debate was the Social Science Association established in 1857 by Lord Brougham for progressive middle-class ideas. The association formed pressure groups interested in reforming five areas of government, one of which was education. The leader of the Langham Place Group of feminists, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, persuaded Lord Brougham to make it open to women.9 Bodichon, for example, sent a paper on ‘Middle Class Schools for Girls’ which Bessie Parkes read at the 1860 Glasgow conference in which she bemoaned the abysmally low standards of girls’ schools. All the papers were printed in the Transactions of the Social Science Association, but the papers specifically relating to women’s affairs were also printed in the English Woman’s Journal, the periodical run by the Langham Place Circle. Although its circulation never exceeded 7,000, it nevertheless went into the homes of the liberal intelligentsia, and thereby had at least the possibility of influencing women with talent and time to spare, plus parents wondering about where to send their bright girls to school. Bodichon begins by arguing that there should be schools founded for girls supported by charity just as there had been for generations of higher-and middle-class boys, commenting that: neither Christ Church, Eton, nor Oxford are supposed to degrade those who are educated by them, yet they are in a great measure charities… I believe that educated ladies who have the will, the intellect and the money wherewith to help their fellow-creatures, cannot begin a better work than by interesting themselves in the education of the girls of the middle class; girls who certainly ought to be sensibly and practically brought up, as they are destined to as hard trials as either their richer or poorer sisters; if these girls could see that ladies above them had solid knowledge, as well as superficial accomplishments, it would do them an immense good—example is always better than precept… Good schools for 6d a week will not pay, but 1s a week from 150 children can be made to pay expenses without profit. Probably schools charging £1 a quarter could be made to pay a profit. It is very desirable that a society should be formed for the establishment of such schools [and that] every effort should be made by the friends of education to raise the standard of the mistresses and to give them opportunities of steady improvement, and some public recognition of their efficiency.10

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The 1865 women’s memorial, of which Anne Jemima Clough was a signatory, to the Schools’ Inquiry Commission, persuaded Lord Taunton to investigate the state of girls’ schools. The commission castigated the inadequacy of traditional provision for girls, and recommended that some ancient endowments should be made over to the creation of girls’ schools. This was a supremely important formal acknowledgement of the predicament to which Anne Jemima Clough, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and many other women educationists had been excoriating at meetings of the Social Science Association, the North of England Council, and also by articles in a variety of journals. The Taunton Commission’s Report, published in 1868, paid special tribute to the work of Frances Mary Buss (1827–94). It recommended the provision of secondary education for girls to be set up in large towns along the lines of Buss’s North London Collegiate School for Ladies in Camden Town, the school she had opened in 1850 with the support of her family. The Endowed Schools Act of 1869, permitting ancient foundations to remodel endowments to meet the needs of the present day, opened up the possibility of getting funding to establish girls’ schools. The Endowed Schools’ Commission (1869–74), was headed by Joshua Fitch, a significant supporter of women’s education. As he toured the country encouraging schools to remodel their endowments, be pressed them, even in the face of governors’ reluctance, to use some of their endowment to create good solid secondary schools. The 1870s thus saw an expansion of schools for girls, potentially creating a new generation of young women capable of taking full advantage of the newly available university education.11 Getting the girls and young women admitted to generally recognized examinations was an important strand of the move forward. Following the institution of local examinations for boys and girls in 1858 by the University of Durham, the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women was formed in 1867, of which Anne Jemima Clough (later to be the first principal of Newnham College, Cambridge) was an active member.12 This was a highly effective pressure-group, working with methodical purpose to secure academic qualifications for women. The council, of which Josephine Butler was president and Anne Jemima Clough was secretary, also devised what they called a University Extension Scheme, a series of local lectures for young women, given by a peripatetic university lecturer. The idea was to improve the poor training and lack of recognized status of women teachers and governesses, and it was hoped that ultimately a regular course of lectures might lead to a special, certificated, examination which would serve as a teaching qualification. The demand—at its height the council had representatives in 12 towns and cities from Glasgow to Cheltenham—indicates that the demand for knowledge from prospective middle-class women who either were, or aspired to be, teachers, was there.13

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But, to start with higher education, in Cambridge two university-level colleges for women had been set up in the 1870s, Girton and Newnham, as the result of long campaigns by individual women and highly effective pressure-groups.14 Initially there was a difference of emphasis in the two institutions. At Newnham College, Anne Jemima Clough, acknowledging the inadequacy of much girls’ secondary education, allowed the early students to follow the studies of their choice, whether or not their work led to university examinations. For example, the Latin, Greek and logic required for the ‘Little-go’, the Cambridge qualifying examination, was a tremendous strain on young women whose secondary education had inevitably been inadequate. This was in sharp contrast to Emily Davies, the first mistress of Girton, who would allow no compromise. Driven by the need to prove women’s intellectual equality, she insisted that Girton students should commit themselves to full Cambridge degree courses and to sit the examinations like the men after the statutory ten terms. It seems that at first Newnham students were less affluent and socially secure than Girton students; an oral tradition has it that ‘Newnham was for governesses and Girton for ladies’.15 This difference between the two institutions soon shifted, however, so that by 1885, when Cambridge Training College was founded, four-fifths of Newnham students were, like their Girton sisters, working for a Cambridge degree (although it was not until 1948 that the University of Cambridge was finally persuaded to award degrees to women). At the Education Section of the Social Science Association Meeting in Leeds of October 1871, unsurprisingly, the friends of education for girls converged. Joseph Payne (1808–76) of the College of Preceptors commented that it was no use for successive commissions simply to keep condemning the inadequacies of the provision of education for girls if they did not address the ‘fundamental remedy [which] must be the better teaching of the teacher: That is the point which really is at the foundation of all the faults found with the system. We go into a girls’ school in which we see the children engaged in what is called learning. We find them listless, indifferent, uninterested. They give no attention to the teaching of the teacher, and we see that there is something altogether wrong at the bottom of the system. We go again in the course of a month to the same school. The school has remained exactly what it was, the school arrangements and furniture are the same, the forms and desks are exactly the same, but we see a total change has occurred in the whole spirit of the school. This does not arrive from any addition to the school funds; not a single farthing has been contributed to make the school more efficient, but a new main spring has been put into the school in the shape of a new teacher, who knows how to direct the minds of the children, how to estimate their character, to stimulate an

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interest in learning, who knows in fact the art of education—an art in which, I am sorry to say, most teachers are lamentably deficient.16 Mary Gurney17 delivered a paper on ‘Middle-Class Schools for Girls’ in which she argued that, when considering the provision of schools the middle class should be thought of as having three strata: ‘(1st) the daughters of professional men and those of the upper class reduced in circumstances; (2nd) the children of tradespeople; and (3rd) the more intelligent children of the artizans and labourers.’18 This point is worth emphasizing because the anxiety about mixing classes, even of gradations within classes was an endemic Victorian anxiety; it is unsafe ever to assume that women educationists who were progressive in gender terms would automatically be progressive in class terms.19 This meeting led to the founding of the National Union for the Education of Girls of all Classes above the Elementary (later called Women’s Education Union) inaugurated on 17 November 1871. Payne was Chairman of the central committee of the Women’s Education Union)20 which committed itself to providing ‘means for Training Female Teachers, and for testing their efficiency by Examination of recognized authority, followed by Registration, according to fixed standard’.21 The central working party included Maria Shirreff Grey (1806–1906), her sister Emily Shirreff 22 (1814–97), who had served as Mistress at Hitchin (Girton College started its life in rented premises in Hitchin in 1869 before the founders bought land for a permanent building in Girton), and Lady Stanley of Alderney,23 and Mary Gurney, both of the latter being benefactors of Girton.24 It is worth noting that these pioneer women supporting the inter-connected layers of female education were usually either single or widowed, women who had control over both their time and also, crucially, control over their money.25 They had, to adapt Virginia Woolf ‘s famous phrase, both a room and a bank account of their own. All of these advocates of female education regarded Miss Buss’s North London Collegiate School as the template for, or mother of them all when in 1872 they formed the Girls’ Public Day School Company (GPDSC) (later Trust), a device to secure money for the building and equipping of new schools along the lines of the North London Collegiate.26 The company managed to found and equip 15 schools in the first five years of its existence, all of them charging about £15 a year; by 1880 the GPDSC had opened 11 schools in London and 11 elsewhere—at Bath, Brighton, Gateshead, Ipswich, Liverpool, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford, Sheffield, Weymouth and York.27 The word ‘collegiate’ is not without significance, because it indicates Buss’s conviction of the necessary close connection between the secondary school and the university. The medieval tradition that bound Eton to King’s College at Cambridge, was adopted by Miss Buss. She herself looked to the newly founded women’s college at Girton, near Cambridge because

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its Mistress, Emily Davies, insisted that the graduands should be of the same standard as any college for men. Girton students had to cope with the ‘Little-Go’, with its compulsory Greek, they must keep proper terms, and sit the finals of the Tripos in ten terms exactly, the same as the men. Emily Davies had rejected London University’s offer of a special examination of women, arguing that it was a case of ‘offering a serpent when we asked for a fish, though we cannot pretend to believe that serpents are better for us’.28 Miss Buss encouraged her ablest girls to apply to Girton as she regarded it, in the early days, as the university college for women with the highest status. She would bring her girls on visits to Cambridge to try to ‘sell’ them the idea of all that was on offer for those of them brave enough to take it. They also set out to charm the male dons out of the idea that scholarly women were somehow unsexed by their learning. One such student remarked on the obvious surprise of the dons at the charming appearance of Sophie Bryant: if the truth were known, some of them expect to meet a monster half masculine, half-feminine, with huge glasses, a man’s collar and tie, and a coat. They are quite agreeably startled to see, instead, a fair face, shaded by a large, soft hat and feather, a dress in aesthetic tone, dainty with falling lace.29 Buss became increasingly widely recognized as an expert on educational matters. She was invited to give evidence to the Taunton Commission and was President of the Association of Headmistresses from 1874–94. She was one of only two women members on the Council of the College of Preceptors, the other being Beata Doreck, the President of the Froebel Society. Buss was very proud of being awarded a Fellowship of the College in 1873. She and Beata Doreck encouraged Joseph Payne in his scheme of establishing a ‘training class of lectures and lessons for teachers’.30 Largely as a result of their influence Joseph Payne was appointed ‘Professor of the Science and Art of Education’, the first professorship in the subject in England.31 In May 1876 the committee of the Women’s Education Union approved Maria Grey’s draft proposal for a training college to prepare women to teach in secondary schools. She envisaged three elements of a secondary teacher’s attributes: knowledge of the specialist subject, instruction in the science and art of teaching, and practice in teaching. She assumed that subject knowledge was being supplied by the new women’s colleges at Cambridge, or through University College, London or through the University Extension Movement. She assumed that the practice in teaching would take place in the Girls’ Public Day School Company schools. The Union’s training committee became the provisional committee for the Teachers’ Training and Registration Society. In 1878 it opened a college at Bishopsgate, which from 1886 was called Maria Grey College.

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After this successful venture, Miss Buss turned her attention to training an elite corps of women teachers, emerging from the newly founded Cambridge women’s colleges. She did not believe that they would be persuaded to train at the Maria Grey College, but, were teacher training to be available in Cambridge itself, some might be persuaded to stay on to prepare themselves for a career in teaching. The way forward had been paved by a series of memorials to the Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge pushing for the university to found a Chair of Education and give courses of lectures on education. Frances Buss and Dorothea Beale sent a memorial signed by both of them.32 Henry Sidgwick also, in his role as Secretary to the Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women in Cambridge, petitioned the university, commenting on: the growing importance of professional training to those of their students who are preparing to be teachers in the High Schools for girls, which are now rapidly increasing in numbers throughout the country. Several of these Schools have adopted arrangements for the training of Student teachers: and the Committee believes that it would be a source of satisfaction to Headmistresses generally if the results of this training could be tested by the University.33 With the establishment of the Teacher Training Syndicate (TTS), with Oscar Browning as its director, the possibility of establishing a college in close vicinity of the university and the TTS with its certificate-awarding powers, provided an opportunity not to be missed. Writing to Annie Ridley on 6 April 1885, Miss Buss said: I am begging for help towards starting an experiment at Cambridge for a class for training the Girton and Newnham students as teachers before they enter their profession. They will not go to Bishopsgate, but we [herself and her deputy at North London Collegiate, Sophie Bryant] think they may be induced to stay in Cambridge for a time. Cambridge is willing, and a suitable lady is ready. A house for seven students can be had. Mrs Bryant is to harangue the Tripos students on the duty of fitting themselves for their work, and I am promised to help to the extent of £50, but we must raise £22, and Cambridge cannot do this.34 This begs the question of which part of Cambridge was ‘willing’. Buss, who was a consummate opportunist, had been encouraged by a conversation with Dr James Ward on an occasion when he visited the North London Collegiate School as Cambridge Examiner.35 But certainly teacher training was not welcomed by Cambridge University as a whole, nor even by many of the new university-educated women. As Sophie Bryant describes it, there was inertia and sometimes downright hostility to overcome, but she and

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Figure 7 Frances Mary Buss, the founder of North London Collegiate School, and her heir apparent, Sophie Bryant, were indefatigable promoters and supporters of the Cambridge Training College for Women. Reproduced with kind permission of North London Collegiate School.

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Frances Buss believed that their best hope was in organizing a crusade from the bottom up, by awakening an ‘enthusiastic belief…in the young intending teachers’:36 We were much exercised in mind by the fact that the women educated at the Universities persisted in neglecting professional training. Either they despised it, or they could not afford it, or they did not like it, and could get entrance into the schools without it [as a consequence] there was serious danger that the credit of training as a practical success would be impaired by the flow in the Training College of the less, and the avoidance of it by the more educated women. Of course we could convert and persuade the able North London girls, but these were only a handful comparatively, and after three years at college they were naturally not so docile to our ideas. Could anything be done to avoid this growing danger that the teaching profession should fall into the two classes of those who were highly educated and not trained, and of those who were trained but not highly educated.37 Sophie Bryant speaks in terms almost of a religious conversion, to bring the light to the minds of the North London Collegiate schoolgirls that to be a teacher was a vocation, a mission for which specialized training was essential. Further, that the converts might slip back into a state of unbelieving after their experience of college life, especially as they would soon discover that they could walk straight into teaching jobs after attending Girton or Newnham. Using the same rhetoric Bryant goes on to say that, more than headmasters, headmistresses ‘believed’ in teacher training, but could not always insist on it. Frances Buss, as one might expect, did all she could to promote the foundation of a training college for women in Cambridge and to promote its well-being. The single most significant thing which could make Cambridge Training College (CTC) a success was the appointment of the right leader. Elizabeth Hughes bad all the qualities required: intellectual ability, untiring devotion to work, the ability to inspire students, a belief in the cause of teacher training and a willingness and ability to get involved with finance and its administration (for the first 20 years the college was entirely self-funding). It seems likely that Anne Clough, noting both Hughes’ examination results at Newnham College, her previous experience as a teacher at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and her determined character, recommended her as the first principal of CTC. I can find no evidence that Elizabeth Hughes especially wanted the job. Indeed, Hughes told her first students ‘that when the task was first proposed to her she refused it flatly, but that Miss Buss had pointed out to her that it was a grand opportunity, that she was cut out for it, that there was no one else to do it, and that she simply must’.38 I imagine that to refuse Miss Buss would have been

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something akin to trying to stop Niagara. Having persuaded Hughes to take on the job, Buss maintained her commitment steadfastly through all difficulties, and was unremitting in her propaganda to the heads of other girls’ schools of the importance of trained teachers. Hughes commented that many a time in the early years ‘I should have given up in despair but for her help and advice—she loved us and believed in us.’39 Hughes was one of the pall-bearers at Buss’s funeral in December 1894, alongside Sophie Bryant, Emily Davies and Dorothea Beale.40 Second only to her own schools, the Cambridge Training College stands as monument to Frances Buss’s faith in the significance of the teaching profession and her commitment to the importance of appropriate training. NOTES 1. Christina de Bellaigue, in her excellent article ‘The Development of Teaching as a Profession for Women before 1870’, Historical Journal Vol. 44, No. 4 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 963–88 points out that although Queen’s College was founded specifically to provide training for governesses, by 1853 it had dropped its regular lectures on the theory and practice of education and reinvented itself as an institution for the higher education of young ladies, not a training college for schoolmistresses and governesses. Both Buss and Beale regretted this as a betrayal. 2. Victoria Glendinning, A Suppressed Cry (London, Routledge &. Kegan Paul, 1969), p.19. 3. See ‘Introduction’ in Hilton and Hirsch (eds), Practical Visionaries on this point. 4. Sutherland, The Movement for the Higher Education of Women, pp. 91– 116; p. 92. 5. Teaching provided in Mechanics’ Institutes and night schools for workingclass adults was also ‘elementary’ and, until 1893, could earn grants under the Government’s Elementary Education Code. 6. Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the State of Popular Education in England Parliamentary Papers 21, the Newcastle Report (1861), pp. 103–4. 7. For example, at the Home and Colonial School Society Institution founded in 1836 and at the British and Foreign School’s Borough Road College in London. 8. See Widdowson, Going up into the Next Class. 9. ‘In connection with the Social Science Association one name ought to be gratefully recorded, and all the more so because absence from England usually prevented the personal presence of Barbara Leigh Smith at most of the actual meetings. But it was mainly owing to previous efforts of hers that women were freely admitted to all its advantages.’ Bessie Parkes, A Passing World (London, Ward & Downey, 1897), p. 20. 10. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ‘Middle Class Schools for Girls: a Paper Read at the Meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social

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11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

Science, Glasgow, 1860’ re-printed in the English Woman’s Journal, November 1860, pp. 168–77. See Gill Avery, The Best Type of Girl: A History of Girls’ Independent Schools (London, André Deutsch, 1991). Blanche Athena Clough, A Memoir of Anne Jemima Clough (London, Edward Arnold, 1897) pp. 118–19. Jane Jordan, Josephine Butler (London, John Murray, 2001), pp. 87–8. See (for Girton) Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, chapters 14 and 15 and Hirsch, Practical Visionaries, chapter 5 (for Newnham) see Clough, A Memoir and Gill Sutherland, Practical Visionaries, chapter 5. Gillian Sutherland, ‘Emily Davies and the Sidgwicks and the Education of Women in Cambridge’ in Richard Mason (ed.), Cambridge Minds (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 34–47, p. 38. Discussion following session on ‘Education of Girls’ at National Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences (NAPSS) 1871, Transactions, p. 370. Mary Gurney was one of the architects of the Girls’ Public Day School Company (later Trust), along with Emily Shirreff, her sister Maria Grey and the Dowager Lady Stanley (grandmother of Bertrand Russell). All were cultivated and largely self-taught women. NAPSS Transactions, p. 367. It is worth noting here that Buss opened a second school in 1871 in the original premises when North London Collegiate School moved to bigger premises. The second school, Camden School for Girls was ‘for the younger daughters of poorer professional men and others, who could afford to have only one daughter at a time in the expensive school. The majority of the Camden girls left early and some began to earn their living, but the majority went home.’ Sara Burstall, Retrospect and Prospect: Sixty Years of Women’s Education (London, Longman’s Green & Co., 1933), p. 46. The course of study at Camden School ended with the Junior Cambridge Local at 15 years old, although there were a few scholarships awarded so a few girls from Camden could proceed to NLCS in preparation for university entrance. One place where these gender/class tensions were visibly played out was in the positions taken up by women serving on Education Boards from 1870 onwards. See Martin, Women and the Politics of Schooling. See also Pam Hirsch’s review in History of Education Vol. 29, No. 6 (2000), pp. 564–6. See Aldrich, School and Society in Victorian Britain, chapter 6. Journal of the Women’s Educational Union I, 1 (January 1873). Emily and Maria were the daughters of Rear Admiral William Shirreff and his wife Elizabeth Murray. Emily remained single and Maria was married to her first cousin William Grey but was widowed in 1864. Henrietta Maria Stanley (née Dillon), married to the Whig politician Edward Stanley, later the second Lord Stanley of Alderley. She was the mother of Kate (later Lady Amberley) who was the mother of the philosopher, Bertrand Russell. She was widowed in 1869. She gave £1,000 for the library, and also provided a laboratory and a gate lodge. Mary Gurney was distantly related to the Gurney Quaker family in Norwich. She was appointed a member of the Executive Committee (later Council) of

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25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Girton College. Her gifts to the college included £1,000 for the chemical laboratory and a substantial legacy in her will. Barbara Leigh Smith (married name Bodichon) had first mounted a campaign to change the Married Women’s Property Laws in 1855, but not until 1882 were married women recognized in law as individuals who could hold property separate from their husbands. See Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (London, G. Bell & Sons, 1928). See Appendix 2 of Josephine Kamm, Indicative Past: A Hundred Years of the Girls’ Public Day School Trust (London, Allen & Unwin, 1971). S.Burstall, Frances Mary Buss (London, SPCK, c.1938), p. 60. Anonymous entry ‘A Flying Visit to Cambridge’ in Our Magazine (North London Collegiate School, July 1885), pp. 46–55; p. 52. Annie E. Ridley, Frances Mary Buss and her Work for Education (London and New York, Longman’s, Green & Co., 1895), p. 273. It set an important precedent, which inspired the thought that there should be Professors of Education established in the Universities of Scotland and England. Cambridge University Reporter, 2 November 1877, pp. 76–7. Ibid, p. 76. Buss, quoted in Ridley, Frances Mary Buss, p. 282 M.S.Young, ‘The Development of Secondary Training and Training Colleges’ in Eleanor M.Hill (ed.), The Frances Mary Buss Schools Jubilee Record (London, Swan Sonnenscheim, 1900). Ridley, Frances Mary Buss, p. 283. Ibid. M.V Hughes, A London Family 1870–1900 (London, New York & Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 242. Burstall, Frances Mary Buss, p. 70. Dorothea Beale was the Principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, ibid., p.83.

8 THE MAKING OF ELIZABETH HUGHES

Women leaders who emerged during the nineteenth century were each remarkable and idiosyncratic individuals, not inclined to accept the status quo. Experience as a biographer has taught me that there are certain signifiers which are strong indicators of potentiality for leadership in this period. An emergent woman leader is likely to come from a politically articulate family who can facilitate the process of learning how to ‘work’ the existing civic machinery. She needs access to money, sufficient at least to devolve domestic work on others. She needs access to a fairly high standard of education. She needs the ability to travel and move freely, which is to say, that she will not be prevented from doing so by family convention. She should have no children, and probably it will be helpful if she has no husband either. As we shall see, the profile of Elizabeth Hughes maps very well on to these general indicators. Information on Elizabeth Hughes’ early life comes mainly from Dorothea Price Hughes’ biography of her father, Elizabeth’s brother. Elizabeth was born in Carmarthen, Wales, on 22 June 1851, the eldest of three daughters and second of five children of John Hughes and his wife, Anne Phillips. Several factors are of interest in the family background. Elizabeth’s paternal grandfather was a Methodist minister; yet the family saw nothing incongruous in attending the Wesleyan chapel on Sunday evenings yet retain a pew in St Peter’s, the much more comfortable Anglican church at the end of their street. Her father, Dr John Hughes was well respected for miles around and a walk down the street with him was a relatively slow process, as everyone was greeted with his characteristic salute. The street in which he brought up his children housed inhabitants of various classes, with St Peter’s parish church at one end, and the county gaol at the other, Her father seems to have had democratic instincts, or at least, meritocratic ones; as his granddaughter notes, he was only observed to take off his hat to one person, that being the Bishop of the diocese, but this was out of respect for his ‘learning and character’, not the position he held.1 Although taking his profession as a surgeon extremely seriously he took his civic duties equally seriously, at various times in his career holding the office of Coroner, Chairman of the Board of Guardians, Borough Magistrate, County Magistrate, Income Tax Commissioner, Member of the

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Board of Conservators, Member of the Burial Board, Certifying Factory Surgeon, Police Surgeon and Surgeon of the Railway Provident Societies. Further, he had served also as Governor of the Grammar School, Chairman of the School Board and President of the Literary and Scientific Institute. Consequently, Elizabeth grew up in a household where education was regarded as a serious matter, and to serve its causes was seen as a civic duty.2 More importantly, as fathers did not always take as much notice of daughters as they did their sons, Elizabeth was very close to her father: she ‘enjoyed her father’s companionship since childhood’.3 Elizabeth’s mother, Anne, was also a remarkable woman, the granddaughter of a Jewish banker of Haverfordwest who had changed his surname from Levi to Phillips on converting to Christianity. There is a sense of a brilliant woman, whose abilities were at least equal to those of her husband’s, and whose potential capacities were perhaps even greater, but she had five babies; of her three sons, the eldest and the youngest died, leaving Hugh (born in 1847), also delicate, on whom she seems to have doted the most. There are some indications that her daughters were never as important to her as this beloved son. Another factor that can be an atom in the character formation of a woman leader is a sense arising out of childhood of an injustice that can spur action. Certainly Elizabeth seems to have grown up taking her father rather than her mother as her role model; not surprisingly perhaps, as her mother’s talents found no outlet in the little town of Carmarthen. Yet innate talent she certainly bad: the same granddaughter writes of her grandmother: ‘She never hesitated for a word. Expression and epigram rolled from her at white heat as if from a book.’4 Similar sentiments were to be expressed about the mature Elizabeth Hughes. Hugh credits himself with being the one who taught his little sister, ‘Bessie’, to read, when she was still unable to do so effectively at the age of ten. Although both children were remarkably articulate, Hugh himself was initially considered rather stupid at school and could never reliably spell, so it seems possible that both siblings suffered from some form of mild dyslexia: My father always prided himself on the aid that he had been permitted to give his learned sister in the chrysalis stage of her intelligence. ‘Poor Bessie’, he would remark, ‘how unhappy she was— and how mercifully I was enabled to shed light into her dark mind. She understood nothing, positively nothing, but I toiled and perspired and made it all clear to her.’5 It is certain both Hugh and Elizabeth inherited their mother’s energy, dynamism and swift wit, but found, unlike her, more satisfactory outlets for it. Although his father had intended that he be trained as a barrister, by the time he was 16, Hugh felt the call to become a Methodist

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preacher, as his grandfather had before him. This led to some conflict with little Bessie as Hugh seems to have been something of a spiritual bully; he insisted that she attended the prayer-meetings he ran when he was home from his boarding school. If she refused, he would threaten to put his head in the fire. This threat always worked, but perhaps it worked because Bessie was afraid of her mother’s reaction if her beloved son came to harm due to some action of hers. It seems likely that she would be aware of the favouritism of the mother, and suffered from a sense of rivalry with the simultaneously adored older brother who was to become an eminent Methodist preacher and social reformer. She herself broke away from evangelical Methodism, although she still considered herself a Nonconformist, albeit one of an ecumenical spirit.6 After her apparently slow start, Elizabeth was sent to a private secondary school, Hope House, in Taunton. In 1876, she went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, the earliest of girls’ public schools, aged 26, initially as a pupil. At this period it was quite common for young women in their twenties to study there as bye-students (part-time students). Cheltenham Ladies’ College had begun in 1854 in the fashionable Victorian spa town as a day college to serve ‘the daughters of Noblemen and Gentlemen’ and had frankly struggled until Dorothea Beale (1831–1906), previously headteacher of Queen’s College School, took over as principal in 1858. By the time Elizabeth went there, it was predominantly a boarding school for 200 students in an imposing Gothic building. This was Elizabeth’s first encounter with one of the educational pioneers whose influence on the education of girls and women was enormous. Miss Beale embodied an ideal of women educating themselves as future leaders, although more stress was laid on the idea of service freely given than on striving for success in the job market. One slightly surprising thing about her attendance there is that the school was emphatically Anglican. The religious instruction given was the doctrines of the Church of England.7 In 1877 she joined the teaching staff as an assistant mistress, a post she held until 1881.8 At the same time she managed to continue studying and took two public exams: the Cambridge Higher Local in 1879 and the South Kensington Science Exam in Animal Physiology (Advanced) in 1880. In the Cambridge Highers she took Group D and got a Class 1, distinguished, in Political Economy and Constitutional History. Following this success, in 1881 she went up to Newnham College, one of the two recently founded women’s colleges in Cambridge (the other being Girton). The founding moment of Newnham College arguably occurred in 1871 when the moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick gave a series of lectures for women in Cambridge. Having come to the conclusion that he could not subscribe to the 39 articles of the Church of England he had resigned his Fellowship in 1869. Although he was promptly reinstated by Trinity as a college lecturer, it indicates his willingness to take risks when a principle was at stake, a quality common to leaders. His desire for university reform

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found a new outlet in his support of women’s education; certainly he could see no good reason for new students (women) to copy slavishly the syllabus for the men, and fell out with Emily Davies at Girton on this issue. He had leased a house for the use of women coming from a distance to these lectures and had invited Anne Jemima Clough, sister of his friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough to take charge of it. By 1875, Sidgwick, Eleanor Balfour (whom he married in 1876), Anne Clough and their various supporters had bought land in Newnham, a village on the south-western edge of Cambridge. Clough became prin-cipal, with Eleanor Sidgwick assuming the role of treasurer in 1880; she personally donated more than £30,000 to Newnham. Elizabeth Hughes arrived in Cambridge at an opportune moment. On the one hand, the founding members of Newnham were much in evidence and once again she saw women assuming leadership roles in a new, female institution, supported by some liberal men in the university. On the other hand, 1881 was a significant year in the history of women’s education at Cambridge, because three Graces (University resolutions) were passed with a clear majority of 366 to 32. Previously women had been admitted to examinations only by the favour of private examiners but on 24 February a grace was passed formally to admit women to sit officially for the Tripos (honours degree examination) provided they met the residence requirements and took either the Previous or Higher Local examination. The substantial majority vote, orchestrated by Sidgwick and friends, must have made it seem that the awarding of degrees to women was an inevitable next step, only just round the corner. The misogynist hostility which was to defer the awarding of degrees to women until 1948 was almost certainly not apparent to Elizabeth Hughes at her moment of arrival, and she may well have been unrealistically optimistic about the welcome of the medium she had entered. Elizabeth appears to have taken the Cambridge Higher Local examination again in a slightly different assortment of subjects: Group C Mathematics and Group D, Class 1, again with distinction in Political Economy, Logic and History. Consequently she was awarded the Cobden Scholarship, worth £50 for two years. She then took a First in Moral Science in 1884 and a Second in History in 1885; to be more accurate, as women were not awarded degrees she was deemed to have obtained those results. From 1881 women who took the Tripos had their names published in an official class list, although separate from the men’s names. The high standard of scholarship at the two women’s colleges was validated and reinforced by these official links with the university. As well as the evidence of these impressive academic results, there is already evidence of the driving energy which characterized her whole life. Her close friend at Newnham, Sophia Turrell, wrote about Elizabeth in her ‘Reminiscences’:

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Her friendship meant a very great deal to me & we used to spend our Long Vacation together—sometimes in Wales—once at Lynmouth… Miss Hughes started a Sunday Class at Barnwell for Working Men & made me help her. Several other students helped. We taught them reading and writing & had Bible Classes too. Just before my Tripos she got ill & I nursed her which kept me from over-studying.9 There are several elements here worth commenting on because they demonstrate character traits that affected her whole life. Elizabeth had a capacity for deep friendships with women and a capacity for inspiring in them enough devotion to follow her in difficult undertakings. We see that like her brother, who had started a mission in London to help educate poor men, she began one in the east part of Cambridge. Her civic-minded sensibilities motivated educational initiatives and she was inclined to throw herself into things full-tilt until she became ill from sheer exhaustion. Even on vacation, she ‘indulged’ in strenuous walking and hill or mountain climbing, although her outdoor activities tended to re-invigorate her. Elizabeth Hughes was closely involved with the movement to advance the education of girls in her native Wales. The Aberdare Report of 1881 (12 years after the corresponding Taunton Report for England) was set up as a result of the growing interest in higher education in Wales, and the corresponding need to reform secondary education.10 It recommended the setting up of two more university colleges (at Cardiff and Bangor) and a series of steps calculated to increase the number of places in nondenominational grammar schools. In 1883 when still a student (albeit a mature one) at Newnham, Hughes sent a paper, The Future of Welsh Education with special Reference to the Education of Girls’ to the National Eisteddfod at Cardiff, where it was read out by T.Marchant Williams at the Cymmrodorian section meeting. She believed that Wales stood at the dawn of a new era in her history. Her paper claimed that before taking decisive steps regarding the country’s educational future, careful consideration should be given to the needs and conditions of the principality, rather than the mere adoption or transplantation of an English system. Furthermore, Wales could learn from the mistakes and weaknesses of her neighbour who had also been constrained and hindered by the weight of educational customs and ideas. English education lacked a definitive aim, allowed too much importance for competitive examinations, over-emphasized the learning of facts in such subjects as history, and was slow in introducing such subjects as the sciences. She was Welsh to her finger-tips, believing that the ‘Welsh nation has shown an especial aptitude for music and poetry. The Eisteddfod is a noble monument of this fact.’11 She also considered that the Welsh were innately religious and that their desire would be for a religious but unsectarian education. She also held that Celts had an innate inclination towards intellectual sympathy which made them more likely than others to possess

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the gift of teaching. She told the Bryce Commission that the Celtic race had a ‘capacity for understanding the standpoint of another person very quickly’.12 She saw their bilingualism as a strength, at a time when the prevalence of the Welsh language was often regarded as a handicap; as the Aberdare Report commented ‘such prevalence was very disadvantageous to proficiency in those branches of knowledge, such as the classics, philosophy, &c., where a copious command of English was necessary to success in competing for the prizes and honours of the University’.13 At the Eisteddfod held in Liverpool in 1884, Elizabeth won a £25 prize donated by John Roberts MR for an essay developing her theme of 1883, entitled ‘The Higher Education of Girls’.14 She argues that, while on the one hand, it was a hopeful sign that ‘education is being treated in a thoroughly liberal manner’, on the other we lived in ‘an age of examinations’ which had the effect of ‘fettering our best teachers’.15 However, even here she found cause for hope as ‘Examinations are becoming more rational, and a strong public opinion is growing up that many valuable qualities, capable of being developed by teaching, can be tested only very inefftciently, or possibly not at all, in an examination room.’16 She argues that ‘Evolution in education, as in everything else, has been in the past to a great extent unconscious, that is, the result of experience. Surely the time has now arrived, when we can have conscious evolution [thereby deconstructing the supposed binary opposition] between theory and practice.’ As this paper is the nearest thing we have to Elizabeth Hughes’ manifesto immediately before taking on the role of Principal of the Cambridge Training College for Women, it is worth quoting a substantial portion of it: A distinction may be drawn between a liberal education, and a technical or professional one. In the former case, man is considered as an individual—an end in himself; its great aim is to develop his faculties, to turn his potential powers, whatever they may be, into actual powers. In the second case, man is regarded rather as a mean to an end, not so much as an individual, but as a doctor, lawyer, or artizan, as the case may be. It is only a certain portion of his potential powers which are developed. Unless the man becomes that for which he is trained, much of his technical and professional education is wasted.17 Having made that distinction, Hughes goes on to question what makes up a liberal education, which was at that period being fiercely contested in Cambridge; Emily Davies insisting on her Girton students slavishly following the Classics courses, whereas Newnham, encouraged by Henry Sidgwick and other reformers considered that science and modern languages were more apposite to a modern age:

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The most common opinion is still that a study of classics gives an intellectual culture which is pre-eminently a part of a liberal education. The means employed, the material used, is considered of great importance, ‘Without classics, no higher education’ is the opinion of many educated men. I venture to suggest, on the contrary, that the material is of comparatively little moment: and that it is the manner in which that material is used which is the vital point. In other words it is not so much what we teach, but how we teach it, that decides whether it shall cultivate the minds of our scholars or not. ‘Facts are not knowledge, and knowledge is not education.’ I shall attempt to prove three points:—First: That any subject, if taught philosophically, can be used as the means of a liberal education. From this it follows that the creation of a class of teachers, capable of so using their subjects, is of paramount importance; and also that the knowledge necessary for a professional or technical education can be taught in such a manner as to be also the material of a higher education. Second: That far from a classical course being the only means of a higher education, it is not even the most appropriate; and there exist, in fact, certain strong objections to its use, some of which did not exist when it was first introduced at the Renaissance. Third: That Philosophy and Art form the best materials for the highest mental culture.18 Hughes’ objections to the study of classics as being the sine qua non of higher education was argued on several heads. Although in the sixteenth century, a knowledge of Latin and Greek was necessary as the key to both philosophy and literature, it was hardly true by the late nineteenth century when most was available in good translations. Furthermore, with the philosophical revolution brought about by Kant, arguably the study of German would be the most important language to study. She points out that at the time of the Renaissance, when Greek and Latin were ushered in ‘the same appellation of scorn’ was hurled against them—for example, they were called ‘heterodox, frivolous and useless for discipline’—just the terms of abuse that Classical scholars of the late nineteenth century were hurling against modern languages and science. But she also argues her case against the reification of Classics on moral and political grounds: The moral tone of the age is higher today than it was in ancient Greece and Rome; and we have not only progressed in morals, but also in political and social organisation. Greek and Roman society were based on slavery and contempt for manual labour. Now we have liberty, and labour is honourable. ‘We are the ancients of the world’, and between us and the childhood of the world is an ever widening gulf. Again, we do not learn from classical literature that

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wide generous sympathy, and that keen sensitiveness to the feelings of others, which we expect as one result of our modern liberal education.19 Further, she sees it as fundamentally undemocratic because: Under existing circumstances, and probably under any circumstances, it can be used effectively only by a very small minority. If it is erroneously considered as the only, or even the chief, means of culture, it tends to make those privileged few fastidious and supercilious, and to limit their interest and sympathy.20 Hughes goes on to argue that: It is not the knowledge which the teacher gives, but the aspect of knowledge which he imparts, which is cultivating, and that aspect, of course, depends largely on what the teacher is himself intellectually and morally… the most efficacious, thorough, and rapid method of promoting higher education, is to encourage in every possible way, the creation of a class of teachers, who have had a liberal training, and have something of the philosophical spirit.21 In many ways, her view could be described as Pre-Raphaelite; she sees the Middle Ages as the time which rendered homage to Philosophy and Art, in her view the ‘most perfect materials for a liberal education’. She points out that the Gothic cathedrals and minsters, the miracle plays and mysteries were examples of public art available to, in the sense of understandable by, everyone regardless of rank or education. It is no coincidence that during her time as Principal of CTC, she brought back from her extensive travels the nucleus of a picture collection to adorn the walls. Her objection to the Renaissance is that by dethroning Philosophy and Art it caused the Classics to reign supreme at Cambridge and Oxford, resulting in an elitist exclusivity. In discussing education in Wales, she argues that the principality has no need to replicate England’s mistakes: Differences of race far from being a subject for regret, as far as possible should be deepened and perpetuated. We value individuality of character in an individual, so should we value it in a race. Two Luthers could not do the work of a Luther and a Melancthon. Integration is not possible without differentiation.22 Another significant criticism she makes of the English system is that ‘no proper connection exists between the elementary schools and the Universities, and there are no adequate arrangements for the training of

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teachers for High Schools and Colleges’.23 The Welsh Intermediate Act of 1889 went some way along those lines, gave Wales a start in the provision of maintained secondary schools. Elizabeth Hughes’ background as a Welshwoman, and a Nonconformist, were part of what made her a critical observer of educational initiatives in England. She held proudly to her background, loving Welsh literature and, in later life, taking the bardic name of Merch Myrddin as a reminder of her birthplace.24 Although an outsider in Cambridge, it was this alterity of viewpoint that was a large part of her strength. NOTES 1. Dorothea Price Hughes, The Life of Hugh Price Hughes by His Daughter (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1905), p. 4. 2. Elizabeth Hughes was to give a lecture in Cambridge to the University Nonconformists Union on 6 February 1898 entitled ‘The Duty of Nonconformists towards Education’. 3. ‘Pen Portraits of working women: Miss EP Hughes, MA, Pourtrayed [sic], Barry Herald November 1896. I am grateful to Dr D.M. Thompson of Fitzwilliam College for drawing my attention to this item. 4. Dorothea Price Hughes, The Life, pp. 11–12. 5. Ibid., p. 34. 6. This break was to remain a tension between Elizabeth and her brother Hugh. 7. See Miss Beale’s comments in the Minutes of Evidence to the Bryce Committee, pp. 172–4. 8. I thank Kath Boothman for supplying information from Cheltenham Ladies’ College records. 9. I am grateful to Philip McNair, of Darwin College, Cambridge, for sharing with me this quotation from his great-aunt’s ‘Reminiscences’. 10. Lord Aberdare (1815–95), a Liberal politician, was closely involved with Welsh education in the last 15 years of his life. He was president of the University College at Cardiff from its foundation in 1883, and having worked towards establishing a University of Wales he became its first Chancellor in 1894. 11. Third Annual Report, National Eisteddfod Association 1883, pp. 52–61. The Eisteddfod is the name of an annual meeting of poets and singers, usually reciting and performing in the Welsh language. It was also an opportunity to read papers on educational and civic matters. 12. Bryce Commission (1895); Minutes of Evidence: witness statement of Miss E.P. Hughes, June 1894, pp. 469–90. 13. See Maclure, Educational Documents England and Wales, p. 114. After the 1871 census it was reckoned that out of a population of 1,426,514 in Wales and Monmouthshire, 1,006,100 habitually spoke Welsh. It was also noted that approximately eleven-twelfths of the Nonconformist bodies of Wales, used the Welsh language in worship. 14. Lord Aberdare and Miss Gladstone adjudicated.

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15. Miss Hughes, Newnham College, Cambridge, The Higher Education of Girls in Wales’, Eisteddfod Genedlaethol, Liverpool pp. 40–62; p. 40. 16. Ibid., p. 41. 17. Ibid., p. 43. 18. Ibid., pp. 43–4. 19. Ibid., p. 47. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., p. 45. 22. Ibid., p. 49. 23. Ibid., p. 50. 24. A bard is a poet who has been recognized at the Eisteddfod. See the Camarthen Historian Vol. 8, 1971.

9 UNDER THE UNIVERSITY’S BENEFICIAL SHADOW

‘Yes but, Mother, it isn’t like Girton or Newnham, it’s quite a beginning place’, Molly Thomas, one of Miss Hughes’ first students at Cambridge Training College for Women.1 A BEGINNING PLACE Timing and opportunism is always a key item in a successful venture, and an appetite for experiment seemed buoyant in Cambridge. Girton College and Newnham College had been established in permanent buildings in Cambridge by the mid-1870s and, as we have seen, the 1881 Grace had formally admitted women to Tripos examinations (albeit not awarding them degrees). The Syndicate for the Training of Teachers had been established by Oscar Browning in 1878, which provided an examining body for teachers in Cambridge. Moreover, two new educational foundations, Selwyn and Cavendish Colleges, were recognized as public hostels for non-collegiate students, so there seemed every hope that a similar hostel for student-teachers might come to be recognized in time. Newnham College provided Miss Hughes as Principal, and Anne Clough personally (rather than in her role as Principal of Newnham) provided CTC’s first premises. Anne Clough spent a legacy from her friend, Miss Crofton, in building two adjacent houses in Merton Street, Newnham Croft and she was prepared to rent them to the new college for £8 per annum. Named in honour of her friend, ‘Crofton Cottages’ could be more accurately described as two semi-detached three-storeyed town houses. According to Hughes’ ‘Letter to My Students’ in the CTC Newsletter in 1892 following the death of Anne Clough, ‘the College was first discussed and planned in her sitting-room at Newnham’. This inaugurating committee, first meeting on 9 May 1885 was chaired by Canon G.F. Browne, the Secretary of the Local Examinations syndicate.2 Also present were Constance Jones, a lecturer at Girton,3 and Kate Street4 the first headmistress of the Perse School for Girls which had been established four years earlier. Both of these women had immediate experience of helping to run brand-new establishments on a shoestring.

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Figure 8 Elizabeth Hughes started her ‘college’ in these two three-storey houses in 1885. Although this photograph was taken a few decades later and therefore Merton Street is more built up, one can see that Crofton Cottages present a rather dour and uninviting aspect to new students. Reproduced with kind permission of the Cambridgeshire Collection, Cambridge Central Library.

Although Anne Clough had great personal interest in the scheme, Newnham College accepted no formal responsibility for it, and so it is misleading to describe it ‘as an offshoot of Newnham’.5 The council minutes of 21 February 1885 make this quite clear: Miss Clough read a letter from Miss Buss on the subject of the training of women teachers at Cambridge, together with a scheme for carrying this out to which she hoped that the Council would give their sanction, but it was agreed that though quite friendly to the scheme the Council could not undertake any responsibility with regard to it.6 Newnham had too many problems getting its own students accepted by Cambridge, to be able to give formal help to a teacher training establishment. Indeed, the most significant and consistent support was given by Frances Buss, who not only offered to guarantee the rent of Crofton

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Cottages for the first year, but also allowed her deputy at North London Collegiate School, Sophie Bryant, to travel to Cambridge once a week to lecture on philosophy of education to the students.7 To establish a highly prestigious training college for women was clearly something both Buss and Bryant supported to the hilt. Elizabeth Hughes took on the principalship for one year at a salary of £100 plus residence and maintenance. The short contract presumably indicates that no-one was sure whether the venture would succeed. It was certainly likely to be a stressful year as Hughes was responsible for most of the teaching; her only help a resident housekeeper. The first 14 students, unsurprisingly, included four students from North London Collegiate School; the links between North London Collegiate School and CTC remained very strong, and retained a sense of continuity.8 When Sophie Bryant succeeded Frances Buss as headmistress of NLCS in 1895, she had intimate knowledge of CTC because she had been involved with it from its first days. Without the professional, personal support and company of Bryant, Hughes would have found the first year in Cambridge very hardgoing. Like Hughes, Sophie Bryant (1850–1922) fits the profile of a female leader outlined earlier. Born 15 February 1850 in Ireland, her father, the Reverend Willock, was a Fellow and tutor at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1863 the family moved to London when Dr Willock became Professor of Geometry at London University. She was mainly taught by her father, but in 1866 was awarded the Arnott Scholarship for Sciences to attend Bedford College. The following year she gained first class honours in the Cambridge Highers. Aged 19, she married Dr William Hicks Bryant but he died only a year later. Undoubtedly, had her husband lived she would have been caught up in domestic life, but her young widowhood meant that she sought a career, teaching first at a school for ladies in Highgate in 1870 and, in 1875, joining the staff of NLCS to teach mathematics. Frances Buss pressed her to continue her studies; in 1881 she was one of the first two women to graduate with a B.Sc. from London University (gaining a first in moral science and a second in mathematics). In 1884, she was the first woman to obtain a Doctorate of Science from London University.9 Aside from her obvious extraordinary intellectual ability, the weekly arrival of Sophie must have cheered Elizabeth’s heart. They were both in their early thirties and, as well as both being apostles of teacher training, had other things in common. Sophie had a feeling for Ireland which matched Elizabeth’s feelings for Wales; they were both exiles from the homes of their hearts as a consequence of following demanding careers. They both had open personalities, and both had a kind of physical courage, even abandon; in vacations they liked to go hill and mountain climbing, and sometimes went together. Scaling up mountain peaks must have seemed straightforward, perhaps, compared with the prejudice which they sometimes had to overcome in relation to their chosen work. This

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friendship must have proved an invaluable support for Elizabeth in what otherwise would have been both a lonely job (in the sense of having no-one with whom to share responsibility) and simultaneously a claustrophobic one, living as she was in close proximity with her students. Mutual respect and friendship between women is never incidental in these founding narratives, it is always a crucial element. CTC was always designed to train graduate women, but in its early days it was glad to get girls straight from the sixth-form of NLCS, and indeed it never attracted the number of post-graduate students from Girton and Newnham that its founders confidently assumed. However, two of the students in the first year were the Conan sisters who had degrees from the Royal University of Ireland (possibly a Bryant connection in there somewhere), two were from Newnham (although had not sat the Tripos examinations) and one was from ‘Somerville Hall’ in Oxford. Some students came to CTC who already had some teaching experience so the age range was wide and there were differing levels of academic attainment. Despite beginning with not much more than a wing and a prayer— Elizabeth Hughes had to furnish her own room and to allow students the use of her own books—there was also the excitement of leading an entirely new venture. In her early youth she had worshipped in the bare Methodist chapel, so she knew that good things happen in bare houses. Stark as it was, Crofton Cottages nevertheless represented the first residential training college in England for women qualifying to teach in secondary schools. Our most vivid account of its early days comes from Molly Thomas, one of the NLCS pupils, who wrote an autobiography. A little of her background may indicate the kind of young woman who arrived at CTC that first term. Molly’s father had been a stockbroker in the City of London and the family lived quite comfortably until, in the terrible fogs of 1879, her father was run over and killed.10 This changed the family situation immediately; although Molly’s four brothers were just about launched, it now appeared necessary for Molly to think in terms of earning her own living. An unmarried aunt paid for Molly to go to NLCS, where, in the sixth-form a few girls from well-off families were prepared for Girton’s entrance examination. In terms of ability, Molly might well have been included in this group (her brother Dym had won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge), but the year Molly was 17, the price of tin (shares in which provided the aunt’s income) was low, so that option was not available to Molly. As she put it herself: [Many of the sixth-formers] faced the fact that we should have to become teachers. It seemed a fairly pleasing prospect, mainly consisting, as far as work went, in talking and putting red crosses on other people’s mistakes. But we now heard that you could be taught how to teach—a funny idea. Soon a chance arose for me to hear more

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about it. Along with some other enthusiasts Miss Buss was trying to raise teaching into a real profession, like Law or Medicine.11 I think there can be no doubt that, had it not been for the loss of the family provider, Molly would have preferred to go to Girton, but she was comforted by the fact that two of her friends from NLCS, Bessie Jones and Bessie Davies, were also going to the new teachers’ college in Cambridge. Again, the details of Molly’s preparation are revealing; she consulted an old girl from NLCS who was already up at Girton, about what would be needed in the way of clothes, and came to the conclusion that she would need three outfits: an everyday one, a Sunday one, and one in case she should be invited to a college dinner where she would be expected to dress formally. Unable to afford these items, fortunately an aunt donated three of her old dresses which Molly and her mother painstakingly altered to three differentiated dresses, known as ‘hightum’, ‘tightum’ and ‘scrub’ in descending order of glamour. Her trunk stuffed with these items, plus bedlinen and her own cutlery, Molly arrived on the Liverpool Street train at Cambridge station. Her poor mother was left behind in London to sell the family furniture and move into an unmarried sister’s house. Nowadays Newnham village is regarded, in estate-agent terms, as ‘the most highly sought after residential area of Cambridge’, but it was very different in the 1880s. The chief colleges were arranged on either side of the leading thoroughfare, which was called in different parts, Trumpington Street, King’s Parade and Trinity Street. Starting from the end nearest the station, on the left was Peterhouse, on the right Pembroke, on the left St Catherine’s (irreverently called Cat’s), behind this Queen’s, on the right Corpus Christi, on the left King’s, with Clare and Trinity Hall behind and the Senate House just beyond. Then came Caius, Trinity College and St John’s all on the left. This was the historic core of the university city, the part of Cambridge which visitors (tourists) would want to see. In stark contrast is Molly Thomas’ impression of arriving at CTC’s first premises: It was late afternoon when I reached Cambridge, and dusk as I drove through the streets to Crofton Cottages (the address given to me). After a long drive the cab pulled up outside a row of mean little houses all stuck together, such as one might see among the less cheerful outskirts of London, with ‘Apartments’ in the window. The cabby asked me which house it was, and while I was hesitating and about to tell him that there must be some mistake, a tiny door opened, disclosing a brightly lit narrow passage, and a staircase to the side, on which one could immediately step… Two tiny houses had been made to communicate by the removal of party walls. There was nothing at all between the door and the pavement. Stairs were so narrow that we had to squeeze to pass one another. Sanitary

Reproduced with kind permission of the President and Fellows of Hughes Hall.

Figure 9 Cambridge Training College could only succeed if the personality of the principal inspired the pioneer students to overcome all discomforts and difficulties. The tiny, vivacious figure of Miss Hughes, encircled by her students, gives a sense of relaxed intimacy.

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arrangements were of the most primitive, and a bathroom, of course was unheard of.12 Molly was one of 12 arrivals that night; two more followed over the next few days. In Crofton Cottages were seven students, with the other seven in neighbouring cottages. The academic staff consisted solely of Miss Hughes herself, plus there was a housekeeper, and a maid of all work; sometimes the students had to help cleaning the knives.13 Sanitary arrangements were of a primitive kind, as it was before ‘the bathroom period of English history’.14The lecture-room was simply the top room of one of the cottages in which a trestle-table covered with American cloth’ and a blackboard took up practically all the available space. The students and Miss Hughes squeezed in, and effectively provided their own heating (body heat) as there was no fireplace in the room. In fact, the room was so small that they ‘had sometimes to stop in the middle of a lecture and go outside for a few minutes to air the room’.15 Tall lecturers whom Miss Hughes invited were in danger of knocking their heads on entry and once in, they could not stand upright in the attic ‘Lecture Hall’. Molly fortunately had the kind of personality which inclined her to regard any small difficulties as part of the adventure, an important and admirable attribute in a pioneer student of CTC. She regarded any sacrifice and discomfort unimportant compared with the skills she was gaining. But even Molly was somewhat shocked by the extremely down-market aspect of having a room which opened straight on to the road outside. As she writes: When my trunk was landed I was shown my room. This was some twelve feet square, on the ground-floor, with one small window flush with the pavement, a narrow bed, a scrap of carpet, a basket chair, one upright chair and a bureau. A bright fire crackled in the hearth… The first morning that I awoke to my new surroundings I saw a policeman passing my window so close that I could have summoned his aid with a touch.16 Miss Hughes, on hearing this tale, promptly sent Molly off to buy some curtains from Petty Cury, where she bought some cheap pink muslin which compensated for the bareness of the room by providing a rosy glow. Even if the accommodation was humble Miss Hughes did her best to make the girls feel comfortable. They had very few books; Miss Hughes and the students’ own books were passed from hand to hand. Hughes was well qualified to give her students lectures on psychology and logic, but she also had to find someone to give college lectures on hygiene, speech production, methods of teaching and theories of discipline and school management. The students also attended the university courses of lectures arranged by the

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Teacher Training Syndicate, although they did not find them as edifying as the ones given by Miss Hughes herself, or those by Sophie Bryant. They heard, for example, James Ward lecture on psychology applied to education (incomprehensible) and James Bass Mullinger on the history of education (dull and with frequent German quotations which the students could not understand).17 In the hope of making them feel like real Cambridge students Hughes also took them to the Divinity Schools to hear Dr Westcott on the Hebrew Prophets. On the whole, the students felt that they learned much more from their in-house lecturers. They especially looked forward to Sophie Bryant’s weekly arrival at CTC, when she came to give her course on ethics because, during her years as a teacher at NLCS, she had discovered the knack of taking hold of complex ideas and making them comprehensible to her listeners. Elizabeth Hughes had a great deal of social charm. Molly Thomas said simply that ‘she could persuade anyone to do anything’.18 She missed no opportunity in persuading people to come to Crofton Cottages and give a lecture for free. In the first term for example, the following lectures were given without fee: Mrs Verrall, on the teaching of Latin Miss Street, on the Training of Teachers Mrs Bryant, on the teaching of Geometry Miss Prescott, on the teaching of Harmony (two lectures) Miss Willock, on Chevé system of sight singing Miss Manley, of the Stockwell Training College, on ‘preparing notes of lessons, and giving an oral lesson’ Miss Gardner, on the teaching of History Mr Shaw, on the teaching of Physics Mr Moore-Smith, on the teaching of English Literature Mrs Shaw, on the teaching of Arithmetic Miss Bergman, on Physical Education.19 Hughes was imaginative in her invitations. For example, she asked an actress to teach her students some of the tricks of her trade which were ‘transferable skills’ to the role of a teacher. Miss Shaw showed them How to stand in front of a class with ease and grace, so as to make ourselves more impressive, and how to make effective pauses between the main parts of a lesson, and how always to ‘set the important in silence’. ‘If you want to make anything emphatic’, she said, ‘you must do as a good actor does change your voice. No need to raise your voice, it’s often far more striking to lower it, but change is essential.’20

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Elizabeth Hughes also used her influence to persuade a wide range of visitors to join them in college at meal-times, to replicate as far as possible the benefits of collegiate life which she had experienced at Newnham where conversation over dinner enriched the mind. She forbade shop talk, as she wanted her students to enjoy a wide cultural experience. One of her precepts was that ‘nothing inspires children more than to be aware that their teacher is engrossed in some big subject that is beyond them; and nothing produces contempt more surely than the notion that her main interest lies in their little successes and failures’.21 Her warning them against narrowness of interest was no doubt sincerely meant, but it was also, undoubtedly, an acute awareness of their secondclass, or rather, third-class status in Cambridge. If the women undergraduates at Girton and Newnham were largely regarded as second class in relation to male students at the older colleges, female studentteachers were a step even lower down the hierarchical scale. The new CTC students looked in awe at Cambridge dons, who, with a very small number of honourable exceptions, utterly ignored their existence. When Francis Cornford published his witty satire Microcosmographia Academica in 1908 his account of where the power of the university lay was rendered thus: ‘Remember this: the men who get things done are the men who walk up and down Kings Parade [between the Colleges of Pembroke and Caius], from 2 to 4, every day of their lives’.22 The little training college, tucked away in the muddy little village of Newnham, was only a half-mile from King’s Parade in geographical distance, but, in terms of power and influence, it may as well have been a million miles away. Perhaps because elitism is a highly contagious disease, even some of their friends were a little patronizing. In the Newnham College Club Newsletter of November 1885, two of the students remarked: An institution, which rejoices in the somewhat ambitious name of the Cambridge Training College, has been opened, and may be mentioned here. Though not directly connected with our College, it is presided over by one who has had a large share in giving to Newnham the distinguished position it has held for the past two years in the Tripos Lists—Miss Hughes. Crofton Cottages has been temporarily occupied by the college, and is quite full, Miss Hughes having under her care fourteen students, who are receiving a technical training as teachers. The course appears to be very comprehensive, the students attend some University Lectures, besides others at their own College, and also have practical instructions at different schools in Cambridge, where they take classes. The tone is a little ambiguous; it sounds a slightly satirical note at the (false) dignity of calling the enterprise a ‘college’. Clearly these Newnham students were impressed with Miss Hughes herself, because she was a

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significant Newnhamite, but not necessarily so impressed with the idea of teacher training, nor her students. Nevertheless, such invitations as the first wave of CTC students received were usually either from Newnham, because of Elizabeth Hughes’ contacts there, or from Girton, largely because of the old girls from NLCS who were there. Miss Clough kindly invited the first CTC students to tea with her on their first Sunday to welcome them to Cambridge. Later in the year Miss Buss organized a ball in a hired hall in Cambridge; the invitees were all her old pupils plus all CTC students and their brothers and friends who were ‘up’. So, the ‘Cinderellas’ did go to a ball, thanks to Miss Buss’s fairy godmother-like act, but it was a brief relief from daily difficulties. And it is here that Hughes’ strengths as a leader show. The first students could easily have felt like the exceedingly poor relations of a rich, powerful and indifferent great-uncle. Elizabeth Hughes set up in Crofton Cottages a Saturday evening ritual of cocoa in one of the students’ rooms. As Molly Thomas describes it: At ten o’clock each guest arrived with cup and saucer, spoon, cushion to sit on, a bit of sewing, and some kind of contribution to the entertainment—a song, story, puzzle, or what-not.’ Hughes introduced them to an American novel published in 1879, Frank Stockton’s Rudder Grange, which she could hardly read ‘for the laughter of herself and all of us. She entered with gusto into all our fun, and seemed to have a bottomless store of anecdotes, either true or ben trovato, from her own life or her desultory reading.’23 As well as showing Hughes’ informal style, it shows also her shrewd ‘emotional intelligence’. She replicated a kind of domestic atmosphere—the girls wore their dressing-gowns and brought their mending to do—but simultaneously she produced a sense that everything they were doing was part of a great adventure which would all turn out well in the end. Rudder Grange was an inspired choice in that the comedy turns on a naive newly married couple setting out in life, without any knowledge of the world, and having near-disasters at every turn, and looking for somewhere to call home. The young heroine, Euphemia, fortunately has a temperament which ignores discomfort and endlessly improvises in the face of difficulties. She and her husband cannot afford to rent a decent apartment so instead they rent an old canal-boat, the eponymous ‘Rudder Grange’. As the boat is not intended to sail they remove the rudder and turn it into an ironing-table. This leads them into difficulties when a high tide floats off the boat and they have no rudder to steer themselves back to their moorings. It is hard not to see this as an extended metaphor for CTC; Crofton Cottages were after all, merely a temporary and unstable mooring, exactly how to steer it towards acceptance by the university was not entirely clear and certainly required a spirit of adventure in all who sailed in her. The fictive rudderless adventure may well have been in Miss Hughes’ mind when she took her students on a rowing expedition on the River Cam. As there were no proficient rowers among them, Miss Hughes clearly had

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moments of wondering whether they would all end up drowned, but announced that she never allowed ‘nervousness to prevent her doing what was worth while’.24 She worked on curing any of her students of ‘nervous tongue-tie’, by inviting them two at a time every Thursday after dinner ‘to take coffee in Miss Hughes’ private room, to meet one or more of her men friends’.25 She would certainly know which of her students needed most help in this department as another of her methods of getting to know her students individually was to take them one at a time on a long walk as it was her opinion that ‘there was no revealer of character like a long walk’.26 Another of her techniques to build up their abilities to grasp material and explain it to someone else was that one evening a week a student gave a prepared lecture to the group which was then criticized. Miss Hughes encouraged clarity of exposition by using Henry Sidgwick as a model: ‘He has not only got to the bottom of his subject, but he has come up again.’27 She encouraged them to take advantage of any cultural opportunities in Cambridge which were available to them. The annual Greek play is one example of something they were encouraged to attend. Unlike the male undergraduates, most of whom would be familiar with Greek from their public school days, the performance of the Eumenides was more of a long yawn than an exiting evening out. Indeed, it may well have had the effect of emphasizing their sense of being outsiders. The only good thing which seems to have come out of it was the fact that Bessie Davies, bored into counting the Eumenides, found that there were 14, just like the first-footers at CTC. As they also seemed to rush about the stage in a wild way, rather as the CTC students who had to rush from lectures in Crofton Cottages in the west of Cambridge via long hot walks to their practise schools on the east side of Cambridge and back again, they referred to themselves ever after as The Furies’. Miss Hughes had a tri-partite job as Principal of CTC. She needed, by hook or by crook, to obtain for her students access to the range of intellectual theories she believed that they needed; she also had to pay attention to their pastoral care, and last, but not least, she had to arrange schools in which they could practise. One lesson a week for each of them was as much as she could achieve initially, and in order that the other students could gain some sense of what it was like to be in front of a class, the rest of CTC went en bloc to criticize the lesson.28 By the Michaelmas Term of 1886 students were practising in three schools: the Perse School, Eden Street Higher Grade School and Park Street Higher Grade School Mary Rogers and Molly Thomas were the first two students to be put to the test. Mary Rogers was probably chosen because she was significantly older than the others and was also possessed of a large and impressive stature.29 Her nickname at CTC was ‘Miss Hughes’ lamb’, the joke being that she was twice the size of the diminutive Elizabeth, and they looked particularly comical on their walks together. It would have been difficult for a stranger

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to identify which woman was the principal and which the student. After giving their lesson the whole CTC body would repair to their attic room for ‘criticism’. Although they had both submitted lesson plans to Miss Hughes, Molly Thomas’ first lesson came in for a lot of criticism and she retired to her room utterly despondent. Again we can catch a glimpse of Hughes’ art of the right word at the right time which made all her students appreciate her encouragement: After a bit there was a tap at the door, and who should appear but Miss Hughes. ‘I was pleased’, was her amazing remark, ‘that you made such a mess of your lesson.’ Then to my dumb astonishment she added: ‘I have noticed that people who are going to do really well—in almost any walk of life—nearly always start with a failure.’30 Again, Hughes had shrewd instincts as Molly Thomas (married name Hughes) went on to be a significant educational leader herself. In January 1892, she was to be put in charge of the Department of Professional Training of Teachers inaugurated at Bedford College.31 One school where CTC students were always welcome, especially as ‘supply teachers’ when staff fell ill, was the Eden Street Elementary School for girls under the headmistress Miss Litchfieid. It was two storeys, each storey divided into one large and one small room. In the larger room three classes were taught divided from each other by two sets of curtains. Inside, 300 children were packed in with six teachers, three of them pupilteachers. Lighting was poor and the only source of heating was a large open fire. There was no playground, so that girls who could not get home at lunchtime played in the streets, annoying the neighbours. In an adjoining terraced house, some senior girls, as a treat, squeezed in a back bedroom for French lessons with CTC students.32 A poem by one of the students, set to the form and metre of Kingsley’s The Three Fishes’ gives an impression of the horrors of teaching while the critics looked on (usually Miss Hughes, the headteacher of the school and the teacher the student was temporarily re-placing): Three students went off to the Eden Street School, To the Eden Street School, as the clock struck three; Each thought of her lesson, her notes and her maps And the College stood watching them critically. For students must teach midst confusion and grime, And there’s much to do in a very short time, Though the students all be moaning. Three critics sat in the very back row, And they scribbled their notes as the lesson went on; They looked at the board, & they looked at the map, And the students taught nervously, pallid & wan. But students must teach though critics frown, Though the children be naughty, & jump up and down, While the students all are moaning.33

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As well as the enormous plunge into the dark of running the college in its early days, Hughes had to spend a lot of time fundraising. Monthly she would attend meetings in the drawing-rooms of the private houses of wellwishers to speak to groups of 12 or so invited guests about the aims and needs of the college.34 The meetings were held in London houses at 4.30pm, so Hughes had to do nearly a full day’s work in Cambridge before rushing to the train and hoping to arrive still looking neat and tidy. It must have seemed to her that explaining the necessity for Training Colleges and the disadvantages of untrained teachers went on ad nauseam, although she was almost always supported at these meetings by both Buss (who usually chaired the meetings) and by Bryant. The meeting where the Drawing Room Committee was set up took place at North London Collegiate School on 1 December 1887.35 Hughes there first explained the methods she was adopting for the training of students and then went on to tell of the necessity for obtaining a proper building in which to carry out the work—at present the only premises being two small cottages, insufficient for the lodgement of all the students in residence, some of them having to sleep out—a manifestly inconvenient and undesirable arrangement. Miss Hughes went on to say that there seemed to be no house in Cambridge suitable for a Training College: therefore the Committee were anxious to obtain money for themselves. Miss Buss pointed out that £7000 was the actual sum required for such a building, but that if £3000 could be obtained, the rest might be raised on mortgage. Reading through these minutes, it is clear that Hughes was after three pots of money. One for the new building,36 another to make loans to poor students so that they could undergo their training and then repay the loan once they had got teaching jobs.37 A third was a push to get people to establish scholarships, which is to say, money which a student would not have to pay back; these were obviously preferable to Hughes, but proved harder to establish.38 A loan to secure training for women was a more established sort of philanthropy; upper-middle-class women helping their less fortunate sisters. The Society for the Promotion of Employment of Women had been doing something similar since 1859, generally supporting women to get training for clerical jobs.39 It was decided that the loans should not exceed twenty-five pounds and that a third of the sum should be paid at the beginning of each term, subject to a favourable report from Hughes. The student was required to pay at least one-fifteenth of her salary per annum when in work.40 As numbers grew Crofton Cottages became impossible, and other, initially rented, premises had to be sought. But it seems almost as though the difficulties themselves bonded the earliest students, or perhaps it is

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always the very bravest of students who become pioneers. In the college’s third year Annie Read wrote a retrospective as a North London Collegiate School ‘old girl’ in its magazine: [The college] is still in temporary buildings, and consequently has to make its own traditions. Perhaps some generous benefactor one day may leave it a legacy, to allow the Committee to dabble wildly in red bricks and mortar. At present our lectures are given in one large iron building, called by the irreverent, the ‘Tin Tabernacle’ to which the students flock, whenever attendance in full force is necessary. This is not by any means confined to the educational cult, but is sometimes demanded by the less sedate Muses, Thalia and Terpsichore. During my year of residence, for example, before the College was moved from Newnham Croft, to Queen Anne’s Terrace, we gave entertainments here to the children from the Schools in which we teach, and to the mothers living in the village. On several afternoons we had parties of children up to the College for a frolic, which we students enjoyed quite as much as our little guests; and this put us on a mutually friendly footing, which was a great help to us in our teaching. Last November we invited all the women of the village to a Varied and original entertainment’; and O! how they enjoyed our waxworks! A Jubilee baby, and Mr Gladstone—collar and axe complete,—were hailed with delight; and many a careworn face brightened up with the approval of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Sometimes a few students would arrange an evening of their own, and invite the rest of the College. Once we had a fancy dress ball on a small scale, six students being hostesses. This turned out to be a great success, for even though very little notice was given, every one managed to rig up some kind of costume, with unexpectedly comic results. An ‘Indian squaw’, decked out with a living embodiment of the ‘Cambridge Boat Race’. Two ladies of the last century, Lady Teazle and Lydia Languish, whose inexpensive state robes consisted of towels and sponges. Another time we invited a number of workingmen of the neighbourhood, our milkman, gardener, baker, postman, etc., to an ‘At Home’, and probably learnt in this way far deeper social truths than we had ever known before. But at other times the lecture-hall wears a very different aspect, ‘When nothing is heard in the room but the hurrying pen of the —’students, taking down the words of wisdom which fall from the lips of the various lecturers on Psychology, Ethics, Logic and strictly professional studies. Besides these, all our educational visitors are more or less laid under contribution for volunteer lectures, when they come up to pay us a visit; Head Mistresses are especially in demand, because they can always speak with practical knowledge; and Mr Courthorpe Bowen, formerly Principal of the defunct Finsbury

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Training College for Men, has shown his warm sympathy with woman’s work in this way more than once. In this lecture-hall too, we do our practical work in ‘Slöjd’, the Swedish educational handicraft, which is at last beginning to find its way into English Schools. Mr Platts, ‘the famed Jocasta’ of the last Greek play, gave a course of Elocution Lessons; and Mr Ablett, a course on his special system of Class Drawing. We also attend the University courses of Lectures, arranged by the Teachers’ Training Syndicate. We get plenty of practical work—teaching in five different Schools in Cambridge; and this training is all the more valuable, because it is so varied, lessons being given in a Boys’ School, where ample scope for disciplinary talents is afforded, as well as in several others of different grades. At the beginning of each Term, a list of all lessons to be given is put up, and each student writes her name under those subjects she wishes most to teach. Almost all lessons are criticised, some more in detail than others, as time allows. A rather special feature of this branch of our work is the teaching of a Class formed of fellowstudents, who sometimes think it is their duty to be more irrepressible than any future pupils could possibly be, in order, as they kindly say, to give us plenty of practice.41 Every June the students had to take the examinations organized by the Teacher Training Syndicate to test knowledge of the history and theory of education and obtain its certificates for ‘practical efficiency’. This was always aggravating to CTC students who had to stay up in Cambridge for several weeks after the colleges had gone down. This led to a poem called The Cry of the Students’, borrowing a rhymescheme from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of which the first two verses went: Do you hear the students groaning, O my brothers As Examination come? Undergrads are free from cares and bothers, They have lots of games and fun. But the Training College students, O, my brothers, They are grinding drearily; They are grinding in the playtime of the others, In this University. The Teacher Training Syndicate was of enormous significance to CTC as the awarding body providing professional validation, the first to be awarded by any English university. Many secondary training institutions for women turned to Cambridge for the validation they needed. But for CTC itself, it was also the hinge of the gate to the university itself.

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NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Hughes, A London Family, p. 235. Later Bishop of Stepney and subsequently of Bristol. Constance Jones became Mistress of Girton in 1903. See M.A.Scott, The Perse School for Girls: The First Hundred Years 1881– 1981 (Cambridge, privately pinted, 1981). The first chairman was the Reverend Dr Bateson, Master of St John’s College; he was followed as Chair by Dr E.C.Clark, Professor of Civil Law. As it is described in an article by Peter Richards called ‘Education for All’ in Cambridge Alumni Magazine (Michaelmas Term, 2001), pp. 14–17; p. 17. Newnham College Meetings of the Council 1880–97. Present: Professor Adams, Mrs Adams, Mr Archer-Hind, Miss Bonham Carter, Miss Clough, Mr Cross, Miss Ewart, Professor Hudson, Miss J.E.Kennedy, Mr Keynes, Mr Latham (Master of Trinity Hall), Mr Main, Mr Marshall, Professor Sidgwick, Mr Trotter, Mr Verrall, Mr Winkworth. Bryant’s lectures are described in EPH’s report for the Michaelmas Term 1885 (HHA) as ‘The Ethical End of Education’ and the ‘Logical End of Education’. A. Conan, J.Conan, Bessie Davies, L.Eisenschmidt, Sarah Hay, J.Henderson, Bessie Jones, Ada L.Lyne, H.W.Mears, C.E.Oldaker, M.E.Rogers, Molly Thomas, Marion Tucker, E.J.Moore Smith. Bryant was the first woman to be elected to the Senate of London University. She promoted the foundation of the London Day Training College and the accompanying Chair of Education. She was honoured with a D.Litt. by Dublin University. In Hampstead she was the President of the local committee of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. She retired in 1918 and died in a climbing accident near Chamonix in August 1922. Hughes, A London Family, p. 141. Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., pp. 238–9. Ibid., p. 242. M.V Hughes, Gild Newsletter, 1926, p. 6. EPH, To My Students’ Gild Newsletter 1891, p. 12. Hughes, A London Family, pp. 239–40. James Bass Mullinger wrote a history of St John’s College, Cambridge. Hughes, A London Family, p. 246. EPH Report on CTC Michaelmas Term 1885. Hughes, A London Family, p. 247. Ibid., p. 253. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica, p. 41. Hughes, A London Family, p. 260. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 258. Ibid., p. 252. EDUC 3/10 60 ii.

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29. Mary Eleanor Rogers, from Exeter, attended Newnham College 1883–85 as College Scholar, where she studied for the Higher Locals. She was a Group D scholar. The Higher Locals were divided into groups and Group D was logic, psychology and political economy. She did not continue to take Tripos examinations but moved to CTC. It seems likely that this vocational training was chosen because of limited funds at home. Subsequently she taught at Newcastle on Tyne 1887–89, at Sunderland 1889–93, and at Baker Street, London 1893–1920 [Newnham College Records]. 30. Hughes, A London Family, p, 249. 31. See M.J.A.Tuke, A History of Bedford College for Women (London, New York and Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 136 and Hughes, A London Family, chapter 11. 32. R.Gardiner, An Epoch-Making School (Cambridge, Parkside Community College, 1988), pp. 26–7. 33. ‘Original Verses’, Hughes Hall Archives. 34. Minutes of the Drawing Room Committee, Box A6, Hughes Hall Archives. 35. Present at the meeting: Miss Buss in the Chair, Mrs Fitch, Miss Connolly, Miss Bear, Miss D. Davies and Mrs Arthur Lyon. Drawing Room Minutes, Box A6 Hughes Hall Archives. 36. Miss Buss and Miss Bryant appointed treasurers and Mrs Meyerstein and Mrs Leon, secretaries. 37. 15 March 1889 at the house of Mrs C Meyerstein, 51 Finchley Road. Hughes, Bryant and Buss spoke to about 12 ladies explaining the ‘use and object of CTC’. Mrs J. Solomon, Mrs Leon and Miss J.T.Ridley formed a committee to collect subscriptions for loans. 38. 4 Febuary 1888 a scholarship of £20 offered ‘to students of Girton and Newnham College…who had resided not less than two years’; in March 1888, an exhibition of £15 offered on the same conditions. See Education Committee Minutes, Box A6 Hughes Hall Archives. 39. See Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, pp. 191–2. 40. If an applicant wanted a loan the committee would write a report. An example follows: Miss Ellis of Beauclerk Rd. in Kensington Park was born in 1867. She first went to a private school &. at the age of 12 passed Cambridge Junior Local Exam, at 14 she passed the Camb Senior [Local Exam]. At 15 she went to Notting Hill High School, where for 1 term she was in the Upper 5th form thence passed into the 6th form. When 16 years old she passed the London Matriculation & at 17 entered Bedford College for a year, where she prepared for the Intermediate exam. She failed in Mathematics & at 18 years studied Mathematics at Trinity Col. London. She then passed the Intermediate exam, 1st Div. At 19 she went to Kensington Academy, where she taught for nearly a year & left because she had not sufficient time for private study. She then took her BA degree, 2nd division. After that she went for 3 months to teach at a school in Tynemouth, Northumberland. She there found that owing to want of training, she was not doing her work well &. decided to leave, altho’ the headmistress begged her to stay. She returned

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home &. now wishes to enter the Camb Tr. Col for a year’s training. Letters were recd as to her character & ability from Kensington Academy from the Rev. Mr Clarke, Christ Church Vicarage, N.Kensington. & from Mrs Kendall, wife of the Rev. T. Kendall, St Clements, Notting Hill. All satisfactory. The committee decided that Mrs Kendall is to be written to as to Miss Ellis’ father’s business, in order to show that he is not capable of paying the entire fees. If Mrs Kendall’s report be satisfactory Miss Ellis is to be elected & will commence her training at the beginning of next term about Sept 25. 89 In this case, Mrs Leon is to advance £8.6.8d—being 1/3 of sum granted i.e. £25—at the beginning of each term commencing on Sept. 25th 1889. The sum advanced is to be sent to Miss Hughes. The next grant of money will only be advanced if Miss Hughes’ report of Miss Ellis’ conduct & work be satisfactory’. Grace Aston Ellis attended CTC 1889/90. 41. Annie Read, ‘The Cambridge Training College’ in Our Magazine (November 1888), pp. 93–7.

10 GETTING ESTABLISHED

During the early years at Crofton Cottages Elizabeth Hughes had established a precarious foothold in Cambridge, with no financial safety-net beneath her. She had to strategically build on friendship networks within the university, studying how the lines of communication worked. Then, as now, it was not only a question of what you knew, but also who you knew. Having herself attended Newnham College, she had the principal’s personal support, even though Newnham was not formally involved with CTC. As well as to Anne Jemima Clough, Hughes looked to the Local Examinations Syndicate as her first line of supporters; Canon G.F.Browne, then secretary, had chaired the inaugural meeting of CTC in May 1885. The council which took over the administration of CTC was subsequently Chaired by Professor Liveing, who had been Secretary to the Examinations Syndicate back in 1869. Emily Davies had brought him and his wife into support of women’s education in the early 1870s when she had tried to work out exactly how a free-standing college in Cambridge could be made to work.1 Another early (and long-standing) friend of CTC was the Reverend Alfred Rose, a Fellow of Emmanuel, who offered his rooms there for the committee to meet until they transferred in November 1886 to the Local Examinations Syndicate Building in Mill Lane. He remained loyal to them after leaving Cambridge for Episcopal office in Stepney. Space for increasing numbers of CTC students was the most pressing problem. A tennis court behind Crofton Cottages was rented and an iron room or ‘tin tabernacle’, as students called it, was used for CTC lectures when they could no longer squeeze into their attic room. By November 1888, Hughes started to rent No. 12 Queen Anne’s Terrace (demolished in 1970 to make room for a multi-storey car park and Sports Centre) and the tin tabernacle moved into its garden. As the student body continued to grow, Miss Hughes rented No. 6 Queen Anne’s Terrace, and then, in 1890, yet another of the houses in Queen Anne’s Terrace. A victim of her own success, it was decided to peg student numbers at 40 until they could get permanent buildings. In terms of success Hughes reported to the Education Committee on 20 October 1890 that 19 students had entered the theoretical examination of the TTS, of whom 15 passed, five with

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distinctions. These 19, plus one other, entered for the practical examination and all passed, nine with distinctions.2 By 1891 it had become necessary to rent two houses in Warkworth Street, and this was also the year in which, sanctioned by the Department of Education in Whitehall, Oscar Browning became Director (later Principal) of the Cambridge University Day Training College for Men. It was controlled by the Teacher Training Syndicate, and principally trained elementary teachers, who would work for their professional qualifications concurrently with taking a Cambridge degree. At the CTC’s Education Committee of 25 November 1891, it was suggested that TTS be approached ‘suggesting the recognition…of trained students of the Cambridge Training College for state-aided schools. Mr Bell undertook to bring the point before the Syndicate’.3 Given CTC’s success in the previous year’s examinations the request could hardly be denied, and the new arrangements helped CTC’s financial position in that prior to this, CTC students attending lectures arranged by the Teacher Training Syndicate had to pay individual fees. But from 1891 onwards, CTC paid a composition fee on behalf of all its students.4 This moment marks a significant step forward for CTC in terms of official recognition, and arguably established CTC as a satellite (however distant) of the university. The year 1891 also marks CTC’s launch of its Old Students’ Gild, an important step both in consolidating the influence of CTC, and countering a lack of continuity as there were two overlapping cohorts within each calendar year. School-leavers and graduates from Oxford and Cambridge came up in September and left the following June (these were known as the As). Graduates from London and elsewhere came up in January and left in December (known as the Bs). Although there was some advantage in that a residue of Bs were available at CTC to initiate the newcomers, it meant that many students overlapped for a mere two terms. The termly Gild Newsletter served a vital function of establishing a network between experienced women teachers and novices; the Gild held regular meetings in both London and Manchester as well as annual summer gatherings, sometimes in Cambridge, and sometimes in the secondary schools where former CTC students now held posts.5 After the business meeting, an invited speaker would give an address on some aspect of education. Gild members could invite a friend to this part of the meeting and to the coffee following and to the dance which sometimes followed that. This brought new sympathizers into the ambit of CTC; perhaps parents who might consider sending their daughters, and perhaps, with luck, some well-heeled philanthropists who might give anything from books to the library, to money to create a scholarship.6 Elizabeth Hughes wrote termly a ‘Letter to my Students’ and these letters offer the most vivid glimpses of her personality. Her opening letter reflects on the sheer audacity of the enterprise she had undertaken:

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How has the Cambridge Training College managed to exist? This is a question which is often asked me, and it is one which I have often asked myself. When I remember the conditions under which we have had to work—no funds, our fees of necessity low, the year’s fees always obliged to cover the year’s expenses, no scholarships or prizes, no practising school of our own, and when we began, no library, and the staff consisting only of one over-worked Principal, badly prepared for her work—when I remember all this, I confess I wonder that the college has survived… One chief factor in the cause of our success has undoubtedly been our students. Under our somewhat democratic form of government it depended largely upon the students to make or mar the college, and it is they chiefly who have made it. When I remember how willingly they have put up with the inevitable inconveniences—the pools and mud of Newnham Croft, the crammed dining-table and ever-passing plates, the weary walking in the rain from Warkworth Street, the time-table susceptible to constant changes…7 She had good reason to be proud of her achievements, in particular the way that CTC students were snapped up both by headteachers, and by training colleges as lecturers, and increasingly were asked to act as examiners and inspectors. Nevertheless, it was clear that the need to acquire a permanent building was acute. Their eyes fell on Cavendish College, which had taken its name from the Chancellor of Cambridge University and had been built in 1876 on ten acres of land to the south of Cambridge on land bought from Trinity College. It had come into existence to take advantage of the university’s decision to allow non-collegiate students to take the Tripos examination. Cavendish College accepted boys from highest grade schools at a considerably lower cost than membership of an established Cambridge college. At first this scheme seemed to succeed. In 1882 it was recognized as a Public Hostel of the university. But in 1891 it went bankrupt and was put up for sale; in the event though, ‘Cavendish’ was bought by the board of a dissenting academy in Homerton, London, originally founded for the education of dissenting ministers, just as Oxford and Cambridge had regarded its chief function as providing a classical training for the clergy of the Established Church of England. By 1852 Homerton had become a coeducational teachers’ training college, and in 1895 moved on to the Cavendish site as a college for women only.8 CTC had missed the opportunity to buy the Cavendish College site, either because they could not raise the money or because they regarded it as too far away from the university. It was, literally, on the other side of the tracks; even the street lighting stopped at the railway bridge. According to the regulations of the Board of Education every initial teacher training college had to possess a practising school, so by 1899

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Homerton College had built the Morley Memorial School in nearby Blinco Grove, where both students and lecturers could experiment with progressive methods. It quickly gained an outstanding reputation among the elementary schools of Cambridge.9 CTC, on the other hand, did not have its own practising school. A great deal of Hughes’ time was engaged in organizing practise opportunities for her students. Again, her charm was put to good use. By 1891 CTC students were teaching in Park Street Higher Grade, Eden Street Higher Grade, St Luke’s Boys’ School, St Luke’s Girls’ School, three ladies’ private schools, the Perse High School, girls’ and boys’ preparatory schools, a co-educational school, and also a private class for young children held twice a week at Mrs Verrall’s house,10 The oldest school in Cambridge was the Perse School, built in the seventeenth century on the strength of money left for the purpose by Stephen Perse, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius. In 1873 the school came under the aegis of the Endowed Schools Act, and an offshoot of that new scheme of management was a department for girls which later developed into the Perse School for Girls.11 Hughes eventually came to think that the diversity of schools in which her students undertook their practical experience was a positive advantage to them, as she was to tell the Bryce Commission in 1894, but the work of setting up all the placements was timeconsuming and exhausting. Hughes was also exhausted by the efforts of renting accommodation for her students. She was desperate to establish a permanent building, to ‘dabble wildly in red bricks and mortar’.12 No doubt tipped off by one of the trustees, Joshua Fitch, Hughes applied for financial assistance to the Pfeiffer Trustees. Here lies one of the most extraordinary incidents in the history of women’s education, and indeed in legal history, so it is worth an explanation. Edward Pfeiffer was born in Germany but after marrying Emily Jane Davis, a poet and artist, in 1850, he was naturalized as a British subject. He built up a highly successful business as a tea merchant and, retiring in the 1880s, went travelling with his wife. In September 1884, just before a trip to the United States, Edward left a letter written to the trustees appointed under his will announcing his intentions, just in case an accident should happen to them. As he and Emily had no children, he instructed his executors, after the payment of certain specific legacies to relatives and dependants, to give the residue to benefit women.13 His letter read: I have always had, and am adhering to, the idea of leaving the bulk of my property in England for charitable and educational purposes in favour of women. Theirs is to my mind the great influence of the future. Education and culture and responsibility in more than one direction, including that of politics, will gradually fit them for the exercise of every power that could possibly work towards the regeneration of mankind. It is women who have hitherto had the

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worst of life, but their interest, and with their interest that of humanity, is secured, and I therefore am determined to help them to the best of my ability and means… I desire that my wife’s name should be chiefly associated with all bequests; at all events it should not be separated from that of mine.14 Mr and Mrs Pfeiffer returned safely home from their trip, and when he died in January 1889 his will bequeathed everything to his beloved wife. A month after Pfeiffer’s death his widow made a will enjoining the executors to follow the wishes expressed in the September 1884 letter. In 1888 Emily Pfeiffer’s book, Women and Work, a detailed feminist argument urging equal education, training and pay for women was published.15 So it was all the more surprising that in May 1889, apparently having been distressed by the Whitechapel murders, she made a second will urging that the money that both her late husband and herself had agreed should go to educational and training ventures for women should go instead towards building small cottage homes for destitute girls. This would have moved the money away from institutions that were likely to transform the future for women, into the rescue of a limited number of society’s victims. Having changed her will in this way, Emily died on the first anniversary of her husband’s death, and his letter came to light. Edward Pfeiffer’s trustees—Anthony Mundella,16 Joshua Fitch17 and Anna Stanwick18—took advice and mounted a legal challenge, hinging on a technicality under the statutes of the law of Mortmain.19 Had Emily Pfeiffer lived 12 months after the making of her second will, nothing could have prevented the money being lost to women’s education. In June 1892, Mr Justice North directed that the earlier will should take effect, and that the letter quoted should be admitted to probate. The Attorney General was then directed to consult the trustees to prepare for the court a scheme for the distribution of the residuary estate. The Pfeiffer Bequest was certain to attract numerous claims from cash-hungry initiatives for women’s education. The trustees appear to have shortlisted claims from institutions which satisfied two criteria: that they should be institutions under the management of responsible governing bodies, and that they should have no pronounced or exclusive sectarian character. CTC satisfied the second, but not the first of these two points, so it seems highly likely that Joshua Fitch gave Hughes a broad hint to change CTC’s constitution. Prior to making their application, CTC was an independent institution whose affairs were administered by a general committee which included some senior members of the university. CTC had no formal legally binding constitution until the Pfeiffer trustees made grant conditional on the college achieving an appropriate legally recognized status.20 They speedily applied to the Board of Trade for incorporation under the Companies Act as an Association ‘not for profit’ limited by guarantee and this was achieved in January 1893. The signatories to the Memorandum and

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Articles of Association were: George Liveing, Professor of Chemistry Charles Smith, Master of Sidney Sussex James Ward, Fellow of Trinity College Walter Bell, Fellow and Assistant Tutor at Trinity Hall Elizabeth Hughes, Principal of CTC Sarah Shaw, wife of W.N.Shaw, Tutor at Emmanuel College Constance Jones, Lecturer, Girton College Alfred Dale, Fellow and Tutor of Trinity Hall Kate Street, Headmistress of the Perse School for Girls Alfred Rose, Clerk in Holy Orders and Fellow of Emmanuel College. These people then elected the first Council, which in future would control the affairs of the training college. All the male signatories became members of the Council, along with Sara Shaw and Constance Jones.21 Sophie Bryant and Miss Day were elected and Kate Street and Mrs Burn co-opted. Hughes was not one of them, although, as principal she attended meetings by invitation and was bound to report to the Council annually. It is worth noting that this more formal arrangement had the great advantage that the university was more inclined to recognize CTC’s existence. The Reporter, the official journal of the university, now reported any changes to its Council. So, for example, in April 1896 when Dr Professor Liveing retired, the Reporter noted that Dr Sidgwick had been appointed a member for three years, and by 1898 the Reporter was reporting that the Council of the Senate had appointed Dr Hill, Master of Downing College, a member of CTC for three years. As the Senate was the Governing Body of the University, it is clear that by this stage it had to some degree adopted the training college for women. But the immediate pay-off of the new form of governance was a grant of £3,000 by the Pfeiffer trustees for the new building.22 Walter Bell was the Treasurer of the Building Committee and Reverend Alfred Rose was his committed supporter. They decided to rent land from Gonville and Caius on a 99-year lease on Wollaston Road, which was in the same section of the city as Warkworth Terrace and the Day Training College. This part of town was some way from the historic core which contained the oldest colleges, and was close to Barnwell in the southeast, an area which had been infilled with ‘poor quality artisan housing and workshops, and some of this area developed a very unsavoury reputation for its public houses, brothels and general villainy’.23 The building was designed to face the more

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respectable part of Cambridge and have its back to Barnwell, nevertheless, its geographical location echoed its uneasy situation position somewhere betwixt town and gown. The architect chosen, W.M.Fawcett, had just enlarged the Local Examinations Syndicate Building. His design was put out to tender and by December 1893 an estimate of £8,471 by Messrs Kett was accepted.24 Now all they needed to do was to raise the rest of the money. Sophie Bryant’s approaches to the City Companies achieved 100 guineas from the Drapers and ten guineas from Merchant Taylors. Local subscribers included the local shopkeeper, W.Eaden Lilley, who gave £100, the Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire gave £25, Alfred Rose himself gave £100, Sophie Bryant gave £20 and Hughes herself £25. A friend of Elizabeth Hughes, Laura Soames, left £500 in her will and, similarly Miss Buss’s will included a bequest of £50. Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick gave £25. The Building Committee decided to raise the further £4,000 by the issue of debentures, in units of £10 at an interest rate of 4 per cent. By July 1894, they were able to advertise in the Journal of Education that the 400 debentures had all been taken up, £1,700 had been raised by various subscriptions and that a last £500 was needed to complete the new buildings. This was because, then as now, buildings always cost more than their original estimates. Even the old students, via the Gild Newsletter were urged to put aside a penny a week and send the amount to the fund. Building began in the summer of 1894 and the college was ready for 50 students to come into residence for the Michaelmas term of 1895. The building was formally opened on 19 October 1895. Elizabeth Hughes was gratified that nearly all of the 200 educationists who were invited accepted. In the morning past and present students gave demonstrations of teaching to children from their practise schools. Lunch was provided in the college halls of Christ’s and Emmanuel or at the University Arms Hotel, situated just across Parker’s Piece from the college. In the afternoon speeches were given in a marquee in CTC’s new grounds. Professor Liveing presided and gave a short history of the college. Then it was declared formally opened by Lord Ripon, who ‘referred to the magnitude of the achievements of the past ten years, which were largely due to the skill, courage and financial ability of Miss Hughes’.25 The event and accompanying ceremony was reported in The Queen, together with a photograph of Elizabeth Hughes and all in all this was a highly public acknowledgement of the significance of the college and a tribute to the inspirational leadership of its founding principal. As a memorial of her debt of gratitude to two early supporters, Frances Buss and Anne Jemima Clough, two trees were planted in the newly laid lawn; the Reverend Septimus Buss planted one in honour of his sister, and Blanche Athena Clough planted one in memory of her aunt.26 It could be argued that by 1895 Elizabeth Hughes had served her purpose (or perhaps one might argue that she had served Miss Buss’

Reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Figure 10 This 1899 map shows the position of King’s College at the centre of power in the historic west of Cambridge. The siting of Cambridge Day Training College and Cambridge University Day Training College emphasizes the fact that teacher training was marginal to the university.

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Reproduced with kind permission of the President and Fellows of Hughes Hall.

Figure 11 In ten short years, Elizabeth Hughes moved from rented premises to establishing a permanent building for the Cambridge Training College, later renamed Hughes Hall in her honour. This remarkable achievement is testimony to her extraordinary determination and drive.

GETTING ESTABLISHED 157

158 ELIZABETH HUGHES

Figure 12 Miss E.P.Hughes in The Queen: The Lady’s Newspaper, 26 October 1895, p. 752. This illustration accompanied an article celebrating the opening ceremony of CTC’s permanent building. Reproduced with kind permission of the President and Fellows of Hughes Hall.

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purpose). CTC was firmly established with a permanent building, a high reputation nationally and internationally, and more applicants than they could manage. The risky days were over, though not the hard work, and I suspect that Hughes, from this time onwards began to look for a larger forum for her educational ideas than CTC itself, although never losing interest in CTC nor affection for its students. NOTES 1. Daphne Bennett, Emily Davies and the Liberation of Women (London, André Deutsch, 1990), pp. 83 and 135. 2. Education Committee Minutes, Box A6 Hughes Hall Archives. 3. Ibid. 4. Bottrall, Hughes Hall, p. 15. 5. Gild Newsletters, Hughes Hall Archives. 6. By 1891 CTC’s library held 2,000 books. 7. Gild Newsletter, Michaelmas 1891, Hughes Hall Archives. 8. It was not adopted by the university until 1977 when it became an ‘approved society’. 9. T.H.Simms, Homerton College 1695–1978: From Dissenting Academy to Approved Society in the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, published by the Trustees of Homerton, 1979), p. 43. 10. Letter from Resident Students, Lent Term 1891, Gild Leaflet. 11. In 1866 there were four church schools in Cambridge: East Road, King Street, St Paul’s and St Giles. By the 1890s four more—St Barnabas, St Matthew’s, Newnham and Park Street had been added. There were also by the later date Higher Grade Schools at Paradise Street, King Street, Eden Street, Barnwell Abbey, Castle End, Occupation Road and Wellington Street. 12. Annie Read, The Cambridge Training College’ in Our Magazine (North London Collegiate School, November 1888), pp. 93–7; p. 94. 13. See Basil Herbertson, The Pfeiffer Bequest and the Education of Women (Cambridge, privately published, 1995), Box Bl, Hughes Hall Archives. 14. Letter quoted in ‘The Pfeiffer Bequest’, Journal of Education 1 September 1894, pp. 483–4; P. 483. 15. Full title Women and Work: An Essay Treating on the Relation of Health and Physical Development of the Higher Education of Girls, and the Intellectual or more Systematised Effort of Women (London, Trubner & Co., 1888). 16. Anthony Mundella (1825–97) a Nottingham hosiery manufacturer and Liberal MP, Vice President of the Committee of Council on Education. 17. Sir Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) Chief Inspector of Training Colleges 1885–94 and a strong promoter of education and training of women. 18. Anna Stanwick (1813–99) Translator of German and Greek texts and a strong supporter of education for women. Visitor to Bedford College 1884, awarded LID, Aberdeen University, 1899.

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19.

It is well known that from the thirteenth century downwards there has been a succession of statutes originally designed to protect dying persons who might be urged to make gifts of land to religious corporations, persons, or uses, and that under what is called the Law of Mortmain (9George II., C.36) it is enacted that no gift of real property can be made for the benefit of any charitable uses before the death of the donor or grantor. Now the estate of Mrs Pfeiffer was personal estate only, and therefore prima facie not affected by this statute. Nevertheless it was argued in court that, although the bequest was not one of realty it was a bequest of personal property to be converted into realty, because the testatrix had directed that her property should be sold and the proceeds laid out in the purchase of lands and houses. For this reason it was ruled by the Court that the second will was invalid under the Statute of Mortmain. Journal of Education 1 September 1894, p. 483.

20. From 1893 the general committee was replaced by a Council, elected to administer the College, submitting the accounts and annual reports to members of the association. The Memorandum and Articles of Association were amended in 1949, when the College first achieved university status as a Recognised Institution for Women and changed its name to Hughes Hall. Other significant constitutional changes occurred in 1968, when Hughes Hall became an Approved Society of the University, and began to admit women pursuing post-graduate studies in disciplines relating to education; and in 1973, when men graduates were first admitted. In 1984 the constitution was extensively revised, and Hughes Hall was recognized as an Approved Foundation of the University of Cambridge with effect from 1 July 1985. At this point the association transferred its powers to the Body of Fellows. 21. Constance Jones was the Resident Lecturer in Moral Science at Girton from 1884–1916; she was Mistress of Girton from 1903–16. 22. As well as CTC benefiting, Girton College, Cambridge, got £5,000; Newnham College, Cambridge got £5,000; Maria Grey Training College got £4,000; Bedford College, London got £4,000; Queen’s College, London £2, 500; School of Art Needlework £4,000; Hospital for Women £3,000; London School of Medicine for Women £3,000; Somerville Hall, Oxford £2, 500; Association of German Governesses £2,000; College Hall for Women, London £2,000; College for Working Women, London £2,000; Alexandra College for Women, London £3,000; Aberdare Hall, Cardiff £2,000; Masson Hall, Edinburgh £2,000; Hall of Residence Aberystwyth, £2,000; Women’s University Settlement, Southwark £2,500; Society for Employment of Women £2,000. 23. Peter Bryan, Cambridge: The Shaping of the City (Cambridge, privately published, 1999). 24. Minutes of the Building Committee, Hughes Hall Archives. 25. The Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper, 26 October 1895, p. 793. 26. Ibid., p. 752.

11 ELIZABETH HUGHES AND THE CATHOLIC STUDENTS

In the nineteenth century ‘religious mixing’ was considered a dangerous thing.1 Many schools were started for one particular group: Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians and Unitarians, for example. Elizabeth Hughes was, as we have seen, religious by instinct, and Nonconformist by upbringing and temperament. Although she had taught at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, which, under Miss Beale, was distinctively Anglican, she herself was ecumenical by instinct. She established CTC on determinedly nonsectarian grounds. Newnham, her alma mater, was the only college without a chapel, for similarly anti-sectarian reasons.2 Her thinking on this matter is made clear in her evidence to the Bryce Commission: [At CTC] we give no religious instruction at all. We have prayers, as unsectarian as I can make them, and attendance at those prayers is of course optional. Practically Catholics, if we have any, generally stay out, and once a Jewess preferred to stay out. We have all possible creeds, and I cannot allow them to give religious instruction in the schools. Many of the schools where we teach are Church of England schools, and they would object, reasonably I think, to those students who are not members of the Church of England giving religious instruction in the schools; and as our college is unsectarian I insist that no distinction shall be made between those who are members of the Church of England and those who are not. I have been asked in two instances whether we would take religious instruction. I pointed out the difficulty, and the headmistress said she would be willing to allow any students I appointed to give the religious instruction, but I said that it might place us in a good many difficulties, and declined.3 In the nineteenth century various training institutions were set up to provide suitably educated and professionally competent elementary teachers to teach working-class Catholics and Irish immigrants.4 But, at the time CTC was founded Catholics had not got an institution for middle-class women who wished to teach girls of their own class in secondary schools, and consequently, a number of upper-class Catholic women, led by the

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Countess of Denbigh and Anne M.Donelan of Thornfield, Rugby, began to sound out the possibilities of establishing one. At the beginning of 1893 Anna Donelan wrote to Canon Scott, Canon of Cambridge, explaining their ambitions. His reply indicated that he approved of the scheme of establishing a Catholic training college for women teachers, because he could see from her letter: That you have in view no standard such as that of the Women’s Colleges of Girton or Newnham, which is said to stimulate the intellect at the expense of Faith, and with risk at least of Agnosticism, to encourage a system of instruction not specially suited to women, and to promote a spirit of rivalry and antagonism between the Sexes. On the contrary is the parallel of intellectual, moral and Catholic Education at which you aim. He goes on to comment that there exists in his diocese: an excellent Training College for teachers of the higher class. The principal is a lady whose educational capacity can be judged of by the fact that she has been deputed by the sub-committee on Woman’s Education in England, under the Royal Commission for the Chicago Exhibition, to be their representative at the Educational Congress of English teachers… You desire, therefore, to start on a small scale an entirely distinct house, the inmates of which must be Catholics and the control of which would be entirely in your own hands. Thus students could have the advantage of the Training College to fit them for their profession, and the additional advantage of your House in which their Faith would be guarded and indeed strengthened by proportionate instruction, and ever facility for its practice. In case of success, you are willing to retire in favour of a Religious Community, who might carry on the work with greater permanence.5 Scott ends by saying that although he is willing for his letter to be shown to those whose aid Donelan hoped to attract, it was ‘otherwise a private communication, not intended for Press’. But what was the position of Catholics and the university at this point? They had, along with dissenters, been admissible as members and potential graduates (but not as officers) since 1856. From 1870 religious tests had been confined only to heads of houses and graduates in theology. However, no Catholics had arrived because, in 1867, a rescript emanating from the congregation de propoganda fide had objected to their attendance at Protestant universities on moral grounds (without explicitly forbidding it). As CTC was not part of the university, it’s link was only via the Teacher Training Syndicate, this opened up a possibility.

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Donelan promptly arranged to attend CTC for the Easter term 1893 as a resident visitor. Hughes suggested that as Catholic secondary education seemed utterly unprovided for, then a house affiliated to CTC, where ecclesiastical authority might have a free hand to control and safeguard the faith of Catholic students might answer the purpose. As a consequence of encouragement from Hughes, in May 1893 Donelan organized A proposal for the Higher Education of Catholic Women’ in which she asked for subscriptions of ten pounds, so that £300 might be raised for this project of setting up a house in Cambridge.6 In October she wrote that the result of living at CTC has been a true friendship with Miss Hughes, and the most unlookedfor boon of her offering us Catholics the golden opportunity of a two years’ apprenticeship in connection with her College, thus enabling us at a mere nominal cost, and without risk of failure through inexperience, to lay the foundations of an independent Catholic Training College for teachers in secondary education. This College to be finally established wherever it may be thought best for Catholic interests, and if judged well, put under direction of a religious order.7 In March 1894 Anna Donelan received a letter from Dr Fitch which approved her efforts and advised that ‘in my judgement, the formation of a strong and responsible Committee, composed of persons who command the confidence of the religious community for whose benefit the institution is designed, is an indispensable condition of its success’.8 Donelan persuaded a number of upper-class Catholic women to form a committee, with the Dowager Countess of Denbigh as president.9 By the beginning of 1894, with subscriptions coming in thick and fast, the committee approached Cardinal Vaughan, Archbishop of Westminster, to enlist his support.10 The committee was well aware that Vaughan was grudging in his support of Catholic involvement with Protestant universities (not surprisingly, as, before 1870, no student could graduate who did not subscribe to the 39 Articles of [Anglican] Religion).11 Several meetings took place with the Cardinal; it was proposed that Anna Donelan, should be head of house. Elizabeth Hughes attended one of the meetings and spoke with her usual cogency about the importance of appropriate training of teachers, if you hoped to have a good secondary education for middle-class girls (in this case, Catholic ones). Vaughan was hostile to young Catholic women being exposed to Protestant Cambridge, but he grudgingly agreed to accept Hughes’ offer to train Catholic intending teachers at CTC as a temporary expedient. His intention was that it should be a strictly timelimited affair, lasting just long enough to get enough qualified Catholic teachers to open up a licenced Catholic Training College for secondary women teachers.12

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It seems likely that Donelan’s committee always hoped that their initiative would be a lasting affair; certainly they orchestrated a successful propaganda campaign. One of the leading Catholic journals of the day, The Month, wholeheartedly applauded the scheme of professional training employed by Hughes: The whole course of study at Miss Hughes’ College, which occupies one school year of thirty weeks, divided into three terms, includes lectures on the theory and history of education, on school hygiene, on psychology and logic, on the art of teaching, on elocution, on classsinging, class-drawing and callisthenics. Furthermore, as proficiency in the art of imparting knowledge can only come by exercise of it, the students are allowed ‘to practice in fourteen different schools in Cambridge of all classes and grades—of girls and boys’. This practical work is organised as follows: the student first carefully prepares her lecture, then rehearses it before a small audience consisting of the Principal of the College, the mistress of the school in which the lecture is to be given, and two fellow-students, all of whom criticize it from their different standpoints, and only when the lecture is revised according to the suggestions thus given, is it allowed to be delivered. In this way a young teacher learns to see all round her subject, to sift it of extraneous matter, and to adapt her treatment of it to the calibre of various minds before she ventures to express it in didactic form.13 To look at the situation from the point of view of CTC, until the establishment of Donelan’s hostel the question of creed had never arisen as a contentious issue. Their only question seems to have been how it would be viewed by the schools where their students undertook their practical experience. The Council of CTC duly inquired to see whether any of their practise schools would entertain any objection to lay students from a Catholic establishment giving lessons. With only one exception (Park Street, bound by its deed of foundation) there seemed to be no problem. Consequently Hughes offered to take six Catholic students for the first year, who would pay the regular CTC fees of £24 a year, provided they had the same entry qualifications as other students. However, when the question of admission of nuns in religious dress arose, the position was a little different, for CTC Council could not in this case guarantee admission to schools. They offered them instead the chance to become ‘visitors’ at the college, paying less, as, although they could receive the same theoretical training they could not ensure practise. Cardinal Vaughan chose to regard this pragmatic decision as bigotry by Cambridge, and raised objections. The problem for the Education Committee of CTC was simply that they could not guarantee opportunities for the nuns to give lessons in their practise schools.14The Council

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attempted to explain to Cardinal Vaughan that the term ‘visitor’ was a technical one. The category included, for example, experienced teachers, who did not wish to take the whole course at CTC. Visitors enjoyed all the privileges of CTC while being free to omit various items. Hughes thought it possible, for example, that the nuns may wish to omit such subjects as callisthenics, gymnastics and musical drill. CTC proposed to charge the nuns four guineas instead of the usual eight pounds a term, precisely because they could not guarantee that they would be able to practise in all the schools. Hughes herself offered to give up part of two vacations, without any extra charge, to help the nuns in their own [Catholic] schools.15 This seems more than generous, but Vaughan refused to see that CTC was trying to help within the constraints of the demands of Cambridge schools, and he insistently held the view that the placing of nuns in a separate category as ‘visitors’ to the college because of their ‘distinctive dress’ was discriminatory.16 Hughes wrote: I think my Council behaved with great wisdom and, indeed, some generosity, and I was keenly hurt that the only answer we received for our offer was the suggestion that my Council showed [religious] intolerance… When I met the Cardinal I felt he understood me and my views, and I always regret that I never had the opportunity of telling him the exact meaning of the Council’s decision. I shall always believe he would not have misunderstood me.17 Hughes, as we have seen, was extremely persuasive in person, and probably assumed that she could have won the archbishop round, but, in this, I think, she was probably mistaken. Vaughan did not want Catholic women in dangerous Cambridge at all. On the grounds that Bedford Training College for Women could also train for the Teacher Training Syndicate examinations and diplomas and was not making a fuss about nun’s distinctive dress, two nuns from the Holy Child Convent, Cavendish Square, London (who had originally intended to come to CTC), instead went to Bedford College, then in Baker Street, five minutes walk away.18 There is a certain irony here in that the teacher training department at Bedford was run by one of Hughes’ first students, Molly Thomas. Bedford College, like CTC, was nondenominational in spirit. It had been founded in 1849 by a Unitarian, Elizabeth Jesser Reid, to take dissenters as Queen’s College, founded a year earlier, was an Anglican foundation. The immediate impact of this move on Donelan and her committee was that, by July 1894, they found themselves in an extremely awkward position. They had made all the arrangements for establishing the Catholic women’s hostel in Cambridge, understanding that their work was approved at all levels of the hierarchy. They came to the conclusion that whereas the Bedford College initiative might serve the Westminster diocese, as

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Donelan’s hostel had not lost the support of the vicar general of their own diocese, they should press on, and consequently they opened their house in October 1894. On 10 October 1894, Hughes informed CTC’s Education Committee that Cardinal Vaughan had determined that he would support the training of teachers at Bedford College, rather than at CTC, but that, nevertheless, two Catholic lay students had entered CTC and were residing under the care and authority of Miss Donelan. As charged by her Council, whenever a Catholic student was about to be placed in a practise school, Hughes would write to the chair of managers. On 24 November 1894 she was able to report with satisfaction that all their schools had been willing to accept a Roman Catholic student with the exception of Park Street. But Vaughan actively campaigned to prevent Miss Donelan s house from becoming permanently established. In June 1894, The Month, which had previously seemed so keen to adopt the chance of Catholic women training at CTC, did a sudden about-face and started arguing instead that the training of secondary Catholic women teachers should be by nuns. Donelan sought to strengthen her position by securing the Pope’s blessing for her endeavour. The papal blessing arrived in Cambridge in May 1896, ‘The Holy See cordially blesses the Catholic House of Residence in Cambridge and all its inmates, present and future, and wishes every success to this movement in favour of sound Catholic secondary education.’ This was a canny political move. Some of Donelan’s confidence was drawn from her sense that her committee of management was made up of powerfully influential Catholics.19 One of her strongest assets was that by including Canon Scott among the members of her committee, she had implicated Bishop Riddell of the Diocese of Northampton on her side. Confident of her strong position, Donelan published a letter in The Tablet in August 1896 appealing for public funds and asserting that she bad received papal blessing for her project and the formal approval of the Highest Authority of the Church. Cardinal Vaughan publicly denied that she had this, and an unedifying spat broke out. Bishop Riddell took the view that Donelan’s hostel in Cambridge was a domestic matter to be dealt with by the Northampton diocese, a matter in which neither Cardinal Vaughan nor any other bishop had the right to interfere. Both he and several other bishops thought it in any case simply illogical to refuse permission to Donelan’s hostel for women and yet support the Catholic house for men in Cambridge, St Edmund’s, which opened in 1896.20 For example, Canon Scott (as vicar general of the Bishop of Northampton) petitioned Rome, claiming that the archbishop’s instruction that Donelan’s house be closed in 1899 should be revoked on the grounds that: The suppression of an institution devoted to the interests of higher education, and which known hitherto to have worked most

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successfully, would be likely to prejudice opinion in Cambridge as to the stability and objects of those much more important Catholic institutions such as Edmund’s Hall, which are in connection with the University, and will thereby make it more difficult to obtain those concessions which are advisable for the success of their important work in the education of the Catholic laity and clergy.21 Vaughan argued in response that women being by nature more refined, more sensitive, more highly strung than men, they are more impressionable for good and evil than their brothers [and that] a proportionate number of the Catholic wives and mothers of the future will grow up spoiled of that Catholic bloom and aroma, which the dominant Protestant and rationalistic atmosphere of non-Catholic Training Colleges cannot fail to destroy.22 This misogynist response, assuming that women were more easily led astray than men, rather gives away his game. It all seems something of a storm in a teacup, but what was at stake in the establishment of Donelan’s Catholic women’s ‘hostel’ or ‘house’? It seems fairly clear that in relation to the university, it was in a sense a Trojan Horse. A ‘house’ or ‘hostel’, used fairly interchangeably, were terms adopted in the nineteenth century for a hall of residence. It sounded harmless, and temporary. But Vaughan was probably correct in suspecting that Donelan intended to make her hostel stick. In terms of attaching itself to the University of Cambridge it was often the very first stage which might ultimately lead to a more definite and established college. As the historian of the university writes, a house would be established usually on a’less grandiose model than the traditional colleges but with a more or less conscious aspiration to collegiate status at some future date’.23 Newnham College and Girton College had begun in this way. Selwyn Hostel was an establishment founded in 1882, identified with the Church of England, and with the specific aim of providing for impoverished ordinands became Selwyn College in 1923, achieving full collegiate status in 1957. A leading figure in the moves to open Cambridge to Catholics was Baron Anatole von Hugel, Curator of the Museum of Ethnology (now Archaeology and Anthropology). Not surprisingly, we find his name on the list of benefactors to Donelan’s hostel for women at the same time as he succeeded in opening St Edmund’s House in Cambridge for Catholic students from St Edmund’s College at Ware.24 Some of those who had campaigned to abolish the test acts, of course, regarded single faith colleges (not specifically Catholic ones) as a retrograde step, rather as there is liberal concern about government support for single faith schools today.

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In any case, despite all of Donelan’s efforts, plus those of her powerful supporters, Vaughan outmanoeuvred the lot of them by orchestrating a prohibition from Rome. Vaughan’s winning card was that the nuns from the convent of the Holy Child who had studied at Bedford College were now ready to open a Catholic teacher training college in Cavendish Square, London, under Mother Mary Raphael (Miss Paley). The TTS had permitted them to present students to be examined for both the Theoretical and the Practical Diploma. Vaughan sent out a ‘Letter to the Convents in the Diocese of Westminster engaged in Secondary Teaching’ marked ‘Need for Immediate Action’ encouraging the Reverend Mothers to support this new Catholic training college.25 Vaughan could now insist on the ‘temporary’ Cambridge house being closed down, on the grounds that it should not compete with the Cavendish Square college. In a letter of 23 December 1897, Donelan reluctantly agreed to close her house by July 1899. Nevertheless, Donelan and her committee tried a last ditch attempt. In April 1899 they approached Bishop Riddell in the hope that he might recognize the house as a purely diocesan undertaking. Riddell sent Scott, his vicar general, with a new petition to Rome asking for the removal of the instruction that the house must close. It pointed out that of the 25 Catholic students 23 had come from Ireland, many of them graduates of the Royal University, and several of these had joined religious orders. Vaughan sent a hostile letter to the bishops of Westminster, ‘On Training Catholic Teachers at Cambridge’, asking them to petition Rome for the Cambridge hostel’s closure, on the grounds that Donelan had known from the very beginning that her hostel could only be a temporary arrangement. In August 1899 the committee sent out a letter in response: It is true that it always has been and still remains Miss Donelan’s hope that, under the unique educational influences afforded by Miss Hughes’ system, a small band of Catholic teachers should be trained, who should in time be able to create a Catholic Training College capable of standing alone. It was certainly not the intention of those who promoted the House that it should cease to exist as soon as any College capable of giving any kind of certificate might be created, for before we can have a thoroughly efficient Training College, its staff must have acquired: 1. The best possible primary education 2. The best possible secondary education 3. A great enthusiasm for the work; and 4. A wide practical knowledge of the best methods of teaching, such as the laborious experience of experts has created in institutions similar to Miss Hughes’ College.

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That the staff of a Training College cannot be called up from the void in a day may be gathered from Miss Hughes’ experience, given as follows: ‘It has been my constant endeavour in Cambridge to prevent the big difference in educational level between my Protestant and Roman Catholic students being very apparent. I should never have known how different the level is, if it were not for my educational position as Principal. It is surely not adequate dealing with the situation to send two or three persons, without special qualification for the task, to take a course at Bedford College, or elsewhere, subsequently to cut them adrift from all educational experience of the country, and to call the result a Training College.’26 Hughes further argued that CTC was generally recognized to be the Rolls Royce of training colleges for women secondary teachers: It is scarcely possible for me to compare the College which I have largely made myself with any other training departments at Bedford College or elsewhere. I can only say that the number and class of students attracted to us as compared with those attracted to Bedford College, &c. prove conclusively that public opinion at present considers us decidedly superior. I honestly confess I agree with public opinion… Our qualifications for entrance are considerably higher than any other Training College, and our advantages at present are certainly much greater, I think, than any other Training College in any country that I know anything about.27 The concomitant to that was that, if the archbishop wished for Catholic girls’ schools to rise to the level of Protestant girls’ schools, they would need to establish an elite corps of Catholic teachers, and in order to do this they should be trained by CTC. Despite all arguments, Vaughan was having none of it; he demanded the backing of his bishops that they should request Rome to ignore Riddell’s petition on behalf of the Cambridge Catholic hostel. The Vatican therefore endorsed Vaughan’s insistence that Donelan’s house should be suppressed in 1899.28 The Catholic Church was the most extreme version of hierarchical and patriarchal power which Hughes had yet faced, and it defeated her. She was not used to losing, and she was extremely annoyed. In the course of her arguments with Archbishop Vaughan Hughes she found herself having to downplay rather than upgrade CTC’s relationship with Cambridge University. She wrote:

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The College had no connection with the University when it was started. At the end of the first year we had permission to send in our students to the examination [TTS] as Cavendish Square can. Some years later we asked the Headmistresses’ Association to send representatives to our Council, because we wanted it to represent many interests, and later we asked the University to send three representatives to a Council of 50… They generally attend once a year…or rather they are invited and don’t always come … Indeed, I think they are only eligible to attend the annual meeting… The University as such does not control us more than it does Cavendish Square… The University neither governs the College nor regulates the lectures; our one link is the negative one of the Syndicate as at Cavendish Square (and the three members of the Council as above stated). The Training College might have been established anywhere. Indeed, we once thought of starting it elsewhere, and decided on Cambridge because of the educational advantages there.29 This statement of August 1899, even acknowledging that it was politically judicious for her to downplay her involvement with the university, is telling. The defeat on the Catholic hostel exasperated her, but, perhaps even more damagingly, it made her consider just how much, 14 years after the founding of CTC, ‘the college I largely made myself was still an outsider. Her explicit statement that the Syndicate was a ‘negative’ link with the university, is also significant. If she now regards the single sesame as a poisoned gift, it begs the question of how she arrived at this view, and her relation with the person synonymous with TTS, Oscar Browning. NOTES 1. See Sara Delamont who writes that a ‘school for army officers’ daughters at Bath nearly failed to be established because admitting Catholics was proposed’ in ‘Distant Dangers and Forgotten Standards: Pollution Control Strategies in the British Girls’ School, 1860–1920’, Women’s History Review Vol. 2, No. 2, 1993. 2. Emily Davies wished Girton to be nominally Anglican; Barbara Bodichon fought hard for the college to be unsectarian. A compromise was reached, which is just as well else they would not have been eligible for the grant from the Pfeiffer trustees. 3. Bryce Secondary Education Commission, p. 482. 4. See, for example, Hilary Minns’ essay, ‘Catherine McAuley and the Education of Irish Roman Catholic Children in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’ in Hilton and Hirsch (eds), Practical Visionaries, pp. 52–65. 5. Letter in archives of the Northampton Roman Catholic Diocesan Trust. 6. The other women who ‘have kindly consented to receive contributions’, and who formed the core of the committee, were: Baroness Anatole von Hugel, Croft Cottage, Cambridge; Mrs Brownlow, 4, Carlyle Terrace, Cambridge;

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7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

The Honorable Mrs Tower, Thornfield, Rugby; The Honorable Mrs E. Stourton, The Grove, Bournemouth; Mrs Bruce, 10 Observatory Avenue, Kensington. Anna M. Donelan, ‘A Proposal for the Professional Training of Catholic Ladies for the Work of Secondary and Higher Education’, October, 1893. Archives of Northampton diocese. Letter from Dr J.G. Fitch, described as ‘late HM Chief Inspector of Training Colleges’, 24 March 1894. Archives of Northampton diocese. See Madeleine Beard’s book, aptly named Faith and Fortune (Leominster, Gracewing, 1997) for an account of upper-class Catholic women’s philanthropic efforts, including educational projects. Vaughan was Archbishop of Westminster from 8 April 1892 until his death on 19 June 1903. In 1613, in the interests of conformity, James I obliged the university to impose religious tests on all those proceeding to doctorates in any faculty and to the BD in the form of subscription to the Act of Supremacy, to the use of the Book of Common Prayer and to belief in the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion first promulgated in 1563. In 1617 the same triple oath was made obligatory for those proceeding to any degree in the university. There was no requirement of conformity for admission to the university, so many dissenters in the nineteenth century attended but did not graduate; it barred them from proceeding further in the university. In 1894 there were three Catholic training colleges for elementary school teachers in England. The Month, May 1984. 30 April 1894 at 12 Queen Anne’s Terrace, Education Committee Minutes, Box 6, Hughes Hall Archives. Hughes’ comment quoted in ‘On Training Catholic Teachers at Cambridge: a Reply to a Letter by the Cardinal Archbishop to the Bishops of the Province of Westminster’ (London, privately printed, August 1899). Cardinal Vaughan, On Training Catholic Teachers in the Protestant Training College for Women in Cambridge, privately printed ‘Letter by the Cardinal Archbishop to the Bishops’ June 1899; Northampton diocesan archives. Hughes’ comment quoted in ‘On Training Catholic Teachers at Cambridge’. Hughes, A London Family, pp. 485–9. Dowager Countess of Denbigh (president), Hon. Mrs Tower (treasurer), Canon Scott (vicar general of the Northampton diocese), Dr Louis Charles Casartelli (lecturing in Louvain, and shortly to be appointed Bishop of Salford), Professor Bertram Windle (Dean of the Medical Faculty and Professor of Anatomy in University College, Birmingham), B.F.C. Costelloe (an Oxford MA), James Britten (Knight of the St George and Secretary of the Catholic Truth Society), and Mrs Fitzgerald (a wealthy intellectual). From 1965 St Edmund’s College; ‘approved foundation’ from 1975. Quoted in ‘A Reply to a Letter of the Cardinal Archbishop’, p. 11. Vaughan, On Training Catholic Teachers. Elisabeth Leedham-Green, A Concise History of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, University Press, 1996), p. 244. Leedham-Green, A Concise History of the University, pp. 172–3.

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25. 26. 27. 28.

Northampton diocesan archives. ‘A Reply to a Letter of the Cardinal Archbishop’, p. 13. Ibid., p. 15. A papal dispensation permitting Catholic women to attend Oxford and Cambridge for the purpose of obtaining degrees was not granted until 1906, three years after Vaughan’s death. See Vincent McClellan, ‘Herbert Vaughan, The Cambridge Teachers’ Training Syndicate, and the Public Schools, 1894– 1899’ in Paedagogica Historica 15 (1975,) pp. 16–38; p. 35. 29. Hughes quoted in ‘A Reply to a Letter of the Cardinal Archbishop’, p. 12.

12 FRIENDS OR ENEMIES: O.B. AND MISS HUGHES

‘We looked with curiosity at Oscar Browning, for we knew the famous quatrain beginning,’ “O.B. oh be obedient”, Molly Thomas1 It is likely that Elizabeth Hughes’ close connections to Newnham College would have led her to expect support from O.B. for any venture connected with women’s education. He had, for example, been happy to give a lecture on Dante’s Purgatorio in Sidgwick’s series of lectures for women in 1877/ 78 and had been willing to give lectures on history to Newnham women.2 He had quickly decided that the women might just as well come at the same time as his lectures to men; nor did he think the contemporary system of chaperonage necessary, A letter home from a Newnham student in 1878 was ecstatic: Hurrah for women’s rights!!!—We have another triumph—Now you know the people of Christs College have allowed Natural Science students to attend the lectures for men but Miss Clough must go too, that is one of the conditions. Well Mr Oscar Browning has been lecturing on History to about 4 of our girls & also giving the same lectures to the men of Kings—he asked the Provost [the head of King’s College] if the girls might attend the men’s lectures to save his time—The Provost called a college meeting & the result is that Kings has opened its arms to the females—They went yesterday for the first time & Miss Clough went just to the first but is not to go in the future.3 However, if women’s position in Cambridge was marginal, O.B.’s position was not so secure as it may have seemed to those young women. When pushed out of Eton, O.B.’s decision to reside at King’s and to teach history was an improvised survival tactic; he did not hold a definite post. A letter from Henry Sidgwick in May 1876 makes this clear: I do not think [the unremuneratedness of your Cambridge work] will make it less valued and less effective, if you can put your heart in it, but rather more so. I think there is a crying need here for the kind of

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influence over youth that you want to exercise, and that in every way there is a sphere for you here, if only you do not mind (1) absence of remuneration, and (2) being continually asked by your friends where you are and what you are doing.4 Elizabeth Hughes initially would have presumed that O.B., as a Fellow of King’s, was securely ‘establishment’, but during the course of their dealing with one another, her status and reputation became increasingly enhanced whereas O.B. was ultimately harshly disenfranchised. Their idealistic commitment to education and the significance of training teachers was equally urgent; their most substantive disagreement was the issue of the concurrent or the consecutive model of training. As Hughes was specifically running a training college for secondary teachers, she perceived the training she was giving as emphatically post-graduate, even if, in the early years of CTC, not all the women students had studied to degree level. O.B., on the other hand, consistently adhered to a concurrent model. By 1894, when Hughes appeared as a major witness for the Bryce Commission, the tide was turning in her direction, rather than his. Despite O.B.’s best efforts, as the Bryce Commission noted, ‘Appointments to masterships…continued to be made independently of any previous professional preparation, and facilities for supplementing the university lectures by practical training in the schools were not forthcoming.’5 University-educated men, in short, did not believe that they needed ‘training’ to teach; nor did the heads of the elite boys’ schools have any interest in vocational training. This was in sharp contrast to women teachers’ desire and acuity in professionalizing themselves. Bryce commented that Browning’s hopes of persuading university-educated men to undertake training had ‘failed’, noting that, on the other hand, ‘the opportunity of connecting colleges for teachers with a university was speedily utilised on behalf of women, and the university lectures were made the starting point for the foundation of the Cambridge Training College for Women’.6 O.B.’s valiant efforts were exploited by women rather than men, and there is an element of tragic irony here, especially given Virginia Woolf ‘s caricature of O.B. as the man trying to keep women out of Cambridge. The enthusiasm with which O.B. had founded the Teacher Training Syndicate in 1879 was an open sesame to ambitious women teachers, providing the professional validation they desired up until the 1950s, In return, one might say, women students (including those at CTC), who paid heavily in examination fees to the Teacher Training Syndicate, largely financed O.B.’s Day Training College for Men.7 Inevitably, O.B.’s position as head of TTS gave him direct power over CTC students. Of the first examinations held in June 1880, 35 of the 42 candidates were external to Cambridge, and 23 of them were from Bishopsgate Training College for Women, whose students’ teaching ability

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was also examined by the Syndicate.8 Women trainee-teachers were therefore, from the start, the major percentage of the Syndicate’s clientele, which may well have been disappointing, or even highly irritating to him. Inevitably there were strains and tensions between the two innovators concerning their ideals, but they had, if not a close friendship, at the very least a symbiotic dependence. It is notable that examinations held at the Women’s Training College were never charged for, the Syndicate only paid for the stationery used. Yet, as soon as O.B. retired, and was replaced by Mr Bell, the Treasurer of the Women’s Training College adopted a much more business-like stance, indicating that students sitting the examination (other than CTC students themselves) would be expected to pay a guinea fee for the use of a CTC room. This implies that a sense of a certain us-against-the world partnership existed when O.B. was in situ, which did not sustain after his departure. Letters from Hughes to O.B. between April 1883 and 1900 are businesslike, but always cordial, with the exception of one serious quarrel or misunderstanding in 1897 (largely caused by some mischievous stirring by Mr Iliffe),9 The crux of the disagreement, or O.B.’s heresy in Hughes’ eyes was his insistence that the ex-pupil-teachers at the Day Training College were far better than the university-educated ones, and that he was therefore against any dismantling of the pupil-teacher system for elementary teachers. Hughes’ idea was that good secondary schools for all able pupils should be put in place, and that these would render the pupil-teacher system obsolete. Nevertheless, after a brief but ferocious spat of letters in 1897, cordial relations were resumed. This quarrel has, by previous commentators, been taken to represent their relationship, although more accurately, it was one incident in a long amicable relationship. How can we characterize this relationship? Hughes always addressed O.B. as ‘Mr Browning’, never ‘Oscar’, which suggests that they were colleagues rather than intimate friends, but generally there was a sense of co-operation between the two educationists. A letter from Hughes’ secretary, Miss Loch, on 22 October 1891 informed O.B. that ‘Miss Hughes will be very glad to send tickets [for lectures to be given at CTC] to any of the boys belonging to the Evening Classes under your direction, & also to admit any number of the Day Training College who may care to attend’.10 On a more personal level, Hughes sometimes asked O.B. (as a Fellow) whether he would provide her with tickets so that she could take a guest to King’s College chapel. This he seems to have done whenever possible. O.B. was clearly impressed with Hughes’ intellectual talents. He wrote in his Memoirs of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge and Elsewhere that: In 1884, I had presided over the education section of the Social Science Congress held in Birmingham, which proved to be the last congress held. In that capacity I listened to an eloquent address given

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by Miss Hughes, afterwards principal of the Women’s Training College at Cambridge, the object of which was to show that existing Training Colleges spent their time almost exclusively in the general education of the future schoolmaster, and not in training for their profession. At this time I knew nothing about Training Colleges, and did not realize how closely I was destined to be connected with them. The deficiencies mentioned by Miss Hughes seem at the same time to have struck the Education Department, and shortly after this I received, as Secretary of the Teachers’ Training Syndicate, an informal communication from Dr Sharpe, who was then one of the most prominent officials in the office, asking me whether the University would cooperate in the work of raising standards of the training of teachers by giving them a better professional education.11 Although it seems remarkable that he would say he knew nothing about teacher training colleges after six years as Secretary of the Teacher Training Syndicate, nevertheless he was clearly impressed by Elizabeth Hughes and felt that she had identified something which needed addressing. It is likely that O.B. was disappointed in the few numbers of men who took up the opportunity for teacher training compared with the numbers of women (especially for secondary teaching). The Finsbury Training College set up in 1883 by some members of the Headmasters’ Conference to provide training for men intending to teach in secondary schools collapsed in 1891 because so few men had enrolled. At the same period CTC had to peg its number of students at 40 because it could not accommodate them adequately. Envy of Hughes’ success, whether or not openly acknowledged, may have coloured O.B.’s attitude; but also, he may have suspected that au fond she regarded ‘his’ men (often working class), as lesser beings than ‘her’ women (usually middle class). The year 1891 was the year in which the Day Training School, mainly for elementary teachers, sanctioned by the Department of Education in Whitehall, opened in Cambridge with just three students. O.B. was its first director (later called principal). In its early years most of its students were pupil-teachers who had been awarded Queen’s Scholarships. At Cambridge they spent three years on a concurrent Tripos and professional training course. A letter from Oscar Browning to the Times Educational Supplement of 2 January 1912 explicitly states his view on the advantages of the concurrent model: In the eighteen years during which I was Principal of the Cambridge University Day Training College, all the members of which took University degrees, my colleagues and myself were convinced that the success of our college, both on the academical and the professional side, was mainly due to the fact that our students pursued their

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University and their training college studies concurrently, and consequently did well in both. In 1908 a third of our elementary students who were taking degrees gained first classes in Triposes, [and] our college was stated by the examiners to be the best which presented itself for the teaching diploma. In my time we could never get the Board of Education to believe, what was patent to all of us who were engaged in the work, that teaching and learning go together, that one is a help to the other, to believe in the maxim docendo discimus [we learn by teaching].12 Elizabeth Hughes’ preferred model, on the other hand, was one concentrated year of professional training after the women had completed a degree-level course. She told the Bryce Commission that she thought it ‘one of the most fatal mistakes that have been made in the training [of teachers] is to attempt to carry on both at the same time’.13 O.B.’s commitment to the concurrent model meant that his students became fully integrated into the life and liberal culture of Cambridge University. He regarded this as an essential part of the making of a good teacher. In any case, Browning and Hughes were running fundamentally different kinds of college. Although DTC attracted a few Cambridge graduates planning to teach in secondary schools, most of them would have been the clever sons of skilled artisans or lower-middle-class parents, who certainly could not—at that time—have attended Cambridge by any other route. Miss Hughes’ intention was that her young women had already had a university education, although, as we have seen, at the beginning this was not always the case. Generally, her women students were more ‘genteel’, at least one social stratum above O.B.’s men students, and although a few of her women students made a career in elementary teaching, the majority would return to teach in the good girls’ secondary schools whence they came. It is clear also that Miss Hughes and Miss Buss, when they arranged for the CTC women to have social gatherings with young men, regarded their ‘natural’ male coevals as their brothers and their brothers’ friends up at Cambridge University, rather than these ex-pupil-teachers. Although Hughes was radical in her gender politics, she was arguably less active in breaking down subtle class barriers within the teacher-training student body. However, like her eldest brother, the Methodist minister, she possessed a zeal to educate working-class men into full citizenship. Although she was not especially close to this brother, her views were not dissimilar. Her brother’s first report to the West London Methodist Mission in 1887 was a kind of battle-cry: The manhood of England has been largely alienated from the organised Churches because we have been so absorbed by the interest

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of the individual soul as to neglect the woes of society, and so preoccupied by the delights of heaven as to overlook some of the most urgent duties of earth. As Mr Ruskin has well said, ‘If our religion is good for anything, it is good for everything.’14 One of his first acts on moving to London was to refuse to sign the middleclass petition for keeping the gates protecting Taviton Street (where he lived) from working-class incursions: ‘Jesus Christ would not have kept up those gates when hundreds of the people have to go a mile out of their way because half a dozen of us do not want to be disturbed.’15 Elizabeth, in her turn, thought actions more useful than fine words, and her form of ‘gateopening’ was to run Sunday evening discussion group meetings for working men at CTC for the consideration of social questions. It began with three men and by 1895, 70–80 were turning up. From time to time she organized a whole Sunday afternoon, known as a ‘Democratic Tea’. She invited various university men—Professor Marshall, Dr Cunningham and Mr Berry —to come and she told O.B. that ‘they are very desirous that you should be asked to attend & speak to them for a short time about the duties of citizenship’.16 Hughes was liberal in politics, Nonconformist in religion, democratic by impulse. O.B., although very committed to raising the education standard of working-class men, simultaneously, and contradictorily, was an enormous snob and name-dropper. This aspect of his character grated on many people and may have been ill-received by Hughes, unless, as Elizabeth had a nice sense of the ridiculous, she was merely amused by O.B.’s failure to comprehend that this aspect of his character invited ridicule. This seems perfectly possible given that the comedy of Rudder Grange (her favourite book) hinged on the fact that the protagonists had absolutely no insight into their own behaviour. Aged 17, O.B. had written in his diary, ‘At present I am going to hell fast, and what is worse obscurity.’17 It seems certain that hell to O.B. was in fact to be overlooked, and his tragedy was to care only too much about the esteem in which others held him, as well as simultaneously indulging in behaviour which allowed people to disregard and forget his serious achievements. One example of his contrariness was the battle over compulsory Greek at Cambridge, for which O.B. was a stalwart. The issue of Classics as the sine qua non of a liberal education was a thorny problem of the day in Cambridge and the reformers, including Henry Sidgwick, campaigned to allow French or German as an alternative to Greek in the Little-Go.18 The proposal came indirectly as a result of the Endowed Schools Act of 1870, which urged the abolition of Greek as an enforced preliminary to all degrees.19 Compulsory Greek effectively discriminated against all women and working-class men. O.B., although keen to modernize in some ways, nevertheless commented that ‘every day I live, I thank God for having given me a purely Classical Education’.20 The journal of the DTC,

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for example, was named Maia (the mother of Mercury) and referred to the Maieutic method, invented by that still more distinguished pedagogue, Socrates. Socrates is represented by Plato as teaching by means of dialogue in close, loving relationship with the boys he teaches. In what K J.Dover refers to as ‘philosophical exploitation’, Piatonic ideas, especially as expounded in the doctrine of Phaedrus argued that the stimulus of bodily beauty is a step in the direction of absolute Beauty.21 Arthur Benson, an Eton schoolmaster of the following generation to O.B., was inspired by love for boys and young men. He was himself steadfastly chaste although sympathetic to men who gave way to temptations of the flesh, grieving over the tragedy of William Johnson Cory.22 Benson asked the question, ‘Isn’t it really rather dangerous to let boys read Plato, if one is desirous that they should accept conventional moralities?’23 Hughes argued that ‘far from a classical course being the only means of a higher education, it is not even the most appropriate; and there exist, in fact certain strong objections to its use, some of which did not exist when it was first introduced at the Renaissance’.24 Is she here suggesting that O.B. and others’ love for the Classics, and especially Greek, was an apologia for homosexuality, and especially that between a man and a boy, a pedagogue and his student. Living in Cambridge, as she did, she may have heard rumours that O.B. was more interested in beautiful male undergraduates than he was with plain-faced ones. She herself acknowledged that she liked what she called ‘original’ students better than ‘flabby’ ones, but she took it as a matter of professional discipline not to foster favouritism.25 I think that it is inevitable that Hughes would have had ambivalent feelings towards O.B., just as there was an ambiguity in his feelings towards women. For example, O.B. belonged, along with Henry Sidgwick, to the Apostles, a more-or-less secret society of Cambridge intellectuals from which women were excluded. Although a strong supporter of women’s higher education, Henry Sidgwick’s psychic geography was largely rooted in a homosocial environment. Despite the fact that Henry was married, he and Eleanor are generally thought by biographers to have been in a mariage blanc.26 This is none of our business, but it is the case that his closest friends were homosexual by inclination or practice; these would include his brother, Arthur, Roden Noel and Graham Dakyns.27 Again, it seems likely that Elizabeth’s earnest non-conforming sense of duty would have found jarring a certain worldliness, which was affected by some of these ‘classical’ men. Henry Sidgwick himself agonized over the moral vacuum left by the loss of Christian faith, and, like George Eliot, pondered on the insoluble conundrum of where duty lay. Writing to a friend, Sidgwick commented: ‘I cannot persuade myself, except by trusting intuition, that Christian self-sacrifice is really a happier life than classical insouciance.’28 Insouciance was certainly not a characteristic considered desirable by Hughes; she had, after all been brought up in Methodist teetotalism, and excess, in any direction, went against the grain.

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How much she knew of the cause célèbre of O.B.’s dismissal from Eton in 1875 is also unclear. O.B. had been dismissed from Eton without a pension after a long feud with the headmaster, officially because of insubordination and slackness, but perhaps primarily because of Browning’s favouring of modern history, art and modern literatures, and his opinion that athletics were overemphasized. The MP KnatchbullHugessen, who had wanted his son to go into Browning’s house, sent a long letter supporting O.B. to six principal daily newspapers.29 The issue was debated in the House of Commons.30 Anstruther’s biography of Browning points out that although the liberal Daily News regarded the matter as a ‘serious dispute’, the conservative Standard dismissed it as merely ‘an Eton squabble’, and, damningly, referred to O.B. as ‘somewhat affected’, a coded (but easily recognizable) term for homosexual.31 Although all this had taken place six years before Hughes arrived in Cambridge, she may have assumed that O.B. would want to keep a low profile. She must, I think, have been surprised that O.B. felt free to sport a flamboyant style, whilst she (and her women students) had to act with extreme circumspection, never to draw attention to themselves. In any event, in 1895, when the Oscar Wilde trial hit the headlines, it must have forced upon Hughes’ attention that O.B.’s style might be a particular form of homosexual display. Apart from anything else there was a nasty little quatrain published in Punch about the time when O.B. was rejected for the Regius Professorship of History, which made an explicit link between O.B. and Wilde: The History Professorship— Who’ll from PREMIER get the post? Here’s MR OSCAR BROWNING, one Whose name is chosen from the host. But should Lord R. o-erlook his claim. Oh! Will O.B. be wildly riled, In fact, will OSCAR BROWNING then Develop into OSCAR WILDE?32 There is no direct evidence whether this connection (O.B./wildly/WILDE) automatically problematized in Hughes’ mind O.B.’s relations with the working-class men whose careers as teachers he nurtured, nor whether she was able to keep O.B.’s worth as a pedagogue and his possible sexual proclivities separate in her mind. She may well have realized that O.B.’s connection with Wilde was longstanding, but did that make him guilty by association in her mind? Wilde’s Poems published in 1881 had been generally savaged by the critics; Punch, for example, had dismissed them as ‘Swinburne and water’, and Wilde’s work was labelled ‘unoriginal and immoral’.33 Only O.B.’s review in the Academy, 30 July 1881 stood out as favourable. When Wilde’s first male

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lover and lifelong friend, Robbie Ross went up to Cambridge in 1888, Wilde asked O.B. to take him under his wing at King’s because ‘I know no one who has a more intellectual influence than yourself: to be ranked amongst your friends, is, for anyone, a liberal education.’34 As O.B. was in the habit of keeping up with old students, in July 1893 Robbie Ross stayed at his mother’s house with a boy called Dansey, whom he had met at the home of Oscar Browning’s brother-in-law, Biscoe Wortham (married to O.B.’s sister, Mina) in Belgium. Dansey was a pupil in Wortham’s school in Bruges; it appears that Robbie seduced him and shared him with Bosie Douglas. The boy’s father Colonel Dansey threatened to take legal action against Robbie and Bosie, but was warned by their lawyer that even if they were sent to prison, his son might be punished too.35 Wortham had intercepted some letters between Bosie and Dansey and began to fear that his own sons may have been ‘corrupted’ by Ross. Philip Wortham did in fact allege that Robbie had interfered with him, when he had been 14, while staying in O.B.’s other sister’s (Mariana) girls’ school, although Ross was to deny this to O.B. Biscoe Wortham was afraid of the effect of scandal on his school and wrote to O.B. asking him for advice: Ross is simply one of a gang of most brutal ruffians who spend their time in seducing and prostituting boys & all the time presenting a decent appearance to the world. Two other persons [Oscar Wilde and Bosie Douglas] besides himself are implicated in this business. Unfortunately there are some compromising letters which it is very desirable to get at. I write to you in absolute secrecy to tell you what a scoundrel this fellow is, & he stayed with us only at Easter when he took the opportunity of our hospitality to make friends with this boy (a very nice looking gentlemanly boy of very good family of 16) whom he invited to London and seduced.36 O.B. immediately wrote to Robbie to warn him of impending catastrophe and ultimately managed to get letters returned on both sides and so avert scandal.37 As this was a scandal suppressed, it cannot be said whether such gossip travelled in a direction that would include Hughes. I think it highly unlikely that she would have been told precise details by anyone, but it is perfectly possible that she may have caught a whiff of sulphur somewhere in the air. However, none of this hidden controversy directly affects O.B.’s support —or otherwise—of CTC. The two writers who are principally responsible for proclaiming O.B.’s attitude towards women damnable are Virginia Woolf and Margaret Bottrall. Virginia Woolf seizes on O.B.’s supposed sexual interest in working-class youths to ridicule him as a pedagogue and further, she implies that this automatically proves his misogyny. This

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collapses separate categories. There is ample evidence that O.B. helped women students in Cambridge and elsewhere. To raise another problem, she has implied that O.B.’s interest in working-class men as objects of sexual desire automatically disbars him from having genuinely democratic reasons for wishing working-class men to have a good education. As this misrepresentation of O.B. has been discussed earlier in this book by Mark McBeth, I will pursue it no further here. It seems surprising, however, that Woolf ‘s claims of O.B.’s misogyny run counter to our knowledge of Browning’s long friendship with George Eliot.38 Marian Lewes (as George Eliot was know to her friends) for example, wrote a letter encouraging him to stick it out at Eton when things had turned sour for him.39 His admiration of her is evident in the rather good biography of George Eliot he published in 1890. The historian of Hughes Hall, Margaret Bottrall, is also consistently hostile to O.B. She writes, for example: The Teachers’ Training Syndicate (TTS) agreed to admit candidates from the CTC for theoretical papers, and were asked to suggest arrangements for testing practical ability as well. Since 1880 they had examined external as well as Cambridge candidates; indeed of the 42 examinees in the first year, no less that 34 were from the Bishopsgate Training College for Women (subsequently Maria Grey). A validating body prepared (for substantial fees) to assess the work of women candidates was clearly an attractive feature of the Cambridge scene to Miss Buss, Miss Clough and their allies. The CTC did not, in fact receive such support from the TTS as might reasonably have been expected.40 It is hard to be precise on what could ‘reasonably have been expected’ from O.B. First, there was a standard charge for students taking the examination whether they were women or men.41 Second, O.B. was running TTS on limited funds from the university. Before 1891 and setting up of his own Cambridge Day Training College he charged each CTC student separately; but afterwards he charged a composition fee of £20 for each course.42 Third, considering how busy he was, he probably had not got much time to attend to CTC. It is fair to say that he did not attend committee meetings of CTC. In 1891, he is chastised on this point by Hughes when she replies thanking him for tickets for CTC students to attend lectures: ‘It is so long since you attended a committee meeting (!) I expect you scarcely realise we now have 46 students in residence.’43 He may well have felt, however, that Hughes was a competent and skilled principal who hardly needed his help on the committee. Bottrall certainly gives a harsh interpretation of Browning’s behaviour. She accuses the Syndicate of not acknowledging the existence of the college and she comments that as the DTC had premises in Warkworth Terrace

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from 1894 it might have been supposed that this development would have some ‘impact’ on CTC.44 However, this is to collapse two functions. The TTS was acting like an (embryo) faculty of education, providing showcase lectures, given by recognized researchers who had published their research, to students studying education in various colleges. The individual colleges, however (then as today), held responsibility for most of the undergraduate teaching, and this is the model O.B. would have been following. Bottrall does not mention instances when O.B. engaged at a personal, rather than a formal level, with CTC. At a formal level he was a member of the college (as a member of its committee), albeit not of its council after it became incorporated in 1893.45 Arguably this involved him in nothing much more than being one of a body of well-wishers, but nevertheless he did not decline to be counted amongst its number.46 He attended the celebratory launch of its new buildings in 1895, although Bottrall suggests that the £1 he gave to the Building Fund ‘represents quite accurately the degree of his commitment to CTC’.47 But, he was not a rich man and women’s education was not his chosen life’s work, so I see no particular reason why he should have given more. It is worth noting that £1 then would be worth round about £70 today—a not insubstantial sum.48 O.B. clearly recognized CTC as a significant teacher training institution. On 9 March 1907 (after Hughes’ departure) a meeting was held at CTC for the purpose of forming an association of ‘teachers engaged in the professional training of students preparing for university diplomas in education’. It was jointly arranged by the staff of CTC and of DTC, most of whom were at the launch, and attracted a great many people involved in the work of training secondary teachers.49 The meeting started with lunch and then went on to draw up a constitution and elect a committee of the Teachers’ Training Association, Oscar Browning was elected to the committee, which saw itself as a pressure-group whose purpose was ‘to make known our opinion upon…questions of educational policy’. It is fair to say that O.B.’s attention to administrative detail left something to be desired. O.B. took on so much that he could not always keep up with the paperwork involved, especially after 1891 when he effectively doubled his workload, acting both as Director of TTS and as Principal of the Day Training College. Hughes herself was highly efficient and so would certainly have been irritated when O.B. did not meet her exacting standards. Over the years there were a few niggles from Hughes about such things as an insufficient number of lecture-lists being sent from TTS, and indeed there is a significant sense of slippage after 1891. For example, on 5 January 1893 she wrote to complain that ‘a list of the successful candidates for the Teachers’ Examinations has hitherto always been sent to me. I have not received one this year. May I ask you to forward it to me.’50 Nor was she the only one to complain. There is, for example, in 1894 a letter from the principal of another Training College to the Journal of Education complaining that he was still waiting for a report

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from TTS five months after the June examination.51 It may be that it was a mounting chorus of similar complaints which led to O.B. being pushed out of his job in 1909, but of course, Hughes bad already left Cambridge by this stage and would certainly have had no part to play in the less than honourable way in which he was treated by Cambridge at the end. We cannot know for certain what she thought about Browning, but it seems likely that her view may be similarly judicious to that of Arthur Benson’s when he wrote that O.B.’s egoism was the fatal flaw in his character but that he ‘really has some genius about him, &…aborious, kindly, publicspirited & devoted’.52 NOTES 1. Quoted in A London Family, p. 257; The whole quatrain goes: O.B. oh be obedient To Nature’s stern decrees, For if you don’t you soon will be Not one but two O.B.’s. (Letter from O.B. to the Sunday Times, 12 February 1922.) 2. See Reporter, 9 October 1877. 3. See Ann Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge, Newnham College, 1988), p.9. 4. Letter from H. Sidgwick to O.B., May 1876 Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir (London, Macmiilan, 1906), p. 321. 5. Bryce Report, Vol.3, ‘Professional Education of Teachers’, p. 205. 6. Ibid. 7. See Searby, The Training of Teachers in Cambridge University, ‘the college was financed by ingenious book-keeping, drawing on the profits of the Teachers Training Syndicate examinations set up in 1879. Candidates, largely students from women’s colleges, had to pay heavily for the privilege, being charged far more than by even the most inflated computation it cost the syndicate to examine them’, p. 24. 8. Ibid., p. 10. 9. J.W. Iliffe, the Headmaster of the Paradise Street School was Master of Method at TTS. 10. EDUC 3/15/75. 11. Browning, Sixty Years, pp. 261–2. 12. I thank my colleague, Dr Peter Cunningham, at the Faculty of Education, Cambridge, for drawing my attention to this item. 13. Bryce Commission Minutes of Evidence, p. 483. 14. Quoted in Price Hughes, The Life of Hugh Price Hughes, p. 329. 15. Ibid., p. 215. 16. E.P.H. to O.B.; Oscar Browning Collection, King’s College, Cambridge. 17. Wortham, Oscar Browning, p. 29. 18. Sidgwick, A Memoir, p. 264.

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19. The Endowed Schools Act (1869) appointed three endowed schools commissioners who were charged with supervising, and, if necessary, reorganizing the numerous charitable trusts belonging to endowed schools. Reference was made in the Act to the need to extend educational opportunities for girls. 20. Letter from O.B. to the Provost 22 June 1919, Add 748/B299 University Library, Cambridge. 21. See K.J.Dover, Greek Homosexuality (London, Duckworth, 1978) section entitled ‘Philosophical Exploitation’, pp. 153–70. 22. Cory’s dismissal from Eton seems to have been as the result of an indiscreet letter to a student, intercepted by the boy’s father. See Mark McBeth’s analysis of this incident in chapter one of his unpublished Ph.D. dissertation The Tightrope of Desire: Lessons from Oscar Browning’, City University of New York, 2001. 23. Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise, p. 194. 24. Paper for Liverpool Eisteddfod, 1884. 25. CTC Gild Newsletter, p. 18. 26. See Helen Fowler, ‘Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick 1845–1936’ in Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker (eds), Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 1. 27. See Fleur Adcock’s translation of Marcus Argentarius’ poem:

Hetero-sex is best for the man of a serious turn of mind,But here’s a hint, if you should fancy the other:Turn Menophilia round in her bed, address her peachy behind,And it’s easy to pretend you’re screwing her brother. Adrian Poole and Jeremy Maule (eds), The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 230. 28. Letter to Graham Dakyns, 1862 quoted by Robert Skidelsky, ‘Henry Sidgwick: Between Reason and Duty’. Lecture given at Warwick University, 31 May 1988. Abridged version appeared in the Times Higher Education Supplement on 26 August 1988. 29. Knatchbull-Hugessen born 1829, the sixth son of a Kentish baronet, educated at Eton and Oxford. Elected to House of Commons in 1857 as Liberal MP Nephew of Jane Austen, he wrote popular books for children, including one called Higgledy-Piggledy. 30. Mark McBeth, however, argues that both Cory and Browning were both dismissed because of their progressive pedagogy, rather than anything else. See McBeth, The Tightrope’, p. 68. 31. Anstruther, Oscar Browning, p. 72. 32. Punch, 2 February 1895, p. 60. 33. Barbara Belford, Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius (London, Bloomsbury, 2000), p. 85. 34. Oscar Wilde to O.B., October 1888, Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), More Letters of Oscar Wilde (London, John Murray, 1985), p. 75.

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35. Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 regarded acts of indecency between men as ‘misdemeanours’, punishable by up to two years’ hard labour. 36. Quoted in Anstruther, Oscar Browning, p. 134. 37. See Jonathan Fryer, Robbie Ross: Oscar Wilde’s True Love (London, Constable, 2000), chapter 4. 38. See letters from G.E. to O.B. in The George Eliot Letters collected by Haight. Interestingly, a letter dated 21 January 1869 has a footnote: The MS has been sold several times at more than its worth as a letter to Robert Browning …’ Clearly, Haight does not think O.B. worth much. See GEL Vol. 5, p. 5. 39. GEL, 6, pp. 126–7. 40. Bottrall, Hughes Hall 1885–1985, p. 9. 41. The fee was £3 per student until December 1888 when it went up to £4 per student. EPH Sixth Principal’s Report, Hughes Hall Archives. 42. Letter from O.B. to E.P.H., dated 22 October 1892, warning that these figures might go up at the beginning of the Easter term 1893. Box 7, Hughes Hall Archives. 43. EDUC, 3/15/52. 44. Bottrall, Hughes Hall, pp. 15–16. 45. EDUC/33/3. 46. See Oscar Browning listed as Committee Member in the Minutes of Council Box Al, Hughes Hall archives. 47. See List of Donations to Building Fund, Hughes Hall Archives. Bottrall, Hughes Hall, p.22. 48. I thank Dr Terry O’Shaughnessy of St Anne’s College, Oxford, for this information. See C.H.Feinstein, Statistical Tables of National Income, Expenditure and Output of the U.K. 1855–1965 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1972); updated with economic trends Annual Supplement 2001 National Statistics. 49 ‘Most of the centres of training were represented: Miss Cooper and Mr Keatinge from Oxford; Professor Adams from London; Miss Woods and the whole staff of the Maria Grey; Miss Morton from Bedford College, Miss Rigg and Miss Carpenter from the Mary Datchelor, the whole staff of the Cheltenham College Training Department, Professor Archer from Bangor, most of the staff of the Clapham High School’, Gild Newsletter 1907, pp. 17– 18.

50. Letter E.P.H. to O.B., EDUC 3/17/60. 51. ‘In June last a number of my students presented themselves for the examination of the Cambridge Teachers’ Syndicate. Most passed, one or two were plucked, as I expected, and one or two unaccountably failed. I have no

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wish to call in question the fairness of the examination, but I do wish to ask why, up to this date, I have received no report. Surely a delay of five months argues laches on the part either of the examiners or the Syndicate. I had hoped to profit by the report in preparing students for the forthcoming Christmas examinations. As it is, the report when it comes will have lost all interest for those whoh—it most concerns. Will the Secretary tell us who is responsible for this delay?—Yours faithfully, A PRINCIPAL OF A TRAINING COLLEGE’, The Journal of Education, 1 December 1894, p. 713.

52. Benson’s diary for 5 February 1904, quoted in Anstruther, Oscar Browning, p. 172.

13 DANGERS AND DISAPPOINTMENTS

John Seeley, Regius Professor of History, once commented that ‘Cambridge is like a country invaded by the Sphinx’.1 If a Regius Professor found the university a monstrous creature, whose gnomic utterances were hard to decipher, it is easy to imagine how the women, excluded from any governance of the university, felt as they attempted to understand it, infiltrate it and ultimately to subvert its homosocial and sometimes misogynist atmosphere. Such was the extreme nervousness of Emily Davies, for example, that she forbade the early Hitchin students to act a few Shakespearian scenes, arguing that cross-dressing could bring down a scandal on their heads which would ruin her attempts to forge a connection for her women’s college with the university.2 In the late nineteenth century the university held extraordinary powers over the inhabitants of the city of Cambridge. Suspected prostitutes, taken in charge by the proctors,3 were subjected to committal by the vice chancellor, after a cursory examination, to the spinning house (house of correction). These women were usually there for days rather than weeks, but in bleak conditions. This remained in force until the cases of Jane Elsden in 1891 and Daisy Hopkins in 1894 attracted a degree of hostile public opinion. Not until 1894, after Hopkins attempted to sue the university authority for wrongful imprisonment, did the university agree voluntarily to an Act abolishing its ancient right to arrest and expel ‘lewd women’. Cambridge University held on to these ancient ‘rights’ a decade after the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in1886.4 This context, in which any woman in Cambridge could potentially be accused of street-walking and arrested, gives a particular flavour to Hughes’ advice to her early students about their behaviour on the streets of Cambridge. When the first cohort of students arrived at Cambridge Training College (that is, the two cottages in Merton Street) their behaviour out of college, despite the freedom inside it, was governed by a strict rule of conduct. On the one hand, a woman student should not move about alone, in case a man engaged her in conversation. On the other hand it was not considered advisable to go about in large groups as CTC did not want to attract the potentially hostile attention of the university

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authorities. Molly Thomas in her autobiography remembers the particular constraints imposed on their movements through and around the city: Straggling in twos and threes was necessary, because to go in a larger body was against the code. We were warned also by this unwritten code not to greet a fellow student in the street, and not to take a short cut through the same college more than once a day.5 When they went on walks into the country CTC students would agree to meet at a spot on the side of town suitable for the direction in which they wished to walk, towards the Gog Magog hills, for example, but would arrive there ‘after percolating through the streets in driblets’.6The prevailing wisdom suggested that CTC students should do nothing to attract attention. If no-one noticed them, perhaps they could remain in their little corner of paradise without being expelled. It is to be noted that Henry Sidgwick, when the first group of women arrived for the ladies lectures he bad organized, had lamented the “unfortunate personal appearance” of the first students! They were all remarkably good-looking women, and the founders of the movement were anxious not to be conspicuous in any way. (Most of the first women students wore preraphaelite garments.)’7Hughes made sure that her students followed codes of near-invisibility. How explicit she was about the dangers for a single unaccompanied female of accusations of ‘lewd’ behaviour, we cannot be sure. However, the historian of the university comments that, after the 1894 abolition, ‘there was popular rejoicing that the respectable women of Cambridge could now walk the streets without fear of proctorial harassment’.8 Ironically, Elizabeth’s sister, Frances Hughes, ran into horrible problems at Bangor, perhaps due to over-zealous chaperonage. W.G.Evans’ account is descriptive rather than analytic and goes something like this. In 1888 a hall of residence for women students in Bangor was opened, run by Elizabeth’s sister, Frances. Their brother Reverend Hugh Price Hughes made a speech reassuring the audience that it was a delusion to think an educated woman was a ‘blue stocking’, a somewhat bizarre comment.9 Not all the women undergraduates lived in the hall, as some chose lodgings in the town. They were forbidden to visit the hall without permission from Frances Hughes. In 1892 Violet Osborn, a graduate, aged 25, and living in lodgings was banned from visiting the hall by Frances Hughes. Frances Hughes regarded Violet Osborn as an improper person to be visiting an 18year-old undergraduate (a Miss Rhys). Frances Hughes warned Rhys’ mother that Violet Osborn had ‘a corrupt and impure mind’, was ‘a woman of the world’, and that she behaved in ‘an indecorous’ manner towards men. Violet Osborn heard of the allegations and complained to the Senate of the college, who launched an inquiry. The Senate decided that Violet Osborn was ‘a refined and honourable woman’. Frances

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Hughes refused to withdraw her allegation, and the dispute became public knowledge, not just in North Wales, but in the London newspapers.10 A libel case followed, brought by Frances Hughes against the Weekly Dispatch, which she won.11 The dispute was then raised in both the House of Commons and in the Lords.12 Controversy continued into 1894 when a male professor resigned because he had been censured by the college council for failure to act towards Violet Osborn with sufficient ‘discretion and reserve’. But the outcome for Frances Hughes, was that a new hall of residence was established under a different principal. In effect Frances Hughes was driven from the field. Evans’ account makes it sound as though Frances Hughes was a fool, but, as the feminist historian Sara Delamont points out, a scandal of this sort was ‘a serious threat to the survival of Bangor, and the continuation of higher education for women in Wales’.13 Frances Hughes may have made the wrong judgement, but it was based on her perceived need to enforce strict standards of ladylike behaviour and the need to keep young girls straight out of home apart from the influence of older, ‘fast’ women. The policing of women students’ behaviour was necessary and problematic, not ridiculous. It seems likely that when Elizabeth Hughes first came to Cambridge, and especially because she attended Newnham College, so strongly supported by Henry Sidgwick, that she imagined that most male dons were supportive of female academic ambition. After all, Henry Sidgwick had financed the Cambridge hostel for women which had evolved into Newnham College. He and Alfred Marshall had devotedly coached two Newnham students for the Moral Science Tripos. As women at that time, prior to 1881, had not been allowed formal admission to Tripos examinations, they had been examined informally by special arrangements with sympathetic examiners. In this particular case they took the examination in the drawing-room of Dr Kennedy’s house in Bateman Street. The Tripos papers were brought from the Senate House to the women by ‘runners’, Sidgwick himself, Marshall, Venn and Sedley Taylor. This had already passed into Cambridge legend: Keynes rather patronizingly described the scene as follows: ‘Apart from Marshall, they were all very short, and had long, flowing beards… I see them as the wise, kind dwarfs hurrying with their magical prescriptions which were to awaken the princesses from their slumbers into the full wakefulness of masculine mankind.’14 By Hughes’ time, however, and as a matter of recent memory, was the famous victory of February 1881, when women had been formally admitted to examinations and placed on the official lists. Undoubtedly, Hughes had arrived in Cambridge at a time when the omens seemed hopeful for the education of women in general. Newnham and Girton aimed to provide for their women students as far as possible the same social, cultural and intellectual process which university education at its best could give, as Hughes knew from her own experience.

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The relative acceptance of the women’s colleges there made it seem in 1885 as though Cambridge was the ideal location for a new teacher training college for women. But, in fact Hughes’ initial dream of attracting large numbers of post-Tripos students from Newnham and Girton had largely failed. Although Anne Jemima Clough, and her successor Eleanor Sidgwick were steady friends to CTC, most of the ex-Newnhamites who came to CTC had not sat Tripos exams. Girtonians, of course, were made to sit the Tripos by the iron determination of Emily Davies, but not many of them went on to CTC.15 In the early days of CTC, the majority of its students arrived directly from the Girls’ Public Day School Company Schools, although increasingly they attracted graduates from London (external BAs), from various Welsh university colleges, and from University College of Manchester. Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds and Bedford College all supplied students, though these were not credited with BAs. When Hughes began, she and her students were dependent on the good will of a few enlightened Cambridge people in order to survive. But Hughes had good reason to believe that higher education for women, including her post-graduate teacher training was gaining acceptance. Nationally, by 1894 women were receiving degrees from the Scottish universities, Wales, Durham, London and many other universities. In 1896, Oxford University refused degrees for women at a university vote, but, in Cambridge, 1,234 past students of Newnham and Girton petitioned the university Senate to have their degrees awarded just like the men, rather than being offered a Tripos ‘certificate’. A highly public campaign by supporters and opponents took place. The university’s journal, the Reporter, duly reported the arguments of both sides. Elizabeth Hughes’ views were submitted in an appendix of selected cases submitted by Miss Clough and Miss Jex-Blake. Hughes, in her position as Principal of the Cambridge Training College for Women Teachers, commented that ‘when representing one section of English education at Chicago in 1893, she found that the possession of a degree would have been of material advantage to her, and would have removed certain inconveniences which she experienced’. She also commented: I am frequently consulted by parents as to the education of girls. On several occasions, when I have recommended a course at one of the two old Universities, I have been asked whether it would not pay better to take a London degree, because that gave the right to a title. I gather from such instances that there is a feeling on the part of many that a course at Oxford or Cambridge is not as valuable professionally as if it gave a title which everybody understands.16 She added, ‘I have been asked on two or three occasions, when graduate teachers were required, to give the names of London graduates only, because the title looked well in a prospectus, and everybody understood

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what it meant.’17 The views of Miss Bertha Skeat, a resident lecturer at CTC, were also recorded. She wrote ‘that among parents of pupils in a manufacturing or country town the professional standing of a Certificated Student of Newnham or Girton is liable to be ranked much below that of graduates of other universities’. She adds that the same objection would apply to graduates who had received any other than the recognized academical letters.18 In those days, such matters were put to a vote of the Senate, effectively the university’s parliament, which was made up of those Cambridge BAs who had paid a small fee to be admitted to the Master of Arts degree (MA).19 Clearly, as long as they did not receive University of Cambridge degrees, women were prevented from joining the Senate, and therefore excluded from playing any role in university governance. The vote to admit women to degree titles was arranged for Friday, 21 May 1897. The Times took the trouble to point out that special trains of the Great Northern Line would leave King’s Cross for Cambridge in time for MAs to register their non-placet votes. There was rabble-rousing going on among the undergraduates (who could not vote) for there were near-riots in the streets of Cambridge. Male undergraduates in one-horse hackney carriages met the MAs at Cambridge station and rushed them at break-neck speed along Regent Street, through the marketplace to the Senate House. There they had to press through excited throngs, under the gaze of undergraduates leaning out of Caius College dangling effigies of women students. A large banner parodying Shakespeare read ‘Get you to Girton Beatrice Get you to Newnham Here’s No Place for You Maids Much Ado About Nothing.’ When at last the result was announced, the women had suffered a crushing defeat. The final vote was 1,707 against women receiving degrees, and only 661 in favour. In triumph, male undergraduates marched en masse to Newnham. From behind the Pfeiffer gates, Newnham’s senior members persuaded them to leave without causing any damage. Local shopkeepers were not so lucky, as the undergraduates returned to the Market Square and celebrated through the night, building a bonfire from doors and shutters ripped from local shops. This shocking display must have forced Hughes to realize that, despite some male supporters for women’s education and training, Cambridge University was a good deal more misogynistic than she had previously imagined.20 For the most part, women were tolerated provided that they remained on the margins, but any suggestion that they might take up a role in university governance produced enormous hostility, Eleanor Sidgwick’s description of women’s peculiar position that ‘with the exception of admission to examinations, they have everything on sufferance’ aptly summed up the situation.21 Perhaps partly in response to this crisis, in December 1897 the governors of Royal Holloway College organized a conference to debate the issue of ‘University Degrees for Women’, which Hughes attended, and where her

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close friend Sophie Bryant was one of the principal speakers. Mrs A.H. Johnson of the Oxford Society of Home Students commented that: University men are not willing that women should share fully in the life of the Universities. I don’t mean to say that they are not willing that women should go in for their examinations or have the advantage of the same education, because we know that they are, and since we began our work in Oxford we have all along been met with the greatest possible sympathy. But they are not willing that women shall share in the life of the University, or form part of its governing body, or be associated with men in all the higher work of the University. Therefore women will never be, so far as we can see, in the same position as the men who are managing the colleges for men. It may be right or it may be wrong, but the fact remains that we are no more liked now than when we began.22 Hughes must have reflected on the very different situation in her native Wales. At University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, women enjoyed all the privileges of the college on the same footing as men and several women were Governors of the College. Again, at University College of North Wales at Bangor, all classes and the laboratories were open to women on precisely the same terms as men, and similarly all courses were open to women at University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire at Cardiff. Hughes was an ambitious woman and she may well have wondered why she should stay in hostile Cambridge when she could return to liberal Wales. Whatever she was thinking, it is the case that, in February 1898, Hughes shocked the CTC council by announcing her intention to resign her post at Easter, which was remarkably short notice. It is fair to note, however, that Hughes had repeatedly complained about overwork to the council. The council of CTC attempted to persuade her to stay by offering her paid leave during the coming Lent and Easter terms.23 But she was determined to go. In the Gild Newsletter she wrote explaining to her old students: ‘“Shattered nerves through overwork. If you want to live you must rest at once”, so ran the verdict last term. In the midst of my growing plans, widening interests and ever-multiplying dreams came the stern command, clear and decisive. And I decided that I did want to live, and so—I am going to stop and rest.’ Who can blame her? She had after all, lectured and arranged lectures, raised finance, organized schools for her students to practise in, arranged for them to be examined, attended monthly Executive Committee Meetings and monthly Drawing Room Committee meetings in London, organized continuing classes and democratic teas for the local community. The list goes on. But also she had achieved what Miss Buss had persuaded her to do. By the time she left, CTC was established in permanent buildings with three

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Figure 13 After establishing the college on a firm financial footing, and with a high reputation for producing professionally trained teachers, Elizabeth Hughes felt free to pursue her career as an educationist in an international arena. Her past students all signed their names in the hand-decorated book. Reproduced with kind permission of the President and Fellows of Hughes Hall.

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lecturers as well as the principal herself. It was acknowledged as the elite training college for women; the lecturers were all university-educated women, one from Girton, a second from Oxford and the third from Holloway College, so the high academic status of the college was firmly established. It is often the case that initiators of projects do not seek to continue once the enterprise is on a secure footing. Hughes was a victim of her own success. As the college grew, the bureaucracy inevitably grew with it; the council, not Hughes herself, took the executive decisions. She was as much interested in process as content of training and the college thrived when she could count on knowing and having a personal relationship with each and every student, taking them away on educational and cultural trips in the vacations. When numbers, as they had, passed 70, this intimacy with students was no longer possible, and some of the pleasure receded. Despite the best efforts of a few good men, she could not defeat the misogyny of the university as a whole. She had gone as far as she could go. NOTES 1. Seeley, Liberal Education (1867), quoted by Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (London, Faber, 1968), p. 181. 2. March 1871, at Hitchin before they had established themselves in a permanent building in Girton. See Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, p. 261. 3. Term used for the two university officers appointed annually to represent the interests of the Regent masters, and to maintain discipline. 4. The Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, designed to decrease venereal disease in the troops, allowed metropolitan policemen drafted into garrison ports and towns to stop any woman they suspected of working as a prostitute and subject her to examination and imprisonment. A long campaign by Josephine Butler and others succeeded in getting the Acts suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886. 5. Hughes, A London Family, p. 240. 6. Ibid., p. 258. 7. H.M. Kempthorne (Peile) Extract from a notebook, c. 1869 quoted in Phillips (ed.), A Newnham Anthology. 8. Leedham-Green, A Concise History of the University of Cambridge, p. 183. 9. Caenarvon and Denbigh Herald, 5 October 1888. 10. See The Times, 1 May 1893. 11. There was a four-day trial at Chester Assizes in July 1893. See the Liverpool Mercury, 26–31 1July 1893. 12. On 15 August, Stanley Leighton, MP, raised the matter in Parliament; on 29 August 1893, the Bishop of St Asaph raised the matter in the House of Lords.

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13. S.Delamont, ‘Distant Dangers and Forgotten Standards: Pollution Control Strategies in the British Girls’ School, 1860–1920’, Women’s Historical Review Vol. 2, No. 2 (1993). 14. Keynes’s memoir of Mary Paley Marshall, quoted by Robert Skidelsky in his address at University of Warwick. 15. The first, who had taken the Natural Sciences Tripos arrived in 1888; see Bottrall, Hughes Hall 1885–1985, p. 13. 16. Cambridge. University Reporter, 1 March 1897, p. 606. 17. Ibid., p. 610. 18. Ibid., p. 604. 19. Anyone holding a Cambridge Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree was (and still is) allowed to be admitted Master of Arts after a certain period of time has elapsed. 20. In 1921 male undergraduates once again rioted at the prospect of women getting degrees, stormed up to Newnham with battering rams and severely damaged the beautiful wrought iron Pfeiffer gates looking down Newnham Walk (literally the barbarians at the gate, one might feel). The gates buckled but did not break; the women held on and finally persuaded Cambridge to award degrees to women at Cambridge in 1948. 21. Cambridge University Reporter, 1 March 1897. 22. Quoted by Gillian Sutherland in ‘Emily Davies, the Sidgwicks and the Education of Women’ in Mason (ed.), Cambridge Minds, p. 41. 23. Minutes of Executive Committee, 1 February 1899.

14 THE LEGACY OF ELIZABETH HUGHES

Aged 47, Hughes retired from CTC and went to live with her younger brother, Arthur, a solicitor in Barry, South Wales.1 As she had inherited an independent income following the death of her father, she did not need to hold a salaried post again. Once away from the strains of CTC and Cambridge, simply being free to do what she wanted, restored her health almost immediately. In an article entitled ‘By a Woman of Leisure’, written for the Gild Newsletter, there is a huge contrast from the account of her broken-down state of health so recently given. Spending a month in Switzerland during which she climbed the Matterhorn, she commented that she ‘had imagined appalling difficulties, and the worst thing that befell me was frozen finger tips on account of the unusual cold’. Perhaps climbing the Matterhorn proved less difficult than achieving acceptance for teacher training in Cambridge. Other exciting new experiences recounted included ‘riding on a fire engine at full gallop…[a] wild rush in the dark night as one clings frantically to rope and rail’.2 Again, perhaps full gallops were more congenial to her nature than the endless round of administration and bureaucracy that inevitably accompanies a growing institution. Miss Pearson, who had been a student at CTC in 1891 and subsequently acted as Hughes’ secretary offers some of the most useful insights into her character. As this book has already demonstrated, Hughes had all the qualities of a dynamic leader; Pearson commented that ‘the salient element of her personality was her superb vitality and her power of energising others’.3 Hughes, she said, was possessed of a Vivid personality …birdlike quickness…humorous sparkle of the eyes…tireless energy …dauntless cheerfulness’.4 One of the keys to her charm, to which many attested, was that although she took her work entirely seriously, she did not take herself seriously. There are many examples of this, but a prime one may be the occasion of the opening ceremony of the new, permanent buildings of CTC in October 1895. The crowd who gathered at Wollaston Road numbered about 1,000, many more than were expected. This circumstance, as Hughes told the Gild Newsletter, led to a somewhat farci cal occurrence, in danger of undoing the dignity of the occasion altogether. As Hughes wrote, it had been planned that:

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The Council etc. should receive the Marquis of Ripon in an impressive manner in the entrance hall, and that a stately procession should be formed of governing body and students, which would sweep through the marquee and on to the platform… The reality was very different. So many people were crowding into the marquee that Lord Ripon was detained in his carriage for a short time, while a despairing but amused Principal struggled to clear the hall, aided and abetted by several energetic members of the Council. With infinite difficulty the speakers were taken into the Principal’s sitting room, and then reports reached us that the marquee was quite full and that a dense mob filled the entrance. Fortunately Lord Ripon had spent the morning with us, and was not quite a stranger, so laughingly I asked permission to guide him through the back part of the premises, out of the side entrance, across the lawn; and the governing body and the speakers had to get down, as best they could, the grassy steep slope, and enter the tent by a hole in the back!5 This strong sense of the ridiculous and ability to laugh at herself was a key component which had helped the infant college in its early days in Merton Street and had encouraged the students to cope with circumstances that were frequently trying and difficult. Hughes was recognized in her time as a leading educational theorist; as one Newnhamite put it, ‘her name is a by-word in all educational circles’.6 J.G. Fitch took every opportunity to applaud the training of secondary teachers at CTC under its accomplished principal. The focus of this book has inevitably been on what Hughes did in Cambridge, but it would be unfair to her legacy not to remind ourselves that she was a highly influential educationist in her native Wales. As the historian of Welsh education, W.Gareth Evans comments, Elizabeth Hughes was one of the Tafia (influential liberals) who ‘exerted a profound impact on the fortunes of girls’ intermediate education and women’s higher education in Wales, particularly through the agency of the much underestimated Association for Promoting the Education of Girls in Wales, in existence from 1886 to 1901, and the influential Cymmrodorian Society’.7 Both in the press, and on public platform, Hughes was one of the strongest advocates of the involvement of the university colleges of Wales in the training of teachers for the new intermediate schools. Her liberal Nonconformist background formed part of her personality in all sorts of ways; in her early youth she worshipped in an unadorned Methodist chapel so that she knew that good things go on in bare houses. Although the starkness of Crofton Cottages in its earliest days had fazed some of her early students, it had not troubled her. She could always visit and enjoy the beauty of King’s College Chapel when she needed something to feed the delighted eye.

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When she returned to Wales, Hughes was co-opted to the Glamorgan county education committee, she was the only woman member of the committee that drafted the University of Wales Charter, and became a member of the governing body (court of governors) of the University of Wales and of University College, Cardiff. For these services to Welsh education she received an honorary LL.D. from the University of Wales in 1920. Two particular qualities of Hughes stand out: on the one hand a willingness to experiment and on the other, an eye for detail. Nothing was too small to escape her notice. There are endless examples, but here is one that neatly encapsulates it. In a letter to the editor of the Journal of Education in December 1894, she writes: The old-fashioned easel blackboard is likely soon to become a thing of the past, and we shall probably have in most of our modern classrooms black-boards round at least three sides. Of course, this is an admirable arrangement, having only one drawback, a somewhat serious one, I think, that it tends to make our class-rooms funereal and ugly. However beautifully tinted the walls may be, and the ceiling also, however gaily decorated the class-room may be with pictures, flowers and casts, the depressing and ugly effect of a large black surface, like a black ribbon along the walls, must seriously decrease the aesthetic pleasure which the room can afford. The idea suddenly occurred to me some days ago, Why should a blackboard be black? This sounds rather Irish, but the more I think of it the more reasonable it appears that we should use other colours e.g. dark red, a good chocolate, a rich brown, &c. Experts would no doubt tell us the best colour to use with reference to our eyesight… How much more easily we could make our class-rooms really beautiful if we had a richlycoloured blackboard, and with walls and ceilings harmonizing with it. Will not some energetic firm consider the question, consult oculists and practical teachers, and offer us beautiful colours with which to cover our blackboards?8 A problem which very able people frequently face is that the more they show themselves capable of, the more responsibility is piled upon them. Hughes was no exception to this general rule; her workload at CTC increased exponentially from its early days. In 1896, Hughes was appointed Manager of the Evening Continuation Schools (we would now call these evening classes for the community) .9 In 1897 she was appointed delegate to the National Union of Women Workers, a philanthropic movement led by Emily Janes. She had long urged all her old CTC students engaged in elementary work—whether in training colleges, pupil-teacher centres or schools—to join the National Union of Teachers (NUT).10 In 1898 she was elected ‘Chairman of the Ladies’ Committee’ in connection

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with the organization of the 30th NUT annual conference held at Easter 1899 (Iliffe was the chairman of the conference committee). It started with an At Home for lady members at the Cambridge Training College’ and 20 delegates were offered hospitality. This was effectively her last organizing role in Cambridge. As we have already seen in relation to Wales, her influence as an educationist spread much further than in Cambridge itself; it certainly impacted on national policy. One of the most significant fora where she was invited as an expert witness was the Royal Commission on Secondary Education chaired by James Bryce, whose findings were published in 1895.11 This commission had been invited to consider ‘what are the best methods of establishing a well-organised system of Secondary Education in England, taking account of its deficiencies’.12 The significance of the commission lay in its recommendations for bringing control of the several types of secondary education under one central authority, a newly constituted Board of Education, formed in 1899, and at local level under education committees, created by legislation in 1902, of the county councils or boroughs. It attempted to fill up the gaps in secondary school provision, just as the 1870 Act bad filled up the gaps in the provision of elementary schools. Miss Buss was invited to become a member of the commission, but she was suffering badly from gout, kidney ailments and repeated attacks of flu. Sophie Bryant took her place, and the committee included two other women: Lucy Cavendish (Lady Frederick Cavendish), of the Girls’ Public Day School Company13 and Eleanor Sidgwick, Mistress of Newnham. With these close contacts, it is hardly surprising that Elizabeth Hughes was called as a witness because of her experience as Principal of Cambridge Training College for Women, and as the commission took a great deal of evidence from her, her influence may be regarded as significant. She argued that a training college for secondary teachers should be ‘a centre of educational information and inspiration, and also to some extent a centre for educational experimenting’.14 Her ideal was that people entering the teaching profession should have proved themselves successful in a teaching college setting. She explained that her college had been started with the express purpose of training existing graduates as teachers, and forcefully argues that this post-graduate form of training is the model which should be adopted, stating: ‘I think it is one of the most fatal of the mistakes that have been made in the training is to attempt to carry on both at the same time.’15 High schools for girls were much increased when the 1902 Education Act, arising from the Bryce Report, placed local secondary schools on the rates. The need for fully professionalized teachers for these schools rose sharply and this consolidated Hughes’ influence. In 1897 she herself was appointed a member of the Departmental Committee of the PupilTeacher System. It was in this capacity that she managed to offend O.B.,

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but as we deal in detail with their quarrel in the conclusion, I will not explore that here. A sustained account of the training of teachers is to be found in a lecture she gave to the Education Section of the Cambridge University Extension Scheme in August 1900.16 Hughes spoke at the annual conference of the National Union of Women Workers in November 1903; indeed she was regarded by Lady Louisa Knightley of Fawsley as having given ‘the most brilliant paper of the week… on Secondary Education under the New Act’.17 Every aspect of government legislation plays out in ways that mean there are some winners and some losers. The 1902 Education Act encouraged the rise of state-aided secondary schools, and this brought about the decline of pupil-teacher centres. Increasingly a secondary pupil intending to teach could now stay on at school until the age of 16 or 17, after which a year could be spent as a student-teacher before going on to training college. After 1907 bursaries were offered to children staying on at school in order to become teachers later. This late start to vocational training was more acceptable to middleclass parents than apprenticeship at 13, and so by 1914 the pupil-teacher system was almost totally replaced by new teacher training colleges. As the historian Wendy Robinson has pointed out, this shift disadvantaged working-class women who had thrived within this system, developing their own culture.18 Nevertheless, this shift was absolutely in line with what Hughes believed should happen; she was adamantly against ‘the wasteful and non-educational plan of educating embryo teachers in Pupil Teachers Centres’.19 Her belief was that bright children should go on to secondary schools and get their own education there, and then on to training college. Its advocates saw the system as forming an essential part of a ladder from the elementary system all the way up to higher education. For many pupils this proved to be the case, yet, as access from elementary schools to secondary schools was gained only by scholarships (and cultural capital was the invisible ingredient of success), this rigid structure disadvantaged some working-class children who might have thrived by the mechanism of the old pupil-teacher system.20 Hughes did not see it like that of course; she believed that whereas elementary schooling was likely to remain socially class-based for a long period, democratization would occur in the secondary school system. In other words she considered that meritocracy would solve all problems of access (a problem both the government and the universities are still wrestling with today). Her argument, published in Manuals of Employment for Educated Women was that In an undemocratic age, secondary education is the area where education is carried on under the most favourable conditions, and consequently the best results can be obtained. A large number of those who count for most in the nation’s life will be educated in secondary schools even under non-democratic conditions, but, when

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the gulf between the privileged and non-privileged classes is bridged over, and the real aristocracy of both classes—the best, the chosen— are free to benefit by a better education, and thus become worthy of greater responsibilities and greater honours, then the secondary schools of the country will educate practically all the nation’s leaders, and the real significance of secondary education will be more fully grasped. England is rapidly approaching this goal, and every step it takes in this direction will increase the responsibility and add to the honour of secondary teachers. It is probable that a certain section of society will always desire class schools for younger children, but the most important part of secondary education is that which concerns children between the ages of twelve and eighteen, because under democratic conditions that concerns the best pupils from all grades of schools.21 Hughes was also strongly of the opinion that secondary teaching, which she defined as ‘the more difficult and highly important work of teaching children between twelve and eighteen’ needed the best teachers. As she put it: The time is rapidly approaching when only the best teachers are likely to succeed here—i.e. teachers of undoubted mental ability, strong character, and excellent education, and wide knowledge and sympathy. Far higher salaries will undoubtedly be given in the immediate future for the higher secondary work, and it will be necessary for those who wish to engage in it successfully to have a lengthy and expensive training.22 In short, she believed that as the importance of secondary education was increasingly recognized more money would be expended on it. The qualifications of secondary teaching would be raised, and salaries increased accordingly. Another significant feature of Elizabeth Hughes’ influence as an educationist arose from her internationalist perspectives. Shortly after her retirement from CTC she attended a Congress in Germany; describing it to her old students, she commented that: The Women’s International Congress was extremely stimulating and also somewhat disappointing. Many of the papers were more suitable for a magazine than a public meeting, and there was seldom time for a satisfactory discussion. On the other hand some of the papers were admirable, and it was most stimulating to meet the leaders of women’s work all over the world.23

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As Principal of CTC she had always taken every opportunity to look at best practice wherever she found it (taking groups of CTC students with her when she could), and she had introduced ideas from all over the world into her college. As her career had progressed, increasingly she travelled abroad as a representative of, and an expert on, the British education system. In 1893, for example, she had been appointed Representative of the English Sub-Committee on Women’s Education under the Royal Commission for the Chicago Exhibition.24 Increasingly, as CTC’s reputation grew, Hughes had enjoyed the role of a sort of roving ambassador for education. By 1898, for example, the student body had risen to about 70, and was a diverse mix, including Irish students in the Catholic house and several foreign visitors, who lived in lodgings. These foreign visitors included women from America, South Africa, Australia, India and Japan who came to the college as visiting students. Edith Neville, one of three exNewnhamites attending CTC at the time gave a sketch of CTC life: About one hundred and seventy lessons are given weekly by the students in the Secondary and Elementary Schools in Cambridge. The work is extremely interesting, as there is full scope for individuality in the teaching, and the Principal is always ready to try experiments. To give examples – the American plan of giving a living interest to History, by starting with the history of the town in which the children live, has been tried with signal success; a new system of teaching Geography to young children by means of stories is working well; and lessons on the events of the week are much appreciated in the Girls’ as well as the Boys’ Schools… In addition to lectures on School Hygiene, the History of Education, Psychology and other branches of the Theory of Teaching, evenings at the College are frequently enlivened by lectures on most varied subjects. To mention a few—the students lately had the pleasure of interviewing the great traveller, Miss Isabella Bird, now Mrs Bishop; Mr Costello, the Progressive London County Councillor, comes periodically to talk on Local Government and London Politics; Professor Haddon spent one of his last evenings in England at the College, explaining what he hoped to do in his most interesting scientific expedition to the Torres Straits; Professor Earl Barnes, the great American authority on Child Study, has lately given several lectures on the result of his investigations. To those may be added lectures from foreigners and those who have resided in foreign countries, and from educational experts of all sorts, from Sir John Gorst downwards. Again, we can see ample evidence of Hughes’ charm and networking skills. Sir John Gorst (1835–1916), was, at that time, the Conservative Vice President of the Committee of the Privy Council on Education.25 Isabella

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Bird, the traveller and writer, could possibly be described as operating the same brand of breaking down barriers for women as Hughes herself. She and Hughes both observed and respected the conventions of nineteenthcentury femininity in the way they dressed, for example, while simultaneously doing things few women of their time did.26 Alfred Haddon was one of the team of seven men sponsored by the University of Cambridge who went out in March 1898 to undertake anthropological studies in the Torres Strait islands of Australia, Sarawak and Papua New Guinea. The expedition proved a major influence on the professionalization of social anthropology in Cambridge and beyond.27 Clearly, the range of speakers that the persuasive Miss Hughes could attract to her college, was remarkable. The students were never allowed to be ‘narrow’, in the sense of seeing everything from the viewpoint of how they could turn things into a lesson for the fourth grade, their own intellectual development was permanently stimulated. Hughes thought that beyond class-room management and skills, the single important thing which made a teacher interesting, was that the teacher herself was interested in the world in its widest sense. In this, Hughes envisioned her college of education along the same lines that her alma mater, Newnham College, had been envisaged. In 1896, Eleanor Sidgwick had addressed a conference in Liverpool on the benefits of university education of women, and had said that ‘the sense of membership of a worthy community, with a high and noble function in which every member can take part, and at the same time not so vast in extent as to reduce the individual to insignificance was one of its most significant goods’.28 This was exactly Hughes’ sense of what her college should be. Hughes’ private income meant that after retirement she could continue to travel around the world both importing and exporting educational ideas. By this time, old students of CTC were working in positions all over the globe and they often provided Hughes with introductions and invitations. Just as she had opened up a world for them, now they, in turn, opened it up for her. For example, in the winter of 1900–01 she visited Massachusetts and Chicago to study the probation system in America, which she considered a system well worth studying. She believed that a prison should be an educational institution whose purpose was to reform the criminal. But the massing of criminals and semi-criminals together tended to mitigate against this. So this experiment, which she defined simply as ‘an attempt to reform a prisoner outside prison’ was one of which she approved strongly. One benefit of this system was that it did not wrench a man away from his work and his family, nor did it stigmatize him as a man who had been in prison. It was especially useful when applied to those under the age of 18 as there was a real hope of reform if the young person was not herded in with more hardened criminals. Women probation officers were put in charge of under-18s and of women offenders and Hughes noted that they were ‘educated and very intelligent’.29 Sometimes it

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was ladies’ clubs who met the expenses of a probation officer as part of their philanthropic contribution. She met Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’. Hughes no doubt told her that this was their theme song at the Working Men’s Meetings in Cambridge: In the glory of the lilies Christ was born beyond the sea; As He died to make men holy, Let us die to make them free, As His truth goes marching on. This interest in prison reform continued so that in Japan she visited Kajibashi Prison and wrote an essay ‘Opinion on reforms of Kajibashi Prison’ which was published in Kokumin-shinbun. After her eight months in America, Hughes sailed from San Francisco to Japan as she was deeply interested in seeing their two new colleges of higher education for women. Until 1901, with the exception of the advanced classes attached to many mission schools and the higher normal school for training of teachers, there had been nothing above the standard of the Higher Girls’ Schools. Hughes had met Umeko Tsuda and Tetsu Yasui in Cambridge and this had helped to place a CTC student S.L.P Wright (1898/99) as a lecturer at the new Women’s University, in Tokyo, Japan. These connections led to Hughes’ making a 15-month visit to Japan between August 1901 and November 1902. She had been initially invited to give a course of lectures at the Higher Normal College for Men in Tokyo. The 16 lectures she gave were published under the title of ‘Miss Hughes’ Lectures on Teaching’ (translated by Masujiro Honda, a professor of the school) with a preface by the principal. The lectures were also published by Kyoiku-jikken-kai (Experiments on Education) by a listener as a series of 13 articles. According to Kyoiku-jikken-kai, Hughes always had warm and pleasant smiles and spoke enthusiastic speeches as if flowing. The acute light in her eyes shone everywhere in the lecture hall. She used pictures for explanation and talked humorous episodes. She was an example of good mixture of theory and experience and humanistic teaching.30 Hughes also lectured at the Higher Normal College for Women where an old CTC student, Miss Jasui, interpreted for her. Hughes, with her usual acuity, had asked CTC to send a box containing specimens of school work with illustrations firstly as visual aids for lecture purposes but secondly to distribute among Japanese schools, and she returned a similar box to CTC containing specimens of Japanese work. Hughes always insisted on the importance of drawing saying that it would improve attentiveness, watchfulness and imagination of students and

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it was an important skill to develop in relation to all subjects, as well as but not only for creative development in children. In order to indicate the different uses of pictures a teacher might encourage children to make she divided them up into categories—such as realism, memory, imagination, illustration. These pictures were arranged as an exhibition by the Ministry of Education before they were distributed to various schools in Japan. Hughes stayed at the house of Tetsu Yasui, Principal of Tokyo Women’s University, which had opened in 1901 with 500 students. The Ministry of Education offered her a translator and she visited various girls’ schools and a teacher training college. On 28 September she gave a lecture at the Women’s University on her struggle to establish her teacher training college in Cambridge. On 12 October she gave a lecture at the Imperial Education Assembly on the topic, ‘Education for women is necessary for better homes and the development of society and the nation’. Describing the advance made for the higher education of women in England, she urged her Japanese audience not to put so much stress on men’s education that women’s education was neglected; she encouraged women to make the effort to learn, and for men to encourage them. She also encouraged Japanese women to take exercise, telling them that she had taken Tetsu Yasui walking in the Alps when she had visited Europe and now that she was in Japan her hostess was taking her walking on Mount Fuji. On 30 October she visited the Women’s School for English (later known as Tusda College) founded by Umeko Tsuda and gave a lecture on English Literature. Miss Tsuda had had a successful career at Bryn Mawr College, and now, back in Japan, was examiner for the governmental examination in English—an honour accorded to no other woman.31 Hughes wrote up her experience in The English Teachers Magazine, published by teachers committed to English language teaching in Japan.32 Proclaiming that ‘the gulf which yawns between East and West is so deep and so wide that it is most necessary to use every time-saving device possible’ she advocates the utilization of ‘a large collection of pictures and lantern slides of English scenery and English life’ to help Japanese students gain insight into English thought, customs and manners. In April 1902 she was appointed as Professor in the Japanese Women’s University and she went on three tours giving lectures on various aspects of education all over Japan.33 In October 1902 she stayed in Kumamoto with Hannah Riddell, a remarkable women who had gone out to Japan under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society and established a hospital for lepers.34 Hughes’ overall impression was that the extreme inequality between women and men in Japan had created certain blocks to social progress, and she maintained a strong interest in the education of Japanese women long after her return to England.35 After leaving Japan Hughes spent a month in China and also visited Malaysia and Indonesia. She continued to open up the world to CTC students and alumnae by reporting all her travels and observations in

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letters To My Old Students’ in the Gild Newsletters.36 Having been the life and soul of CTC, she maintained her links through her role as Vice President of the Gild. If she was in the country she attended its annual general meetings, and sometimes gave the address, which is to say, a talk which followed the business matters. So, for example, at the AGM of 30 January 1904 held at the St Saviour and St Olave’s Grammar School for Girls in southeast London, she was able to exploit her recent travels to give an address on The Far East; from a British Citizen’s Point of View’. From her home in South Wales she devoted the rest of her life to social and political reform as part of a coterie of liberals described earlier. Calling herself a ‘radical democrat’, she supported enfranchisement, organizing a number of public petitions in favour of enfranchisement, although she was highly critical of militant suffragette action.37 Improving educational provision for women was an obvious part of a feminist agenda, but she was also concerned with enhancing and developing women’s skills in their roles as homemakers.38 In 1902 she formed the Barry Twentieth Century Club. She herself, and many of the women she had worked with or met on her travels, were examples of single women carving out substantial public roles for themselves. But she had also noted: the loneliness of many women, especially unmarried women. Now that I have more leisure myself, I have more opportunities of meeting women who are not working at high pressure, and I feel keenly that the world wants altering a good deal. There seem to be so many women, often interesting women, living in the same town, with many common interests, who somehow yet miss knowing one another. There seem to be so many women who scarcely know anyone, and with desires crushed, live monotonous, unsatisfied, and dull lives. I think it is largely because many of us have not been taught to make the best of our surroundings, to go out and find for ourselves what we want. We women have been so sheltered and planned for and cared for in the past, that we are not good at taking the initiative. We long for what we could get, and yet do without it. We do not utilise the chances that come to us. We do not crack the ice when it is thin, so it freezes hard and some day we find it cannot be broken.39 She had noted on her trip to America that American women took club life for granted, as a place where they could invite friends for lunch and to hear a discussion or lecture. She noted that although one kind of club was essentially for fashionable ladies only, another kind, which she called a ‘democratic’ club, was one in which women of all classes could meet and learn together. It was this second kind which Hughes thought most useful, and predictably she set about organizing one in Barry when she returned home, with the help of two old CTCs, Miss Lowden and a Miss

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Pointon (who came over from Cardiff to help at the first public meeting). The aim of the club was twofold: to help its members to continue lifelong education, rather as the Open University and the University of the Third Age operate today. Hughes described its organization as consisting of: (a) A course of lectures, a concert of real educational value, and a dramatic performance. (b) Study circles. These vary from session to session. At present the Club has the following: (i) Dramatics, (ii) Music Appreciation, (iii) Citizenship, (iv) Literature, (v) The League of Nations Union, and (vi) Purity. (c) Club teas. These are distinctly educational. On the invitation card is placed the subject which will be discussed at the tea. A simple tea is followed by an informal address on the subject, after which come many questions and a keen discussion. This club, not surprisingly, with her great executive skills, was a great success; membership continued to grow until, by 1923, it had reached about 700.40 Hughes unabashedly indicated from the outset that the secondary purpose of the club was to be ‘an effective centre of women’s influence for good’.41 Hughes continued to be identified with a good deal of public work in connection with education, public health (particularly tuberculosis) and insurance. During the First World War she helped to start the first Red Cross Hospital in Barry, South Wales and was commandant of a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) hospital in Glamorganshire. She gave lantern lectures and talks to the wounded at many hospitals in Glamorgan district. She was awarded the MBE for her war work. Although in Cambridge the name of Elizabeth Phillips Hughes is halfremembered because of its connection with Hughes Hall, she did not write a major book about educational theory. She was, rather, a practical visionary, who put most of her formidable energies into teaching, founding her college, and spreading educational ideas in her role as expert witness, and on public platforms. In June 1923 she organized the Barry Education Week, and in the ‘Forward’ she wrote for the programme, perhaps, her most central ideas about education are spelled out. She wrote: Who should be interested in education? It is becoming old-fashioned to regard teachers as forming the only class which should carefully study the general principles of education, and keep in touch with educational development. Parents also are concerned in education… There is a reasonable and growing belief that the work of administering education is probably the most far-reaching and important work to be performed by members of a local authority.

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They also, therefore, require some general knowledge on education and its latest developments.42 Having indicated three particular groups—teachers, parents, members of the local authority—she then argued that, as education should continue right through life, education was an issue for all adults, or, in effect, all citizens. The sense of Hughes as a modernizer in her belief that education was not a thing set aside, but the business of everyone, is very clear, and similar to discourses of citizenship today. Hughes died aged 75 at her home in Barry at the end of 1925.43 She fell ill on 10 December, though her brother wrote to CTC to say ‘I am sure you will be glad to know that she is quite happy and is not suffering any pain. Death is coming to her very kindly.’ A second letter, sent on 19 December said: ‘My sister died this morning early. The doctor, who has been in practice forty years, told me that he had never seen death come so quietly and painlessly. It was a fitting end of a long and useful life.’44 CTC sent a wreath ‘in token of the love and gratitude with which it mourns its first Principal’. Her legacy is embodied in almost all-pervasive ideas about education and citizenship, even if they are not immediately recognizable as hers. NOTES 1. John Arthur Hughes had been Clerk to the Council at Barry. I am grateful to Tom Clement for this information. 2. Ibid. 3. Bottrall, Hughes Hall, p. 32. 4. Gild Newsletter 1926 ‘In Memoriam’, p. 4. 5. Bottrall, Hughes Hall, p. 23. 6. Edith Neville, ‘Cambridge Letter’, Newnham College Club (1898), pp. 36–8. 7. W. Gareth Evans, Education and Female Emancipation: The Welsh Experience, 1847–1914 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1990), p. 7. See The Education of Welsh Women’ Seventh Annual Report, National Eisteddfod Association, 1887, pp. 86–92. E.P. Hughes was also present at the Shrewsbury Meeting of the Cymmrodorian Society on 5 and 6 January to discuss The Future Development of the Welsh Education System’ 1888. See also E.P. Hughes, ‘The Future of Welsh Education’ in the Transactions of the Cymmrodorian Society 1894/5 and ‘A National Education for Wales in Young Wales (Aberystwyth, 1895) Vol. 1, p. 105. 8. E.P.H. letter dated 12 November 1894, to the editor of Journal of Education 1 December 1894, p. 713. 9. Minutes of the Executive Committee, 21 November 1896, Box A6, Hughes Hall Archives. 10. Minutes of Executive Committee, 14 July 1897, Box A6, Hughes Hall Archives.

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11. James Bryce (1838–1922) born in Belfast, the son of a schoolmaster. Glasgow University followed by Oxford where he took a first in Greats. He served as an assistant commissioner on the Taunton Commission of 1868. He became a barrister in 1867, and Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford in 1870. He entered Parliament as a Liberal in 1885, remaining a member until 1906 when he became Ambassador to the United States. 12. Bryce Report, Vol. 1, p. xxvi. 13. Lucy Cavendish’s name is commemorated by a college set up for mature women students; it started as an approved society for graduates in 1965, and first admitted undergraduates in 1971. 14. Bryce, Minutes of Evidence, p. 469. 15. Ibid., p.483. 16. Reprinted in R.D. Roberts (ed.), Education in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1901). 17. Diary of Lady Louisa Knightley of Fawsley, 5 November 1903; Northamptonshire Record Office. Quoted by Jane Martin, ‘An “Awful Woman?” The Life and Work of Mrs Bridges Adams, 1855–1939’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 8, No 1, 1999, pp. 139–61. 18. Wendy Robinson, ‘Sarah Jane Bannister and Teacher Training in Transition 1870–1918’ in Hilton and Hirsch (eds), Practical Visionaries, pp. 131–48. 19. E.P.Hughes, Foreword to the Barry Education Week Programme 1923. 20. See Martin’s interesting article ‘An Awful Woman.?’ Martin’s article shows very clearly how Hughes’ conservative line was acceptable to the annual conference of the National Union of Women Workers in November 1903. 21. Introduction by E.P Hughes in Christabel Osborn and Florence B. Low (eds), Manuals of Employment for Educated Women, No. 1 Secondary Training (London, Walter Scott, n.d.). 22. Ibid. 23. Gild Newsletter, Michaelmas Term 1899, No. 25. 24. She went on 1 June 1893 and stayed in a student’s room at Chicago University while visiting the Liberal Art Building which housed the educational exhibits. See letter in Gild Newsletter 1993 and letter to O.B.; Oscar Browning Collection, King’s College, Cambridge. 25. Sir John Eldon Gorst was a lawyer and politician. Third wrangler at St John’s College, Cambridge in 1857. He had briefly worked as an assistant master at Rossall School in order to be near his ill father, which may have inspired his lifelong interest in the health and education of children. On Gorst as educationist, see his The Children of the Nation (1906) and Education and Race-Regeneration (1913). 26. Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in japan (1880); Sara Mills, Discourse of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London, Routledge, 1993). 27. Alfred Haddon was given to lecturing with a skull in his hand as, at this stage in his career, he believed that there was a correlation between physical attributes and ethno-logical concerns regarding race and migration. See exhibition catalogue marking the Centenary of the 1898 expedition edited by Anita Herle and Jude Philp (University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1998), pp. 54 and 57.

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28. Sutherland, ‘Emily Davies, the Sidgwicks and the Education of Women’, pp. 34–47, p. 42. 29. E.P. Hughes, The Probation System of America, issued by the Howard Association, London, p. 13. 30. E.P. Hughes in Japan (1901–1902) by En-in Ono (1989); Annual Collection of Essays and Studies, Faculty of Letters, Gakushin University, Vol. 36. Kindly translated from the Japanese by Miyako Matsumoto, of Newnham College, Cambridge. 31. Elinor Gladys Philipps of St Hilda’s Mission, Tokyo, Japan ‘The Women of Japan’ in Newnham College Roll Letter 1904. 32. ‘The Teaching of English to Japanese in Japan’ in The. English Teachers’ Magazine, June 1907, Vol. 1, No. 3 and continued in Vol. 1, No. 4 in December 1907. 33. For the detail of the visit, and the extraordinary amount of lectures Hughes gave during the 15-month stay, see En-in Ono, E.P. Hughes in Japan (1901– 1902); Annual Collection of Essays and Studies, Faculty of Letters, Gakushin University, Vol. 36.1 wish to thank Miyako Matsumoto, of Newnham College, Cambridge, for translating this document for me. 34. See Julia Boyd, Hannah Riddell: An Englishwoman in Japan (Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, Charles E. Tuttle, 1996) for an account of this fascinating woman. 35. In 1904 when war broke out between Russia and Japan following the Russian occupation of Manchuria, Hughes wrote an essay ‘The War against Russia and the Development of Japanese’. British sentiment was firmly with the Japanese at this time. 36. See for example her letter from Tokyo, May 1902. 37. Barry Dock News, 21 January 1907, 7 June 1907 and 7 December 1907. See also Richard Lewis, The Welsh Radical Tradition and the Ideal of a Democratic Popular Culture’ in Eugenio F. Biagini (ed.), Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles 1865–1931 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 325–40; p. 331. 38. The Highway 2, 17 (February, 1910), pp. 75–6. 39. Gild Newsletter, Michaelmas Term 1899, No. 25. 40. Information from Barry Education Week Programme, 23 June 1923. 41. E.P. Hughes, The Twentieth Century Club, Barry’ in the CTC Gild Newsletter, No. 37, December 1903, pp. 7–10; p. 9. 42. Foreword by E.P.H., Barry Education Week Programme, June 1923. 43. Times Obituary, 21 December 1925. 44. Gild Newsletter, 1926, p. 4.

CONCLUSION Pam Hirsch and Mark McBeth

‘Some day men will look back with amazement at a system which takes a young graduate fresh from the University, sets him face to face with a class of boys, and tells him to impart to them what he knows in the best way he can find, to try his pedagogic experiments in corpore vita, and to learn his profession at his pupil’s expense.’ J.G.Fitch, ‘Professional Training for Teachers’, Educational Review, January 1892, p. 122 Even though teacher training, specifically Hughes and Browning’s training colleges at Cambridge were successful ventures throughout the late nineteenth century, pedagogy still did not figure as a high status academic subject.1 Oscar Browning once wrote: It is urged by some that a university graduate who has been at a public school needs no special training [to teach], because having had experience of many teachers he can tell for himself what should be imitated and what avoided. It would be as reasonable to assert that an invalid who had passed through the hands of many physicians would make an excellent doctor.2 On a less sardonic note, Browning also wrote: It would be well if schoolmasters could adopt the plan of describing their cases of education as methodically and accurately as a doctor describes his cure. In this way a mass of information might be collected which would be of the greatest service in forming a true theory of education.3 In his first statement, Browning reacts against those who do not see the value of pedagogical studies. In the second excerpt, he suggests that educators should reflect upon their own classroom practice and share their insights publicly as a way to form a body of knowledge about teaching and, as a result, improve its quality. In their work at their respective Cambridge

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colleges, Browning and Hughes forcefully challenged the prevailing opinion that teaching skills can occur by osmosis when a teacher arrives in the classroom. What can the careers of two educationists from two centuries ago tell us about our current educational circumstances? As contemporary educators, we often feel that problems we are dealing with today (such as problems of access and inclusivity and how best to train and retain highly motivated teachers) are new problems, whereas government legislators, in particular, might benefit from the informative perspectives provided by historical knowledge. In the preface to his Educational Theories, Browning commented: The history of Educational Theories may be of practical use to teachers in two ways: it may show what is the historical ground for retaining existing practices in education or for substituting others; and it may, by telling us what great teachers have attempted, and what great thinkers have conceived as possible in this department, stimulate us to complete their work or to carry out their principles under easier conditions. The dead hand of spiritual ancestry lays no more sacred duty on posterity than that of realising under happier circumstances ideas which the stress of the age, or the shortness of life, have deprived of their accomplishment.4 Under Browning’s proposal that past educators may enlighten today’s educational debates, we finalize our discussion by highlighting the pertinent issues relating to our nineteenth-century protagonists. Whilst the two principals collaborated and dedicated equal energies to sustaining their underfunded colleges, they did not share identical philosophies about teacher training. After once attending a lecture by Browning, Hughes wrote to him, ‘I was sorry to hear you propound so many educational heresies yesterday; and still more sorry to find that you were in the majority and I in the minority; but truth must conquer in the end.’5 Issues of concurrent or consecutive training, classical or modern curricula, and how secondary training should best be achieved may all have been the ‘heresies’ to which Miss Hughes referred. As leaders of their colleges at Cambridge, Browning’s and Hughes’ interactions offer a prime historical situation in which to review not only the development of these two teacher training colleges, but also the polemics of late-Victorian men’s and women’s education. Furthermore, we review how public opinion fluctuates regard-ing teacher training, and how public opinions of a certain historical moment may shed light on present-day teacher training conundrums. By the end of the nineteenth century an ideal of teaching as a respected profession was gradually growing. In 1879 the TTS in Cambridge was formed to offer lectures and examinations to teachers who would gain a

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vocational qualification with the added cachet of the university’s recognition.6 As it turned out, women teachers sought this accreditation more eagerly than men as at this point they were unable to acquire university degrees from Oxford or Cambridge. Indeed, women candidates outnumbered men by about ten to one. Teaching was also one of the few occupations that a middle-class woman could assume in the male-centred job market of the nineteenth century. In 1885, Hughes, an inspired opportunist, established her training college for women in Cambridge to exploit a favourable circumstance where the Syndicate and the new women’s colleges were congruent. Six years later, in 1891, Oscar Browning and Henry Sidgwick gained the permission of the Education Council as well as the university to open the Cambridge University Day Training College for Men. With the establishment of both women’s and men’s training colleges at Cambridge, pedagogical studies, however tenuously attached, had a foothold at one of the ancient universities. As these two experimental educational projects were housed in, or in the vicinity of, one of England’s elite institutions, they gained the attention of external reformers who attempted to improve the quality of education in Victorian England. Miss Hughes’ college, although not directly connected to the university, did, however, have the support of influential heads of houses at Newnham and Girton Colleges. By contrast, Browning’s programme was considered a quasi-department of the university (however peripheral); his students resided in a conventional Cambridge college while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in a recognized academic subject. They undertook their teacher training simultaneously, under the auspices of Browning’s day training college. Browning’s and Hughes’ colleges set the standard and helped to advance the professionalization of teachers.7 Both principals played significant roles in the development of education in Cambridge as well as on the larger scale of national (and even international) education. At all levels, their scholarly work and activities were establishing a viable discourse about the value of teacher training as well as the theory and praxis of pedagogy. Also, because at Cambridge the leadership roles of Browning and Hughes shifted constantly between insider and outsider in relationship to their academic colleagues and circumstances, they give us the opportunity to see how they negotiated their subtle, but charged, political positions. The distinctive flourish that the animated (often confrontational) Browning presented to traditional Cambridge differed greatly from the assured diplomacy of Hughes. Even though their approaches were quite different their ultimate goals were similar and unwavering. Although, then as now, the importance of having quality teachers was generally accepted, there was not a consensus on where these teachers should come from nor how they should be trained. Browning and Hughes, albeit in their very different styles, produced teachers who would then spread their thoughtful philosophies and methods throughout the classrooms of the United

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Kingdom. In Browning’s case, the working-class men who entered his college had the dual benefit of acquiring a Cambridge degree whilst also gaining entry into a hitherto closed career track. On the other hand, Miss Hughes’ aspiration was more straightforward. She aimed to create an elite corps of teachers by means of what we would now call a Post-Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE), and send these professionally trained women teachers into the secondary girls’ schools to raise the standard. Her initiative was the logical next step of the aspirations of the Girls’ Public Day Schools Trust, and sought to educate succeeding generations of girls for university entrance. Between their two efforts, Browning’s and Hughes’ projects altered the face of the Cambridge student population in terms both of class and gender. In many ways both characters have been buried under the debris of neglected archives and a minute amount of scholarly attention. Generally, people know what Elizabeth Hughes did but not who she was; whereas with Oscar Browning people know who he was but not what he did. Browning was a legend in his own lifetime, but what his biographers and critics have recorded of his life misconstrue the significance of his educational contributions. By contrast, Miss Hughes has been glimpsed as a fleeting figure only in the official history of Hughes Hall. Browning has been endlessly lampooned (affectionately or otherwise), yet few details remain of Hughes’ personality: to date she has been commemorated solely in her institutional context, as founder of Hughes Hall. In our profiles of these two individuals, we have tried to redress this balance: Browning’s contribution to education is re-examined and taken absolutely seriously, whereas neglected aspects of Hughes’ background and character which allowed her to take up her initiating role are given close attention. We integrate into their stories their voices and idiosyncrasies that reveal them not only as two-dimensional historical figures but as many-sided and complex individuals. Seeing them from this perspective allows us to create a more intimate, yet simultaneously more substantive account of nineteenth-Century education, especially that of the training of teachers. By revisiting these historical locations, issues of gender roles, sexuality, classroom relations, classroom dynamics (both pupil—pupil and teacher— pupil), university acculturation and pedagogical methods are all brought into sharp focus. Finally, we explore the dialogues and dynamics of their relationship as a way to understand the issues anew. PRINCIPAL RELATIONS Miss Hughes’ and Browning’s relationship has previously been portrayed as irresolvably hostile, and yet their work together with the two Cambridge teacher training colleges reveals a considerably different and more complex rapport. Browning and Miss Hughes worked closely on the administrative links between their respective colleges. Although separate entities, the

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students shared lectures, similar curricula, and professional exams for the teaching certificate. Browning and Hughes corresponded often, sought advice from each other, dined together with students, and attended the same conferences and Syndicate meetings. Both principals had tremendous energies in implementing their training colleges and, even though the force behind their leadership may have been similar, their public personas could not have been more different. In the official history of Hughes Hall, Margaret Bottrall asserts that ‘there was no indication whatever of cordiality between these two remarkable educationalists’.8 Accepted as an established fact, this oversimplified statement has overshadowed the degree to which Miss Hughes’ and Browning’s relationship was symbiotic. In his final memoirs, Memories of Later Years, Browning described a lecture expedition to the Mediterranean on which both he and Miss Hughes were touring. (This final memoir before his death reads primarily as a travelogue as well as a means for Browning to namedrop every friend and acquaintance of any importance whom he had ever met.) Browning commented, that ‘Miss Hughes, my old friend or enemy, who had been Head of the Training College at Cambridge’ was also a passenger on board.9 By his own admission, Miss Hughes—his ‘old friend or enemy’—and he had not always seen eye to eye, but both were exceptional leaders and bad strong philosophical stances about education. Inevitably when opinionated leaders work together, disagreements may occur. However, their collaboration was a productive one over many years and they both worked diligently for the benefit of students in their respective colleges. Miss Hughes had also been mentioned in his first published memoir where she was lauded as delivering a fine lecture on the subject of teacher training. Knowing Browning’s penchant for writing about noteworthy people in his recollections, spotlighting his Welsh comrade in this way indicated a form of respect and admiration. On the other hand, Miss Hughes’ praise for Browning would have bad more caveats; although she recognized him as an ally in most educational matters, his reputation as a fellow educational leader in Cambridge was often threatened by his outrageous, even reckless, behaviour. As F.M. Cornford in his Microcosmographia Academica has taught us, public perception at Cambridge was a political matter: where you were seen and with whom mattered.10 As one of a very few high profile women leaders in Cambridge, Hughes would have been conscious of her high visibility which necessitated a strict grip on her public image. She needed Browning’s administrative participation, and privately she enjoyed his company, appreciating his willingness to dine and entertain her students, but in the public domain he could be something of a loose cannon. The trim, tidy Miss Hughes would have kept a measured distance from Browning’s boisterous antics. The points of contention between Miss Hughes and Browning, and his resulting reputation as a misogynist, have been generally over-determined

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by one quarrel that they had in the late spring/early summer of 1897. The over-inflation of this one altercation has distorted the narrative of the years that they spent in co-operative endeavour at Cambridge. The context of the quarrel was the Committee on the Pupil-Teacher System which had been appointed in December 1896 to report to Parliament.11 Hughes was one of three women on this committee, and Iliffe, the Cambridge University Day Training College’s Master of Method, was one of the witnesses.12 He gave his evidence on 27 May 1897, and then reported back to Browning a version of events which triggered an escalating row. The first signal of dispute occurred on 1 June 1897 when Miss Hughes sent Browning a short but somewhat pressing note: Dear Mr Browning, I am anxious to write to Mr. Iliffe, but I do not want to write to him until I have seen you. Would you so kindly suggest two or three possible times in the next few days? Tomorrow I am engaged from 1–6 pm & on Thursday up to one o’clock. I should be glad to hear from you as soon as possible.13 At first the note seems nothing more than one of her typically efficient memoranda in arranging meetings and, at this stage, she did not seem to realize that he was offended. It was not until Miss Hughes received Browning’s response seven days later that their conversation became heated. On the following day Browning drafted a pernickety letter to Miss Hughes, which declined her request for a meeting: My dear Miss Hughes I am as much occupied as yourself at the present time, and I do not see what good a personal interview could do just now, although I would be quite ready to come and see you if I had time to look in. There can I think be no harm in your writing to me. At the bottom of this draft, he wrote and then crossed out: ‘I am of the opinion that no question about stipend should either have been asked or answered.’ Browning believed that Hughes had asked questions about his salary at a public meeting and assumed by what Iliffe told him that Hughes had publicly criticized him. Browning’s draft was never sent, and, for a week, he fulminated over what he believed Hughes had said in the public forum of this parliamentary committee. It was not until the following week when Hughes received Browning’s response, that she realized how serious the misunderstanding was becoming. Browning appended a transcription of Iliffe’s version of their conversation, a conversation she had intentionally held privately and separately from the formal evidence gathering of the committee. Rather than his customary ‘Dear Miss Hughes’, Browning began his letter with a frosty greeting:

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My Dear Madam, I shall infer from your few words at the end of your letter received this morning that you do not intend to write any more upon the subject or to express your sorrow for what has occurred, also in the absense [sic] of any counterstatement from yourself as to the conversation which took place between you and Mr Iliffe I must assume that his report of it is substantially correct. This is what the question and answer sequence in Iliffe’s handwriting said: Q. Does Mr Browning really do much? A. Yes he does a great deal. Q. But what does he do? A. He interviews the students, sees them periodically, advises them, sees them if they are reported to have exercises, general supervision over them, and is usually present at criticism lessons. Q. But he isn’t paid anything? A. Yes of course he is. Q. How much? A. I get £100; he gets £70. Q. Then he is worse than I thought him. I shall ask you what the duties of Director are so you can be getting your answers ready. A. Very well, I think I can tell you. Having read this version of the conversation from Iliffe, Browning thought Hughes had attacked his beloved CUDTC; whereas she was rehearsing her questions to Iliffe prior to publicly demonstrating the superiority of the day training colleges in contrast to the pupil-teacher centres. Hughes had been appointed as a leading investigator on this important committee which attested to her increasingly respected position as an educational leader. Familiar with the types of questions that other members of the committee would ask, she was in effect briefing Iliffe on how he might respond. She was at pains to elicit answers that would show that Browning’s day training college was good value for money, in order to disabuse the chairman of his idea that the day training college scheme ‘must be an expensive college to work’.14 The conversation that Iliffe outlined to Browning was a ‘rehearsal’ for the questions which Hughes would pose during the official inquiry. Browning neither comprehended her motive for briefing Iliffe nor understood that she was supporting his college and not attacking it. He wrote to her, ‘I am entirely unable either to explain or to excuse your action.’ Bizarrely, Iliffe did not clarify the situation. Consequently in his letter, Browning went into a passionate defence of the success of his CUDTC. It is worth remarking that Browning’s many spelling and grammar errors may indicate his high degree of fury and upset. He continued:

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The Cambridge University Day Training College is admitted by all who know anything about [it] to be not only a great but a most remarkable success it [sic] was predicted when it was first started, one, that it would consist mainly of Cambridge residence [sic], two, that the student [sic] were all N.C. [Non-Collegiates] Three, that they would not mix with the life of the University, (four,) that they would be all normall [sic] men, five, [the next part is written between the lines] that they would never be able to combine professional and university work that the college could not be carried on without a large sum of money. All [sic] these predictions have been falsified there [sic] are very few residence [sic] in the college and very few N.C. The students pass excellent examinations in these professional subjects and also take high honour degrees they mix to the full in the undergraduate life of the place and [owing] to the self denile [sic] of the teaching staff the college is entirely self supporting. This may have been Browning’s draft, which he then copied and sent to Hughes. Along with this justifying diatribe, he enclosed reports to substantiate his claims—reports with which she would have already been familiar. He wrote: I enclose our two last reports in support of my assertions the success of such an important experiment as ours ought to delight the heart of anyone who is interested either in the training of teachers or in the progress of education. The credit of this success would naturally be given to those who are in charge of the institutions, and no one who was not heard [but] asking by an idle and impertinent curiosity, unless the positive duty of inspection were laid upon them, would dream of enquiring as to the precise division of duties among staff of the college, a matter which necessarily varies from year to year, or of the appointment of the government grant to the several objects to which it is applied. I cannot conceive myself under any circumstances asking such questions about the College of which you are principal, or even caring to be told them. Browning’s letter became increasingly more irate in disbelief that anyone would dare question his dedication or his right to a salary. He insults her by questioning her interest in education and teacher training. Browning knew perfectly well that Miss Hughes was as devoted to her college and to teacher training as he was and knew this attack would injure her. In his final lines, he became pointedly venomous. He concluded: What has happened will certainly be a lesson to those who have the management of our College, and I hope to you also. Perhaps allow me to say that it furnishes a strong argument to those who think that

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the admission of women to participation in University business would be disastrous in their time. If he had not already insulted her enough, he accused the always measured Miss Hughes of indiscretion and alluded that her actions upheld what critics always said about women. He indirectly flings in her face the stereotypical slander of women—that they are all busybodies. This accusation of indiscretion was particularly galling coming from the infamously gossipy Browning.15 Hughes was wrongly being accused and was justifiably livid. She returned a letter the same day, writing: Your letter astonished me. The conversation I had with Mr Iliffe was a private one after the committee was ended for the time being, and should have considered it a gross breach of confidence if I had repeated anything he told me. However I am perfectly willing to tell you why I spoke to him and to the best of my ability what I said, his report of it is not correct in many particulars I think. May I ask you to come and see me this evening any time after 5:40 and may I venture to remark that until you know what happened I should advise you to keep the matter to yourself. My first impulse when I received your letter was to write indignantly both to you and to Mr Iliffe, but I remembered what you had done for education and refrained. I have not written to Mr Iliffe and do not intend to do so until I see you. After that I shall of course take steps in the matter. Miss Hughes was warning Browning not to slander her. Browning ignored her letter and chose not to reply. In a letter marked ‘Wednesday night’ she responded a second time: You have wronged me seriously. I feel indignant that you should doubt for any moment my deep interest in the Day Training College, and your attack on me applies equally to the Chairman of the DT Committee who asked in public for more details than I did in private. You have not heard my side at all, and are under a complete misapprehension as to what happened. You cannot expect me to pass over your last letter in silence. I have already asked you to come and see me, and I ask once more… I have not mentioned the subject to anyone as of yet, but after your last letter, if you refuse to come and see me, I shall feel obligated to consult my friends and show them your letters. I am assuming that Mr Iliffe has shown you my letter to him. Mr Iliffe’s role in this scenario is difficult to figure. Strangely he reports to Browning something that he knew would aggravate him. And if it is true

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that a committee chairman was inquiring into Browning’s responsibilities, it should have been the chair who was exposed to Browning’s wrath rather than Miss Hughes. One wonders what Iliffe stood to gain in this situation. The ‘or-else’ tone which Miss Hughes uses with Browning shows her confidence that the ‘friends’ whom she would ‘consult’ and to whom she would ‘show [his] letters’ had some power to censure him. In the furious letter she wrote to Iliffe she began: It is with difficulty that I write calmly, but I am reminding myself that we both belong to the same profession, and that there are some things that I could appropriately say to you if I were a man, that I must not say because I am a woman. Mr. Browning’s letter astonished me greatly. I think I should have an overwhelming majority of men on my side in asserting that to repeat an ordinary conversation as you repeated ours (as far as I can see without any necessity) was unpardonable. The amount of mischief that would be made if it were frequently done is really appalling. Mr Browning assumed that the circumstances under which the conversation took place were in some way special. Of course you know that it was an ordinary private conversation after the committee had closed its meeting. Still smarting from Browning’s gender-related comment, Hughes alluded to what, were she a man, she could say to Iliffe: for example, ‘Sir, you are no gentleman to repeat a private conversation.’ It is Iliffe, not Hughes, who has been the gossip in this situation. She then states her case: Meanwhile I will give you the facts of the case. I only trouble you with them because it is difficult for me to remove the false impression that Mr Browning has received without being guilty myself of an act of grave impoliteness, and running the risk of making mischief. She repeats variations of the phrase about ‘making mischief, such as ‘I don’t want to make mischief and ‘I should be still more sorry to cause mischief. It is very clear that she regards Iliffe as the one who has made mischief’, be appears to have acted as something of an agent provocateur. For a woman of extreme professional discretion, it must have been astoundingly irritating to her to have received Browning’s letter accusing her of overstepping a boundary. Browning erroneously believed (thanks to Iliffe’s ambiguous account) that she had criticized him in a public forum, which she had not. He resented the idea that she had assumed the authority to question his role, responsibilities or salary in any way. Browning was probably also envious of Hughes’ position on the committee. He had devoted many years of service to the Syndicate and to the training college yet was not invited to serve as an investigator—no doubt a blow to his often fragile ego. However, he did not condone this committee’s

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approach to teacher training and therefore would have been counterproductive to their underlying agenda. In the end, this was a quarrel where both principals became seriously offended, but, to retain a sense of proportion, it was a quarrel which merely lasted a week. There remained a little stiffness for perhaps a few months, but after that Hughes resumed her teasing or bantering tone in letters to him. Once again he was invited to come to supper and he assented to entertain her students in his customary manner. This is all to say that a quarrel of one week, hot and bitter in the mouth though it was, should not have been construed to represent their relationship as a whole. Because Browning knew that Hughes did not agree with him on some substantive issues which were being addressed at the departmental committee, he clearly felt personally under attack. Although, as we have established, their quarrel does not emblematize their personal relations, it does highlight disagreements they had about alternative routes into teacher training. A year later (December 1891), Browning delivered a Presidential Address to the Association of Principals and Lecturers in Training Colleges in which he repeats the list of issues he had defensively included in his letter to Hughes: namely, how students pursue their professional training alongside studying for their university degree, the money spent on teacher training programmes, students’ lack of involvement in university life, and students’ overall success at Cambridge. Whereas, Hughes and Browning agreed on the desirability of access to wide university culture for their students, Hughes preferred a consecutive model. She believed it would be more efficient for students to complete their subject studies before embarking on the professional training because this made logical sense for her students. Hughes’ constituency was different from Browning’s and, thus, affected her opinion. She had set up a college to train women as secondary teachers. The consecutive model made sense to her because some of the women had already undertaken university-level education, or, at the least, had attended good girls’ secondary schools.16 These women needed certification and professionalization to find good jobs in schools which increasingly demanded professional qualifications. In contrast, the men who came to Browning’s training college had not completed any higher education, and, in many ways, were unprepared for the work they would do at Cambridge. Unlike conventional Cambridge University students, they had little or no Greek or Latin but would need these languages to complete the preliminary exam (the Little-go). Experiencing their classroom lives as students, while simultaneously exploring the theories and practices of pedagogy would be a rich combination of bookwork, classroom observation and first-hand experience; in today’s ethnographic terms, they would be participating observers. Furthermore, the concurrent model benefited CUDTC students, because as funding was sparse, this model concentrated their subject studies and professional teacher training into

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three years. Of his training college, Browning boasted, ‘It was a new and fruitful enterprise to send out every year a number of well-trained and distinguished University men to be elementary schoolmasters, and incidentally our college was a most efficient machine for providing a firstrate University education for exceedingly poor men.’17 As many of the poor men came to the CUDTC via the pupil-teacher system (on Queen’s scholarships), Browning was reluctant to dismantle the pupil-teacher system. Browning had recently established a secondary training branch of his CUDTC; most often these men arrived already with a university degree. He said, [T]he experience which I have had of seeing the two classes of students together, doing the same work, has given me a respect for the pupil teachers’ system which is so commonly decried by modern progressive educationists… I should be sorry to see any change which would tend to diminish the supply of pupil teachers in elementary schools until we are quite certain that we have something better to take their place.18 When Browning refers to the ‘two different classes of students’, be speaks specifically of the elementary trainees and the secondary trainees, but also implies that they are from different social classes. Browning worried that, were the pupil-teacher system to end, it would close down the route by which working-class students had access to his DTC. Hughes was exactly the sort of ‘modern progressive educationist’ who believed that the pupil-teacher system was extravagant and wasteful. She wanted good secondary schools for everyone and did not believe that the pupil-teacher centres could provide, in one afternoon and evening per week, the amount of secondary education teachers needed. She preferred a model of bursaries for those, who at the age of 16, desired to go on to training colleges as elementary trainees. The very ablest students, as she saw it, would go on to university and take their degree, then train as secondary teachers. She saw herself as a radical democrat, looking to influence the provision of good education for citizens who needed a wide range of skills and competencies at the turn of the century. She believed that the pupil-teacher system, instituted in 1846, had served a useful purpose but now the government should be funding secondary schools, rather than pupil-teacher centres. Two months after Browning had delivered his Presidential Address, he sent a copy to Hughes, to which she teasingly responded, ‘I have read it with much interest; there are many points in it on which I do not agree with you at all, and I hope to have an opportunity of fighting you over them some day…with kind regards, yours very truly EP Hughes.’ As the tone of this letter shows, normal relations had resumed. Even though they had disagreements of substance, as outlined above, for the longest

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part of their relationship they shared the same motives and ideals about the professional recognition of teachers and the significance of high quality training. Despite Browning’s historically dubious reputation, without his initiative of the Teacher Training Syndicate, trainee teachers, whether women or men, would never have entered the ambit of the University of Cambridge. OPENING THE GATES After laying out a key debate of nineteenth-century teacher education through Browning’s and Miss Hughes’ dispute, we go back nearly 20 years to the founding moment of teacher training at Cambridge. On 12 June 1878, a committee of the newly formed Syndicate met to consider the outcomes of the ‘Teaching Memorials’ Oscar Browning had orchestrated.19 He had collected 150 circulars from heads of schools across England, enquiring upon their opinions regarding teaching qualifications to be offered by the university. He divided the responses into four classes (1) decidedly unfavourable, (2) unfavourable on the whole, (3) partly favourable, (4) decidedly favourable. For the most part, the majority of responses were favourable; in fact, those who were decidedly favourable submitted schema. However, the first answer to be reported upon was from Reverend Dr Hornby at Eton College who had dismissed Browning from his assistant master’s post. (Imagine Browning’s pleasure at sending Hornby the Cambridge questionnaire under his signature.) Hornby’s response, the most ‘decidedly unfavourable’ of the group contradicted all the proposed ideas of the Syndicate. In his report, Browning summarized Hornby’s memorial, writing, ‘Earnestly deprecates the foundation of professorships or lectureships for training of teachers. Such method cumbrous and wasteful. From the great difference and diversity of public schools, we cannot train mechanically as in elementary schools.’20 Browning foregrounds Hornby’s answers as an example of a resistant, if not complacent, perspective about teacher training. If Browning conscientiously allowed Hornby’s negative response to begin the report, he strategically ended the report with Miss Clough’s (Principal of Newnham College) affirmative responses. She suggested a scheme under an Executive Committee which would provide (1) Training Schools, (2) Lecturers on Theory and Method of Education, and (3) Inspectors. Lecturers might circuit in the large towns to provide a more expansive and convenient training service and certain schools could be designated where both men and women trainees could practise their methods. If Hornby was cast as the ‘Villain’ in Browning’s report, Miss Clough was certainly its heroine. Her proposal was in fact the general plan for the resulting Syndicate project. This initiative, the first time the university involved itself in the training of teachers, resulted in a commitment of £100 per annum from the

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University Chest. The Teacher Training Syndicate (TTS), with Browning as secretary, not only arranged the first lectures on the theory, practice and history of education, but also organized examinations. The TTS examinations professionalized teaching and, in addition, the TTS course of lectures was the first example of ‘Education’ conceived of as an academic subject within the University of Cambridge. The necessary action was being taken to make Cambridge a prime location for more expansive teacher training initiatives. Seeing the beneficial circumstances offered by the TTS certification, Miss Clough, along with Miss Buss, encouraged the most able woman they could envision to found a women’s training college in Cambridge. On the assumption that a significant cohort of Girton-and Newnham-educated women would wish to train as secondary teachers, Elizabeth Hughes was perusaded to assume the Principalship of Cambridge Training College. After initial hesitation, beginning in 1885 with 14 students in two rented houses, Hughes managed within a decade to establish a recognized and respected college safely housed in its own purpose-built premises, with a large lecture hall, a library of 3,000 books, a museum and a gymnasium. Without underestimating the significance of the Pfeiffer bequest, which awarded £3,000 to CTC so that it could establish a permanent building, nor the stalwart support of Buss and Bryant in particular, this is nevertheless a breathtakingly remarkable achievement for the relatively young Hughes have made. By the time she resigned in 1899 her college was developing exponentially, with increasing enrolments, special scholarships, and an impressive reputation for excellence. Hughes’ students gained prestigious positions in good schools and other training colleges in both the United Kingdom and across the world. Consequently, Hughes’ philosophy of what a teacher should be was internationally influential. In 1891 in collaboration with Toynbee Hall and interested university colleagues, Browning began CUDTC which introduced mainly workingclass men to teacher education. At the beginning, he was primarily interested in training elementary school teachers; however, in February 1898, he introduced secondary teacher training. By this time most people within the university were convinced about the training of elementary school teachers, but they could not yet accept the value of training middleclass men (who already had degrees) to be secondary masters. Most were graduates on admission, but the non-graduates followed a course concurrent with their degree studies, in the same way as (and alongside) the ‘elementary’ trainees. This model differed from Oxford’s programme which kept primary and secondary (effectively, working-class and upper-class) teachers separated. Peter Searby, who has made the only significant study of the CUDTC, explains: Browning gave the college a direction strikingly different from the Oxford Day Training College, with which it is natural to compare

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Cambridge. The Oxford College was confined to training for elementary schools: when secondary training began in Oxford a separate agency was created for it, and the two institutions did not merge until 1919. This division came easily in Oxford in an age when the schools for which students were prepared were themselves so separated and different from each other. It was avoided in Cambridge by Browning’s view that it was necessary to combine different sorts of teacher training. His attitude rested less on abstract theory than on his sense of human unity and the need to bring different sorts of men together.21 Browning’s attempt to keep elementary and secondary trainees together was an ideal which paralleled the aim of another social innovator, Canon Barnett of Toynbee Hall, whose vision was to bridge class differences. In fact Browning once wrote to Barnett: In the seven years during which I have been head of the Cambridge University Day Training College I have acquired a great respect for pupil teachers. The skill which they have gained in imparting would be extremely difficult to bring secondary teachers up to their level, in the time at present at our disposal…since January last, a few of the most distinguished students in the University have been members of the College for the purpose of secondary training. They have attended the same criticism lessons as the primary students, and have heard them teach, but up to the present moment they have never consented to give a lesson themselves in the presence of the primary students, being aware of their own inferiority… [These secondary teachers] have more knowledge, more culture, a wider intellectual sympathy; but regarded as teachers and disciplinarians the pupil teachers seem to have derived from their early apprenticeship to the craft powers which it would be difficult to acquire in any other way.22 Beyond the disparities in pedagogical skills, between the two groups, Browning further elucidated the logistic problems that occurred when he attempted to introduce his trainees into secondary schools for practical training. It is at present claimed that secondary teachers must be trained principally in secondary schools, but as head of a Secondary Training College I find it extremely difficult to obtain admission into secondary schools for that purpose… Most secondary schools are badly organized and are conscious of bad organization. The masters are also conscious of their want of training and of their other defects, and are unwilling that these faults should be perceived by others.23

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Browning wrote this letter to update patrons at Toynbee Hall of the progress and problems which occurred at the CUDTC. As Toynbee Hall members had been funding working-class boys’ education for seven years, Browning wanted them to know how their donations benefited students and how successful their recipients had been. Likewise, Browning alludes to the class divide that was being, albeit slowly and with difficulty, diminished. He notes that slow progress had more to do with problems of the system and lack of co-operation on the part of the secondary schools than with the students themselves. Browning’s adherence to the concurrent model for the secondary students (as for the primary students) upheld his own belief as well as the aspirations espoused by Toynbee Hall. Browning was an idealist and within the context of Oxbridge education used his training college as a form of social activism. As seen, both Hughes’ and Browning’s training colleges acted as flagships, which had a material effect on raising the profile of education and teacher training in the United Kingdom. Both of their colleges opened opportunities for people, namely women and working-class men, who had been previously disenfranchised from higher education and professional employment. Significantly, during their tenures as principals their colleges thrived and grew, but, after their respective retirements (Hughes’ voluntary, Browning’s forced), the colleges floundered. Searby reports that because historical and political contexts changed, the reputation of Browning’s Day Training College declined. He writes: Those to whom the author has spoken about the reputation of the college between the wars agree that it was scorned and despised by the university to which it was only nominally attached. It seems true that the only function of the Day Training College which university opinion had ever been truly enthusiastic over was the opportunity it gave to poor boys to acquire Cambridge degrees. So, paradoxically, when by 1920 other avenues for working-class entry were opened, and the coming of the consecutive course clearly exposed the college’s narrow professional purpose, its standing in the university declined sharply. Similarly, it is probable that consecutiveness made it harder for the college to sell itself to students, who found it easy to see professional training as a mere appendage to the Tripos when it was sharply dissociated from it.24 Searby’s explanation helps to distinguish how the evolution of Browning’s college differed from Hughes’ and indicates why their future trajectories were inevitably to differ. Perhaps in moving away from Browning’s model, Cambridge University lost a potential means of creating a more diverse student body. As Homerton College, an elementary training college, established in Cambridge in 1894, but existing quite independently of Cambridge

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University, was successfully training large numbers of women elementary teachers, CTC could concentrate on its original intention of focusing on training secondary teachers after they had obtained a first degree from any recognized university.25 By 1911, Hughes’ chosen model for secondary training of a three-year Tripos followed by a one-year training course had been adopted as government policy. Nevertheless, without the extraordinary drive of its founder, CTC declined, its numbers fell, debt accumulated and the college’s fortunes revived only after the Second World War when the demand for secondary teachers increased. It was formally recognized as an institution of the University of Cambridge on 1 October 1949 and renamed Hughes Hall to honour Elizabeth Hughes’ founding role. This acceptance by the university coincided with the university’s belated decision in 1948 to award degrees to the women students at Girton and Newnham. If the university at last recognized women graduates, clearly it could also recognize post-graduate women. Passing through the appropriate institutional stages, Hughes Hall finally became an ‘approved foundation’ (a fully-fledged college) of the university in 1985. In the 1970s, it broadened its academic range, and continues today as a graduate college open to both sexes. For historical reasons, it still attracts to its student body a significant percentage of students studying for a PGCE. But, despite the continuing existence of Hughes Hall and thereby a permanent monument to Elizabeth Hughes, Browning’s CUDTC was not so fortunate. By 1934 the university was considering closing it down, although a few advocates argued that is should remain open and be improved by receiving more financial support. In 1936 the college was given more spacious accommodation in Brookside which was physically closer to the centre of university activities. In 1939 the last vestiges of Browning’s DTC were fading as it became subsumed into a department under the control of the General Board.26 Upon the recommendation of a Royal Commission 17 years earlier, the university had decided to appoint its first departmental Professor of Education. Charles Fox, who had worked closely as Browning’s administrative assistant and then succeeded him as principal, was pointedly overlooked for the position and resigned in anger. Although the evidence would indicate that be was neither such a gifted teacher nor such an energetic administrator as Browning had been, Fox was nevertheless the person who knew best the vision Browning had originally conceived. The medieval historian that Cambridge University appointed as Professor of Education, G.R.Owst, was fundamentally uninterested in teacher training. With Owst’s increasing ennui with the position and the onset of the Second World War, fewer men enrolled in the teacher training college and it eventually became defunct, fading into a sort of unnoticed death. Not until new leadership took hold in 1959 did the study of education gain renewed interest, and, out of nearly forgotten ashes, did Browning’s legacy and ideals start to resurface.

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From this point until the present day, the relationship between the university and the training of teachers has evolved, albeit somewhat reluctantly on the part of the university. It has rarely felt as though the university was leading the way in education, rather that it had been dragged kicking and screaming. The most significant push in the twentieth century was given by the 1963 Robbins Report on Higher Education which envisioned teaching as a graduate profession, and recommended that colleges of education (as it renamed training colleges) should be transferred to university schools of education. The Council of the Senate of the University of Cambridge set up a committee to consider whether the Robbins Report had any relevance to the university. It submitted two reports and finally, in 1968, the Regent House accepted the committee’s proposals that candidates from colleges of education for the B.Ed. degree should become members of a college of the university during their fourth year, and thus satisfy the residence requirements of the university. The residence requirement set up particular problems for women candidates (about half of whom were from Homerton College). The number of places at women’s and mixed colleges in the university was very small. Miss Hughes’ alma mater, Newnham College, promptly offered all the Homerton candidates formal membership of the college, no doubt helped by the Newnham links of the Homerton Principal, Beryl Paston Brown.27 Newnham would matriculate them and present them for degrees, but would take no responsibility for their work as this would be administered by Homerton. This old alliance between Newnham and teacher training initiatives granted Homerton a quasi-independent function in the university. The Faculty of Education’s duties were to conduct the teaching and examinations for the B.Ed. The candidates would take selected Tripos papers (usually known as main subject studies) as well as examinations in education. The first examination with classed results was held in 1971; the Faculty board instituted a careful comparison between the standards of this new degree and those of other degrees in Cambridge and found them to be equivalent. Consequently the B.Ed. began to find acceptance within the university.28 The insistence of the University of Cambridge that all its students undertook honours degrees, and the aspirations of Homerton College to become part of the University of Cambridge converged. Homerton was the only college to enter students for the B.Ed. degree at Cambridge, which left the way clear for the Faculty and Homerton to begin working in partnership.29 Together, they designed an Education Tripos which was accepted by the university in 1976.30 In 1974 the government’s Department of Education and Science recognized Homerton College as a centre of excellence as an institution dedicated to the study of teacher training for both primary and secondary teachers.31 In consequence, in 1976 Homerton was recognized as an Approved Society within the university. After 30 years this long-standing union between the university

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and Homerton College was finally cemented in October 2001, when the teaching and research staff of both the Faculty of Education and Homerton College converged. Browning’s vision of teacher training fully incorporated into the university had finally taken place 180 years after its inception. It is easy to see in this long drawn-out evolution both how the histories of Browning’s and Hughes’ colleges relates to present-day teacher training provision in Cambridge, but also how their founding roles have largely been forgotten. Arguably, the final push for the convergence described above has been led, not by idealism, but by the demands of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), from the sense that submitting research jointly from the Education Faculty and Homerton College might achieve the kind of result which Cambridge University expects from all its faculties. Consequently, Homerton College itself is finally recognized as an ‘approved foundation of the University of Cambridge—in other words, it is now a college like any other, not the ‘red-haired stepchild’ but a legitimate heir.32 This strategy has succeeded triumphantly: the figures of the five-yearly RAE for December 2001 reveal that the converged Education Faculty has been awarded a 5.33 The University of Cambridge as the leading research university in the United Kingdom wants all of its faculties to achieve a 5* (internationally recognized excellence in research scholarship) but a 5 is clearly very close. To put it in perspective, out of 68 Cambridge faculties, 30 achieved a 5*, 18 achieved a 5 and 3 achieved a 4. After two centuries, Browning’s dream of education (the teaching of teachers) being taken seriously by the University of Cambridge, and research into education (its practice, its philosophy and its history) being viewed as a respectable academic discipline, has finally been realized. Similarly, Elizabeth Hughes, in her time, had envisioned a Cambridge degree specifically aimed at encouraging the study of the science of education because she believed that people should read and think a good deal more about education than they did in her time.34 This degree, she argued, would not in itself be regarded as a sufficient preparation for teaching, but would be suitable for people entering into local government or national policy making. For example, when lay people on local education authorities allocated funds, she believed that they should be familiar with educational matters if they were responsible for making decisions about it. The degree she envisioned now exists; Homerton College offers a BA in Education Studies which does not include practise in classrooms; if students wish to gain Qualified Teacher status they have to do a further year’s PGCE. In the newly converged Faculty of Education we see embodied the best of Browning’s and Hughes’ ideals: they both thought that they were preparing future leaders directly for educational institutions as well as political policy makers.

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Figure 14 The Faculty of Education in Cambridge today represents the embodiment of the ideals of both Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes. The significance of teacher education is at last fully recognized by the university. Reproduced with kind permission of Dr Peter Warner, Homerton College.

THE PRINCIPLES Thus far in the conclusion, we have shown how our protagonists’ colleges evolved and how their ideals are embodied in the present-day arrangements for Education at Cambridge University. However, some things remain obstinately and regrettably the same. The unstable relationship between teacher trainers, the university, and the government of the day continues. This often overlooked triangular relationship is something we have attempted to trace in our nineteenth-century setting. Its negotiations are still troubled and troubling. Writing recently about the government’s attempt to persuade students from elite universities to train for teaching careers, the Institute of Public Policy recently commented that the last two decades have seen a decline in both the numbers and percentage of graduates who enrol on post-graduate teacher training courses.35 Hughes’ and Browning’s concept of the ideal relationship between government and teacher training institutes has been consistently under-mined by staid and constricting educational policies. In 2002 New Labour’s stated aim was to establish teaching as ‘a profession capable of attracting and retaining the nation’s best and brightest individuals’.36 Indeed, the Teacher Training Agency’s most recent

232 TEACHER TRAINING AT CAMBRIDGE

figures show an increase in entry to PGCE, but that does not necessarily mean that the quality of graduates is improving, nor that promising graduates will follow teaching careers.37 Corporate companies are able to offer high salaries to graduates throughout their careers, whereas the increase in teacher’s pay since 1997 is able to compete only with the starting salaries of many graduates.38 It is the ambivalent status of the teaching profession-now as then—which seems to be the major problem. The data IPPR produced on the Russell Group University graduates showed that the average percentage of first destinations from the listed elite universities who go on to do PGCEs is 2.1 per cent, compared with the average percentage from all universities of 3.7 per cent.39 Both Oxford and Cambridge and the London colleges in the Russell Group, produce low quantities of graduates taking PGCEs. If fewer graduates from elite universities are becoming teachers, then there are fewer role models to encourage school-leavers to apply to them. The government lays great stress on widening access to Oxbridge, but needs perhaps to look very closely at this area (and its historical antecedents) if it hopes to change this pattern.40 At the end of the twentieth century, as at the beginning, the majority of schoolteachers were women, yet, predictably (in 1999) the average annual salary received by women classroom teachers was £22,250; for men the figure was £24,360. The status of schoolteachers has also remained ambivalent; when compared with another professional group, say that of general practitioners, it is worth noting that the average income of a general practitioner is 80 per cent more than that of a male teacher. Although, historically, teachers have been applauded for their altruism, in the face of a decade of disparagement from the government, it is hardly surprising that there is both a recruitment crisis and a crisis of retention. Brian Simon, writing in 1998, commented that ‘Teacher Training has never had a good press; while university education departments, with some exceptions, have seldom been highly regarded.’41 History repeatedly tells us (as witness the fallout from the Revised Code of 1862) that a belittled, bemused, underpaid and harassed-by-having-to-cram-for-examinations teaching body can never serve the next generation well, and consequently the nation’s educational needs. Schools need teachers of the highest calibre and creativity, and such talented people will not be retained within a system which crushes out of them the ideals with which they entered the teaching profession. The utopic visions of Browning and Hughes were predicated on the assumption that professionally prepared teachers would work and be rewarded by an educational system which respected their professional judgement. We can take it for granted that teachers are idealists; the pay and status of teachers slips year on year by comparison with other professionals. Browning and Hughes would have empathized with idealists today who express alarm about a growing climate within Cambridge of ‘brash, pro-

CONCLUSION 233

business triumphalism’. While the Faculty of Education has gained respect by achieving what the university values, nevertheless a graduate teacher today does not command the status or salary of fellow-professionals who go into almost any career which requires an equivalent amount of education. For example, Cambridge boasts that a MBA can expect a salary of £80,000 three years after graduation, which is certainly not going to be true of anyone starting out in the teaching profession.42 As one correspondent to the Cambridge Alumni Magazine sharply put it: ‘Apparently it is praiseworthy that the holder of a Cambridge MBA is worth the equivalent of four graduate teachers or nurses.’ A practicing teacher also comments, ‘If you’re enthusiastic enough, flexible enough, resilient enough and imbued with a love of your subject and of communicating it to young people, you might just make a half-decent teacher… If you can’t hack this challenge, there’s always law, medicine and the City …’.43 To sum up, Oscar Browning and Elizabeth Hughes have, for the most part, been prophets without honour, yet their initiatives make them the founding father and mother of teacher training in Cambridge, respectively of those studying an academic discipline and professional training simultaneously, and of those undertaking post-graduate training. They set off bravely on the long and tortuous road which led the University of Cambridge, at last, to recognize that teacher training is something it should adopt, esteem and promote to the best of its ability. NOTES 1. In fact at that time, even subjects such as a modern foreign language or history were considered avant garde. Browning was also at the forefront of history teaching at Cambridge. 2. Preface by Oscar Browning in Johann Friedrich Herbart, The Science of Education, p. vi. 3. Browning, ‘On Science Teaching in Schools’, p. 243. 4. Browning, Introduction to the History of Educational Theories, p. vii. 5. Elizabeth P.Hughes, unpublished letter, 4 February 1899. King’s College Archive, Cambridge. 6. Written examinations were used increasingly from the late nineteenth century by professional and would-be professional groups as a way of defining and certifying their expertise. Lawyers, doctors, chartered accountants, municipal engineers, architects, electrical engineers and veterinary surgeons were all setting their own examinations by 1900. See Alison Wolf, ‘Qualifications and Assessment’ in Aldrich (ed.), A Century of Education, chapter 10, p. 207. 7. It could be argued that the speed with which universities moved into teacher education had less to do with a zeal for education but more from enthusiasm for ‘a regular supply of students paid for out of public funds’ H.C.Dent, The Training of Teachers in England and Wales (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1977), p. 33.

234 TEACHER TRAINING AT CAMBRIDGE

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

Bottrall, Hughes Hall, p. 10. Browning, Memories of Later Years, p. 43. Cornford, Microcosmographica Academica, p. 41. The committee consisted of Reverend T.W.Sharpe, C.B., HM Senior Inspector of Schools (Chairman); Mr H.E.Oakley, HM Inspector of Training Colleges; Mr W. Scott Coward, HM Inspector of Training Colleges; Mr P.A.Barnett, HM Assistant Inspector of Training Colleges; Miss Hughes, Principal of the Cambridge Training College for Women; Mr G.N.Richardson, Director of the Oxford Day Training College; Miss Manley, Principal of the Stockwell Training College; Reverend G.W.ent, Principal of St Mark’s Training College, Chelsea; Mrs Bannister, Headmistress of the Pupil-Teacher Centre, Stockwell; Mr T.Clancy, Headmaster of the St John’s Roman Catholic School, Portsmouth; Mr W.H.Woodward, Principal of the Liverpool Day Training College and Lecturer on Education in Victoria University. For a more detailed explanation of women’s participation on this committee, see Wendy Robinson, ‘Sarah Jane Bannister and Teacher Training in Transition 1870–1918’ in Hilton and Hirsch (eds), Practical Visionaries, pp. 136–7. The letters in the following exchange are in the Oscar Browning Collection in King’s College Archives. Departmental Committee on the Pupil-Teacher System: Minutes of Evidence (1898) Minute 15,512. This seemingly misogynist attack by Browning on Hughes directly opposed sentiments he expressed elsewhere. In an obituary note he wrote about Miss Clough he stated:

The higher teaching of women is now a fact of such magnitude and importance at Cambridge, that it is difficult to imagine a time when it did not exist. If some criticisms might be made on its general effect upon the University, they do not deal with the drawbacks which evil prophets would have predicted for it. Its fault (if it has any) are not those which would have occurred to serious quidnuncs [definition: busybodies]. That several hundred young women should be attending the same lectures as undergraduates, should be coached by youthful Bachelors of Arts privately in their several subjects and there should not be a breath, I will not say of scandal, but even of ridicule, can only be due to the extraordinary good sense and judgement of those who have had the direction of the movement, and to none more than to Miss Clough. The plan grew from such small beginnings that no one conjectured the magnitude it would attain, and before it had reached dimensions which invited criticism, it had won such favours as to disarm it.

Educational Review, April, 1892 Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 351. 16. For example, schools of the Girls’ Public Day School Company (later to become the GPDST) which established ‘superior Day Schools at a moderate

CONCLUSION 235

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

cost for Girls of all classes above those provided for by the Elementary Education Act’ where girls were to be prepared for ‘such University and other Examinations as may be open to them’. Browning, Sixty Years, p. 263. Ibid., pp. 10–11. The members of the committee were E. Atkinson (Vice Chancellor), W.H.Bateson, B. F.Westcott, B.H.Kennedy, F.J.A.Hort, G.D.Liveing, James Stuart, G.F.Browne, H. Sidgwick, Oscar Browning, B.E.Hammond, W.E. Heitland, H.S.Foxwell. Archive of Education Department, Cambridge University Library Educ 1/6 ix. Training of Teachers Syndicate: Report of Mr Browning, Secretary to the Syndicate’ Educ 1/6 v.vi a. Searby, The Training of Teachers in Cambridge University, pp. 2–3. Oscar Browning, letter to Canon Barnett, 11 July 1898. Education Archives, Cambridge University Library. Ibid. Searby, The Training of Teachers in Cambridge University, pp. 33–4. Homerton College, run by the congregational Board of Education, moved from East London into the empty buildings of Cavendish College in Cambridge. Cavendish College had been created to take advantage of the university’s decision to allow non-collegiate students to take Tripos examinations. Cavendish College, built in 1876, was intended to accept boys from the highest grade schools at a lower cost than membership of a college would entail. Although it was recognized as a public hostel of the university, it went bankrupt and closed in 1891. See Simms, Homerton College for a full account of the Homerton story. See also Edwards, Women in Teacher Training Colleges. Searby, The Training of Teachers in Cambridge University, pp. 37–8; Peter Richards, ‘Education for All’, CAM: Cambridge Alumni Magazine Vol. 34 (Michaelmas Term 2001) (Cambridge, University of Cambridge, 2001), pp. 14–17. Although Homerton College was coeducational for the first two years of its establishment in Cambridge, from 1896 onwards it was women only. In 1978, after the establishment of the B.Ed. degree, it became coeducational again. Beryl Paston Brown, the Principal of Homerton from 1961, pushed through the move to coeducation. She was a graduate of Newnham College, where she had spent two years teaching before becoming the Principal of the City of Leicester Training College. Simms, Homerton College, p. 83. Simms explains:

The framework within which the academic work of the College was undertaken remained the examination of the Local Examinations Syndicate until 1951. The publication of the McNair Report Teachers and Youth Leaders, in 1944 revived the principle of ‘securing the integration, on an area basis, of the institutions which are to be responsible for the education and training of teachers’. Cambridge University…refused to accept a local

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responsibility. [It had refused in 1927 when the Board of Education had first suggested a regional group of colleges around a university on the grounds that it claimed national status.] The ten colleges of East Anglia were associated in an area training organisation, the Cambridge Institute of Education, directly funded by, and responsible to the Ministry of Education. It had no formal link with the University. Its first examination of students took place in 1952.

Homerton College, p. 66. 30. For the first two years of their four-year course Homerton students would be taught by the lecturers of Homerton College, preparing for an intermediate examination which would admit them to the second two years of the course. They would take their main subject Tripos papers at the end of the third year of their course and Education papers at the end of the fourth year. The college would present them for their degrees in the Senate House. This form became the Education Tripos of the university. 31. This is still the case. See, for example, Cambridge Evening News Friday, 14 December 2001, ‘Top Marks for Teacher Training’, p. 13 which reports that the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) awarded the Faculty of Education, Cambridge, the top marks in all four inspected subjects—the teaching of mathematics, English, geography and art. 32. This means that Homerton College can take students reading for any Tripos. It can take on research students for any subject. It has a fellowship for its governing body. 33. The scale runs from 1 up to 5*. The breakdown of the RAE results is that the School got a 5 (b) and Homerton a 5 (c). 5 is the level of excellence (only 5* would be higher). The (b) and (c) refer only to the percentage of researchactive staff. When you consider that the bulk of Homerton staff are engaged in initial teacher training in a very hands-on way, this is particularly impressive. 34. Hughes, Minutes of Evidence, Bryce Commission, p. 487. 35. Steve Haines and Joe Hallgarten, ‘From Ivory Towers to Chalkface: Recruiting Teachers from the Elite Universities’, in Martin Johnson and Joe Hallgarten (eds), From Victims of Change to Agents of Change: The Future of the Teaching Profession (London, Institute of Public Policy Research, 2002). 36. Estelle Morris, 2001, quoted by Haines and Hallgarten, ibid., p. 153. 37. In an article called Teacher Training Colleges Can’t Fill Vacancies’ by Tracy MacVeigh and Bob Osman in the Sunday Observer (28 July 2002; News section, p. 9) they comment: With just six weeks to go before the start of the new academic year, attempts to attract more graduates into the profession have shown few signs of success. According to the latest figures from the Graduate Teacher Training Registry, 64 per cent of all post-graduate secondary school teacher training courses in England remain unfilled… In Scotland, where far more

CONCLUSION 237

attractive pay and conditions exist for teachers the problems are far less severe. Just 26 per cent of courses have vacancies for this September.’

38. Teachers’ pay has increased by 25 per cent since 1997 (DfES 2001c). 39. The Russell Group is a self-appointed body that claims to represent research institutions of the highest quality in the country. Two of this group— Liverpool and Manchester—did not return data, so Haines and Hallgarten could not include them in their statistical graphs. 40. For example, the New Labour government has designed its Fast Track programme with exactly this in mind, although only 110 graduates were recruited in 2001. 41. Brian Simon, A Life in Education (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1998), p. 15. 42. See letters from Peter Coates and David Byram-Wingfield in CAM (Cambridge Alumni Magazine), Easter 2002. 43. Letter from Martin Gold, CAM, Easter 2002.

SELECT TIMELINE

1816 1818 1832 1833 1835 1837 1839 1846 1851 1852 1856

1859 1860 1861 1861–63 1864 1868 1869 1870 1871 1873 1874

First Inquiry into Popular Elementary Education Brougham Report (Follow-Up Report to 1816) Reform Act Roebuck Education Bill (1st Grant for Education) Royal Commission Report on Popular Education (Roebuck Report) Oscar Browning born in London Grammar School Act Pupil-Teacher System introduced by Kay-Shuttleworth Browning entered Eton Elizabeth Hughes born in Camarthen, Wales Browning left Eton; enters King’s College as undergraduate; Education Department created by Parliament Royal Commission Report on Popular Education (Lowe Report); Browning became a Fellow of King’s Browning became Assistant Master at Eton Report of Newcastle Commission Clarendon Commission Investigations on Public Schools (released 1864) Royal Commission Report on Schools (Lowe Report) Public School Act of 1868 Girton College for women founded; Public Schools Act; Taunton Commission Report Elementary Education Act of 1870 Newnham College for women founded (at Hitchen); religious tests abolished at universities University Extension programme begins Report of Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge

239

1875 1876–81 1878 1880 1881–85 1884 1885 1886 1888 1891 1893

1894 1895 1897 1898 1899 1902 1905 1915–18 1916 1918

1920

Browning dismissed from Eton Hughes was Assistant Mistress at Cheltenham Ladies’ College Teacher Training Syndicate established at Cambridge; London University opened degrees to women Mundella’s Education Act: Compulsory Elementary Education Hughes attends Newnham College Opening of Toynbee Hall (December 1884) Cambridge Training College for women founded in Cambridge Browning’s Introduction to Educational Theories published Cross Commission Report Cambridge University Day Training College for Men founded University Extension Lecture Syndicate accepted lecturer applications from women; registration of teachers; Hughes travels to France, America and Canada to study training college systems Bryce Commission Report (Hughes called as expert witness) New CTC permanent building completed; name of college changed to Cambridge Teachers’ College for Women Hughes appointed to Departmental Committee on PupilTeacher System Browning proposed scheme for CUDTC secondary education Hughes resigns and settles in Barry, South Wales Balfour-Morant Education Act; Hughes visiting lecturer at Japanese women’s colleges Browning retired from King’s College responsibilities and DTC Hughes commandant of the VAD Hospital Browning moves to Rome Hughes started first British Red Cross Camp; awarded MBE; Member of governing body of University of Wales and of University College, Cardiff; British women get vote with restrictions Hughes awarded Honorary LL.D. (Wales)

240 TEACHER TRAINING AT CAMBRIDGE

1923 1923 1925

Browning awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE); death of Browning Browning’s Memories of Later Years published Death of Hughes

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PARLIAMENTARY REPORTS Brougham Report, 1816. Report of the Royal Commission on the Education of the Lower Orders in the Metropolis. Newcastle Report, 1861. Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the State of Popular Education in England. Clarendon Report, 1864. Report of the Commissioners on Public Schools and Colleges. Taunton Report, 1868. Report of the Royal Commission known as the Schools Inquiry Commission. Cross Report, 1888. Report of the Royal Commission on the Elementary Education Acts. Bryce Report, 1895. Report of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education.

PRIMARY SOURCES FOR OSCAR BROWNING Archives Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation British Library, London Department of Education, University Archives, Cambridge University Library Eton College Archives Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Austin, Texas King’s College Modern Archive, King’s College, Cambridge London Metropolitan Archive, Farringdon, London MUDD Library, Yale University Toynbee Hall Archives, Whitechapel, London Official Publications Reports from Commissioners: Public Schools and Colleges, Clarendon Report, 1864. Report of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education 1894, University Memoranda, pp. 138–44 and part 3, p. 205.

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Key published writings by Oscar Browning Herbart, J.F., The Science of Education, Preface by Oscar Browning (Boston, MA, D.C. Heath, 1900), p. vi. ‘On Science Teaching in Schools’, The Chemical News and Journal of Physical Science 17 (1868), pp. 243–4. ‘Considerations on the Reform of the Statutes of King’s College, Cambridge’ (1877) Cambridge University Library. Cam.c.877.17. ‘Report of the Teaching Memorials Syndicate’ (12 June 1878) CUL Educ Arch. ‘Address on Secondary Education delivered at the Social Science Congress Birmingham, 1884’, CUL Cam.c.884.8. Aspects of Education (New York, Industrial Education Association, 1888). An Introduction to the History of Educational Theories (New York, E.L. Kellogg & Co., 1888). ‘Arnold and Arnoldism’, Education, A Journal for the Scholastic World 1 (1890), pp. 309–10. ‘Presidential Address to the Association of Principals and Lecturers in Training Colleges under Government Inspection’ (December 1898), CUL Educ Arch. ‘Introduction’, Maia: Journal of the Cambridge University Day Training College 1 (October 1902), CUL Educ Arch. ‘Letter to W.G. Bell’ (26 October 1909) CULUA Educ Arch. Memories of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge and Elsewhere (London, John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York, John Lane Company, 1910). ‘Letter to Sidney Colvin’ (1 January 1918), Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation. ‘Letter to The [London] Sunday Times’ (12 February 1922). Memories of Later Years (London, T.Fisher Unwin, 1923).

PRIMARY SOURCES FOR ELIZABETH HUGHES Archives Cheltenham Ladies’ College Department of Education, University Archives, Cambridge University Library Hughes Hall, Cambridge King’s College Modern Archive, King’s College, Cambridge Newnham College, Cambridge Northampton Roman Catholic Diocesan Archives Perse School for Girls, Cambridge Official Publications Report of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education 1894, Minutes of Evidence, pp. 469–90, 201 and 207. Report of the Departmental Committee on the Pupil-Teacher System 1897, pp. 482–6. ‘Report of the Degrees for Women Syndicate in Cambridge University’ Reporter, 23 February 1897, pp. 586–605.

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Key published writings by Elizabeth Hughes ‘The Higher Education of Girls in Wales’, paper given at the Eisteddfod held in Liverpool in 1884, pp. 40–62. ‘The Slojd System’ in School Board Chronicle, 9 February 1889. ‘Miss Clough, First Principal of Newnham College’, Educational Review, April 1892. ‘The Future of Welsh Education’, Transactions of the Cymmrodorian Society 1894/ 95. ‘A National Education for Wales’, Young Wales Vol. 1 (Aberystwyth, 1895). ‘The Training of Teachers’, Education in the Nineteenth Century, R.D. Roberts (ed.), Secretary for Lectures of the Local Examinations and Lectures Syndicate (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1901), pp. 171–92. Published lectures given in August 1900 in Education section of the Cambridge University Extension Summer Meeting. ‘Letters to My Students’ in Cambridge Training College Gild Newsletters 1891– 1906. Introduction to Christabel Osborn and Florence B.Low (eds), Manuals of Employment for Educated Women, No. 1, Secondary Teaching (London, Walter Scott, n.d.). The Probation System of America issued by the Howard Association, London. ‘The Teaching of English to Japanese in Japan’, English Teachers’ Magazine (Tokyo, 1907) two instalments: June, pp. 3–6 and December, pp. 9–14.

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Rich, R.W. The Training of Teachers in England and Wales During the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn (London, Cedric Chivers, 1972). Ridley, A.E. Frances Mary Buss and Her Work for Education (London and New York, Longman’s, Green & Co., 1895). Rothblatt, S. The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (London, Faber, 1968). Ruskin, J. Time and Tide and Munera Pulveris (New York, Macmillan, 1928), pp. 5–153. Scott, M.A. The Perse School for Girls: The First Hundred Years 1881–1981 (Cambridge, privately printed, 1981). Searby, P. The Training of Teachers in Cambridge University: The First Sixty Years, 1879–1939 (Cambridge, Brookside Resources Centre, Cambridge University Department of Education, 1982). Selleck, R.J.W. The New Education: The English Background 1870–1914 (London, Pitman, 1968). Sidgwick, E. Health Statistics of Women Students of Cambridge and Oxford and of Their Sisters (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1890). Sidgwick, A. and Sidgwick, E.M. Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir (London, Macmillan, 1906). Simms, T.H. Homerton College 1695–1978: From Dissenting Academy to Approved Society in the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, published by the Trustees of Homerton, 1979). Simon, B. Studies in the History of Education (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1960). Simon, B. A Life in Education (London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1998) Spencer, H. Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (Paterson, NJ, Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1963). Stewart, W.A.C. and McCann, W.P. The Educational Innovators 1750–1880 (London, Macmillan, 1967). Stockton, F.R. Rudder Grange (London, Everett, c. 1913). Strachey, R. The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (London, G.Bell & Sons, 1928). Sturt, M. The Education of the People: A History of Primary Education in England and Wales in the Nineteenth Century (London, Routledge &. Kegan Paul, 1967). Thomas, J.B. British Universities and Teacher Education: A Century of Change (Lewes, Falmer Press, 1990). Tuke, M.J. A History of Bedford College for Women (London, New York and Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1939). Vicinus, M. Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850– 1920 (London, Virago, 1985). Watson, N. And Their Works Do Follow Them: The Story of North London Collegiate School 1850–2000 (London James & James, 2000). Wilde, O. More Letters of Oscar Wilde R. Hart-Davis (ed.) (London, John Murray, 1985). Woodward, Sir L. The Age of Reform (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1938). Woolf, V. A Room of One’s Own (New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957). Wortham, H.E. Oscar Browning (London, Constable, 1927).

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Wortham, H.E. Victorian Eton and Cambridge: Being the Life and Times of Oscar Browning (London, Arthur Barker, 1956).

ESSAYS AND ARTICLES Cook-Gumperz, J. ‘Literacy and Schooling: An Unchanging Equation?’ in J.CookGumperz (ed.) The Social Construction of Literacy (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 16–44. de Bellaigue, C. ‘The Development of Teaching as a Profession for Women Before 1870’, Historical Journal Vol. 44, No. 4 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 963–88. Delamont, S. ‘The Contradictions in Ladies’ Education’ in S. Delamont and L. Duffin (eds) The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World (London, Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 134, 163. Delamont, S. ‘Distant Dangers and Forgotten Standards: Pollution Control Strategies in the British Girls’ School, 1860–1920’, Women’s History Review Vol. 2, No. 2 (1993), pp. 233–51. Dyhouse, D. ‘Social Darwinistic Ideas and the Development of Women’s Education in England, 1880–1920’, History of Education, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1976), pp. 41– 58. ‘Education of the Poor’, Edinburgh Review 17 (November 1810), pp. 58–89. Fitch, J.G. ‘Professional Training for Teachers’, Educational Review 3 (January 1892), pp. 117–22. Fowler, H. ‘Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick 1845–1936’ in E.Shils and C. Blacker (eds) Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 7–28. Gent, G.W. ‘On the Proposed Day Training Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge’, Educational Review 2 (1891), pp. 193–5. Haines, S. and Hallgarten, J. ‘From Ivory Towers to Chalkface: Recruiting Teachers from the Elite Universities’ in Martin Johnson and Joe Hallgarten (eds) From Victims of Change to Agents of Change: The Future of the Teaching Profession (London, Institute of Public Policy Research, 2002), pp, 150–64. Hughes M.V. ‘Pioneer Days in a Woman’s Teacher Training College’ in L.J. Lewis (ed.), Days of Learning: An Anthology of Passages from Autobiography for Student Teachers (London, Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 88–102. Jackson, W.W. ‘Day Training Colleges at Oxford and Cambridge’, Educational Review 1 (January 1892), pp. 136–42. Johnson, R. ‘Educational Policy and Social Control in Early Victorian England’, Past and Present 49 (1970), pp. 96–119. ‘Lancaster’s Improvements in Education’, Edinburgh Review 11 (October 1807), pp. 61–73. Lewis, R. ‘The Welsh Radical Tradition and the Ideal of a Democratic Popular Culture’ in E.F. Biagini (ed.) Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles 1865–1931 (cambridge, cambridge university press, 1996), pp. 325–40

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Marcus, J. ‘Book review of Ian Anstruthers’s Oscar Browning: A Biography in Victorian Studies Vol. 28, No. 3 (Spring 1985), pp. 556–8. Martin, J. An “Awful Woman”? The Life and Work of Mrs Bridges Adams, 1855– 1939’, Women’s History Review Vol. 8, No. 1 (1999), pp. 139–61. McBeth, M. ‘The Pleasure of Learning and the Tightrope of Desire: Teacher-Student Relationships and Victorian Pedagogy’ in J.Goodman and J.Martin (eds) Gender, Politics and the Experience of Education: An International Perspective (London, Woburn Press, 2002), pp. 46–72. McClellan, V.A. ‘Herbert Vaughan, The Cambridge Teachers’ Training Syndicate, and the Public Schools, 1894–1899’, Paedogogica Historia Vol. 15 (1975), pp. 16–38. McCullough, G. ‘Secondary Education’ in R.Aldrich (ed.) A Century of Education (London, Routledge Falmer, 2002), pp. 31–53. Mills, J.S. ‘Educational Endowments—A Letter to the Secretary of the Schools Inquiry Commission’ in J.M.Robson (ed.) Essays on Equality, Law and Education (Toronto, Toronto University Press, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 209–14. Mill, J.S. ‘Inaugural Address at St Andrews’ in J.M. Robson (ed.) Essays on Equality, Law and Education (Toronto, Toronto University Press, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1984), pp. 217–57. Ono, E. ‘E.P Hughes in Japan (1901–1902)’ in the Annual Collection of Essays and Studies Vol. 36, Faculties of Letters, Gakushin University (1989). Read, A. ‘The Cambridge Training College’ in Our Magazine (November 1888), p. 93–7. Sutherland, G. ‘The Movement for the Higher Education of Women: Its Social and Intellectual Contexts in England, c. 1840–80’ in P.J.Waller (ed.) Politics and Social Change in Modern Britain (Brighton, Harvester Press, 1987), pp. 91– 116. Sutherland, G. ‘Emily Davies, the Sidgwicks and the Education of Women in Cambridge’ in R. Mason (ed.) Cambridge Minds (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 34–47. Tuck, J. ‘From Day Training College to University Department of Education’ in D.E. Lomax (ed.) The Education of Teachers in Britain (1973), pp. 71–94. Warner, E. ‘Catholic Women’s College Cambridge’, The CrucibleVol. 2 (1907), pp. 69–79. Wilmot-Buxton, E.M. ‘Headmistresses in Conference’, The Crucible Vol. 8 (1912), pp 135–42. Woolf, V. ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in M.A. Leaska (ed.) The Virginia Woolf Reader (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1984), pp. 3–40. Young, M.S. ‘The Development of Secondary Training and Training Colleges’, in E.M.Hill (ed.) The Frances Mary Buss Schools Jubilee Record (London, Swan Sonnenscheim, 1900), pp. 139–49.

DISSERTATIONS AND UNPUBLISHED PAPERS McBeth, M. ‘The Tightrope of Desire: Lessons from Oscar Browning’’. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (City University of New York, 2001).

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Strathern, M. ‘Frances Mary Buss: Her Role in the Education of Women’ (Girton College, Cambridge, October, 1999). Widdowson, F. Going Up Into the Next Class: Women and Elementary Teacher Training (London, Women’s Research and Resources Centre Publications, 1980).

INDEX

Numbers in italics refer to illustrations Aberdare, Lord, 128n10 Aberdare Report, 124, 125 Aberystwyth: University College of Wales, 192 Academy, 180 Acton, Lord, 4 Ainger, A.C., 51 America, 204-204, 206 Anglicans/Church of England, xiii, xiv, xv, xv, xxiv n24, 122, 123, 160; Queen’s College as Anglican foundation, xix, xxviiin45, 108, 165 Anstruther, Ian, 2-2, 18, 22, 40, 53, 54, 105n65, 179 Apostles, 22, 178 Archer, R.L., 83, 86 Arnott Scholarship for Sciences, 132 Arthur, 4, 9-11n10 Ashley, Lord see Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Association for Promoting the Education of Girls in Wales, 197 Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women in Cambridge, 114 Association of Headmistresses 113 Association of Principles and Lecturers in Training Colleges, 86, 221 BA in Education Studies, 229 B.Ed degree, 228 Balfour, Eleanor see Sidgwick (née Balfour), Eleanor

Balfour-Morant bill, xxiv Balliol College, Oxford, 72 Bangor, 124, 188-5; University College of North Wales, 192 Barnes, Professor Earl, 202 Barnett, Canon Samuel A., 67, 72, 74, 76, 77, 82-83, 225 Barnwell, P.J., 103n54 Barnwell area, 153 Barry, 196, 207, 208 Barry Education Week, 207-4 Barry Twentieth Century Club, 206-3 Bath, 113 ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, 204 Beale, Dorothea, 108, 114, 117, 122, 160 Bedford College, xix, xxviii n45, 108, 132, 141, 165, 166, 168, 169, 190 Bell, Reverend Andrew, xiii Bell, W.G., 71, 99 Bell, Walter, 153, 174 Bellaigue, Christina de, 117n1 Benson, Arthur C, 2, 99, 178, 183 Berry, Mr, 177 Bexhill-on-Sea, 100 Bird, Isabella, 202-9 Birmingham, 71, 175, 190 Bishopsgate Training College for Women (later Maria Grey College), 114, 174, 181 Blandford, F.G., 83 Bloomsbury, 4 Board of Education, 151, 176, 199 Board of Education Act (1899), xxx n73 251

252 TEACHER TRAINING AT CAMBRIDGE

Board of Trade, 153 Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith, 67n15, 108, 108, 109, 110, 117n9, 119n25, 170n2; ‘Middle Class Schools for Girls’, 109 Bottrall, Margaret, 181, 182, 215 Brett, Reginald, Lord Esher, 57 Briggs, Asa, 76 Brighton, 113 Bristol, 190 British and Foreign School Society, xiii, xiv, xxivn18 British Anti-Slavery campaign, 108 Brookside, 227 Brougham, Lord Henry, xii, xiii, xiv, xxiv n10, xxivn18, 109 Brougham Committee, xiii, xiv Brown, Beryl Paston, 228, 235n27 Browne, Canon G.F., 130, 148 Browning, Mariana (OB’s sister), 180 Browning, Mina (later Mina Wortham; OB’s sister), 180 Browning, Oscar: introduction, ix-x, xi, xxiv, 2-12; impact of student life on teaching of, 13-26; educational zeitgeist and pedagogical influences, 27-38; teaches at Eton, 39-50; dismissed from Eton, 50-53, 179; Fellow of King’s College, 53-68, 172-70; and TTS, x, xiv, 69-9, 114, 130, 173-71, 181, 182, 223-20; and CUDTC, 74-100, 150, 175-3, 214, 218, 221-18, 225-2; in Rome, 100-8; death, 101; relationship with EH, 170, 172–82, 200, 215–19; concluding discussion about, 211, 213, 214, 215–19, 223–20, 225–2, 229, 231, 232; illustrations, 7, 44, 66, 94; Writings: Aspects of Education, 35; History of Educational Theories, 28, 35; quoted, 29, 35–5, 213;

Memories of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge and Elsewhere, 13; quoted, 13–14, 15, 22–3, 52, 57, 58, 70, 74–2, 97, 98, 100, 101, 174– 2; Memories of Later Years, 215; quoted, 101 Bruges, 180 Bryant, Sophie, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 132–31, 137, 142, 145n9, 153, 155, 192, 199, 224 Bryant, Dr William Hicks, 132 Bryce, James, 199, 209n11 Bryce Commission, xxiv, 125, 152, 160, 173, 176, 199 Bryn Mawr College, 205 Burn, Mrs, 153 Buss, Frances Mary, xix, xxviii n47 and n48, 108, 110, 113–11, 115, 119n18, 134, 181, 199; and CTC, xix, 114, 116–15, 131– 30, 140, 142, 155, 176, 194, 224 Buss, Reverend Septimus, 155 Butler, Josephine, 110 Butler, Montague, 101 CTC see Cambridge Training College for Women CUDTC see Cambridge University Day Training College Caius (Gonville and Caius) College, Cambridge, 134, 153, 191 Caldecott, A., 74–3 Carmarthen, 120, 121 Cambridge Alumnae Magazine, 232 Cambridge Higher Local exams, 122, 123 Cambridge Training College for Women (CTC): and Buss, xix, 114, 116–15, 131–30, 137, 142, 155, 176, 194, 224; context of, x, 108–12; from foundation to EH’s departure, 114–15, 130–56, 160, 161–60, 164– 2, 166, 169–7, 176, 177, 187–4, 192, 194, 196–3, 202, 214, 224; illustrations, 131, 135, 159;

INDEX

OB’s involvement in, 181–9; Old Students’ Gild, 150; resignation of EH, 192; sends wreath for EH’s funeral, 208; subsequent history, 227; brief mentions, 125, 127, 155, 173, 174, 175, 190, 198, 199, 204, 204, 206, 207; see also Gild Newsletter Cambridge University: appetite for experiment, 130; CTC recognized as institution of, 227; and Catholic students, 167; EH studies at, 122,121; Faculty of Education, x, xi, 228, 229, 230, 232, 235n31; OB studies at, 22–4; OB’s career at, x, 52, 53–100; power over city of Cambridge, 187; Senate, 69, 74, 74, 153, 191, 228; and social anthropology, 204; and teacher training, ix,xi, 69–8, 114, 116, 153, 169–7, 214, 227–5, 230, 231, 232 see also Cambridge Day Training College; Teacher Training Syndicate; and women, 111, 191–8, 196n200, 227; see also Oxbridge; names of colleges Cambridge University Day Training College (CUDTC): developments before founding of, 69–74; from foundation to OB’s departure from 74–100, 150, 175–3, 214, 224– 22; last years of, 227; subject of dispute between OB and EH, 216–18; brief mentions, 22, 33, 103n54, 155, 173, 178, 181, 182 Camden School for Girls, xxviii n47 and n48, 119n18 Card, Tim, 15, 25n17 Cardiff, 124;

253

University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, 192; University ofWales and of University College, 198 Catholics, xiv, 160–68 Cavendish, Lucy (Lady Frederick Cavendish), 199, 209n13 Cavendish College, Cambridge, 130, 151, 235n25 Cavendish Square college, London, 168, 169, 170 Charterhouse, 40 Cheltenham Ladies College, 108, 116, 122, 160 Chicago, 190, 204 China, 205 Christ’s College, Cambridge, 155, 172 Church Missionary Society, 205 Church of England see Anglicans/ Church of England Clare College, Cambridge, 134 Clarendon Commission/Report, xx, 39, 40, 41–42, 52n4 Clough, Anne Jemima, 110, 111, 116, 123, 130, 131, 140, 148, 155, 172, 181, 190, 223–20, 233n15 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 123 Clough, Blanche Athena, 155 Cobden Scholarship, 123 College of Preceptors, xix-xx, 111, 113 Collegers, 14, 15, 17, 24n5 Colvin, Sidney, 21 Committee on the Pupil-Teacher System, 200, 216, 233n11 Companies Act, 153 Conan sisters, 133 Conservatives, xiii, xv Contagious Diseases Acts, 187, 194n4 Cornford, F.M.: Microcosmographia Academica, 84, 139, 215 Cornhill Magazine, 39 Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 134 Cory, William Johnson, 19–22, 25n19, 25–6n21, 26n25 and n27, 27, 42, 49, 51, 52, 97, 178, 184n22; ‘Hints for Eton Masters’, 20, 26n25 Costello, Mr, 202

254 TEACHER TRAINING AT CAMBRIDGE

Courthope Bowen, Mr, 86, 144 Cowper-Temple clause, xx—xxii Crofton, Miss, 130 Crofton Cottages, 130, 131, 131–30, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 140, 143, 148, 197 Cross, Richard Assheton, 1st Viscount, xxii, xxx n68 Cross Commission/Report, xxii-xxiii, xxiv Crouzet, François, xviii-xix Cunningham, Dr, 177 Curtis, S.J.: History of Education in Great Britain, xv, xv Curzon, George (later Lord Curzon), 42–6, 44, 105n65 Cymmrodorian Society, 197 Daily News, 179 Dakyns, Graham, 178 Dale, Alfred, 153 Dansey, 180 Dansey, Colonel (father of above), 180 Davies, Bessie, 134, 140 Davies, Emily, 111, 113, 117, 123, 126, 148, 170n2, 187, 191 Davis, Emily Jane see Pfeiffer (née Davis), Emily Jane Day, Miss, 153 Delamont, Sara, 189 Denbigh, Countess of, 161, 163 Dent, H.C.: The Educational System of England and Wales, xiv-xv Department of Education and Science, 228 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes, 83 Donelan, Anne M., 161–60, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168 Doreck, Beata, 113 Douglas, Lord Alfred (Bosie), 11n13, 180 Dover, K.J., 178 Drapers’ Company, 78, 155 Drawing Room Committee, 142 Drumlangrig, Viscount, 12n13

Durham, University of, 110, 190 Durnford, Walter, 93–94, 99 Eaden Lilley, W., 155 Eden Street School, 140,139, 152 Edinburgh Review, i, xii, xxiv n8, 31, 32 Education, Board of see Board of Education Education Act (1870), xx-xxii, 199 Education Act (1902), xxiv, xxx n75, 199, 200 Education and Science, Department of, 228 Education Bill (1833), xiv Education Department, xv, xxiii, xxiv, 72, 74, 175 Education Reform League, 74 Educational Review, 211 Educational Times, xix Eisteddfod, 124, 125, 128n11 Elementary Education Bill (1870), xx Eliot, George (Marian Lewes), 28, 61, 67n15, 178, 181 Elsden, Jane, 187 Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 148, 155 Endowed Schools Act 1869, 110, 152, 177, 184n19 Endowed Schools Commission, 110 English Sub-Committee on Women’s Education, 202 English Teachers’ Magazine, The, 205 English Woman’s Journal, 109 Esher, Reginald Brett, Lord, 57 Eton College: fictional account of, 25n15; and King’s College, 13, 14, 15, 24n5, 39, 113; OB as pupil at, 13–22, 24, 27; OB as teacher at, 39–50; OB dismissed from, 50–53, 53, 172, 179; brief mentions, 2, 5, 9n4, 11nll, 54, 90, 91, 97, 181, 223 Eton Collegers, 14, 15, 17, 24n5 Evans, W.G., 188, 189, 197

INDEX

Evening Continuation Schools, 198 Exeter College, Oxford, 72 Factory Act (1833), xv, xxiv n21; revised (1844), xv Fawcett, W.M., 153 Ferrers, H.N., 82–83 Finsbury Training College for Men, 144, 175 First World War, 207 Fishmongers’ Company, 78 Fitch, Sir Joshua G., 110, 152, 153, 158n17, 163, 197; ‘Professional Training for Teachers’, 92, 211 Fletcher, S.S.F, 83, 87, 89–7 Footlights, 62 Forster, E.M., 9n10, 11n11 Forster, W.E., xx, xxixn59 andn61 Fox, Charles, 78–6, 227 Freire, Paolo,53n27 French Revolution, 31 Froebel Society, 113 GBI (Governesses Benevolent Institution), 108 Gateshead, 113 Gent, George W., 80–8 Germany: Women’s International Congress, 200 Gild Newsletter, 150, 155, 192, 196–3, 206 Girls’ Public Day School Company (GPDSC; later Trust), 113, 113, 119n17, 190, 199, 215, 233n16 Girton College, Cambridge: Buss’s links with, 113; contrasted with Newnham, 111; and degrees, 191, 227; establishment of, x, 111, 167; Gurney’s connection with, 119n24; intellectual demands at, 111, 113, 126; permanent buildings acquired, 113, 130; and religion, 170n2;

255

teacher training in relation to students at, 114, 116, 133, 190, 224; brief mentions, 2, 4, 12n15, 74, 108, 123, 134, 139, 140, 189–6, 214 Glamorgan county education committee, 198 Glamorganshire, 207 Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, 134, 153, 191 Goodman, Joyce: Women, Educational Policy-Making and Administration in England, x Gorst, Sir John, 202, 209n25 Governesses Benevolent Institution (GBI), 108 Graham, Sir James, xv, xxivn24 Granta, 62–64, 67–6n23 Grey, Maria Shirreff, 113, 113, 119n17 and n22 Gurney, Mary, 113, 119n17 and n24; ‘Middle-Class Schools for Girls’, 113 Guthrie, Murray, 62–64 Haddon, Professor Alfred, 202, 204, 209n27 Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure, 38n16 Harrop, Sylvia: Women, Educational Policy—Making and Administration in England, x Harrow, 40 Hart-Dyke, Sir W., 74 Hastings, 101 Headmasters’ Conference, 175 Henry VI, King, 13, 14 Hickson, Alisdare, 21, 26n27 Higher Normal College for Men, Tokyo, 204 Higher Normal College for Women, 204 Highgate, 132 Hill, Dr, 153 Hilton, Mary: Practical Visionaries, x Hirsch, Pam:

256 TEACHER TRAINING AT CAMBRIDGE

introduction (co-author), ix; section by, 106–211; conclusion (co-author), 211–31; Practical Visionaries, x Hitchin, 9, 187 Hollis, Christopher, 20–21 Holy Child Convent, London, 165, 168 Home and Colonial Institute, xxviii n45 Homerton College, xxiv n24, 151–9, 227, 228–5, 235n25, n27, n29, n30 and n32 Honda, Masujiro, 204 Hope House, Taunton, 122 Hopkins, Daisy, 187 Hornby, Dr, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49–8, 51– 52, 53, 223 Howe, Julia Ward, 204 Hugel, Baron Anatole von, 167 Hughes, Anne Phillips (EH’s mother), 120, 121 Hughes, Arthur (EH’s brother), 196 Hughes, Dorothea Price (EH’s niece), 120 Hughes, Elizabeth: introduction, ix, x, xi; educational context of career, 106– 14; making of, 120–26; accepts post of principal of CTC, 116–15; as principal of CTC, 130–57, 214, 224; and Catholic students, 160–68; relationship with OB, 170, 172–82, 200, 215–19; dangers and disappointments, 187– 8; resigns from post at CTC, 192–9; legacy of, 196–207; death, 208; concluding discuttions about, 211, 213, 214, 215–19, 224, 226, 229, 231, 232; illustrations, 135, 159, 193; Writings: ‘By a Woman of Leisure’, 196;

‘Forward’ for programme for Barry Education Week, 207–4; ‘The Future of Welsh Education with special Reference to the Education of Girls’, 124; ‘ The Higher Education of Girls’, 125–6; ‘Letter to My Students’, 130, 150–8; ‘Opinion on Reforms of Kajibashi Prison’, 204; ‘ To My Old Students’, 206 Hughes, Frances (EH’s sister), 188–5 Hughes, Hugh Price (EH’s brother), 121–20, 176–4, 188 Hughes, Dr John (EH’s father), 120–19 Hughes Hall, 157n20, 181, 207, 215, 215, 227 IPPR (Institute of Public Policy Research), 230, 231 Iliffe, J.W., 83, 174, 183n9, 199, 216, 217, 219, 220 Imperial Education Assembly, 205 Indonesia, 206 Infant School Society, xxivn10 Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR), 230, 231 Ipswich, 113 Jackson, W.W., 72–74 Janes, Emily, 198 Japan, 204–205 Jasui, Miss, 204 Jesus College, Oxford, 72 Jex-Blake, Miss, 190 Johnson, Mrs A.H., 192 Johnson, William see Cory, William Johnson Jones, Bessie, 134 Jones, Constance, 130–9, 153, 160n21 Journal of Education, 72, 155, 183, 186n51, 198 Kajibashi Prison, 204 Kay-Shuttleworth, Sir James, xv, xviii, xxiii, xxiv n27 Kett, Messrs, 155

INDEX

Keynes, J.M.,185 Keynes Papers, 66 King’s College, Cambridge: and Eton, 13 14, 15, 24n5, 39, 113; OB as student at, 22–4; OB as Fellow at, 4, 52, 53–68, 172– 70; OB’s work for CUDTC based at, 83, 84; brief mentions, 5, 12n11, 74, 97, 99, 134, 155, 180 King’s College, London, 108 Knatchbull-Hugessen, Edward, H., 179, 184n29 Knightley, Lady Louisa, 200 Kokumin-shinbun, 204 Kumamoto, 205 Kyoiku-jikken-kai, 204 Labour, 231 Lancaster, Joseph, xiii Langham Place Group, 109 Latymer, Lord, 2 Leeds, 190 Leslie, Shane: The Oppidan, 25n15 Lewes, Marian see Eliot, George Litchfield, Miss, 141 Little-Go, 79, 111, 113, 177, 221 Liveing, Professor George, 148, 153, 155 Liverpool, 113, 125, 190, 204 Local Examinations Syndicate, 148; Building, 148, 153 Loch, Miss, 174 London, 2, 9n4, 76, 113, 124, 132, 142, 150, 168, 177, 194, 206; University,113, 132, 190, 231 see also names of colleges Lowden, Miss, 207 Lowe, Robert, xvii, xviii, xx, xxviii n35 and n37, 32 Lubenow, W.C.: The Cambridge Apostles, 62 Luxmoore, H.E., 51 MBA, 232

257

Macartney, Anne, 76 McBeth, Mark, x, 181, 184n22 and n30; introduction (co-author), ix-xxx; section by, xxxi–105; conclusion (co-author), 211–31 MacCarthy, Desmond, 59–9 Mack, Edward C., 25n18 Maia, 85, 178 Malaysia, 206 Manchester, 150; University College of, 190 Mandeville, Dr Robert, 31, 32, 37n10 and nll; ‘An Essay on Charity and Charity Schools’, 31, 37n10 Manuals of Employment for Educated Women (ed. Osborn and Law), 200–7 Maria Grey College see Bishopsgate Training College (later Maria Grey College) Marshall, Professor Alfred, 177, 189 Mary Raphael, Mother (Miss Paley), 168 Massachusetts, 204 Matterhorn, 196 Mechanics’ Institutes,xxiv n10 Mediterranean, 215 Merchant Taylors (company), 155 Merchant Taylors’ School, 40 Merton College, Oxford, 72 Methodists, 120, 122, 160, 179, 197 Mill, John Stuart, i, 28, 29, 32–3 Minister of Education, xxiv, xxx n73 Montaigne, 52–53 1n9 Month, The, 164, 166 Morant, Robert (later Sir), xxvi Morley Memorial School, 151–9 Morris, Christopher: King’s College: A Short History, 22, 26n21, 56 Mortmain, law of, 153 Mullinger, James Bass, 137 Mundella, Anthony, 153, 158n16 NLCS see North London Collegiate School for Girls

258 TEACHER TRAINING AT CAMBRIDGE

NUT see National Union of Teachers National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church (National Society), xiii, xiv, xxiv n18 National Union for the Education of Girls of all Classes above the Elementary, 110 see also Women’s Education Union National Union of Teachers (NUT), xxii, 198–5; Ladies’ Committee, 199 National Union of Women Workers, 198, 200 Neville, Edith, 202 New College, Oxford, 72 New Labour, 231 Newcastle Commission/Report, xv-xvii, xx, xxviii n35, 108, 126 Newnham College, Cambridge: and Browning’s lectures, 172; Club Newsletter, 139; contrasted with Girton, 111; and degrees, 191, 196n20, 227; EH at, 116, 122, 123, 124, 139; establishment of, x, 22, 111, 122– 21, 167; and Homerton College, 228; intellectual demands at, 111; no formal responsibility for CTC, 131, 148; non-sectarian, 160; permanent buildings acquired, 130; teacher training in relation to students at, 114, 116, 133, 190, 224; brief mentions, 2, 4, 12nl5, 74, 110, 140, 189–6, 191, 199, 204, 214, 223 Newnham Croft, 130, 151 see also Crofton Cottages Newnham village, 134, 139 Noel, Roden, 178 Nonconfomists, xiii, xv, xv n24, xxviii n45, 160 197 see also Methodists; Unitarians Norris, Rev. J.P., 108

North, Mr Justice, 153 North London Collegiate School for Girls (NLCS), xxviii n47 and n48, 108, 110, 113, 114, 116, 119n18, 132, 133, 134, 137, 140, 142, 143 North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women, 110 Northampton, Diocese of, 166 Norwich, 113 Nottingham, 113 O’Connor, T.P., 5–6 Ollard, Richard, 26 Oppidans, 14 Osborn, Violet, 188–5 Owen, Robert, xxiv n10 Owst, G.R., 227 Oxbridge, xix,xxiii, 40, 76, 77, 80, 83, 231 see also Cambridge University; Oxford University Oxford, 113 Oxford Day Training College, 224–21 Oxford Hebdomadal council, xxiv Oxford Society of Home Students, 192 Oxford University, xxiv, 29, 72, 76, 77, 80, 83, 90, 190, 231 see also Oxbridge PGCE (Post-Graduate Certificate of Education), 215, 227, 229, 231 Parliament, x, xiv, xv-xv, xvii Park Street Higher Grade School, 140, 152, 164, 166 Parkes, Bessie, 109 Pater, Walter, 61, 67n15 Payne, Joseph, xix, xx, 111–10, 113 Pearson, Miss, 196 Pembroke College, Cambridge, 134 Penny Encyclopedia, xxv n10 Penny Magazine, xxv n10 Perse, Stephen, 152 Perse School, 140, 152 Perse School for Girls, 131, 152 Peterhouse, Cambridge, 134 Pfeiffer, Edward, 152, 153

INDEX

Pfeiffer (née Davis), Emily Jane, 152, 153, 158–7n19; Women and Work, 153 Pfeiffer Trustees/bequest, 152–50, 153, 224 Plato, 178; Phaedrus, 178 Pointon, Miss, 207 Political Society, 56–7, 62, 67n10 Post-Graduate Certificate of Education (PGCE), 215, 227, 229, 231 Presbyterians, 160 Punch, 4, 179, 180 Queen, The, 155 Queen Anne’s Terrace, Cambridge, 148 Queen’s College, xix, xxviii n45, 108, 117n1, 165 Queen’s College, Cambridge, 134 Queen’s Scholarships, 80, 175, 222 Queensberry, Marquess of, 11n13 RAE (Research Assessment Exercise), 229 Ratich, Wolfgang, 36 Read, Annie, 143, 165 Red Cross Hospital, Barry, 207 Reform Act (1932), xiv, xxiv n16 Regent House, 228 Reid, Elizabeth Jesser, 108 Reporter, 153, 190 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), 229 Revised Code (1862), xvii-xviii, 231 Rice, F.A., 68n26 Rich, R.W., xx Riddell, Bishop, 166, 168, 169 Riddell, Hannah, 205 Ridley, Annie, 114 Ripon, Lord, 155, 197 Robbins Report on Higher Education, 228 Roberts, John, 125 Robinson, Wendy, 200 Roebuck, John, xiv Rogers, Mary Eleanor, 140–9, 146n29 Roman Catholics see Catholics

259

Rome, 66, 100, 101, 103–105n62, 166, 168, 169 Rose, Reverend Alfred, 148, 153 Roseberry, Lord, 4, 11n13 Ross, Robbie, 180 Royal Commissions see names of Commissions/Reports Royal Holloway College, 192 Royal University of Ireland, 133 Rugby, 40 Ruskin, John, 36–6, 61, 177; Time and Tide, 36 Russell, Lord John, xv Russell Group, 231, 236n39 SDUK (Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge), xxv n10 St Andrews, 28 St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, 134 St John’s College, Cambridge, 74, 134 St Edmund’s College, Ware, 167 St Edmund’s House, Cambridge, 166, 167 St Luke’s Boys’ School, 152 St Luke’s Girls’ School, 152 Saint Paul’s, 40 St Saviour and St Olave’s Grammar School for Girls, 206 San Francisco, 204 Scarsdale, Lord, 43, 45–5, 48 Scott, Canon, 161, 166–4, 168 Scott-Coward, Mr, 93 Scottish Universities, 190 Searby, Peter, 74, 83, 96, 103n54, 183n7, 225, 226 Second World War, 227 Seeley, John, 54, 187 Select Committee of the Privy Council, xv—xv Selwyn College, Cambridge, 130, 167 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of, xv, xxiv n20 Sharpe, Dr, 175 Shaw, Sarah, 153 Shaw, Miss, 137 Sheffield, 113 Shirreff, Emily, 113, 119n17 and n22

260 TEACHER TRAINING AT CAMBRIDGE

Shrewsbury, 40 Sidgwick, Arthur, 178 Sidgwick (née Balfour), Eleanor, 123, 155, 178, 190, 191–8, 199, 204 Sidgwick, Henry: and CTC, 153, 155, 188; and CUDTC, 74–2, 76, 214; and Christianity, 178–6; friend of OB, 22, 22; and homosexuality, 178; and Newnham College, 22, 122–21, 126, 189; and OB’s move to King’s College, 172–70; on importance of professional training for women, 114; brief mentions, 12n17, 140, 177 Simms, T.H., 235 Skeat, Bertha, 191 Smith, Barbara Leigh see Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith Smith, Charles, 153 Soames, Laura, 155 Social Science Association, x, 109, 110, 111, 117n9; Transactions, 109 Social Science Congress, 71–72, 174–2 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), xxiv n10 Society for the Promotion of Employment of Women, 142 Socrates, 178 South Kensington Science Exam, 122 Spencer, Herbert, 27–8, 32, 34–4, 67n15; Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical, 28 Standard, 179 Stanley of Alderney, Lady, 113, 119n17 and n23 Stanwick, Anna, 153, 158n18 Stephen, J.K., 9n10, 57, 66 Stephen, Leslie, 4 Stockton, Frank: Rudder Grange, 140, 177 Strachey, A., 57 Strachey, Lytton, 9n10, 11n11 Street, Kate, 130–9, 153

Sunday Observer, 236 n37 Sunday Times, 66 Sutherland, Gillian xxix n58 Switzerland, 196 Symonds, John Addington, 67n15 TTS see Teachers’ Training Syndicate Tablet, The, 166 Tafia, 197 Taunton Commission/Report, xx-xx, 110, 113, 124 Taylor, Sedley, 83 Teacher Training Agency, 231 Teachers’ Training and Registration Society, 114 Teachers’ Training Association, 182 Teachers’ Training Syndicate (TTS), x, xxiv, 69–9, 72, 74, 114, 145, 150, 161, 170, 182–80, 213–9, 223–20; examinations, x, xxiv, 71, 148,162, 168, 173–71, 181, 183, 183n7, 186n51, 224; lectures organized by, x, 71, 71, 136–5, 144, 182, 224 Teachers’ University Association, 78 Thomas, Molly (later Molly Hughes), 130, 133–2, 136, 137, 140, 140, 141, 165, 172, 188 Thring, Edward, 15–17 Times, The, 191 Times Educational Supplement, 175 ‘Tin Tabernacle’, 143, 148 Tokyo, 204 Tokyo Women’s University, 204, 205 Toynbee, Arnold, 76 Toynbee Hall, 72, 76–5, 79, 224, 225, 226 Toynbee Record, 77 Trade, Board of, 153 Transactions of Social Science Association, 109 Trevelyan, George, 22, 101 Trinity College, Cambridge, 22, 22, 55, 74, 123, 134, 151 Trinity College, Dublin, 132 Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 134 Tsuda, Umeko, 204, 205

INDEX

Tsuda College (formerly Women’s School for English), 205 Turrell, Sophia: ‘Reminiscences’, 124 Unitarians, 108, 160, 165 University College, London, 108, 113 University College of Manchester, 190 University College of North Wales, Bangor, 192 University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff, 192 University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 192 University Extension Scheme, 5, 110, 113, 200 University of Wales, 198; Charter, 198 University of Wales and of University College, Cardiff, 198 Vaughan, Cardinal, Archbishop of Westminster, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167–5, 169, 171n10 Verrall, Mrs, 152 Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) hospital, Glamorganshire, 207 Wadham College, Oxford, 72 Wales, 124–3, 127, 189, 190, 192, 196, 197, 198, 206 Wallis, J., 83 Ward, Dr James, 114, 137, 153 Warkworth House, 83 Warkworth Street, Cambridge, 150 Warkworth Terrace, Cambridge, 153, 182 Wedd, Nathaniel, 62 Weekly Dispatch, 189 Welsh Intermediate Act (1889), 128 West London Methodist Mission, 176 Westcott, Dr, 137 Westminster, 40 Weymouth, 113 Whigs, xiii Whitechapel murders, 153 Widdowson, Frances xxix n70

261

Wilde, Oscar, 4, 11n13, 51,67n15, 179, 180; Poems, 180 Williams, Rowland, 24n8 Williams, T. Marchant, 124 Willock, Reverend, 132 Wilson, H.G., 84 Winchester, 40 Windsor, 9n4 Windsor and Eton Association for the Education of Women, 5, 12n16 Wollaston Road, Cambridge, 153, 196– 3 Wolley-Dod, Rev. Charles(Eton tutor), 43, 45, 47, 48, 49 Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 108 Women’s Educational Union (formerly National Union for the Education of Girls of all Classes above the Elementary), 113, 113–12 Women’s International Congress, 200 Women’s School for English (later Tsuda College), 205 Women’s University, Tokyo, 204, 205 Woolf, Virginia, ix-x, 2–4, 4–5, 9– 11n10, 1111 and n14, 57, 113, 173, 181; A Room of One’s Own, ix-x, 2–4, 9n10, Working Men’s Meetings, 204 Wortham, Biscoe (OB’s brother-in-law), 180 Wortham, H.E. (OB’s nephew), 2, 4, 8, 9–11n10, 12nl7, 13, 17, 45, 47, 48–7, 84 Wortham (née Browning), Mina (OB’s sister), 180 Wortham, Philip, 180 Wright, S.L.P., 204 Yasui, Tetsu, 204, 205 York, 113