Chapter 3.
'Patterns of female excellence' Training the elementary school-mistress, 1890-1914

Subjected to closer state supervision and no longer possessing a monopoly of teacher training, voluntary colleges were forced to respond to a bewildering range of new pressures, from above and from below.

John Faunthorpe and John Ruskin

The key figure in reshaping the character of Whitelands College in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was its Principal, John Faunthorpe. Born in 1839, the son of a small farmer in Lincolnshire, he did well at his local National School, became a pupil-teacher, and was placed second in the national list of successful Queen's Scholars in 1857. Equally impressive as a student at Battersea Training College, he became a master there at the end of his training. His rise continued. In 1865 he gained a first-class Honours degree in English as an external student at the University of London, following it up with an M.A. in 1869. In 1867 he became a deacon of the Church of England and was ordained by the Bishop of Westminster in the following year. In these years he also produced a number of geographical text-books. Finally, the capstone of all this effort and success, he married well -- in 1870, to Charlotte, the daughter of Rev. John Blackmore, vicar of Ashford near Barnstaple. She had inherited a house and land at Bolingbroke Grove, Wandsworth Common, where the family lived until 1890. Appointed to Whitelands in 1874 at the age of 35, from a field of 85 applicants, Faunthorpe was to remain principal until 1907.

From Lincolnshire farm boy to M.A., Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, college principal and gentleman scholar: Faunthorpe's was the kind of success story that might have illustrated one of those Victorian self-help books penned by Samuel Smiles. No wonder that he looked back from retirement to the system which produced him with some complacency. 'It is the fashion now', he wrote in 1909, 'to decry the Pupil Teacher System, but it was in its day an excellent system, and it produced excellent results' [JPF/I]. Faunthorpe was, of course, one of its excellent results. A contented friend of the established order, his text-book, Geography of the British Colonies, was suffused with the economic and social orthodoxies of the middle years of the nineteenth century -- the wonders of the free market, the benefits of emigration, the racial superiority of the British (especially over the French), the value of education in reforming the working class, and so on. [fn 1]

A couple of years after arriving at Whitelands, Faunthorpe became involved in a relationship with one of the major intellectual figures of Victorian England -- John Ruskin -- who challenged some of these comfortable prejudices. A friend had loaned Faunthorpe some of the early numbers of Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen of England. He was impressed: 'I read eagerly, with a sort of feeling -- this is new, this is not out of books but out of his heart -- he means this' [JPF/I]. In July 1877 Faunthorpe wrote to him. It was a bad year for Ruskin. Prone to recurrent spells of depression and hypochondria since the 1840s, he was experiencing by the summer of 1877 the onset of delirium and complete mental collapse. There were bouts of aggression and a falling out with several old friends. Nevertheless Ruskin responded to Faunthorpe's letter. He declined an invitation to become directly involved in the affairs of Whitelands college but he kept the door open to further communication:

I am entirely sensible ... of the privilege of being brought into connection with the teaching in an establishment of this character, and hope to be useful to you. -- Would the Church of England's principles permit you to accept the published series of my books to begin with? [fn 2]

A couple of months later Faunthorpe risked breaking the new connection with Ruskin. In Letter LXXXIII of Fors Ruskin had made some disparaging remarks about the relentless cramming that went on at 'so-called "Training Colleges"' and the 'bondage' in which teachers worked: 'we conceive sooner or later that our duty as Teachers is to crush life in every form and whenever showing itself'. Faunthorpe at once wrote to Ruskin, rebutting these charges in a forthright letter (10 November 1877): 'I utterly doubt the "bondage" theory, and I believe every one of my past and present students would agree with me.' [JPF/I] He was offended by Ruskin's reference to 'so-called "Training Colleges"'. Such colleges were not involved in cramming their students but provided a rich and varied syllabus. Pupil-teachers, after years of drudgery, 'gladly looked forward to the wider instruction received in a training college'. Nor were the demands placed upon teachers unreasonable. That teachers were 'groaning' under the weight of government pressures or were trying to 'crush' life out of children was, he said, 'utterly false'. Ruskin at once replied in conciliatory mode and promised, with his permission, to print Faunthorpe's reply and some new thoughts on the topic in the January 1878 issue of Fors. Nothing in fact transpired and their divergences on education were apparently forgotten.

Over the next few years Ruskin had considerable involvement in the affairs of Whitelands College, though increasingly incapacitated by spells of insanity. He visited -- in March 1880, for instance -- dispensing approval and disapproval. He corresponded with Faunthorpe, the Head Governness, Kate Stanley and even some of the students. He was remarkably generous in his gifts to the College. Over a number of years hardly a week went by without him sending something -- one of his own publications, a book from his library, a geological specimen, a picture or a print, an odd antique object and even furniture [see, for instance, WC, 1881]. One might wonder what a student teacher would make of some of the books. Virgil's Aeneid done into Scots by Gavin Douglas in the sixteenth century can hardly have been bed-time reading for weary student-teachers. But Ruskin's gifts and his personal involvement provided the college with some intellectual kudos.

He also initiated what is still an annual event at Whitelands. In January 1881, in reply to Faunthorpe's request for a copy of his book Proserpina as a College prize, Ruskin voiced his unease with the whole system of competitive examinations and prizes. 'In all competitions, success is more or less unjust'. He came up with an alternative suggestion:

while I intensely dislike all forms of competition, I believe the recognition of an uncontending and natural worth to be one of the most solemn duties alike of young and old. Suppose you made it a custom that the scholars should annually choose by ballot, with vowed secrecy, their Queen of May? and that the elected queen had, with other more important rights, that of giving the 'Proserpina' to the girl she though likeliest to use it with advantage? [Wise,I,43-4]

Ruskin was a difficult man, however. In his relations with members of the college there were frequent glimpses of his obsessiveness, his authoritarianism, his unpredictability and his appalling prudery and sexual insecurity. During his visit of March 1880 he expressed his anxieties about female students studying physiology and thus learning about fertilisation and generation, in other words, about sex. He fulminated against students dissecting plants under a microscope: 'I wish I could slap their fingers and break their microscopes' [Wise, II, 75]. He laid down the law about what the students should sing and what they should read -- and equally emphatically what they should not sing and not read [see Wise, I, 58].

Kate Stanley and some of the students volunteered to make Ruskin several waistcoats, possessing four pockets, to his exacting specifications. At one point a query about this task was met with the perplexing outburst: 'never mind about the waistcoat -- Help me in getting people clothed who are in rags.' It is not clear how the propertyless and overworked female victims of this tirade were to help the wealthy and influential Ruskin -- except to feel chastised. Ruskin's gratitude for one embroidered waistcoat he was sent from Whitelands was somewhat mitigated by the fastidious observation: 'My theory of perfect needlework is that the wrong side, though embroidered, should be as orderly as the other ...'

Kate Stanley earnestly correponded with him, visited 'the master' at his Coniston refuge and dedicated her book, Needlework and Cutting-Out [fn 5], to him:

TO
PROFESSOR RUSKIN LL.D.,
who writes,
"A happy nation may be defined as one in which the husband's hand is on the plough, and the housewife's on the needle; so in due time reaping its golden harvest and shining in golden vesture"
("Two Paths," i., p.140

BY KIND PERMISSION
THIS LITTLE BOOK
IS AFFECTIONATELY AND RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED
BY THE AUTHOR

By the 1880s the proportion of men whose hands were on any kind of plough were few indeed. Nor had needlework in the elementary school much to do with 'shining in golden vesture'. 'Poor Joseph's coat would have looked commonplace by the side of them', one sensitive observer of the 'thin, anaemic, ill-clad and barefooted' children pouring into a London Board School commented a few years later:

Little girls in long dresses, big girls in short dresses; many girls in very little dress at all; little boys all overcoat, from which buttons were conspicuously absent; big boys in no overcoat at all, very little coat, and no waistcoat whatever; material most miscellaneous; stockings absent in many cases, holey in nearly all; fit no object; legs bare, legs half-covered; shawls (which often enclosed a baby) of many hues, knitted or woven; collars -- but few to be seen; head pieces -- a truly marvellous mixture of straw, cloth, wool, velvet, flowers and finery. [fn 6]

'One remembers', wrote a Southlands student of 1882-3 with some bitterness, 'the utter waste of time and trial to the eyes of the sample stitches on small pieces of calico which were never used in ordinary work'. [fn 8] Generations of students at Whitelands (and at Wandsworth) were no doubt equally resentful of all that pointless, wearying effort. In this instance, as in others, Ruskin was no rebel against the brutalities of Victorian capitalism. His many pronouncements on the duties of women reinforced the dominant values and disciplines through which female submission was quietly but harshly enforced. More than that, his writing -- as in the passage quoted above in Kate Stanley's dedication of Needlework and Cutting-Out -- frequently dressed up reality in a pretty pre-Raphaelite package.

Faunthorpe's annual sermons to the students at St. Luke's display this influence of Ruskin by similarly aestheticising a bleak reality. They are highly ornate and crafted texts, pre-Raphaelite prose poems with little explicit contemporary reference. Preaching, for instance, on a text from Psalms -- 'The King's daughter is all glorious within, her clothing is of wrought gold' -- the elementary school-teacher is transmuted into a Burne Jones princess: 'She should be beautiful in loving word and deed. Her high lineage should shine forth of her eyes, and speak itself from her lips, and appear in all her deeds'. The beauty of course was unworldly, as another Faunthorpe sermon warned the students. They must dress appropriately for their modest station in life and cultivate the virtues of submission: 'What better adornments, storied window richly dight, altar cloth, flowers, screen, organ for your very own little temple, than purity, obedience, love'. [fn 9]

Ruskin's influence on Faunthorpe was substantial. The principal of Whitelands was a founding member of the Ruskin Society of London (the Society of the Rose) in 1881 and its President for a number of years, as well as being 'chaplain' of the Guild of St.George. For a number of years he was trusted with the final proof-reading of new editions of Ruskin's works. But he had to put up with the frequent irascibility of 'the master' and relations were often strained -- in 1886 to breaking point. For three years, assisted by his wife and some Whitelands students, Faunthorpe had toiled to produce an annotated index to the chaotic text of the eight volumes of Fors Clavigera. He received fulsome thanks and praise for this labour until it was completed at the end of 1886 when he unexpectedly received a peremptory refusal from Ruskin to write a preface to the work:

There are some points and stubbornesses and conceit in you which I never met with before in so kind and able a man. What favour would it be to me though you had spent twenty years on the Index if it was finally done in a way I didn't like. [JPF/I] [fn 10]

Did he have a significant influence on Whitelands College? [fn 11] Ruskin, Faunthorpe commented in a magazine article in 1895, was not in tune with 'modern education':

He does not greatly believe in the teaching we hear so much about -- arithmetic, science, compulsory attendance and competitive examinations. Most of these things he cordially hates ... Religious education, and technical education, he utterly approves; and he would have every girl taught to sing, sew, dance, cook and look pretty. And he has taught many successive generations of our students how much real and keen enjoyment; how much pleasure, with no sting in it, can be had from simple but pretty dresses, wild flowers, dance and song; and these students in turn have introduced such pleasurable enjoyment into hundreds and hundreds of girls' and infants schools all over England. [fn 12]

In particular, Ruskin hated competitive examinations. But at Whitelands, in the year he began his association with the college, the chase for examination success and prizes was manic. In 1877 there were 22 prizes for Religious Knowledge, 22 prizes for drawing, 10 prizes for needlework, a dozen prizes for the best essays on Domestic Economy and Sanitary Science and another dozen for cookery; there were 2 prizes each for reading and recitation, for history and biography, for school management, for geography and map reading, for teaching, for grammar, for composition, for music; there were three prizes for the senior monitors and single prizes for penmanship, for general knowledge and for neatness. One of the star pupils for that year, Harriet Ball, leaving to take up a post as governness at Durham Training College, carried off no less than five prizes. But 102 prizes was clearly not enough and in 1879 new prizes were initiated in Arithmetic and Geography. In addition to prizes there were armfuls of certificates -- including a First Aid Certificate on completion of a course of Ambulance Lectures provide by the St.John's Ambulance Association, a needlework certificate and a drill certificate. The voracious appetite for prizes and certificates remained unsatisfied. In 1887 one student won the first prize of £15 offered by the Royal Geographical Society to all the female training colleges in the country. One student gained a medal and another a certificate for Botany from the Royal Apothecary Society. And six students obtained a diploma for cookery from the South Kensington School of Cookery. The forty-second annual report in 1890 commented: 'this year was notable as having the largest number of prizes ever obtained by students' [p.5]. But new competitive examinations, prizes and certificates continued to proliferate. These did much to preserve the status of Whitelands as among the most successful and prestigious training colleges in the country. But Ruskin's response to an invitation to present prizes to the Whitelands students was succinct: 'Never: I hate them' [JPF/I].

Ruskin's contribution to Whitelands was limited but significant. It was, as Faunthorpe 1895 article indicates, largely a matter of surface or the material culture of the college: like St.Pancras Station, for instance, an aesthetic shell around a fundamentally utilitarian kernel. But such externalities confirmed the high status of the college. The new chapel with its stained glass windows by Burne Jones (at Ruskin's urgings) and interior fittings by William Morris, the annual May Queen festival, the numerous associations with Ruskin gave Whitelands an impressive cultural reputation. Here is a newspaper account of the 1905 May Day Festival:

King's Road, Chelsea, is one of the noisiest and most sordid of London thoroughfares. With its cheap shops, constant motor traffic, and insistent hawkers, it is a very pandemonium of unrest -- and it was extraordinary to pass, merely by the opening and shutting of a door, from its blatant and vulgar materialism into a quiet and sombre hall, which led straight out into a conventual courtyard, with grass and great trees, surrounded by solemn college buildings, and so into a little chapel full of worshipping white-robed girls with wreaths of ivy in their hair. [See WC, 1905, 27]

From governess to lecturer

Something rather less material but more substantial than pseudo-medieval romance was going on, however, to transform social relations and values in teacher training in these years. The subordinate position of training college staff as governesses under the authority of educated gentlemen was being slowly transformed by their rising academic qualifications and increasing professional status. And this involved a radical reshaping of male-female relations. Some of the pressure in this direction came from the state. The Cross Commission in 1886 had expressed its doubts about the quality of training college staff:

The staff are often elementary teachers, sometimes appointed immediately on the completion of their two years course of training, and, consequently, the teachers are often wanting in wide knowledge of the subjects taught, though they may have aptitude in imparting knacks and short methods which may enable their students to pass examinations, and put their pupils through them. We need for the training of our elementary teachers that those who educate them shall have a wide knowledge of the subjects which they teach, and shall kindle intellectual enthusiasm and stimulate power of thought rather than aim merely of securing passes at an examination. [fn 13]

The kindly and most natural desire to maintain the family feeling of the college and to provide for its more attractive or deserving members, as well, too, as to place docile and tractable instruments in the hands of its chief, has led to the practice of choosing the lecturers not from the best to be found anywhere, but from among old students. [CCE,1895,130]

For the first time in 1886 the Annual Report lists one of the governnesses at Whitelands College as affiliated to the University of London: Henrietta Sheppard, a student at the College 1881-2, had returned in 1883 as a Governess after a brief spell as a schoolmistress. Two other governesses similarlarly displayed (Univ.Lond.) after their names in the annual report of 1889. All the Whitelands governesses had matriculated as external students at the University of London by the early 1890s and the HMI report for 1892 noted that Faunthorpe was actively encouraging his staff to pursue University degrees. Governesses were given small grants to pay fees and purchase books. Progress through matriculation, intermediate examinations and ultimately graduation was rewarded with increases in salary. Failure at any stage was commented on coldly and the governness found her salary frozen and her future uncertain. By 1898 four out of eight Whiteland governesses had gained a B.A. This went part of the way in dealing with the problem of 'closeness' in the 'intellectual atmosphere' of the College -- but only part of the way. In 1899 the HMI Report specifically commented on Whitelands:

The staff is strong, well qualified for its duties, and works with characteristic earnestness and industry, though it is impossible not to suggest that it is too uniformly and exclusively recruited from its own ground. [CCE, 1899,366]

By 1899 Faunthorpe had been Whitelands Principal for 25 years and, increasingly old fashioned, a bearded mid-Victorian patriarch, he remained Principal at Whitelands until, approaching 70 years old, he was forced to retire in 1907. It was the new female principal, Miss Clara Luard, a member of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, who took further steps in the creation of a more professional teaching staff at the College. The Head Governness was retitled Vice Principal and the Governesses were listed in the annual report, for the first time, as "Lecturers" with their qualifications and academic specialisms attached. She also encouraged the appointment of new staff who had not been trained at Whitelands. The College Council resisted her pressure to have women represented at their meetings but this became a requirement of the Board of Education in 1911 and three women members were finally co-opted two years later.

Staffing policy at Southlands College moved in the same direction, but, apparently, more slowly. Information on Southlands staff in the late nineteenth century is very thin. As in the case of Whitelands, there was some encouragement for staff to matriculate at the University of London and pursue part-time degree-level study. At least four Southlands tutors had gained external London degrees by 1906. There was also a shift away from simply appointing former students of the College. Obedient young governesses in their early twenties, began to be replaced by women with some University education and some wider experience of teaching. M.E.Findlay seems to have been the first graduate appointed to the College, in 1898. A decade later a Staff Register commences giving full details of new appointees. [fn 14] This indicates the successful drive to recruit University-educated and experienced teaching staff at Southlands. In the seven years before the Great War a series of highly-qualified and experienced young women were appointed. In 1908 three new lecturers were appointed: as Maths Mistress, Else Carrier, aged 29 years, with B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Liverpool, as well as four years teaching experience; as Assistant Mistress of Method, Jane Holgate, a 27 year old graduate of Leeds University; and Jessie Thomas, the oldest of the three at 32, who had a B.Sc. degree after five years as an external student at University College, London, as well as several years teaching experience. These new confident and professional women did not always fit smoothly into the traditional Southlands regime, as we will see below.

The Wandsworth Training College had special problems in adapting to this increasing professionalization of teaching staff. Its 'governesses' were nuns. These were frequently from cultivated upper middle class families, had received a liberal education and had lived much abroad. Among the teaching staff at Wandsworth at various times were French, Swiss and German nuns and a number of others had spent time at Sacred Heart convents and their schools in Ireland, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Australia. A number of them had trained as teachers while aspirant nuns. And a number of them attended courses in music, physical geography and various science subjects at the College of Science and Art in South Kensington. However they generally did not pursue formal qualifications of any kind and, inevitably, their experience was rather restricted. This seemed to present no particular problems. Year after year HMIs commended the quality of the education provided at the College and the energy and commitment of its staff.

In 1904 the Board of Education raised some problems about recognising as a properly qualified training college teacher a nun that Janet Stuart had sent from the Roehampton convent to Wandsworth. The new Training College Regulations of that year gave the Board new powers to ensure that colleges were working towards a proportion of two-thirds of their staff in possession of appropriate academic qualifications. E.K.Chambers, for the Board, rather abruptly instructed the college authorities 'to improve their staff':

Of the twelve teachers at present on the staff only one is a graduate of a university; three others have passed the London Matriculation Examination, which is one of the Examinations accepted from students at their first admission to a Training College, and the remainder possess no academical qualifications at all. [fn 15]

Some trouble had been taken at Wandsworth to utilise outside expertise in particular areas. From the 1890s a regular course on kindergarten teaching was provided by visiting lecturers from the Froebel Institute and the Maria Gray training college. There were frequent guest speakers at the college on a range of issues -- some aesthetic, some scientific, some on contemporary issues. In 1899 (and probably in other years) the students attended a course of lectures on Sound, Light and Heat and another on Practical Chemistry at the Wandsworth Technical Institute. There were also frequent visits to lectures at the South Kensington Museum. But the College responded quickly to the Board of Education's admonishment. A Miss Murphy (B.Sc.) was immediately appointed as a visiting lecturer to provide a course for Matriculation candidates. Another visiting lecturer was appointed to teach Botany. And in November 1904 a third visiting lecturer was appointed, a Miss Smith (B.Sc.), to teach first-year science. These were short-term stop-gap measures. The apparent crisis of confidence soon blew over. Within a matter of days of Chambers' sharp 1904 letter the Convent School at Roehampton gained official recognition as a 'Secondary Training College' qualified to train pupil-teachers.

Janet Stuart at Roehampton was sceptical about degrees and other kinds of official certification but recognised that it was politically necessary for Catholics to conform to the pressure on staff in teacher training to have recognised qualifications:

For those who have to devote themselves to the cause of Catholic education it is often and increasingly necessary to win degrees or their equivalents, not altogether for their own value, but as the key that fits the lock, for the gates to the domain of education are kept locked by the state. [fn 16]

New and impressively-qualified nuns of the Sacred Heart were appointed to Wandsworth. Rachel Steel (b.1876) had a B.A.degree from Alexandria College Dublin, had subsequently studied for four years at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and had a Cambridge Teacher's Diploma when she was appointed in 1908. Eileen Fincham was appointed the year after, at the age of 25: she already had several years teaching experience (some of it at Roehampton Convent School), had a Cambridge Teacher's Diploma (1905) and a University of London B.Sc. degree (1908). These are a few intances of the ways in which the profile of the teaching staff at Wandsworth and St.Charles was rapidly transformed in the years before 1914. [fn 18]

The 'new woman' at Southlands

There were tensions between the old patriarchs (and occasional matriarchs) who dominated the committees and councils of the world and this new generation of educated professional women. There is a glimpse of this in the laconic commentary of Else Carrier, arriving at Southlands in 1908 with B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Liverpool and confronting the values of an older generation. One of her early recollections was the Missionary Sewing Meeting -- 'an enterprise reputed to be the light of Miss Sargent's eye'. The Missionary Society at Southlands provided support to Methodist missionaries in India and China, among whom were a number of former Southlands students. During its sewing meetings crowds of industrious figures packed the college, engaged, as Carrier put it, 'upon some mysterious pieces of needlework known as "patches"'. Her amused disdain was clearly as obvious to the Lady Superintendent at the time, as it is in her later account:

As my tastes lay in less domestic directions, Miss Sargent made a point of asking me what I thought of my first sewing party. I remember that my reply, to the effect that it was "quite harmless", was detailed to the Principal, who admonished me of having used "a singularly inappropriate epithet"! [fn 19]

I am to ask therefore that a proposal may be submitted for the appointment of a woman teacher who would be resident in the College as Acting Principal in Mr Chapman's absence. [SCA]

Here the story takes a new twist. No sooner had the post been advertised than the Governors were petitioned by 105 ex-students to appoint Miss Walker as Principal. Sarah Walker (b.1870) had been appointed in 1899 and in 1903 had become Mistress of Method. She was intellectually progressive and dynamic. The HMI report for 1903 singled out her teaching for praise [WEC, 1903,53]. She introduced new courses in philosophy and psychology and instituted school practices in rural Surrey. Awarded a Gilchrist Travelling Scholarship, she spent three months in 1906 travelling in the United States and studying teacher training there. Her authority was acknowledged when she was given charge of the College during Chapman's visit to the United States in 1912 -- the first time a woman had been the ultimate figure of authority at the Southlands. One of the tutors in these years, Mary Wright, casually describes the years before Chapman's death as 'the latter years of Miss Walker's regime'. She was clearly a dynamic character and after 1910 seems to have replaced Miss Sargeant as the College's key figure.

Sarah Walker must have stepped on some sensitive toes. Or perhaps her confidence frightened an older generation of Methodist men. Despite some enthusiastic support for her within the College, the Governors did not even place Walker on the shortlist of six drawn up from 19 applicants. She was, according to the minutes of the meeting, absent from the College on the day of the interviews, 'not being sufficiently well to carry on her duty'. None of the short-list of six were appointed. Miss Atkinson Williams, a former Southlands student and from 1906 to 9 a tutor, teaching in Australia, was given the post without interview. According to the Wesleyan Education Committee, the governors did not need to interview her: 'her qualifications and testimonials were considered, and she was personally known to many of its members' [see WEC, 1914,11].

Uproar ensued. Sarah Walker and four other lecturers immediately resigned. Even in Australia the new Principal became aware of the controversy surrounding her appointment and telegrammed her resignation. After reassurances from the Acting Principal, she returned to England to take up the post, though she was to remain in it for less than four years. Meanwhile the former students of the London Southlands Society extracted permission from the Governors to use the College hall for a presentation to Miss Walker. She was subsequently appointed to non-Methodist training colleges in Leeds and Darlington, becoming Principal of the latter. The Wesleyan Education Committee blandly smoothed over the disruptions caused in the College by the appointment of Atkinson Williams:

It was recognised that her advent, as Lady Principal, was the inauguration of a new era in the history of the College, and a pledge that the great tradition of the past will be maintained. The important changes in the personnel of the tutorial staff are working smoothly, and promise highly satisfactory results. [WEC,1914,10]

The active, even subversive, role of Southlands students past and present during this crisis is striking and signals profounder changes in power relations inside the college. The Wesleyan commitment to evangelical self-discipline, to strict hierarchy and authority was ostensibly maintained -- but students were increasingly resistant. From 1883 until 1910 the college's Lady Superintendent was the formidable Miss Sergeant. Restricting students' exposure to the male of the species seems to have been one of her particular obsessions. The weekly excursions twice each Sunday to services at the nearby Battersea Bridge Chapel were especially dangerous. Each Sunday the students were lined up and inspected. Any hint of untidiness was reprimanded. They then marched two by two -- 'in meek procession' -- to the Chapel where they occupied, under the all-seeing eyes of the Lady Superintendent, the front four pews. Speaking to a member of the opposite sex outside of the College, at any time, was forbidden. If they met any male they knew at chapel they were allowed to shake hands but not to speak. One student recalled being reprimanded for answering a man -- even though he was very old and the Methodist Sunday School Superintendent from her home town. Visitors to the College were strictly limited to immediate family, but students found it difficult to get permission for their brothers. 'He may be your brother', Miss Sergeant would pronounce, 'but he is not the brother of the other girls'.

Miss Sergeant's bark seems to have been worse than her bite. According to a student who was going into her second year when she arrived, the new Lady Superintendent marked 'a great improvement in the social life of the College': 'There was greater freedom and a more home-like condition of affairs'. [fn 21] The prison-like austerity of the 70s was replaced by domestic comforts. Pictures, ornaments, vases, curtains appeared everywhere. There was still a fastitidious institutionalization of recreation: undisciplined free time meant idleness which meant dissipation and sin. The Principal, Frederick Greeves, addressed the students on this point in 1893:

The College bell will be the absolute guide of the disposal of your time, and strict punctuality will be required, not simply as a matter of submission to authority, but as a practical necessity that you may not hinder each other's work. If you have been accustomed to make your morning toilet in a slow and dilatory fashion, you will be cured of that habit and attain a measure of expedition which to non-Collegians is incredible ... In future life you will see that College residence brought you no more lasting benefit than habits of order and regularity and submission to constituted authority. [WEC,1893, ]

There were other changes which began to weaken traditional codes of femininity at Southlands. From the 1880s there was a new emphasis on physical sports -- croquet, battledore and especially tennis. Hockey, rowing and swimming became available in the 1890s, and even that agent of Satan and feminism the bicycle. The traditional Wesleyan anathemas against theatre persisted but the student Literary Society at Southlands pushed at these limits with readings from Shakespeare and by the late nineties 'tableaux vivants' were presented at evening concerts. After 1900 the students began to perform Shakespearean comedies and even visited London theatres on occasion. The Principal could not allow himself this indulgence but he did not actively prevent students from so doing.

Item by item these changes do not apparently amount to very much. And yet their cumulative effect was to open up further possibilities for change and to ensure that the Southlands student at the beginning of the twentieth century was a less constrained and more confident figure than her predecessors of the 1870s and 80s. There were many economic, social and political factors involved in this gradual relaxation of the old Wesleyan puritanism and conservatism. Mid-Victorian critics of the social disaster of laissez-faire capitalism -- Carlyle, Dickens, Disraeli, Ruskin -- were now in the intellectual ascendant. The active role of a new generation of radical Wesleyan ministers was important here. Hugh Price Hughes, for instance, as President of the Methodist Conference, gave a storming address to the students of Southlands and Westminster in July 1899. Hughes, an active supporter of Josephine Butler in the feminist campaign against the Contageous Diseases Act, editor of the radical Methodist Times and supporter of Wesleyan Missions in the slums, was a vehement opponent of an older generation of conservative Methodists. His 1889 collection of sermons, Social Christianity, was a vigorous attack on the political and economic hierarchy of late Victorian England. In his 1899 sermon, he warned the students of Southlands and Westminster:

I hope none of you share the vulgar opinion that Democracy means the supremacy of the vulgar, drunken, brutal, ignorant mob. It means the exact opposite. It means that, in the gradual Divine evolution of human history, the person who is most capable of filling any position is the person who has to fill it ... The essential idea of Democracy is that Brains are of more importance than Birth, and that Character is of more importance than Cash. [WEC,1899,61]

Southlands students were described by one HMI as 'extremely well behaved, diligent and earnest' [CCE,1895, 187]. Nevertheless a new generation of students (and staff) at Southlands was responsive to the movement in fin de siecle Methodism towards radical democracy and social reform. One student recalled a particularly dramatic moment in the early 1890s:

One warm evening a student speaking from a wide open window made a speech airing our grievances, appealing for votes to secure the position of lady principal, promising the abolition of early rising, evenings out until ten o'clock, gentlemen visitors and dancing. In the midst of her impassioned speech the portly form of the Lady Superintendent (Miss Sergeant) descended from the steps of the verandah upon which the staff sat on Summer evenings and stood revealed by the light from the rooms. No rebuke on her part was necessary. [fn 22]

The Debate on the value of giving women the vote and so hastening social reform was particularly fruitful of arguments both for and against, though the anti-suffragists were hopelessly outnumbered in the vote taken at the close of the meeting. [fn 23]

It was not of course only women who did not have the vote. Only around 60% of men were on the electoral register in Edwardian England. By its geographical location the students at Southlands College could not evade the visible signs of other kinds of inequality. The streets around Battersea High Street had not the extent of squalor and poverty to be found in some other parts of London. The population was very various -- clerks, tradesmen, skilled workers -- and almost all worked outside the immediate district. Except along the Thames, there was little industrial activity with its attendant noise and pollution. Nevertheless there were patches of real poverty and slum housing in the area. And it was drab. A Southlands student from the country recalled in 1903 arriving by train at Battersea:

Along either side of the line are small and wretched dwelling houses, with backyards which hold the serpent spirits referred to by Ruskin, as truly as do those between Vauxhall and Deptford. [fn 24]

Occasional contributions to the Southlands debating society magazine reveal a sharp awareness of the radical social inequalities of Edwardian society. 'E.W.' contrasted the two routes from Southlands College into London. One route to Piccadilly exhibited all that was opulent and comfortable, the other to Westminster showed 'the sad side of London life':

The one route is lined with splendid West End shops, with hotels frequented by the elite, with the mansions of the rich, and the refreshing green of Hyde Park; the other through Battersea Park Road and Lambeth, past grimy wharves, factories which by their sordidness strike chill into one's heart, or shops where people just manage to eke out a living. [fn 26]

Changing Patterns of Authority

Southlands exemplified in radical form the ways in which internal authority structures were changing in many female teacher training colleges in these years. Petty regulations were being removed. There was a decline in the amount of needlework and domestic duties required of students. After 1900 there was little or no involvement of students in cleaning, cooking and laundry work. Strict rules about dress were relaxed, though a sober neatness was the norm. There was a good deal more individual autonomy in use of free time. As one HMI commented:

Self-respect, courtesy, manly and womanly bearing are more conspicuous than formerly. The reason for this is mainly the greater freedom allowed and trust accorded by the college authorities; they are treated not as schoolchildren, not as drudges, but as ladies and gentlemen. [CCE,1897,203]

These changes in the disposition of female student teachers in the years before 1914 had something to do with the separation of religious and professional authority. As the teaching staff ceased to be docile governesses and the college less dominated by a male cleric, college regulations began to lose some of their religious sanctions. A few students followed their governesses in working towards an independent professional status by studying for the B.A. degree of the University of London. The Whitelands annual report of 1895 noted: 'It is a great advance in the character of the College and of the present Curriculum of Studies that a few students can now matriculate at the London University'. In the academic year 1894-5 five students had done so and a year later one of them passed the Intermediate examination in Arts, the first Whitelands student to get this far towards a degree. The college now instituted a matriculation class for selected students -- they were called 'University students' -- and a number of them were successful each year. A smaller number passed the Intermediate exams (1 in 1898, 3 in 1899, 4 in 1900, 3 in 1901, 2 in 1902, etc.) By 1903 the class for students preparing for matriculation, intermediate and final exams had reached 25. 'This is a larger number of University Students than the College has ever had'. Whitelands in these years was still recruiting its students from pupil teachers with Queen's Scholarship exam results in the first class or in the upper echelons of the second class. At Southlands entering students were ranked much lower and progress towards degree-level study was slow but again there was a growing number matriculating as external students at the University of London and the occasional pass in the intermediate exam by the end of the century. Out of eight Southlands students sitting for University matriculation in 1900, six passed, four of them in the first class. In 1903 a Miss Westlake was the first Southlands student to gain a B.A. degree.

Other initiatives began to broaden the professional horizons of training college students. From the 1890s the occasional Whitelands student was sent to a training college in provincial France for a year's study -- initially one a year, rising to two or three sometimes from 1901 and in 1904 reaching five. Others were sent to the Franco-English Guild in Paris. By 1903 third-year language specialists were being sent from Southlands to Paris to study at the Guilde Internationale, though in that sink of iniquity they were carefully instructed to go out at all times in pairs. These young women no longer depended on the paternal benevolence of the college principal for their professional credentials. His personal recomendation to a school manager still sometimes mattered, but increasingly significant was their publicly-recognised and validated qualifications and experience.

Denominational colleges were no longer sending students off only to teach in denominational schools -- again removing religious authority from the career options of student teachers. At Southlands more and more students were taking up posts in Board Schools by the 1890s and this was accepted:

Though founded by the Methodist Church, and conducted by Principals and officers appointed by that Church, your Colleges are also recognised by the State as doing the nation's work, and all your studies and methods of instruction have the sanction of the state. [WEC,1895,57-8]

The religious character of voluntary colleges was further diluted by new Board of Education regulations in 1907 which required colleges to admit students irrespective of their religious affiliation. The National Society protested vigorously and the regulation was modified. Nevertheless the religious identity of voluntary colleges was weakening. By 1914 more than 20% of the students entering Southlands were not Wesleyans. Out of 71 students admitted in that year there were six congregationalists, three baptists, three anglicans, two united methodists and a calvinist.

In the case of Catholic teacher training, however, there were few concessions to these stealthy processes of secularisation. The Catholic Education Council, successor to the Catholic Poor-Schools Committee after 1905, insisted on its continuing commitment to denominational education: 'Catholic Schools under Catholic control with Catholic teachers for Catholic children remained the watchword of the Council to the end' [CPC, 1906,13]. There was a constant reminder, transmitted through all the channels of communication within the Catholic community, that Catholic pupil-teachers should go to Catholic training colleges and that qualified Catholic teachers should teach in Catholic schools.

Religion continued to play an important role in college life at Whitelands and Southlands, but its influence was less overwhelming by the late nineteenth century than at Wandsworth/St Charles. The latter was in many ways a religious community in which the church, physically, intellectually and morally, stood at the very centre of daily life. Only at the latter were all its staff, as nuns, wholly withdrawn from the secular world. Janet Stuart, Mother Superior at Roehampton and ultimate director of the college, declared that the aim of the Order of the Sacred Heart in training teachers was not only to equip them with an academic education and a professional qualification. They were also to be educated as representatives of the Catholic Church:

The professional qualifications of Catholic teachers require that that they should possess their grounds of faith, their knowledge of positive doctrine and of scripture history, and their practical understanding of Catholic life with sufficient grasp to be able to bring up wisely the Catholic children who will be under their charge. They must also be capable of holding their own among non-Catholic teachers and others with whom they may mix, ready to answer their questions and objections, and, in whatever company they find themselves, ready to give a good account of their faith in word and example. [fn 28]

Of course, here as elsewhere, there was some relaxation of restrictions and access to a world outside the walls of the college and the Catholic community. Students were allowed to attend the theatre to see Shakespeare performed, to visit the South Kensington Museum, even to picnic at Richmond. They occasionally attended public lectures. There was a busy sporting calendar – especially hockey, netball and cricket. In November 1913 Southlands staff and students came to St Charles for a netball match – the visitors lost – and stayed afterwards for tea. And there were outside speakers who came to talk to the students on a range of topics – including speakers from the National Union of Teachers. One HMI remarked in July 1905:

The bearing of the Girls is frank and courteous, and they are clearly in a vigorous state of health. It is much to their benefit that they are both encouraged and assisted to avail themselves of a due amount of cultured life outside the College. [Report in OSHPA]

There were, then, inevitable tensions between an emphatically-Catholic form of teacher training and the demands of a secular state. The major problem for Catholic education, however, was to maintain an adequate supply of Catholic teachers for Catholic schools. In 1891, for instance, thirty schools had applied to Wandsworth Training College for newly-qualified teachers after all the second-year students had found a post. There was some expansion of buildings and facilities over the next few years and accomodation was increased from 50 to 90 places in 1892 and increased further to 100 places in 1900. This failed to solve the problem, since there was a shortage of Catholic pupil-teachers passing the Queen's scholarship exam. An HMI commented on Wandsworth in 1895: 'The students are generally backward at entrance, in fact the vacant places could not be filled up this year from want of a sufficient number of successful candidates'. The following set of figures of student numbers at Wandsworth reveals the continuing problem in recruiting to capacity.

1892	1893	1894	1895	1896	1897	1898	1899	1900	1901	1902
75	92	74	62	51	56	77	85	99	92	92

In only a single year in the 1890s were all 90 student places filled and in the years 1895-97 less than 70% were taken up. After 1900 the situation improved, though in some years there were still vacant places.

The problem was the same as it had been a generation earlier. Working-class Catholic children had few educational advantages. Their families often needed them to begin earning some kind of wage as early as possible. Their schools were under-funded so that those that did become pupil-teachers had to work long hours – often between 30 and 35 hours per week – leaving little time (or energy) for serious study. In 1894 the college tried to help candidates for the Queen's scholarship examination by setting up a correspondence course. This had limited success. 'The inability of so many to work by themselves, and to make use of the notes sent, has hitherto prevented the results from being altogether satisfactory', the principal, Mary Moran, reported in 1896. There was no short-term solution to a problem rooted in the endemic poverty of a substantial part of the Catholic population.

The expansion of opportunities that was creating a more confident and professionally autonomous student teacher at Whitelands and Southlands, was much more limited at Wandsworth and its successor St Charles. Most entering students had passed the Queen's scholarship in the third class or the lower echelons of the second class. They needed much help in developing basic reading and writing skills. This was a constant theme in the reports of examiners and HMIs. For example, in the July 1908 examination in the principles of teaching there was only one distinction out of the 56 students who sat the paper; only 21 were above 50% and 8 got less than 30%. The examiner commented:

There was much vague, confused and wordy writing; the opinions expressed were often crude and sometimes inconsistent with each other; punctuation was largely confined to commas and dashes, and sentences were often neither separated by proper stops nor joined by conjunctions or other connecting words … Spelling was also a little uncertain and in one case the word 'ginelly' apparently stands for generally; this is hardly consonant with the dignity of a college student. It is, however, fair to mention in this connection that many of the students from their names appear to be Irish, who may therefore have found special difficulty with their English composition. [Report in OSHPA]

At the annual prize-giving in 1905 the Duke of Norfolk warned the students that their work as Catholic teachers 'will involve much self sacrifice, it will be full of drudgery'. Most of them could look forward to returning to the kind of school at which they were pupil-teachers themselves -- understaffed, underresourced, in working-class districts of cities, teaching slum children. And not only were material conditions worse and the work harder, they would also be paid less than other elementary schoolmistresses. The average salary on taking up their first teaching post was £55 in 1888 – compared to £75 for Southlands students and £80 for Whitelands students. There is no evidence that this imbalance was remedied over the next 25 years. Hence the role of the teacher was imbued with compensatory religious qualities. In the words of Janet Stuart:

Whenever Catholic teachers wish to be worthy of their calling they have to face sacrifice; for this reason alone their profession is more like a vocation than a career. The prize before them is not really in this world; it will be attained when they learn hereafter what has been the fruit of their self-denying labours, when the souls of the children they have served so faithfully shall be gathered in and counted to them as their reward and crown in the kingdom of God. [fn 30]

Conclusion

In the obsessively hierarchical social order of Victorian England, the governess and her successor the schoolmistress, did not quite belong anywhere. Neither middle class nor working class, neither independent nor quite a servant, educated and yet propertyless, she drifted in a social no-man's land. She did not belong in the servant's hall and yet she sold her labour for a wage. As a housekeeper grouched about governesses in Thackeray's Vanity Fair: 'they give themselves such hairs and hupstarts of ladies, and their wages is no better than you nor me'. When Jane Eyre, probably today the best-known Victorian governess, arrives at Thornfield she is advised that she must not mix too familiarly with the servants: 'John and his wife are very decent people; but then you see they are only servants, and one can't converse with them on terms of equality; one must keep them at due distance for fear of losing one's authority'. Mr Rochester tells Jane: 'You are not a servant at the Hall, of course. You are –'. And precisely what she was, what a governess was in social terms, remained unspoken and unspeakable.

Half a century later the education system had been transformed. The training college student and elementary schoolmistress was no longer a governess in the service of her church, an educated menial, dependent upon the grace and favour of male clerics and school managers. She pursued qualifications, including in a minority of cases steps towards a University degree, recognised by the state. The training college student, and her college teachers, were members of a profession with progressive salaries and a career ladder. The salaries of schoolmistresses were rising in real terms and after 1890 the payment-by-results system no longer applied. Incomes were therefore fixed and guaranteed. In addition, from 1898 certificated teachers had a pension scheme. Conditions of work were improving. Teacher-pupil ratios were falling: in London Board Schools, for instance, from 59/1 in 1890 to 42/1 by 1903. The grinding regime of the pupil-teacher system was gradually fading out: pupil-teachers spent less and less time as classroom drudges and more time studying to qualify for training college. The National Union of Teachers elected its first female president in 1911, indicative of the significant voice of women within the profession.

Too rosy a picture cannot be painted however. There was still uncertainty about the status of teaching, especially for women, especially in elementary schools. Salaries were still little better than the wages of a skilled labourer for many certificated schoolmistresses and they were particularly low in many of the voluntary schools in rural areas or small towns. Ann Veronica in H.G.Wells novel of 1909 is warned against 'the hopeless miseries of underpaid teaching'. Salaries were considerably higher in the Board Schools of big cities but even here the male/female differential was anything between 25% and 50%.

Irrespective of rising wages and improved professional status, there was still a considerable amount of discomfort surrounding the social attributes of the schoolmistress. The final report of the Cross Commission in 1888 had accepted that the attempt to recruit into the training colleges and the elementary schools 'females of superior social position and general culture' had failed. But there was continuing unease about the social origins of student teachers. 'It is very well known', one article in the educational press commented in 1900, 'that, speaking broadly, our elementary teachers are recruited from a grade in society lower than ought to be the case, and lower than, considering the very fair pay now received by elementary teachers, the Government is entitled to expect'. The anonymous author's complaints focused on one student teacher -- her dreadful accent, her 'tawdry coloured dress', her ugly posture and general lack of poise: 'she stood before fifty persons a monument of human awkwardness'. Such reminders of their social inadequacies were relayed to students by college authorities. The students of Westminster and Southlands, for instance, were warned:

it is of utmost importance that in these Colleges our standard of culture, of general reading, of refinement and good breeding should rise higher and higher. With all our excellencies, we have in the past been by no means perfect in this respect. [WEC, 1895,60]

The position of college-trained elementary schoolmistresses in Edwardian England remained, in many ways, as full of social ambiguities as Jane Eyre's governness in the 1840s. An educated and to some degree refined young woman, removed from the world of her family but still of dubious social origins, with some of the attributes of the young lady but engaged in wage labour, she did not quite fit in anywhere. One of them wrote eloquently of the predicament in 1902. On social terms neither with the working-class parents of her pupils nor with the clergyman, school managers or middle class members of her church, and often living alone in lodgings, social isolation was her fate:

Term after term passes by and sees her still in the same condition -- living almost solitary, meeting no one, without a chance of making friends outside the school, her only diversions consisting in a tea now and again with the headmistress, and such pleasures as the town affords and her salary will admit of... [fn 32]

Two brief years at a training college was a formative experience for many of these woman, giving a lifelong sense of belonging and an identity. They often looked back on it with nostalgia and, as Thomas Hardy commented when he visited Whitelands College in 1891, it gave them a faith and a sense of purpose in their vocation as teachers which seemed to defy reality. He can have the last ambiguous word:

A community of women, especially young women, inspires not reverence but protective tenderness in the breast of one who views them. Their belief in circumstances, in convention, in the rightness of things, which you know not only to be wrong but damnably wrong, makes the heart ache, even when they are waspish and hard … There is much that is pathetic about these girls, and I wouldn't have missed the visit for anything. How far nobler in its aspirations is the life here than the life of those I met at the crush two nights back. [fn 33]

return to index page

footnotes

1. J.P.Faunthorpe, Geography of the British Colonies and Foreign Possessions for the Use of Students in Training Colleges, Pupil Teachers, Middle-Class Schools, and for Candidates Preparing for the Civil service, Army and Navy, etc. (2nd edition, 1874).

2. Ruskin to Faunthorpe, 5 ix 1877. in T.Wise, ed., Letters from John Ruskin to Rev.J.P.Faunthorpe M.A. (1895) Vol.I, 5-6. This is subsequently cited in the text as Wise, volume & page.

3. J.A.Owen, 'Mr Ruskin's May Day Festival at Whitelands College', A Girl's Own Paper, 11 June 1881, 584.

4. See Malcolm Cole, Whitelands College. May Queen Festival 1881-1981 (1981)

5. Kate Stanley, Needlework and Cutting-Out (5th edition, 1893).

6. Charles Morley, Studies in Board Schools (1897), 38.

7. Stanley, Needlework, 16, 7.

8. Emily Jeffreys, 'Southlands in 1877', The Southlander (1927), 19.

9. J.P.Faunthorpe, In Limine. On the Threshold Between Preparation and Work being words of encouragement and farewell to those who have passed between one to the other at Whitelands College during the years 1874-87. (1894), 1, 81.

10. Others were receiving similarly irrational communications around this time. See for instance Ruskin's virulent letters to his old friend Charles Eliot Norton in H.G.Villjoen, ed., The Froude-Ruskin Friendship: As Represented Through Letters (New York 1966), 139-46.

11. For a much more detailed examination of the Ruskin/Whitelands connection see Helen Cocker, Whitelands College, John Ruskin and the Education of Women, 1850-1900 (University of Surrey M.Phil.thesis, 1997), especially chapters 5 & 6.

12. J.P.Faunthorpe, 'A May Queen Festival, with letters from Mr Ruskin', The Nineteenth Century (May 1895), 734.

13. E.H.Lyon, Royal Education Commission 1886-8. A Summary of the Final Report, containing the Conclusion and Recommendation of the Commissioners (2nd ed., 1888) 288.

14. This is to be found in SCA.

15. E.K.Chambers to Madame O'Flaherty, 5 xi 1904. The file of this correspondence is held in OSHPA.

16. Janet Stuart, The Education of Catholic Girls (1927), 220. This was first published in 1912.

17. Staff Register, containing full details of the experience and qualifications of college staff in these years is held in OSHPA.

18. For information on staff see 'Staff Register, Kensington St Charles Training College' in OSHPA.

19. E.H.Carrier, 'Reminiscences (1908-18)' in Retrospect-Prospect. Southlands Training College 1872-1928 (1928), 15.

20. The following narrative is largely based on 'Southlands Training College, Governing Body, Minute Book', in SCA, pp.19-47.

21. Emily Jeffrey, 'Southlands in the Eighties', The Southlander, 1928, 20.

22. Quoted in Eva Williams, op. cit., 40.

23. Southlands Debating Magazine (1909-10), 2-3. Copy in SCA.

24. No author, 'A Country Girl's First Impressions of London', Southlands Debating Society Magazine (1903),19. Copy in SCA.

25. A.C.Coffin, 'Our Training Colleges: XXVIII. Southlands', The Teacher, 5 May 1906.

26. E.W. 'Thursday at Southlands', Southlands Debating Society Magazine (1909-10), 14.

27. For an account of student unrest at another church college in these years see G.P.McGregor, A Church College for the Twenty-first century? 150 Years of Ripon and York St. John (York 1991), 100.

28. Janet Stuart, The Society of the Sacred Heart (1914), 58.

29. For an insight into student life at the college see 'St Charles. Journal of studies 1904-1909', in OSHPA.

30. Ibid.,59.

31. C.S.B. 'At a Training College', Journal of Education, new series, XXII (1900), 208.

32. 'The Social Isolation of Assistant Mistresses, By One of Them', Journal of Education, new series, XXIV (1902), 309.

33. Florence Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-91 (1928),308. It is not clear what 'the crush' was, but perhaps he is referring to his visit to the Royal Academy a few days earlier.