—— bounteous BuckinghamThe mirror of all courtesey.
—— bounteous BuckinghamThe mirror of all courtesey.
—— bounteous BuckinghamThe mirror of all courtesey.
Stokys and Stokes was a well-known name before Sir George Stokes went to Pembroke; Sedgwick was on the papist side in the controversy held before Edward VI.’s commissioners; Tyndale, like Aldrich, belongs to the xvi and xvii centuries. Fitzhugh is a name which flourished at the university in the xv and early xvi centuries. Parker, Paston,[437]Morgan, Cosin and Cousins, and the various forms of Clark are constant Cambridge names. In modern times Macaulay, Trevelyan, Paget, Maitland, and Lyttelton should be added.
The subject of university men must not be dismissed without noticing how many of the most distinguished Cantabrigians never earned a degree. We have already seen (in chapter iii.) that in some periods of greatest intellectual achievement the examination tests at the university were wholly inadequate: what follows is a list of great and prominent men who took no degree at all:—Bacon, Byron, Macaulay (fellow of Trinity), Gray (professor of history),[438]Morland the hydrostatician,[439]Woodward the founder of mineralogy,[440]Donne, Fulke Greville, Parr the classic, Sir William Temple, Cromwell, Pepys and Mildmay both of whom were conspicuous benefactors of the university, Dryden who received his degree by dispensation ofthe Primate, Stratford de Redcliffe who was createdM.A.by royal mandamus, Palmerston who graduated “by right of birth.” There was no one so important as Macaulay in 1822 when his name was absent from the tripos list, no one so great as Darwin in the tripos lists of 1831 when he took an ordinary degree.
The Oxford roll of non-graduates is not less distinguished: Sir Thomas More, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Philip Sidney, Wolsey, Massinger and Beaumont the dramatists, Shaftesbury, Gibbon, Shelley—while Halley the astronomer took hisM.A.by royal mandamus, and Locke’s degree was irregular. Dublin university has not a dissimilar tale to tell; Burke failed to distinguish himself there, and Swift was given a degreespeciali gratia.
Etheldreda of Ely and Hild of Whitby connect the school of York with the monastery of Ely—English women and education—the four “noble and devoute countesses” and two queens at Cambridge—the rise of the movement for university education—two separate movements—Girton—Newnham—rise of the university lecture movement—Anne Clough—the Newnham Halls and Newnham College—the first triposes—the “Graces” of 1881—social life at the women’s colleges—character and choice of work among women—the degree—status of women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford—and status elsewhere.
Etheldreda of Ely and Hild of Whitby connect the school of York with the monastery of Ely—English women and education—the four “noble and devoute countesses” and two queens at Cambridge—the rise of the movement for university education—two separate movements—Girton—Newnham—rise of the university lecture movement—Anne Clough—the Newnham Halls and Newnham College—the first triposes—the “Graces” of 1881—social life at the women’s colleges—character and choice of work among women—the degree—status of women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford—and status elsewhere.
THEfoundation of the women’s colleges is of sufficient importance to call for a chapter in any history of the university, even if they did not in themselves awaken so much general interest. Cambridge cannot be otherwise than proud of its position as pioneer university in the higher education of the women of the country; the women’s colleges count as one of its glories and stand to it in the relation which Spenser gave to the river Ouse:
My mother Cambridge, whom as with a crowneHe doth adorne, and is adorn’d of it.
My mother Cambridge, whom as with a crowneHe doth adorne, and is adorn’d of it.
My mother Cambridge, whom as with a crowneHe doth adorne, and is adorn’d of it.
They belong to its atmosphere of vitality and growth, their presence adds something to that air of newness and renewal which has never been absent from the university town.
Etheldreda of Ely and Hild of Whitby were of the same blood, kin to Edwin and Oswy. They founded two of those famous double monasteries for women and men, one of which became the greatest school in England, the other the nursing mother of the university of Cambridge.[441]The histories of the School of York and of the School which was to rise on the banks of the Granta had therefore been linked together since the vii century by Hild and Etheldreda. Was any prevision vouchsafed to Hild, that mother of scholars, of the day just twelve hundred years later when two women’s colleges were to rise by the side of the great school in the diocese of Ely? The centre of learning which had Etheldreda of Ely for one of its patrons was certainly propitious to women; but Cambridge had another patroness—whose name was among the earliest to be invoked in the town after the coming of the Normans—that Rhadegund who ruled the first nuns and the first double monastery in France, who was ordained a deacon by S. Médard, in whose convent study camenext to prayer, who lectured each day to her spiritual children, and whose learning is recorded with admiration by one of her monks, the poet-bishop Venantius Fortunatus.[442]
Perhaps there is no country with a long history where women have played a smaller part on the national stage than England. But a conspicuous exception must be made—in education they have played a great part, and this part was nowhere greater than in Cambridge. We have the little group of college builders who lived in contiguous centuries—Elizabeth de Clare, Marie de Saint-Paul, Margaret of Anjou, and Margaret of Richmond—to prove it: but the activity of the xiv and xv centuries was equally apparent between the viith and xth. It was Saxon nuns who carried learning to Germany, and the rôle of the great abbesses in those centuries, while it must be reckoned among the exceptions to the inconspicuous part played by women in English history, also served prominently the cause of education.[443]
The “two noble and devoute countesses” who built Clare and Pembroke, and whom Margaret of Anjou desired to imitate, realised perhaps more than anyone else in the xiv century the extraordinary joy of launching those first foundations with their promise for the
THE GREAT BRIDGE—BRIDGE ST. This view is painted from the old Quay side. The water-gate of Magdalene College is seen on the right, and in the distance is the Tower in the New Court of St. John’s College rising above the tree-tops.THE GREAT BRIDGE—BRIDGE ST.This view is painted from the old Quay side. The water-gate of Magdalene College is seen on the right, and in the distance is the Tower in the New Court of St. John’s College rising above the tree-tops.
future:[444]but it was something of this joy which was reserved for their descendants who saw the rise of Newnham and Girton. It was, indeed, not to two but to four noble and devoute countesses[445]that Cambridge owed its most efficient co-operation in the great periods which mark its history—the dawn of the renascence in the xiv, the threshold of our modern life in the xv, and the consolidation of the religious movement in the xvi century:[446]and if Queens’ College was built by Margaret of Anjou “to laud and honneure of sexe femenine” Cambridge has repaid her by extending the significance of her ambition.
The women’s colleges which we now see did not, then, begin the connexion of women and the university, they completed it. It is a curious thing when one looks down a list of Cambridge benefactors to find that from a college to a common room fire, from a professorship to a Cambridge “chest,” from the chapel to a new college to the buttress of a falling college, from a university preacher to a belfry,[447]the names of women never fail to appear as benefactors, but appear in no other way. Not once until the xix century did anywoman benefit from the learning which her sex had done so much to inaugurate, to sustain and consolidate.
In the year 1867 the idea of founding a woman’s college and of associating the higher education of women with the university of Cambridge began to take shape.[448]No movement of the century, it may confidently be affirmed, has done so much to increase the happiness of women, and none has opened to them so many new horizons. If men look back on the years spent at the university as among the happiest in their lives, so that everything in later life which recalls theiralma mater—not excluding the London terminus from which they always “went up”—borrows some of its glamour, the university life meant all this, and more, for women. To begin with it repaired a traditional injustice, the absence of any standard of individual life especially for the unmarried; the neglect of every personal interest, talent, or ambition, which a woman might have apart from looking after her own or other people’s children. The Reformation, in itself, had done singularly little for women. Puritan views were of the kind patronisedby a Sir Willoughby Patterne, and no step had been made towards recognising women’s claims as individuals since the days when convents had in some measure certainly admitted these, a fact which probably sufficed to make the convent turn the scale on the side of happiness.
Girton and Newnham are the outcome of two contemporaneous but separate movements. In 1867, as we have seen, the moral foundations were laid of a college in connexion with Cambridge university where women should follow the same curriculum and present themselves for the same examinations as men. In 1869 the late Professor Henry Sidgwick, fellow of Trinity, and afterwards Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, suggested that lectures for women should be given at Cambridge in connexion with the new Higher Local Examination which the university had that year established for women all over England. To-day, more than thirty years after the building of the two colleges, Newnham and Girton are as alike in character as two institutions can be, but this likeness is the consequence of changes on both sides. The view taken by the promoters of Girton was that if women were to be trained at the university by university men they should undergo precisely the same tests, and take precisely the same examinations as men. Professor Sidgwick contented himself with a scheme for relating the higher education of women to university teaching, and not only accepted but encouraged a separate course of study and a separate examination test. Girton represents the principle that a woman’s universityeducation should closely resemble that which the centuries had evolved as the best for men. Newnham was started to further a scheme of education as unlike the men’s as preparation for the higher work made possible. The one grew out of a claim to have the same examination as men; the other was the outcome of an examination established expressly for women. Events have not justified the second scheme. If women’s education was to be connected with the university, the only permanently satisfactory way was, clearly, to follow the curriculum already traced out. If this was not actually the best which could be devised, the foundation of women’s colleges was not the moment to attempt to alter it. A “best” created for women would always have been thought to be a second best. There were in fact not one but two objects set before all who interested themselves in these things—to get higher education for women, and to win recognition for their capacity to do the same work as men. Among the founders of women’s colleges many had present to their minds something further than the advantages of education—they looked forward to a time when women should participate in the world’s work, and have a fair share in the common human life; not a fair share of its labour, for this had never been lacking, but of the means, the opportunities, and the recognition enjoyed by men.
Women and the ordinary degree.
Girton at once prepared its students for the university Previous Examination, and claimed that they should be examined for both the
VIEW OF CAMBRIDGE FROM THE CASTLE HILL The central object in the picture is the tower of St. John’s College Chapel, with the tower of Great St. Mary’s a little to the right and King’s College Chapel to the extreme right. In the middle distance on the left is Jesus College and the Round Church, and nearer to us we look down upon the roofs of Magdalene College. The building on the right in foreground is St. Giles’ Church, the original foundation of which takes us back nearly to the Conquest. In the extreme distance is the rising ground known as the Gog-Magog Hills.VIEW OF CAMBRIDGE FROM THE CASTLE HILLThe central object in the picture is the tower of St. John’s College Chapel, with the tower of Great St. Mary’s a little to the right and King’s College Chapel to the extreme right. In the middle distance on the left is Jesus College and the Round Church, and nearer to us we look down upon the roofs of Magdalene College. The building on the right in foreground is St. Giles’ Church, the original foundation of which takes us back nearly to the Conquest. In the extreme distance is the rising ground known as the Gog-Magog Hills.
ordinary and the honour degree. Newnham at first prepared its students for the Higher Local examinations and the triposes, discountenanced the Previous Examination and would not allow its students to prepare for the Ordinary degree. In the event, Newnham has had to abandon the examination which was the originalraison d’êtreof its existence, and Girton has had virtually to abandon its claim to examination for the ordinary degree. This means that every woman who takes a degree takes it in honours: the same is true of no college of men in Cambridge except King’s. The founders of Newnham considered it a waste of time for women to come to the university to qualify themselves for that Ordinary degree which graces the majority of our men, and which represented such a mysterious weight of learning to sisters at home in the old days. This decision has a doublericochet—it is good for the colleges, for only the better women come up; it is bad for many women who, like many men, are unfit to do tripos work and who might yet enjoy from residence at Cambridge the same advantages—direct and extraneous—which the ‘poll’ degree man now obtains.
Girton.
The first committee for the future Girton College met on December 5th 1867;[449]but the foundationof Girton dates from October 16, 1869 when a hired house at Hitchin, midway between Cambridge and London, was opened to six students at a time when it was not thought advisable to plant a women’s college in Cambridge. The college at Hitchin[450]was carried on under serious tuitional and other disadvantages—lecturers from the university, for example, were paid for the time occupied in the journey—and in 1873 the college was removed to Girton, a village two miles out of Cambridge.
The manor and village of Girton.
The manor of Girton on the Huntingdon road—the old via Devana—belonged in the xi century to Picot the Norman sheriff of Cambridge who expropriated part of its tithes for the endowment of the canons’ house and church of S. Giles which is passed by Girtonians on their way from the college to the town. In the xvi century the manor provided a rent charge for Corpus Christi College. Earlier still it was the site of a Roman and Anglo-Saxon burial ground (discovered in a college field in 1882-6). The college itself is built on old river gravel.
The founders.
The final decision to build near but not in the university town was taken at the last moment when Lady Augusta Stanley, wife of Dean Stanley, refused both money and moral support if it were decided otherwise.[451]Lady Augusta Stanley who thus determined a step which has not proved advantageous to Girton was not, however, one of the founders of the college. This honour is due in the first place to Madame Bodichon (Barbara Leigh Smith before her marriage) and to Miss Emily Davies, daughter of Dr. Davies, rector of Gateshead, who elaborated the scheme together. The first thousand pounds which made possible the realisation of the scheme was given by the former, whose activity in all causes for the advancement of women’s interests was crowned by her gifts to the first women’s college: part of her capital was made over in her life-time to Girton which became her trustee for the payment of the interest until her death in 1891, and of certain terminable annuities afterwards.[452]The third founder was Henrietta wife of the 2nd Lord Stanley of Alderley and daughter of the 13th Viscount Dillon,[453]a munificent donor to the college, who joinedthe movement in 1871, before the removal from Hitchin, and who died in 1895.
The college.
The picturesque and collegiate-looking building which arose in 1873 for the accommodation of 21 students, was thus the first residential college for women ever built in connexion with a university. It was, like Pembroke, the result of a woman’s intention to found and finish adomus seu aula scholarium, the scholars being, for the first time, of the sex of the founder. Subsequent building in 1877, 1879, 1884, 1887 (when Jane C. Gamble’s legacy enabled the college to house 106 students) and finally between 1899 and 1902, has greatly increased its capacity, and the college now holds 150 students in addition to the Mistress and the resident staff. It contains a large hall, libraries, reading room, lecture rooms, a chemical laboratory, chapel, hospital, and swimming bath; and its position outside the town gives it the advantage of large grounds, some thirty acres being divided into hockey fields, ten tennis courts, an orchard, and kitchen garden; while a seventeen acre field, purchased with the Gamble bequest in 1886, is utilised as golf links and woodland. Over the high table in the hall are the portraits of the three founders; Madame Bodichon is represented painting, reminding each generation of students that one of their founders was a distinguished and delightful artist.
GIRTON COLLEGE—EVENING These buildings were designed by Mr. Waterhouse. They are of red brick, and were first occupied in 1873.GIRTON COLLEGE—EVENINGThese buildings were designed by Mr. Waterhouse. They are of red brick, and were first occupied in 1873.
Government.
The college is governed by its members,[454]from whom is drawn the Executive Committee, three members of which are indirectly chosen by the old students. The Executive Committee appoints the Mistress and college officers, but the Mistress nominates the resident staff with the exception of the bursar, junior bursar, librarian, and registrar. The fees for residence and tuition are thirty-five guineas for each of the three yearly terms, and they include “coaching.” Students may be in residence who are not reading for a tripos, the goal of the great majority. A great part of the preparation for triposes is done at the college by its own resident staff. The first Cambridge degree examination taken by women was in 1870 when five of the six Hitchin students were examined for the Previous Examination;[455]and the first tripos examination taken by women was two years later when three of these students passed in the classical and mathematical triposes.[456]In scholastic successes, Girton trained the first wrangler (Miss Scott, equal to 8th wrangler 1880), the first senior moralist (Miss E. E. Constance Jones, the present Mistress of Girton), and the only seniorclassic (Miss Agnata Ramsay, now wife to the Master of Trinity); and was the first to obtain first classes in the classical tripos.[457]
Among scholarships and exhibitions are six foundation scholarships the gift of private persons; the scholarships of the Clothworkers’, Drapers’, Goldsmiths’, and Skinners’ Companies and of the Honourable the Irish Society; in addition to which there are other valuable scholarships and studentships due to private benefactors, and the Gamble, Gibson, Montefiore, Metcalfe, and Agnata Butler prizes.[458]
Former Girton students.
Former Girton students not only fill posts all over Great Britain and Ireland as head or assistant mistresses in high schools, grammar schools,and women’s colleges, but they are to be found holding the professorship of mathematics and a classical fellowship at Bryn Mawr College Pennsylvania, in the high schools of Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Moscow, in women’s colleges at Toronto and Durban, as mathematical or other tutors in Queen’s College London, Queen’s College Belfast, and Alexandra College Dublin. A Girtonian is vice-president of the British Astronomical Association, computer at Cambridge Observatory, assistant inspector to the Scotch Education Department, lecturer in modern economic history in the university of London, a fellow of the university of London, on the staff of the Victoria History of the Counties of England, assistant on the staff of the English Dialect Dictionary (just published); while one is secretary and librarian of the Royal Historical Society, and another (aD.Sc.of London) is a fellow of the same society. Old students are also to be found as educational missionaries in Bombay and Calcutta, as members of the Missionary Settlement for University Women in Bombay, and of the Women’s Mission Association (S.P.G.) at Rurki; as medical missionary at Poona, as missionaries at Lake Nyasa, and in Japan, and the principal of the North India Medical School for Christian Women is also a Girtonian. In special work, a Girtonian is H.M.’s principal lady inspector of factories, one of H.M.’s inspectors of schools, a Poor Law guardian, a deputy superintendent of the women clerks’ department of the Bank of England, and on the secretarial staff of the Tariff Commission. An oldGirtonian is the only woman member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and the only woman to hold the Hughes Gold Medal of the Royal Society.
All other colleges which have been founded or will be founded for women owe a debt to Girton for upholding the principle of equal conditions and equal examination tests in the university education of women and men. Its promoters always kept steadily before them the two ends of women’s education, and never moved from the position that “what is best for the human being will be found to be also the best for both sexes.” To them it is mainly due that when Plato’s ideal of equal education of the sexes came at length to be realised, after women had waited for it more than two thousand years, it was not upon a basis of separate examinations for women, and separate tests so designed as to elude comparison.[459]
Newnham.
The village of Newnham which is approached from the “Backs” of the colleges, and
THE BOATHOUSE ON ROBINSON CRUSOE’S ISLAND On the upper river at the back of King’s Mill, not far from Queens’ College. Across the bridge in the distance and behind the trees on the left is Coe Fen, and on the right is Sheep’s Green.THE BOATHOUSE ON ROBINSON CRUSOE’S ISLANDOn the upper river at the back of King’s Mill, not far from Queens’ College. Across the bridge in the distance and behind the trees on the left is Coe Fen, and on the right is Sheep’s Green.
which, until 1880, was also accessible by a ferry over Coe fen, played an important part in the early history of the university. It was the site given to the Whitefriars, who had been the first arrivals in Cambridge, and who from the time of their appearance there as romites till they became the sons of S. Theresa were the most conspicuous community in the town. The first general of the Carmelites—an Englishman—had been a contemporary of the founder of the first college, and it was at Newnham that he visited his friars in the middle of the xiii century, at the convent there which is described in the Hundred Rolls and the Barnwell Chartulary.[460]In the same century William de Manfield left his lands in Newnham to the scholars of Merton. In the next (the xiv) century the manor of Newnham was given to Gonville Hall by Lady Anne Scrope, and both Sir John Cambridge and Henry Tangmer, who were aldermen of the guilds of the Blessed Virgin and Corpus Christi, gave or bequeathed lands and houses they held in Newnham to the new college which the
A.D.1291.
guilds had built.[461]The Carmelites moved later to thepresent site of Queens’ and the adjoining ground, and the edge of their property is skirted by every Newnham student on her way to lectures either through Silver Street or King’s College. This new residence was the gift of Sir Guy de Mortimer and was in the busy university centre—Mill Street in the parish of S. John Baptist—so that the friars still heard the sound of the horn which was blown at the King’s Mill to tell the miller at Newnham that he might begin to grind. Beyond the mill was Newnham Lane, which stretched to Grantchester.[462]
Like Peterhouse which was adapted and built for the “Ely Scholars,” the Hall at Newnham was the outcome of a students’ association:—the North of England Council for the Higher Education of Women, of which Miss Clough was president, and the association formed to promote the interests of the Higher Local students were its real progenitors.
As soon as the removal from Hitchin had been decided, it was hoped that the students already settled in Cambridge and the Girton community might form one body; but the decision to build away from the town put a stop to any such scheme. The standpoint of the promoters of Newnham had always diverged in some particulars from that of the promoters of Girton. The former wished to reduce the expenses of
QUEENS’ LANE—THE SITE OF THE OLD MILL STREET The Towers of Queens’ College Gateway are seen on the left, through the trees on the right is St. Catherine’s College, and in the distance a portion of King’s College.QUEENS’ LANE—THE SITE OF THE OLD MILL STREETThe Towers of Queens’ College Gateway are seen on the left, through the trees on the right is St. Catherine’s College, and in the distance a portion of King’s College.
a university education to the minimum, and they wished, too, that it should be completely undenominational, while a clause in the constitution of Girton provided for Church of England instruction and services. Finally, the question as to which preliminary and degree examinations should be preferred by women was still pending.[463]But when the moment came to hire and build a house of residence, the advantage was all on the side of Newnham. Work began in a hired house in the centre of the town with five students, in the October term of 1871.[464]These quarters were too noisy, and Miss Clough, who loved a garden, found an old house set in a large garden and orchard, with the historic name of Merton Hall, and moved there in 1872. A supplementary house in Trumpington Street was taken next year, and there were then in residence 14 students in Merton Hall, 7 in Trumpington Street, and 8 in town lodgings. In 1875 Newnham Hall was built on one side of Coe fen and Newnham Mill, asPeterhouse had been built on the other. So that Newnham students frequented the streets of Cambridge from the first, and had their house of residence in the town two years before the sister community settled at Girton. The founders of Girton had been the first to ideate a women’s college in connexion with university teaching, but Newnham was the first college for women to take its place by the side of the historic colleges in Cambridge.
Let us now retrace our steps for a moment. In March 1868 the North of England Council memorialised the university to obtain advanced examinations, and in the following year Cambridge instituted the examinations for girls over eighteen since known as the Higher Local Examination. In the autumn of the same year (1869), as we have seen—the year which saw the establishment of the future Girton community at Hitchin—the organisation of the Cambridge lectures for women was mooted under the auspices of Mr. Henry Sidgwick. The first meeting was convened at the house of Mrs. Fawcett, whose husband was then Professor of Political Economy at the university, and whose little daughter, the future senior wrangler, was peacefully cradled at the time in a room above. The result of this meeting was the formation of a committee of management consisting of members of the university, and of an executive committee, and the programme of a course of lectures was printed for the following Lent term 1870.[465]The original scheme
MERTON HALL An old house in the Merton Estate district.MERTON HALLAn old house in the Merton Estate district.
included a students’ house where women from a distance could be lodged. Two students applied in the autumn term of 1870 for permission to reside in Cambridge, and were received into private houses in the town. Meanwhile in response to an appeal, originating with Mrs. Fawcett, exhibitions of £40 for two years for students attending the lectures had been given by John Stuart Mill and Helen Taylor, and before the year closed it was found necessary to open a house of residence. In March 1871 the post of head of a house of residence was offered to Miss Anne J. Clough.
Anne Clough.
We know more about Miss Clough than about any founder or first principal of a college on which he or she left a personal mark. Of the life and thoughts of others, with the exception perhaps of Bateman in the xiv century and Fisher in the xvith, we know singularly little. Anne J. Clough was born on January 20, 1820, at Liverpool. Through her Newnham received, what Girton missed, the impress of a strong individuality, now placed by “great death” at a distance which enables us to focus and appraise it. Her father’s family was of Welsh origin and traced itself to that Sir Richard who was agent to the great merchant-adventurer, Sir Thomas Gresham. To her Yorkshire mother, Anne Perfect, she and her brother, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, owed their literary interests. In appearance she was of middle height and spare—an old woman of that Victorian epoch in which she was born, out of whose eyes looked the soul of the twentieth century, and after. She seemed indeed to have two personalities—the white hair and an uncertain gait typified the one, but the eyes, very dark and very bright, would lift unexpectedly in the midst of a conversation, and then the visitor would receive a revelation; he would see no more the old woman but the woman who must always be young, the stamp of an inexhaustible energy, that shrewdness with an unconquerable idealism close behind, an atmosphere about her of uncouth poetry.
For she was no artist. She had not that which separates the artist from the man of ideas, or thedreamer, or the seer—expression. No poetical imagination was ever more tongue-tied. She spoke by actions, and used words only as indications of thoughts. Her speech was compared by a former student to the works of early painters, before command over the material had been obtained, but where “sheer force of character and feeling had risen over the difficulties.” She was an idealist, but she could never understand the value of an abstract principle. Her interest was always in the individual, in the career, and she came to no matter, to no person, with a store of general principles ready for the case. She wanted to give women not merely learning, but a life of their own, to call out interests, to satisfy their individuality. She liked to find in them many and marked vocations, for she understood the dignity of all work and had no disdain of common things. She wanted every one to have a place and an office in life, and must perforce fit the squarest bits into a round hole, so intolerably pathetic was it to her that they should have no hole. You could not “hand her the salt or open the door for her” without receiving “some recognition of your individuality” a student said of her. This recognition of the individuality of women and of the human and practical sides of higher intellectual training was her contribution to the movement in which she took so great a part. And the contribution was all important.
She had besides a strong belief in the value of academic advantages. It was in order that some crumbs of things academic might fall to the teachersin elementary schools, that she arranged the summer meetings of University Extension Lecture students. Miss dough’s belief in happiness—in people’s right to happiness—was the source of most delightful qualities. She had waited, she said, for her own till she was fifty years old, and it had come to her with Newnham. She insisted on the little pleasures “which bring joy by the way.” Nothing was too small to engage her own attention, and her educational qualities lay in awaking similar interest in others, as her moral disposition led her to share and so to increase the common stock of interests and supports in life. And so on the rare occasions when she left the college boundaries she would recount to the students at her table or in her room all that had interested her during her absence. She busied herself over the minutest details of their health or well-being, and finding that two students made a simple supper upstairs on Sunday, she arrived at the door carrying a good-sized table, because she had noticed there was none convenient for the purpose. Newnham was for her a big house, and the students were grown-up daughters in a delightful family not yet realised elsewhere, each of whom had her own place in the world, her own personal life, its rights and liberties. Yet the “head” who habitually intervened in small college matters (with a total lack of power of organisation, which in the administration of Newnham she left to others) and who was frequently agitated and over anxious about them, balanced these things by a life-long habit of interest in large publicaffairs, and, what was more strange, by a very real serenity. She did not think the individual should be sacrificed to the college, or “to a cause, however good.” She never lived in a small milieu—even Newnham.
She constantly exercised a simple diplomacy, not divorced from sympathy—with independent-minded students, with university dons who viewed Newnham with disfavour, and in generally vain attempts to conciliate high theory with prudent practice. It was here that her characteristics sometimes jarred on the early students, among whom were many ardent spirits, people whose presence there at all was the consequence of a struggleà outrancewith convention and prejudice; and who resented Miss Clough’s temporising ways, as though the first maker of Newnham were a backslider in the matter of first principles. They thought her indirect and timid. She was neither. She had real courage, not only as her biographer has said “audacity in thought”[466]but audacity in execution. She was staunch and tenacious, and might be found taking an individual’s part against the whole college; and whether the help she gave was moral or financial, no one ever knew of it but herself. Neither did she always prefer the most brilliant or useful student, but would take under her wing the apparently most insignificant. She had no fear of the unusual, though the younger students thought so, and it was “her indifference to abstract principle” which made themsometimes judge that she despised ideals. She had also a singular frankness—a singular directness—when speaking with others face to face; her important things were said at odd moments, odd moments were her opportunities. Neither did she compromise; she went all the way round and came out at the same place. This expedient made it quite unnecessary to override obstacles, and her aphorism “my dear, you must go round” was received with hostile scorn by a student seated on the high horse of abstract considerations. Indeed Miss Clough was not a fighter in the sense that she could neglect the quantity of others’ feelings: and her desire that people should not be offended was part of a sympathy, not of a timidity, which could not be conquered. The working of her mind is shewn in the saying: “If we watch, we may still find a way to escape”—because to her there was no inevitable where her sympathies were engaged. Her diplomacy led her to keep her notions to herself, so that they should not be nipped in the bud by the frost of hostile criticism.
“My dear, I did wrong” was the disarming reply to a very young student who asked her “as one woman to another” whether she considered she had been justified in a certain course of action. Her singleness of purpose—the absence of all vanity—a complete disinterestedness, shone on all occasions. Her never failing search after the right course she once tried to express by saying to a student: “You must remember that I try to be just but I don’t alwayssucceed”; and she criticised the performance with complete detachment from the personal equation.[467]
Among the ideas which seethed in her brain was the training of students as doctors to work among Hindu women; and one of the last things she interested herself about was a school for girls at Siam. She wanted teachers trained to teach.[468]She urged students to know at least one country and one language besides their own. Her liking for new people, her interest in foreigners, especially in Italians, and in travel, was part of a spirit of adventure with which she was largely endowed. She liked old students to go to the colonies, and her interest in such doings never flagged. Her hold on the xx century was foreshadowed in the interest she took during the last years in the Norwegians, and in Japan. She felt very special sympathy with elementary teachers who receive small encouragement for highly important and difficult work. Even the monotonous life of the country clergy claimed her attention, as did a Sunday class for working men inaugurated by one of the students—which she visited, taking the keenest interest in the handwriting of the men, in the books they read. Her relations with her servants were always delightful, and she found time in the midstof a busy life to teach the Newnham house boy to write.
She sometimes spoke at the college debates, and usually, as a student remarked, “spoke on both sides.” On college anniversaries she would make short addresses, and point the connexion of study with life—“examinations demand concentration, presence of mind, energy, courage,” qualities which “come into use every day”: or she would tell students “to bear defeat, and to try again and again”; or she would quote the American who said we should not complain about things which can be remedied, or which cannot be remedied; and add: “there is great strength in these words.”
Her religion was unconventional like her mind; full of aspiration, but lacking in definiteness. She spoke of it as “a longing towards what is divine,” as “arising from the contemplation of the divine.” She spoke of “bringing our hearts into a constant spirit of earnest longing after what is right” and added in language which discovers the burning thought and the halting utterance that made strange partnership in her: “There is no occasion, then, of kneeling down and repeating forms to make prayers.”
One of the last acts was to preside on February 3, 1892 at a meeting which recommended the Council to build a college gateway; the gateway which was to symbolise the concentration of the work—for the public pathway had just been closed—and theattollite portasto ever fresh generations of students. Its bronze gates are the old students’ memorial of her.And on the morning of October 27, 1892, she died, in her room on the garden at Newnham, looking out at the gathering light of the new day.
She was buried with the honours of the head of a college, the Provost and fellows of King’s offering their chapel for the purpose. She lies in the village church-yard of Grantchester, thecivitatulawhich Bede describes where the sons of Ely monastery came to fetch the sarcophagus for S. Etheldreda. So in her death she is not divided from the great memories which link the history of the university to that of the movement to which she gave her life.
The first 28 students came into residence in Newnham Hall on October 18th 1875, and found the moment no less thrilling because they approached the door of theiralma materacross planks and unfinished masonry. More room was at once needed, and “Norwich House” in the town was hired. In 1879 the Newnham Hall Company and the Association for promoting the Higher Education of Women[469]amalgamated, and as “the Newnham College Association for advancing education and learning among women in Cambridge” built the second, or North Hall. Thus Newnham Hall became Newnham College. A public pathway led between the two halls, and this was not closed till 1891; but in 1886 a still larger building, containing the college hall, was erected, and calledClough Hall, the original Newnham (“South”) Hall becoming the “Old Hall,” and the North Hall becoming “Sidgwick Hall.” Lastly the two original halls were joined by the “Pfeiffer building”[470]and the college gateway in 1893, and in 1897 Mr. and Mrs. Yates Thompson presented a fine library, the pretty old library of Newnham Hall which had been built in 1882, being converted into a reading room. The land for the three Halls was purchased from S. John’s College, the hockey field is on Clare land, and the total acreage is about ten and a half acres. The college holds 160 students, a few ‘out students’ being affiliated to one or other of the halls—and consists of a large hall, capable of seating 400 persons, a smaller hall and reading room in each building, the library, nine lecture and class rooms, gymnasium, small hospital, chemical laboratory, and the Balfour laboratory in the town which is a freehold of the college. The grounds contain two fives courts, lawn tennis courts, and a hockey ground. In the hall are the portraits of Miss Clough, Professor and Mrs. Sidgwick, and Miss M. G. Kennedy, as the four people who had given most of their life work to Newnham.[471]
The fees vary from £30 to £35 a term according to