Indicative Past

A Hundred Years of the Girls' Public Day School Trust

Josephine Kamm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134531745
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1971, this volume is much more than a history of the Girls' Public Day School Trust; it examines the growth of educational opportunities for girls and is set against a background of changing social attitudes and ideas. The book is mainly concerned with a small group of schools which pioneered girls' education in the nineteenth century; schools which to this day, whether maintained, direct grant or independent are all concerned to provide the best possible educational opportunities for development and fulfilment to their pupils.

Chapter 1

The Founders

‘There is a pretty theory abroad, which is always brought forward when women’s education is talked about, i.e. that they are educated to be wives and mothers. I do not know a more fallacious one. They are not educated to be wives but to get husbands.’¹

So said Mrs William Grey in 1871. With the help of her sister Miss Emily Shirreff and of two other stalwarts, the Dowager Lady Stanley of Alderley and a much younger woman, Miss Mary Gurney, she was the architect of the Girls’ Public Day School Company (later the Girls’ Public Day School Trust) which over the next twenty-five years was to open thirty-eight first-rate girls’ schools, twenty-three of which are still in existence today.

The older women had grown up in an age when, for the overwhelming majority of girls, education was woefully deficient and they themselves had had to rely mainly on their natural intelligence and intense desire for self-improvement.

Of the Shirreff sisters, Emily Anne, the elder, was born on November 3, 1814, a year before the Battle of Waterloo, and Maria Georgina on March 7, 1816. They were the daughters of Rear-Admiral William Shirreff and his wife Elizabeth Anne Murray, both of whom had French blood, the Admiral claiming, through his mother Margaret Bayard of New York, collateral descent from the famous Chevalier Bayard, ‘sans peur et sans reproche’.

According to his daughter Maria, the Admiral was no scholar but a man of ‘great natural abilities’, determination and ingenuity. As a boy he had been spoilt by his mother, ‘a woman’, wrote his eldest daughter Emily, ‘with more heart than judgment [who] exposed her son to his father’s severity by her over indulgence’. The father, General Shirreff, had decided on an Army career for his son: the boy had other ideas. At the age of eleven he ran away from Westminster School and managed ‘to get on board some craft in the river and so reach a naval port and slip on board a man-of-war on the point of sailing’. By an unlucky coincidence the Captain was a friend of the General’s and he wrote to know what he should do with the boy. The General replied that the best punishment would be to allow him to stay on board and recommended that he ‘should have his full share of hardship and be treated with the utmost severity’ that the Captain ‘might deem expedient’. Nothing loth, the Captain treated the boy as a rebel, ‘and actually went the length on one occasion, of mastheading him for a whole week; but as he did not kill him neither could he kill the spirit within him’. The boy returned to England ‘more determined than ever to be a sailor’. His father relented but refused to give him any help. There was no time for further schooling and William, wrote Maria, made do with ‘such instruction as he could pick up in the course of most arduous naval service during war time’. He was still a boy when he came under the command of Sir Home Popham, the first reformer of naval education, who taught him ‘the use of his instruments and laid the foundations’ of a lifelong interest in science and astronomy, and encouraged him to read the English classics and books on practical science.

It was from the Admiral that the Shirreff girls inherited their pioneering spirit. Their mother, wrote Maria, ‘was in many ways the exact opposite’ of their father. She had plenty of common sense but, like most people of her day, she considered that learning in a woman was ‘not only unnecessary, but undesirable’. She wished her daughters to acquire ‘the modicum of general, historical and other information then considered sufficient for girls: more than this she did not wish them to know’.

Emily was a brilliant, precocious child. She learned to read very early but after a severe illness had to relearn the alphabet at the age of seven. From that time onwards Emily’s health was a recurring topic in Maria’s writings. The four Shirreff sisters – there were two younger girls – had lessons at home from a French-Swiss governess, who taught them to appreciate ‘all great and beautiful things’ but whose own knowledge was so scanty that ‘she probably could not have formulated a single rule of education and would undoubtedly have failed in any examination’.

When Emily was fourteen and Maria twelve they were sent with one of their sisters to a boarding-school in Paris, where Emily was at once placed in a class with girls more than two years her senior. ‘She kept it easily’, wrote Maria, ‘during the one term she was able to remain, but the living was so coarse and all the domestic arrangements so rough that her health . . . broke down under them, and she had to be taken away’.

This episode brought their formal education to a close. In 1830 Admiral Shirreff was appointed to Gibraltar and he did not think it necessary to engage another governess for his daughters. He had, however, built up ‘a good collection of standard books, and there was an excellent Garrison Library in Gibraltar’. Although ‘he was unable from his own want of reading, to direct ours, he gave us free leave to satisfy our eager appetite for knowledge, always saying that he did not care how blue a woman’s stockings were if only her petticoats were long enough to hide them.’

When Maria was about seventeen one of her father’s friends offered to teach the girls mathematics. The offer was ‘eagerly accepted’ even though it meant starting work at seven in the morning, but the lessons were soon ‘broken off by illness’ – Emily’s presumably – and ‘the point reached did not go beyond the mere elements of geometry and algebra’. ‘Regarded as knowledge’, Maria commented, ‘the result was nil, and circumstances have always prevented me carrying it any further; but regarded as training, as cultivation of the reasoning powers, it was invaluable.’

The studious girls redoubled their efforts at self-improvement. During a summer spent not far from Cadiz, at a spot ‘famous for its mineral waters, which had been strongly recommended for Emily’, they learned, ‘under pressure of necessity’, to speak Spanish, since ‘there was not a soul in the place who understood anything else, except two old ladies who could manage a little French.’ Emily, intellectually ahead of her sisters, learnt to write Spanish as well as to speak it fluently, and for some years afterwards corresponded ‘with a most agreeable elderly gentleman at the head of the Observatory in Cadiz’.

Emily and Maria remained sharply aware of the deficiencies of their education for the rest of their lives. In 1850, in their first serious book, Thoughts on Self-Culture, they looked back on the days when they ‘stood as young girls on the threshold of life’, their childhood, ‘with its so-called education behind them, the untried future before’. They recalled ‘the painful sense of inconsistency between life as it appeared in reality and the religious theory of life’, the confusion of their ideas, ‘the want of some comprehensive principle by which to regulate thought and action, of some real aim for exertion; and the vain seeking for some guiding thread to lead [them] out of this perplexing labyrinth, into light and a straight path’.²

There was ample time in the Shirreff household for serious discussion as Mrs Shirreff discouraged frivolity; and in her description of life in Gibraltar Maria does not mention any meetings with other young people and there is no hint of flirtations. In 1834 Mrs Shirreff brought her four daughters home to England. There Maria, a slender, pleasant-looking girl, met her first cousin William Grey, a nephew of Lord Grey under whose premiership the Reform Bill of 1832 was passed. William Grey, who lived with his widowed mother and aunt, was a wine merchant but his chief interests were Greek and mathematics. He gave ‘our minds’, wrote Maria, ‘the bent towards philosophical speculation and study’ by introducing them to the works of Locke and Bacon, of the philosopher Dugald Stewart ‘and others which remained with us through life and to which I trace back our early study of education, the natural sequel to study of the human mind’.

The bond between Emily and Maria was exceptionally close and, as Maria wrote, her marriage to her cousin William in 1841 was ‘a crushing blow to Emily’. Owing to William Grey’s affection for Emily, however, ‘it did not separate us as she had feared it would’. The Greys, who had no children, were a devoted couple, but Maria was clearly the dominant partner. In the Memoir, which she wrote many years later as a tribute to her sister Emily, she was very reticent about her husband but, as she said elsewhere, ‘true happiness is only to be found in marriage’.³

She was less reticent about their circle of friends, to whom they owed their ‘chiefest pleasure’. Through friends they met ‘in turn almost every man of note as a leader in thought and science’, among them the future Master of Balliol, Benjamin Jowett, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, the physicist John Tyndall, the historian George Grote and his wife, the aged novelist Maria Edgeworth and the Reverend Frederick Denison Maurice, Professor of English Literature at King’s College, London, and a leading figure in the fight for girls’ education.

The two youngest Shirreff girls married and had children of their own, and two brothers died very young but Emily remained single. She was her father’s favourite child and he wanted her constantly with him. He even went as far as rejecting an appointment in South America because the delicate Emily suffered so dreadfully from seasickness that it would have been impossible to take her with him. The relationship between father and daughter may well have prevented Emily from marrying. It was not until after his death, when she was nearly forty, that she came under the influence of another man. He was the historian Henry Thomas Buckle, a delicate young man seven years her junior, author of the monumental History of Civilization. Buckle and Emily were close friends – indeed, Emily is reputed to have told one of the first students at Girton College, Cambridge, that they were engaged to be married: if they were Maria did not mention it. She admired Buckle immensely but considered that his influence on Emily ‘was that of a strong and fruitful stimulus to independent exertion rather than in changing the direction of her efforts or her views of life’. He certainly encouraged Emily to study. She learned enough Latin and Greek to read the classics in the original, added Italian to French and Spanish, and was persuaded by him to learn enough Dutch to read Grotius. Much later in life, Maria recorded, she taught herself to read German, ‘for a language to her was a key to open up a literature. . . . But she threw study to the winds if her help was wanted in sickness or sorrow by those she loved.’

Buckle died in 1862, at a moment of family crisis. Emily, wrote Maria dramatically, had recently been ‘struck down by a carbuncle of the worst kind at the back of her neck, and . . . while the surgeon was telling me of her extreme danger from the nearness of the wound to one of the great arteries of the neck, my husband fell down in a fit, the forerunner of the paralytic stroke which came ten days later’. Buckle’s death was ‘a blow very heavily felt by Emily in her still weak state’. For the next two years Maria acted as nurse to her husband. In 1864 he died, and Maria was ‘left to build up my life without him’.

Three years later the Dowager Lady Stanley of Alderley, the third of the founders of the Girls’ Public Day School Company, also became a widow. The fourth, Mary Gurney, was unmarried and still a young woman.

There can scarcely have been a greater contrast between Maria Grey and Emily Shirreff on the one hand and Henrietta Stanley on the other. The sisters, high principled, dignified and devoted to self-improvement, were typically Victorian. Henrietta Stanley, though only seven years older than Emily, belonged to an earlier age. ‘She was always downright, free from prudery, and eighteenth-century rather than Victorian in her conversation,’ wrote her grandson Bertrand Russell.⁴ Born in 1807 Henrietta Maria Dillon, she spent most of her girlhood in Florence where her father, Lord Dillon, was British Minister. The seventh Viscount Dillon had followed James II into exile and the family was staunchly Jacobite. Henrietta, an exceptionally pretty girl with long golden curls, attended the weekly receptions held by the widow of the Young Pretender, but in later life ‘she used to say that the only thing she regarded as stupid about her ancestors was their having been Jacobites’.⁵ She spoke fluent Italian and French and developed a romantic interest in the Young Italy movement. She was very popular with the Italians, who admired her for refusing to dance with the Austrian officers even though, as she said, they danced much better than the Italians.

At nineteen Henrietta married the Whig politician Edward Stanley, later the second Lord Stanley of Alderley. Edward Stanley, who served with no particular distinction in Palmerston’s cabinets, was a man of great charm (when he chose to exercise it); he was also extremely able though too lazy to use his abilities to the full. Famous for his mordant wit, he was known among his friends as Ben, after Sir Benjamin Backbite, but he became more tolerant as he grew older and his wit was less malicious. Henrietta doted on him, despite his frequent escapes from domesticity and the numerous infidelities with which she taxed him. She seldom accompanied him to London or the country houses of his friends, and his visits home were generally followed by the birth of yet another child. Henrietta Stanley had twelve children, of whom a turbulent brood of nine survived, four boys and five girls. She loved them all, some more than others, but found them a continual source of anxiety.

Henrietta’s mother-in-law, the first Lady Stanley of Alderley, was a dominating, fearsomely outspoken woman, who wrote almost daily to ‘Hen’, as she called her daughter-in-law. ‘You might be glad of the Children being longer in the country than you would like yourself sometimes’, she wrote in 1841, a few months before the birth of Kate, the future Lady Amberley and Bertrand Russell’s mother, ‘but the truth is, & an unpleasant truth it is, that Edward has no taste for the company of Wife & Children by themselves and that you are afraid of being . . . left . . . when he is amusing himself in Town.’⁶

Hen bore these home truths meekly but continued to fuss and worry. When the children went to stay with their grandmother she was terrified that they would misbehave. ‘I am not at all afraid of the little boys being troublesome particularly,’ wrote her mother-in-law tartly in 1844. ‘It is a very large family altogether & especially feeding time that is oppressive. . . . I wish I could explain to your clear understanding, that I am more annoyed sometimes by your own anxiety to keep the boys quiet & your unceasing attention to them, than by anything they can do – & I would like girls, & all, to be more natural than they are with me and that they should not be lectured too much into pretty behaviour & that if I find a trifling fault & say don’t do or do do such a thing that you should neither be offended nor yet say anything to back me, as if it was necessary.’⁷

Occasionally Henrietta rebelled. ‘I do not know why we were asked here it is so evident our presence gives no pleasure,’ she wrote to her husband in 1845 while visiting his mother. ‘It is impossible to make things go smooth where every action or expression must be moulded to suit the imperious pleasure of one nothing can please. The poor girls are quite subdued & it gives one an indigestion.’⁸

The children’s health, her husband’s and her own formed an absorbing topic of correspondence. ‘Edward has set up a nervous headache in half his head at a fixed hour every day,’ she informed his mother in 1843, ‘I am attacking his stomach.’⁹ Some years later she was complaining to her husband that her heart was so weak that she dreaded any shock but found walking for five hours a day efficacious. For headaches she took a lethal mixture of arsenic, bark, ether and camphor, supplemented by a full diet of meat three times a day and a supper of soup and wine. If she thought that these complaints would bring her ‘dearest Love’ home or persuade him to remonstrate with his mother she was very much mistaken.

Soon after her marriage she had started to prepare for a family by studying the educational theories of Locke and Rousseau. She took more than a passing interest in the local school, entertaining parties of schoolchildren to tea and making sure that the villagers sent their children to school and had them vaccinated during a smallpox epidemic.

Her own daughters were taught by a succession of governesses, most of them incompetent. ‘It does seem wonderful that good or even tolerable governesses shd. be so scarce’, wrote her mother-in-law in 1843, ‘& that their expectations should be so exorbitant in times when one might suppose many would wish for a governess who cannot afford to pay them high, & that very many well educated persons must be wanting bread. I am much afraid you will not get all you require under £100.’ Hen ought to be content with ‘a sensible woman . . . who will improve their minds & be able to converse with them on what they read hear or see. . . . I quite agree with you that the manners of a gentlewom...