Frances Mary Buss and her work for education

by Annie E. Ridley

“I have been asked to write some account of these latter—perhaps we might call them triumphant—years of my dear friend’s life-work, as I saw them in the light of my close connection with her, and the marvellous friendship she extended to me. These were the years when she had entered, in one sense, into the fruits of her labours. The school she founded had become a public school—‘Miss Buss’ school’ still—but immortalized. The women’s educational movement, in the moulding of which she had been a potent force, had taken shape, and was moving to its goal—that goal of equal opportunity with the hitherto more favoured sex, which we younger women are apt to regard as our natural birthright, although we have not entirely secured it yet. There were many worries for her still, and very much work on educational problems; but as regards the general question of the education of girls, the critical turnings on the road were practically passed when I joined it, and to reverse the course of our educational efforts would have been like turning back the Thames at—well, not London Bridge—say, Maidenhead.

“In 1875, the future of women was, I believe, much more certain than it appeared. It may be that I think this because it was always taken so much as a matter of course in the logic of my family circle. It had never been suggested to me in my life that I had not an equal birthright to knowledge with my brother. Hence it happened most naturally that I was an early candidate for the Senior Local Examinations, out of which came my acquaintance with Miss Emily Davies, and afterwards with Miss Buss. I remember seeing her among her girls in the intervals of the examination; and she, as I afterwards learned, was interested in the girl whose chief subject was mathematics. Our family birthright was specially in mathematics, and all of us, boys and girls, grew up to cultivate that soil. I dwell on this fact here because it was as a woman who could teach mathematics that Miss Buss first sent for me. She believed that young girls should be taught by women, and she wanted to build up mathematical studies.

“Presently a time came when I resolved, not to do a little teaching, but to throw my whole life into the work of education. Especially I wanted to teach girls mathematics. I thought that women’s lives would be happier and sounder if they had, as a matter of course, their fair share of the sterner intellectual discipline that had been such a joy to me. My father was a born teacher and an educational enthusiast. Moreover, to his scientific habit of mind it was as natural to regard teaching as a scientific art as to believe that girls should be fully educated. My feeling about these things was, in the first instance, the continuation of his. Then I was early a disciple, in matters philosophical, of the great Mill; and my first definite idea of a science of education, comparable in practical efficiency to the science of medicine, was built up out of a suggestion in the pages of his great work on Logic. I had just begun to be a student of psychology, and was so profoundly interested in problems of life and character that I was strongly drawn to turn my taste for scribbling, then very strong, to writing novels of a serious workmanlike kind. However, I was resolved that they must be first-rate novels, and I had doubts—wise doubts—that I could count on myself for such. But in education the work was sure to be good world-building work, however humble, if honestly done, and my interest in psychology could take practical shape in it. So I resolved to leave the pen for leisure moments, to take to blackboard and chalk instead, and thus to work out real results in thought and character—that is, if I could get the chance. And presently the best of all chances was given. An old pupil of the Camden Street School had been a student with me at Bedford College, and from her I obtained an introduction—a great boon, I thought it—to the founder and head of the North London Collegiate School.

“So I first saw Miss Buss in her own home, in the drawing-room of Myra Lodge, gracious, dignified, strong of head, tender of heart, as I ever knew her afterwards. She gave me an hour or more of her precious time, and explained to me clearly and graphically, as she was wont, the then present position of affairs as regarded the education of girls and the prospects of teaching as a professional career. Great was her zeal at all times, and her ambition in the cause of the women who work for their living, and so she laid stress on the new opportunities for making a position and an ample income that the educational demand was opening up to women, a profession with a few great prizes and many smaller ones having taken the place of the resident governess’ limited outlook. So she told me about the new Endowed Schools for Girls, and, among other things, that the great prize (financially speaking) would be the projected St. Paul’s School for Girls, the mistress of which would have a salary rising to as much as £2000 a year. Alas! that was a project which is only a project still, and the North London Collegiate School remains, as it was twenty years ago, at the high-water mark of remuneration for women’s labour. It was her view that, for the dignity and efficiency of teaching in this branch and for the good of women-workers generally, there should be many more prizes at least as great, and at all times she was much concerned that reasonably good salaries should be secured, especially for that class of assistant teachers who remain at work for the best part of their lives.

“But the central interest of that first conversation turned, to my mind, upon the expression of her views about the importance of teachers being trained for their work. It seemed to her so obvious that she who undertakes to carry out an undertaking so delicate and difficult as that of education should first make as careful a study as might be of the end to be attained and the means of attaining it, and should be trained as an artist is trained in the technique and spirit of his work. She was, above all things, practical, and her feeling in the matter was of practical origin, while my feeling, which coincided with it, sprang rather from a theoretical root. She was an artist’s daughter, and her method of judgment was largely the artistic method. She saw her problems whole, as concrete ends to be gained, and she found her way to them intuitively as she went on. She always saw truth in the concrete, and was so little doctrinaire herself that the doctrinaire character in other people did not rouse her antipathy and interfere with her perception of merit in their theories. It is the pure theorists who are most impatient of each other.

“The great artist zealous for his work, and intent on its perfection, is eager to learn all he can about it—to assimilate the wisdom of other workers in his field, to think about it in all its bearings, to learn to see, to practise, to be criticized, to be trained. This, I take it, was the attitude of mind in which Frances Mary Buss some forty years ago, conceived the idea of training for teachers as a universal need from which secondary teachers should not be exempt. Before the school in Kentish Town was opened, Mrs. Buss went to the Home and Colonial Training College and put herself through the training of the elementary teacher. One may well wonder whether any other woman in the same rank about to open a small private school ever dreamed of such a preparation as needful. But to these two, mother and daughter, it seemed simply essential, and when the school developed, and they had a staff of teachers, they thought it necessary not to be content with the training they themselves could give in the school ways, but applied to have a department for secondary teachers opened at the Home and Colonial College. This was done solely for the benefit of ‘Miss Buss’ teachers’ at first, though others came in time. Greatest among those others was Miss Clough.

“This little history of the idea of training, as Miss Buss held it first, is characteristic of her attitude on the subject throughout. She thought it essential, and at the same time so great and special a work, that it ought to be undertaken by those who made a special business of it, and not by the heads of schools whose special business was something else. She felt the need of it as an artist in her work, she sought to have it supplied in the spirit of the administrator by the foundation of institutions for it.

“To these lectures Miss Buss sent all the young teachers whom she could induce to go. Very often, I suppose, they resisted the light, as, in the pride of youth and eagerness to be doing, they resist the light of the training college still. In eagerness and self-confidence I was probably equal to most, but I had been theorizing about education on my own account, and was very sensible of the darkness. So when she told me about the College of Preceptors and Mr. Payne, she showed me what I was looking for, and I eagerly accepted the suggestion of attending the lectures. She told me afterwards how much she was pleased with my ready interest. It was indeed at this point that our minds first met. And perhaps this was partly why, when she brought me into the hall to let me out herself, she first held out her hand and then looking at me in the way her girls so well know, she suddenly took me in her arms and kissed me. But chiefly it was an impulse of motherly tenderness that prompted her. I was young and had suffered.

“This was in January, before school opened. In February, she sent for me to come twice a week and teach mathematics. The school was in 202, Camden Road, then, and there were 300 girls. Miss Armstead and Miss Lyndon were in the first class I ever taught. They were great friends, but had agreed not to sit together, so that they might escape the temptation of talking. I had never been inside a school before, and had no idea what girls other than I had been were like intellectually. I might well feel modest about the need of training in the technique of managing a class, the one thing in which the College of Preceptors’ lectures did not specially help me. But the girls were very good, and did not ‘try it on,’ with one exception, and she used to be sorry, and apologize of her own accord. I remember being wonderfully impressed by the high tone of feeling that prevailed, the absence of petty jealousies, the trustworthiness of the girls, and the confidence placed in them about marks and conduct. Over all the head-mistress was as a second conscience. Nothing mean, petty, or egotistic could survive contact with the fresh bracing air of her personality. I was very new and very inexperienced in school ways; she had her little anxieties about me, and used to look after my classes a good deal at first. All young teachers know what this feels like, but it was a great help none the less, and we must all win our spurs before we get them. Except those who remained of the original staff, I was the only teacher there who had not been a pupil.

“Soon I came for all my time, and taught German. But the demand for mathematics grew as the teaching developed, and before long all my teaching time was absorbed in this stricter intellectual discipline of the North London girl. It is perhaps a digression, but I may mention that the first genius I found was Sara Annie Burstall. With Miss Buss as a head-mistress, and such a pupil as that, and many more to love and help, I began to be happy in those days.