“Will you (or can you, rather, with your other claims) help? Can you tell me where to apply for more? I have these promises: F. M. B. £10 (for three years), Miss Soames £10, Mrs. Bryant £10, Mr. Brooke Lambert £5, Mr. T. W. Sharpe £5, Mrs. Micholls £5, and Miss Behrens £5.”
My name was added to this list, and I find another letter dated April 1, 1891, when Miss Buss writes again—
“Do you know any one who, for the sake of education, would buy a house in Cambridge, and let it at once to the committee of the Teachers’ Training College? It would be a safe investment, and the committee could certainly pay four per cent. A splendid opportunity of getting three adjoining and connected houses offers. The college is successful, but the Cambridge people are poor, in one sense, as they are given to plain living and high thinking rather than to money making! Of course it would be easier if the three houses, each at £1200, could be got, but the committee would probably take one, and the others might be got by leaving a mortgage on them.
“I hardly think it right to take one myself, as I have No. 202 on me till the end of the year; and the leases of 87 and 89, in King Henry’s Road, and the house 85 next door, and this will probably be on my hands till the end of my life.”
In October of the same year, she sent out a letter to her friends bringing forward a scheme to secure a suitable building by starting a company to raise the necessary capital in £10 shares, to pay four per cent. She mentions that she and Mrs. Bryant are ready to put down their names for £750 between them, and asks for more names, before the first meeting of the committee, with an earnestness which could not be refused. In the end, however, illness prevented further effort on her part, and the work was done by others. Mrs. Bryant gives some interesting details—
“My personal knowledge of her work in this field has to do with the history of the Cambridge Training College. We were much exercised in mind by the fact that the women educated at the Universities persisted in neglecting professional training. Either they despised it, or they could not afford it, or they did not like it, and could get entrance into the schools without it. Miss Buss, in her straightforward practical way, wondered that they did not see their own need of it; she thought it so obvious that a person undertaking a delicate task ought to learn as much as possible about the ways in which it is and can be done. I also wondered at the absence of desire in well-trained minds to get at a theory of their art founded on a knowledge of its bottom sciences. There, however, was the fact, and there was serious danger that the credit of training as a practical success would be impaired by the flow into the Training College of the less, and the avoidance of it by the more educated women. Of course we could convert and persuade the able North London girls, but these were only a handful comparatively, and after three years at college they were naturally not so docile to our ideas. Could anything be done to avert this growing danger that the teaching profession should fall into the two classes of those who were highly educated and not trained, and of those who were trained but not highly educated.
“We used to discuss the fact and its causes. Vis inertia certainly had much to do with it. The Head-masters’ Conference had passed resolutions in favour of training, but they had not raised a finger to support the Training College intended to supply them with masters. The head-mistresses, in larger numbers, believed, but it was not always convenient to insist on training as a necessary qualification in their intending mistresses. How was this inertia to be overcome, unless an enthusiastic belief could be awakened in the young intending teachers?
“Such a belief was far from forthcoming. Indeed, our chief stumbling-block lay in the distrust with which the ordinary academic mind was apt to look on the ideal of training. At the bottom of it lay, no doubt, a prejudice against the methods of the elementary training colleges, and an unexamined fear that all training must be more or less of that type. Otherwise it seemed to be for the most part a vague distrust inarticulate, unargumentative, but strong. On the other hand, there were leaders of thought in the universities who believed that there was a great work to be done in the development of educational theory and practice. In witness of their faith, Cambridge had not only instituted a teachers’ examination, but had established courses of lectures on teaching which were at that time barely attended.
“So the idea naturally shaped itself that training should be carried out under University influences, that this would insure for it the influence of the soundest theoretic ideas, and also that it might benefit by subjection to the criticism of the academic mind. A closer contact between the Training College and the Women’s Colleges at Cambridge would tend certainly, we thought, to better understanding and mutual adaptation. The practical thing, then, to be done was to establish a Training College for Women at Cambridge.
“Miss Clough, Mrs. Verrall, and Dr. James Ward were heartily in favour of the establishment of such a college, and several other Cambridge friends, including the present Bishop of Stepney, so well known at Cambridge as Canon Browne, and Miss Welsh of Girton, approved the proposal from the first. We held preliminary consultations, Mrs. Verrall acting as secretary, while Miss Buss representing the school-mistresses, and Dr. Ward the University, formed a powerful combination of enthusiasm and conviction in favour of the attempt. There were many difficulties; we were not rich in money-bags, and everything depended on finding the right person to act as principal. But there was a student at Newnham who took the first place in the Moral Science Tripos, known to Miss Clough as an able woman, to Miss Beale as a gifted teacher, and to Dr. Ward as a talented pupil, and the matter was settled by the acceptance of the principalship by Miss E. P. Hughes in June, 1885. In the September of that year, the college was opened in a few small cottages near Newnham. A guarantee fund was formed, and Miss Buss guaranteed £100. Students came, though of University students but a few, and by the zealous economy and good management of Miss Hughes the college paid its way. In 1887, it was moved into better houses in Queen Anne’s Terrace, and this year it has at last, after ten years, moved into suitable college buildings. Miss Buss never ceased to take the keenest interest in its success, though of late years she was not able to take an active part. It will always be a matter of deep regret to those of us who knew how dear its progress was to her that she never even saw the new building. From time to time she had hoped to pay another visit to Cambridge when she was stronger in health.