Frances Mary Buss and her work for education

by Annie E. Ridley

There are a few words to her sister, which show the influence of Dr. Hodgson from 1865, and onwards—

“1865.

“Miss Davies has asked me to meet Miss Clough of Ambleside (who drew up a plan for co-operation among teachers), Miss Bostock, and other educational ladies. I cannot help feeling that our new friend, to whom I am so devoted and grateful, has had greatly to do with my position lately. It is almost indefinable, but it would seem as if he had set a stamp on me, so to speak. Certainly the Cambridge Examination did something—introduced me to him, for example—but it is only since Christmas that so many little courtesies have been paid me, officially, I mean. Only one other person so helped me.”

In some early letters we have descriptions of life at Bonaly Tower, which indicate the kind of letters she might have written if life had been less hurried—

“Newcastle-on-Tyne, Jan. 7, 1873.

“I liked Mr. Knox quite as much last Wednesday. He gave me a hearty welcome, and asked most affectionately for you. From what Dr. Hodgson says, he is not doing so much on the Merchants’ Company Schools as he was. I lunched at Mr. Pryde’s house, and then went with him and Mrs. Pryde to the ‘Women’s Medical Educational Meeting.’ For the first time I heard Miss Jex-Blake speak; she spoke well. Mr. P. seems sensible and liberal in his ideas. When you and I were in Edinburgh, it seems Mrs. P. and two of their children had scarlet fever, and he himself was in lodgings, away from ‘his own fireside.’ Mrs. P. is quite ‘advanced,’ and, as her husband said, ‘is the most refractory parent’ he has to do with. ‘She was always wanting something’ (he said before her), ‘or not wanting something else.’ She did not like her girls to learn so much writing or sewing, for instance. Their second girl is to be brought up for medicine. So, you see, Mr. and Mrs. P. must be advanced.

“One day last week, we, i.e. Mrs. H., Dr. H., and I went to lunch with Mrs. MacLaren. Mr. M. is Member for Edinburgh, and Mrs. and Miss M., as you will perhaps remember, are working for the Women’s Suffrage. I met there Dr. Guthrie’s youngest son, a very fine young man, who made a strong impression on me. He is evidently as fine in mind as in person.”

In speaking of her visits, she had always much to say of the interesting persons whom she met at Bonaly, and of the talk she so thoroughly appreciated, well described under the heading, “The Professor at the Breakfast-Table,” in Mr. Meiklejohn’s “Life of Dr. Hodgson,” as—

“the sparkling table-talk, apt illustration, and racy anecdote with which the doctor enlivened all the time we sat at table. Without monopolizing the talk, he never allowed it to flag; and by manifesting the kindliest interest in the sayings and doings of all, he induced even the shyest to take his part in a manner that must have astonished him when he came to look back upon it.”

Mrs. Hodgson, too, had so much grace and kindness that even this shyest of her guests was made so much at home as to be “led to imagine that he must have sat in that particular corner hundreds of times before, though now for the first time conscious of it.”