Frances Mary Buss and her work for education

by Annie E. Ridley

And yet Miss Jewsbury’s hopeful words, written about this time, were quite true. Public interest was roused, though not as yet to the point of generous giving. Miss Jewsbury writes—

“Give my love to Miss Buss, and wish her a happy New Year. The idea of a thorough education for women has now, I think, taken hold of the public mind, and will be followed by the desire to obtain it. Miss Buss’s schools will bring forth abundant fruit. She has borne the burden and cold of the day, but her work will take root. There was a notice of Mrs. Grey’s letter in the Manchester Examiner and Times, and a leading article too. I had seen a nice letter of Mrs. S. C. Hall’s yesterday. Yes, Mrs. Grey is charming, and good to the core.”

The subject was in all the papers. Miss Cobbe did good service in the Echo, and Miss Chessar in the Queen. Our hopes had naturally risen high when Mrs. Grey took the question up so warmly. The disappointment was proportionately great.

And, bad as this might seem, there was yet more to follow. During the six months since the reading of Mrs. Grey’s paper before the Society of Arts, Mr. Rogers had collected £5000 for a girls’ school in the City. But some City endowments—the “Datchelor Charity” and others—had been found available for girls’ education. Consequently, at the seventh annual meeting of “the Corporation formed for Promoting Middle-class Education in the City of London and the Suburbs,” it was proposed that the £5000—collected for girls expressly—should be used for the new hall of the Cowper Street School for Boys (already endowed with £60,000), this particular sum being just what would make up the £11,000 needed for a new hall.

Several voices, notably that of Alderman Besley, were raised against this act, and mention was made that this sum was all that was asked by the Camden School, in the suburbs, and very close to the City. But the motion was carried.

It was to no purpose that leading journals, as well as “educational enthusiasts,” were “aghast at the announcement that a sum of money contributed for the special purpose of endowing a middle-class school for girls is to be devoted to the purpose of beautifying and enlarging the present middle-class school for boys.” The thing was done.

That the school on which so much had already been expended should, in addition, take the sum, which, comparatively small as it was, would have sufficiently endowed the one existing school for girls of the same class, was a blow calculated to wound to the utmost the women who were devoting themselves heart and soul to the effort to help these girls. Mrs. Grey, in a letter to the Times, expresses this natural feeling with a strength that was not in excess of the provocation received, as she says, “It was with painful astonishment, not unmingled with bitter feelings,” that she had read the report of the meeting. Her letter ends with a still stronger appeal to the editor—

“Will you, sir, not raise, in the name of the nation, a protest which cannot be so easily set aside? Will you not at least make it clear to the public that this is not a woman’s question, but a man’s question, a national question, and that to leave uneducated one-half of the people—and that the half which moulds the associations, habits, and life of the other half—is a course so suicidal that of the nation which deliberately follows it we are tempted to exclaim in bitterness of soul, ‘Quem deus vult perdere prius dementat’?”

Miss Buss naturally shared in this bitter feeling, to which she thus refers—

“You have received my outburst of indignation about the City corporation? Fancy coolly alienating the money collected for a girls’ school, and then handing it to the boys’ school, on which ONLY £60,000 have been spent! Then the land in Southwark, purchased as the site of another school, is to be sold, and the proceeds handed over to the same school. Of course, it would be infinitely more useful to build a school at Southwark than to spend the money on the City school.