Some reminiscences of former pupils give a little idea of what Dorothea Beale was like in her teaching and in her relationship to her children.
“I never remember her raising her voice, scolding us, being satirical or impatient with dullness or inattention. She was not satirical even when a small girl, on being asked what criticism might be passed on Milton’s treatment of “Paradise Lost,” ventured the audacious suggestion that the poet was ‘verbose’.”
Her methods were designed to encourage rather than to repress. A pupil recalls “an afternoon when she visited the needlework room and found me being most justly blamed for inefficiency. In kindly tones she said to the shy and clumsy culprit: ‘You ought to sew well, for your mother has such beautiful long fingers,’ and somehow I felt comforted and encouraged. Then there was a day when I summoned up courage to go and tell her that I had been guilty of some small disobedience as well as others who had been detected and punished. She seized the opportunity of impressing upon me that as I was (though only fourteen) a teacher in my father’s Sunday School—a fact of which I did not know she was aware—I must surely see that obedience to rule was necessary. I can still hear the low, earnest tones in which she made her appeal to my sense of justice and right.”
At this period of her life her power was probably as great as it ever was, though the scope was comparatively narrow.
“It is my peculiar privilege,” writes one, “to have spent all my college career in her class, to go through years of her special personal teaching. In later days when the College assumed large dimensions, such an experience must have been rare; to those who could claim it, it meant a potent influence for life. How vividly can I recall her sitting on her little daïs, scanning the long schoolroom and discovering anything amiss at the far end of it; or making a tour of inspection to the various classes with a smiling countenance that banished terror.”
Her personal relationship to any of her children in sorrow was always a very tender one.
“When I was almost a child at College I lost my mother and shall never forget Miss Beale’s tender sympathy and help. She took such interest in my preparation for Confirmation and brought me herself to my first Communion—just she and I alone: a day I shall always remember. All through my girlhood she was a kind and ready adviser, and continued her interest throughout my married life. One always felt whatever happened to one, ‘Now I must tell Miss Beale’.”
So with the varied joys of teaching, and the difficulties of narrow means, and the opposition of supporters of the old régime, did Dorothea Beale’s life at Cheltenham begin.
Forty years later she wrote of this time:—
“How often I was full of discouragement. It was not so much the want of money as the want of ideals that depressed me. If I went into society I heard it said: ‘What is the good of education for our girls? They have not to earn their living.’ Those who spoke did not see that, for women as for men, it is a sin to bury the talents God has given: they seemed not to know that the baptismal right was the same for girls as for boys, alike enrolled in the army of light, soldiers of Jesus Christ.”