With her consent Miss Louch, then a member of the College staff, proceeded to America in 1894 to attend a course of lectures by Dr. Stanley Hall on child-study. On her return the Association was formed in Edinburgh, and in the same year a branch was started in Cheltenham, with Miss Beale as local president. Before her death she was president of the whole Association, and presided over the conference held in Cheltenham in 1906, the year of her death. When the Paidologist, the organ of the Child-Study Association, was started, Miss Beale contributed largely to the guarantee fund, and for five years was a member of the Magazine Committee. She promoted the work of the Association by trying to get the College staff, boarding-house mistresses, and parents of pupils to join and assist in it.
Miss Beale was among those consulted by Miss Mason when, in 1888, she definitely sought to give the Parents’ Educational Union, which had had a successful year’s work in Bradford, a national name and character. The work of the society appealed greatly to Miss Beale, and the Cheltenham branch was one of the earliest founded. Her name appears among those of the vice-presidents in 1892.
To pass beyond the limits of the work in which, from the fact of her position, the Lady Principal of Cheltenham was called upon to take a part, it may be noticed that she was always much interested in Sunday-school teaching, and wrote many articles upon it. Several of these have been printed. Her interest was caused largely by the numbers of old pupils who took up this work, and who came to her for advice about it, as well as to the congenial nature of religious instruction. Dissatisfied with the methods or want of method prevailing in many Sunday-schools, she had a high ideal of the work for the sake both of teacher and children, and was always ready with sympathy and suggestion. To an old pupil engaged on a paper intended to point out some existing ills in Sunday-schools she wrote in 1880:—
‘I should say begin with all the good done—the necessity for them at the time, etc. Then speak of the evils, and with each sort suggest a remedy, and admit that the evils are not universal. Try to put it in rather a different shape, and I think it would do good in overthrowing some self-complacency. Especially is it an evil when quite raw girls—some ignorant girls such as we have at College—pretend to teach. Children accustomed to proper teaching of course fidget. I should have been a little rebel myself, if I had had to hear the wretched stuff that some children do at Sunday School. But it does, when done properly, draw classes together.’
Institutions and societies designed to help the poor of Cheltenham came of course before Miss Beale’s notice. She never, however, allowed herself to be drawn from the pressing requirements of her own work, so as to become acquainted with the details of that which, to some extent, grows up round every church. She was, indeed, on principle, chary in her support of this, maintaining that in a town there was generally great waste of funds and labours, owing to the lack of combination. She wrote as early as 1881 in reference to Cheltenham:—
‘I am so anxious that we should all work in the direction pointed out by our Rural Dean, get all Church people to work together as one, for works which cannot or ought not to be merely parochial, and in all charitable work, wherever it is possible, to get all, whether Church or not, to join in opposing all forms of evil.... I think we should take works in order of importance. I may be wrong, but I have regretted the erection of Church steeples when there was other work that seemed to me of more importance [left unsupported]. I think the increase of offertories in churches, good as it is in many ways, has tended to hinder united work in the town. I do not know whether there ever could be a sort of Council for the administration of at least part of the funds so collected; but it does seem as if the present plan gave too much to some districts and too little to others, and left some institutions which have a claim upon all, with scarcely any support, because what is everybody’s business is nobody’s.... The laity have very little influence in the distribution of money collected in churches, which tends always to become a larger proportion of what is given away, so that much of the power to organise united work must rest with the clergy. And living forces, which are enormously more important than money, are wasted by “congregationalism.” Could there not be some larger association of Church workers from which some sort of administrative council might select persons suitable for any special work? Could not work sometimes be done collectively, instead of each clergyman doing it separately for his own congregation? I do hope that more and more, in one work after another, we may unite our forces, and if once people can be induced to look into the evils which exist at their very doors, they will be moved to work with one heart and mind to remove what is a disgrace to our town.’
Among the institutions of Cheltenham, for which Miss Beale specially claimed the need of united action, was the Working Men’s College. She herself on one occasion read a paper there, her subject being ‘Self-support and Self-government from the point of view, not of the individual, but of the College.’ The paper, simple and direct, shows how Miss Beale could throw herself into the minds of those she addressed, appealing to all that was best in them, while at the same time putting her own thoughts into them. It embodies her favourite theories of the danger of helping people through gifts:—
‘I do not think there are many belonging to this College who could not pay a few shillings annually. Self-denial adds value to energy.... Everybody does not agree with me. Some think you will misunderstand,—think we do not want help. I do not think you will, to judge by my own feelings. I like to be independent. You look at the Ladies’ College and say, “You have got all you want.” But time was when we were very poor, so poor that our Council said, ... we will have but another year’s trial and then shut up. We never said we would beg people to help us: we would make it self-supporting, or it should die.... I feel certain if you working-men were to say, We will take the management ourselves, and it shall be a success, that it would be, and I think that if other people manage and pay for it, that some of the strongest and most independent would stand aloof.... I am quite sure that our College would not have been what it is if we had had money to fall back upon. I might myself have left the helm and gone to sit quietly in the cabin while the vessel drifted on to the rocks.’
Among Miss Beale’s papers there exists a very simple address entitled, ‘Is Death the End?’ She intended to read it at a little mission-room, maintained in a very poor street by her friends, Mr. and Mrs. James Owen. The subject was one which had taken strong hold of her fancy at the time. Some one had discovered a dragon-fly emerging from its chrysalis on a water-lily in the little pond which then existed in the Fauconberg House garden adjoining the College grounds. It was taken to Miss Beale, who saw enacted before her own eyes a living parable of resurrection-life. Her childlike delight in this came out in almost every Scripture lesson she gave that summer. The pond was watched for chrysalids; they were taken into the classrooms for the children to see the creatures creep out of their tombs, lie soft and sleepy for a little, then sail away on new-found wings. This true story of the dragon-fly and all it could teach of life, through death, Miss Beale longed to tell to Mrs. Owen’s poor friends. She wrote it carefully, and had little illustrations made; but the lecture was never given. ‘Mrs. Owen would not let me,’ she said sadly, ‘but I think I could have interested them in the dragon-fly.’ But Mrs. Owen was probably right, since the audience for whom the paper was intended was such as Miss Beale knew only in the pages of Browning’s Christmas Eve.