Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham

by Elizabeth Raikes

To few is it given, as it was given to her, to realise so nearly the dreams of youth, for few possess the sense of purpose and the indomitable will which fell to her portion. But the college of her vision did not come into being without a process of development so slow that for some years progress could hardly be recorded, nor without infinite disappointment even in matters which seemed at the time vital; not without ceaseless effort, seen and unseen, on the part of the Lady Principal.

We have reached, in the twentieth century, a period in the history of education in which schools may be said to be founded ready-made. A great and fine ‘plant,’ opening ceremonies, royal patronage, appear necessities from the beginning. The Ladies’ College, Cheltenham, was twenty years old before it had a building of its own, its first stone was laid by an unknown hand, its opening rite consisted of school prayers in the ordinary way on a Monday morning, at 9 A.M., with the addition of a few words rather nervously read by the Lady Principal. The college has never had a patron, nor did it even have any specially distinguished visitor, till the Empress Frederick came in 1897.

The Ladies’ College did not originate with Miss Beale. She brought to it, when it was but a weakling and like to perish, all her dreams and all her energies. She made it emphatically her own; but its first inception was with a small number of Cheltenham residents, notably with the Reverend H. Walford Bellairs, then H.M. Inspector of Schools for Gloucestershire,[30] and the Reverend C. A. Bromby,[31] Principal of the Training Colleges. Its foundation was a continuation of work already begun in the town with the opening of Cheltenham College, in 1843. This was one of the earliest of the great nineteenth century public schools, and one of the very few which has no ancient origin. A very slight glance at the history of the town, which has produced two great colleges, will serve to show that their work in its midst has been almost that of a quiet and beneficent revolution.

The mild air and fertile soil of the great plain below the Cotswold Hills were recognised as early as the days of Edward the Confessor, when Cheltenham was called upon to furnish a large amount of bread for the royal kennels. For centuries only a little market town with a beautiful Early Gothic church on the banks of an insignificant stream, it crept out of obscurity in the pages of Ogilby who, in 1785, described it as inhabited by people ‘much given to plant tobacco, though they are suppressed by authority.’

Forty years after this the discovery of the medicinal properties of its waters made the place attractive to those who could afford to take the remedy, and in the later years of George the Third, it came to be the ‘Queen of watering places.’ Details of the long royal visit of 1788 may be read in the pages of Fanny Burney and others. The King would afterwards speak of Cheltenham and the Vale of Gloucester as ‘the finest part of my kingdom that I have beheld.’ Other distinguished visitors followed: the Prince Regent, who gave a ball; Charles James Fox; Wellington, within a year of Waterloo; Louis Philippe and Marie Amélie in their exile; and many others, among whom, as a boy, came Byron, to wander, according to a continental biographer, ‘on the seashore at Cheltenham!’

As late as 1870 there was in Cheltenham scarcely a house which did not testify by its grandiose, pseudo-classic[32] architecture to the past magnificence of a town which had striven to be worthy of a court. Even to-day there are but few which do not follow the lines laid down by the builders of the early years of the nineteenth century, a time at which the town grew with mushroom speed. It was a period when population was rapidly increasing all over the country; but in few places were the leaps and bounds so marked as in Cheltenham, where in 1840, a census return was tenfold larger than it had been in 1804.

This rapid growth was due, less to the famous wells and pump-rooms than to the reputation of its climate, and the absence of any great winter severity, attractive to those who had lived in tropical countries. Hence Cheltenham became a favourite residence for Anglo-Indians, military and civil. The town grew perhaps a little less distinguished, but not less gay and popular. The fashion in Cheltenham waters passed; kings and dukes sought their ‘cure’ abroad; but it was possible to have balls and other amusements without a Prince Regent, while the hunting season especially became a time of festivity. And side by side with the lovers of pleasure, who formed so large and sparkling a part of Cheltenham society, existed those who took all life with deep, almost forbidding seriousness.

To meet the needs of the rapidly growing population during the first forty years of the nineteenth century, several churches were built under the auspices of different persons. Church-building in the days of proprietary sittings was a not unprofitable investment; there were also liberal benefactors to support Mr. Close, who was incumbent of Cheltenham for nearly thirty years, in his schemes for the welfare of his flock.

Francis Close, a disciple of Charles Simeon, came to Cheltenham in 1824, as curate-in-charge of Holy Trinity, a newly erected chapel-of-ease to the parish church. The living of Cheltenham was already at that time in the hands of Simeon, who had purchased it from its various patrons, and presented it to the Reverend C. Jervis. On the death of Mr. Jervis, Simeon appointed young Close to this important charge. From the first Mr. Close was a very popular preacher. ‘It was,’ says an admirer, ‘a new and interesting sight to see so singularly handsome a young man filled with such religious zeal.’ A man of pronounced and narrow views, immense activity and determination, combined with geniality and cheerfulness, he sought to regulate the ways of society, and to some extent succeeded. He ruled the town from the pulpit of the parish church as from a throne, and earned, among those who loved him least, the name of the ‘Pope of Cheltenham.’[33] He preached against racing, acting, dancing. But if, as has been said, he established dinner-parties and destroyed the theatre, he acted only with others of his school of thought. Those were the days of eating and drinking, since some form of recreation was necessary, and, moreover, abstinence had a suspiciously Roman look. They were days when all forms of art, not that of the theatre alone, were regarded with distrust. It is true that Mr. Close gave a lecture on ‘Literature and the Fine Arts considered as Legitimate Pursuits of a Religious Man’; he also preached a sermon entitled ‘The Restoration of Churches is the Restoration of Popery,’ and he said to the head-mistress of a fashionable boarding-school where dancing was included in the curriculum: ‘When Mrs. Close wished my daughters taught dancing, I reminded her of her marriage vow.’