‘Integrity of understanding, and nicety of discernment, were not allotted.
‘(Attach to this paper specimens of your needlework and of your drawing).’
To the true teacher the interest of her work lies, beyond and above all subjects and methods, in the child. No tale, alas! nor letter remains to show what Miss Beale thought of her children when she first came among them. In one respect there must have been disappointment. Miss Procter had opened a rival school, which had drawn off the elder pupils; consequently the first class consisted of girls of thirteen and fourteen. But fortunately there are some of those same children who can recall the first impression made upon themselves by the new Principal, as she appeared on August 19, 1858. Mrs. Mace, a daughter of the late Bishop Bromby, was among these. She writes:—
‘I well remember Miss Beale’s first appearance at College, and how I and three or four special friends, who were already there ... felt fiercely loyal to the former rule, and told each other we knew exactly what the new Principal would be like, “thin, tall, spectacled, and old-maidy.” I can see her now as she appeared in reality,—the slight, young figure, the very gentle, gliding movements, the quiet face with its look of intense thoughtfulness and utter absence of all poor and common stress and turmoil, the intellectual brow, the wonderful eyes with their calm outlook and their expression of inner vision. You may be sure it was not long before the captious thirteen-year-olds were changed into warm admirers.
‘I do not think her quiet dignity, her strength and personality, her power of influence, could at any time of her strenuous and successful life have been greater or more impressive. We were few in number then, and, of course, saw more of her than was possible for later pupils.
‘I never remember her raising her voice, scolding us, being satirical or impatient with dulness 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.”’
Small instances of the new Principal’s own powers of observation and use of outside facts stand out through the mists of time; for instance,
‘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.’
The incident suggests a laxer state of discipline than was ever known after. Assuredly on this point Miss Beale found a good deal to do. Some of the ‘young ladies’ treated the good-natured French master as their brothers at Cheltenham College might have done. There is a story, too, of a convenient cupboard at the end of the schoolroom, large enough for a quiet game or gossip, and of the consternation produced on a little knot of girls who thought they had assembled unobserved, when the door was quietly opened upon them by the Lady Principal herself.
In the matter of discipline, as of tuition, Miss Beale appears to have worked on lines already laid down. Perhaps she kept before her mind counsel which she later gave to a pupil who left Cheltenham to be head of a Foundation School: ‘Remember the school belongs to the governors, not to you.’ But we are equally certain that she would not have worked on any lines which she did not approve. She found no system of rules and penalties. She did not wish to introduce one; but she made real and abiding, in a manner hardly credited by those outside, the rule introduced by Miss Procter, by which no pupil might speak to another without leave. With regard to this rule, which at once taught self-control and produced order, the ‘quietness which minimises irritability,’ it may be further remarked that in a place and time of ‘exclusive’ views, the College could hardly have existed without it. The rule, kept, in itself prevented any pupil from making friends for the first time in College; at any rate, it enabled her not to do so. There was, however, when Miss Beale first came, a good deal of speaking without leave. This disobedience with other irregularities she gradually overcame, not by an overawing personality alone, but with the ‘quiet’ ways and the word in season of which more than one old pupil speaks.