Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham

by Elizabeth Raikes

By 1864 all pressing anxiety for the existence of the College was over. With its one hundred and thirty pupils it was practically full. A regularly constituted boarding-house was opened. Here the day-pupils, whose parents were leaving Cheltenham, could be taken, and thus another cause of diminution in the number of pupils was put an end to. Undivided attention and care could now be given to the work.

In February a change which greatly told on this was made, a change which now seems to have been only wise and reasonable, but which was at the time regarded as extraordinary and revolutionary. Longer morning hours were substituted for morning and afternoon school each day, Thursday afternoons being set apart for dancing and needlework. Possibly Miss Beale anticipated the outcry that would be raised; for she asked the mother of one of the pupils, one likely to be opposed to the change, to be with her at the Council meeting at which it was determined, ostensibly because she herself dreaded the meeting, but doubtless in order that a representative of the parents might hear the subject fully discussed. No notice of the change was sent to the shareholders, parents and guardians received an intimation scarcely a week before it took place. Before that week was over, stormy articles appeared in the local papers, notices of removal were sent in, and a memorial from the shareholders and others caused Mr. Brancker hastily to summon another Council meeting, and to write to Mr. Hartland, ‘May I specially beg that you will attend ... as I consider the vital interests and the future prospects of the College are at stake.’ Mr. Brancker and Miss Beale recognised that now or never the battle must be won. Either the College authorities must rule, or the local papers and popular clamour.

The objections of the memorialists were that the change was a coup d’état; that four hours’ continuous study was too much for the children; that the governesses were idle in wanting a half-holiday every afternoon. But the real ground of dislike was doubtless that parents shirked the responsibility of looking after their children in the afternoons, and preferred schoolroom arrangements which would provide them with occupation during the whole day.

The Council replied in a circular to the parents that they would limit the experiment to a period of two months, after which they would act upon the opinion of the parents; and should the new plan be adopted, the quarter’s fees should be returned to those who wished to remove their children. The advantages of the change were then set forth.

It had been made to meet the objections raised to physical and mental effort following immediately upon a hurried meal; to the young ladies passing constantly through the streets, to the trouble of sending servants, the exertion of so much walking, the time wasted in dressing and undressing, and to many others.

Medical men, among whom were Dr. Barlow and Dr. Gull,[39] were asked for their opinions; these were uniformly favourable to the change. The long morning hours were lightened by the introduction of calisthenics, drawing, and needlework, and it was arranged that certain teachers should attend the College every afternoon to supervise the preparation of lessons when the parents desired it. When a general meeting on the subject took place at the end of the specified two months, only eight voted for the old system. ‘It was found,’ says Miss Beale, ‘that more work was done in less time, for attention was closer ... teachers and children had been able to get some afternoon exercise.’

What was then thought so extraordinary has since become the order of the day for girls’ schools. In this matter Cheltenham led the way, a similar change was made by Miss Buss in 1865, and when the hours of the Girls’ Public Day School Company were arranged in 1873, it was on the plan of putting all regular studies into the morning hours.

At the end of Miss Beale’s first six years the College was in a much improved condition. There were ten classes, where she had found six. The notable changes on the staff, which was now larger, were that Miss Brewer had left to open a school for little boys in Brighton, and Miss Anna Beale and the Miss Eatons had joined. Increased prosperity, and above all an older first class, enabled Miss Beale to introduce some of the subjects which at first were thought to be too unacceptable to be safe. There was, of course, opposition from those who were constantly repeating that ‘girls would be turned into boys by studying the same subjects.’ What, it was asked by some parents, do girls want with Euclid or advanced arithmetic? There were, however, a few who understood Miss Beale’s aims, and she was ever grateful for the support they gave her.

The method of annual examinations was gradually improved. When there was so little money available, local examiners, some of whom had no claim to the position, were chosen. Miss Beale records her conviction that a German examiner, who was at the time teaching in a local school, was a waiter from some hotel who had come to England out of the season. One English examiner recommended that history should be taught backwards. This was then regarded as an astounding proposition. Mr. Brancker fully sympathised with Miss Beale’s wish to improve the standard by obtaining examiners from one of the universities, and obtained permission from the Council to seek them himself in Oxford. The result was that for two or three years Mr. Sidney Owen undertook the principal part of the annual examination. His name was the first of a long list of men notable for scholarly achievement or educational progress, who in later years conducted these examinations at Cheltenham. In his first report Mr. Owen said much for the moral characteristics revealed by the intellectual work it was his business to survey. He concludes a very favourable judgment by saying he must not omit to mention that there were particular instances of remarkable excellence of which the College may justly be proud. Some of the papers he said, ‘would do credit to any Institution and gain high marks in any public examination.... May the College long give the lie to the miserable and pernicious fancy that accomplishments ought to be the staple of a lady’s education, and that her reason is not designed by the Almighty to be highly cultivated.’ But he thought the papers too long. Mr. Owen was indeed the very first adventurer into that flood of response which examination questions cause to flow from uncontrolled feminine pens. Mr. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was in 1863 the first university examiner in arithmetic and mathematics.

This year was a fruitful one to Miss Beale for yet another reason. It was the year of the completion of her Chart. Always interested in history, ideally and practically, she had as early as the Queen’s College days adopted a French scheme by which the learning of dates was to be simple and easy, and the connections of history, the bearing of facts and events upon each other, were to be seen at a glance. She now perfected and brought it into use. The plan was based on the assumption that a fact is more readily grasped through the eye, than by the ear. By means of large squares, which were to represent centuries, enclosing smaller ones, which should denote years, the whole coloured in different shades according to the different ruling dominions and dynasties, a complete outline of the history of a country was to appear on one page. The reckoning was made by which ninety-nine was counted as the last year of a century, with the result that in the year 1900 the chart found itself somewhat discredited. But this method of counting, of course, in no way interfered with the system. In learning dates at the College, great stress was laid upon having a chart open before the student, so that she might grow familiar with its look, and become able to call up the knowledge of any special event by remembering the position of a dot in a certain square. There were those to say with Canon Francis Holland, founder of the Church of England High Schools in London, ‘Why was I born before such aids were given to the understanding?’ Whether this system was indeed the royal road Miss Beale had planned for her pupils may well be questioned; but the Chart had at any rate the value of a simple vade mecum of chronology, introducing every girl at College to the minimum of facts she should know in the history of the world.