Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham

by Elizabeth Raikes

It was only through actual experience that the position of the boarding-house and its head could be defined. In point of fact, this situation had to grow and develop according to the requirements of the College, which as formerly had to constitute precedents and make experiments. It is but seldom that the details of any great scheme can be arranged beforehand with deliberate judgment, that all difficulties can be foreseen, and occasions of conflict avoided. They are more often worked out by single-minded intention which can endure through small errors and trifling disputes. The Lady Principal’s position was rendered more difficult by the tacit opposition of ‘local interest’ to the extension of boarding-house accommodation. The very existence of the College had been for many years precarious. Few people in Cheltenham wished it to become anything more than a suitable day-school for the sisters of boys at the College. Consequently a lady who took boarders was regarded with no special favour, and her actions were very often severely criticised.

In the difficult work of forming and increasing boarding-houses, mistakes were made by many. Miss Beale’s own belief in others, her habit of accepting people at their own estimate, of believing they were what she wished them to be, of judging character from her wide experience of books rather than from that of life, sometimes led her astray in her choice of fellow-workers. She who in her lonely position often felt the need of sympathy, to which she was ever responsive, was anxious to give it, even where she could not understand. This made her slow to bring about a change, lest sufficient opportunity for amendment had not been given. On the other hand, sometimes she could see that a change should be made promptly, but as she could not act alone a dangerous delay would ensue.

At first the position of a head of a boarding-house was little defined, and it was hard sometimes for a clever, well-intentioned woman, anxious to do the best for the children in her care, not to regard the work of the house as primary, that of the College as secondary only. One lady, who was extremely capable and interested in her work, was ambitious to make her boarding-house a complete institution in itself, rather than an integral part of the College. Many of the girls in her charge came as her own relations or friends; she chose to adopt the position that it was right for her to decide whether they should be taught at her house or sent to College, and she denied the right of any one to interfere in her management. She also claimed the right to take another house for herself and her own children, where she could receive and entertain her friends. As soon as Miss Beale’s eyes were opened to the danger of such independent action, she did not hesitate a moment on the right course to be pursued with regard to the boarding-house management. She perceived that in this matter, as in the work of the school, there was no standing ground between obedience and independence. ‘I am so sorry for Miss Beale,’ wrote Mrs. William Grey to Miss Buss, ‘and so glad our Council determined to have nothing to do with Boarding-Houses. I cannot help thinking that the wisest course for the Cheltenham Council would be to wash their hands of them, only reserving to themselves, as we have, the right to refuse pupils from a house they disapprove of. There seems to me no tolerable alternative between this and the hostelry system.’

It may be safely said that never, even in moments of worst annoyance, did Miss Beale ever propose to ‘wash her hands’ of the boarding-houses. She felt they should be ‘organically related’ to the College life, a part of it which she could not do without, one which had in it great possibilities for extending and strengthening the influence of the College teaching, one which, neglected, must be an infinite source of difficulty, by which the standard of the corporate life might be lowered, and its best work hindered.

So she persisted, lending her whole mind and strength to help in the evolution of a system which should be fair to individuals and the best for the College as a body. In 1890, after she had won her point, she wrote to Miss Arnold, then head-mistress of the Truro High School, who had consulted her on the subject:—

‘I think I told you that after many years, I have prevailed on our Council to take the whole risk of the boarding-houses,—the pecuniary risk is of course very great, and in case of war or sudden depression, I don’t exactly see how we should meet it, but one must have risks, and we find the moral risks of not taking pecuniary ones so great that we decided for the latter—and indeed we had to pay pretty considerable sums in law expenses and to get rid of unjust claims too. We could not prove that these ladies had not lost money, if they said they had—and if they were bad managers they did perhaps lose—and an outcry was raised that we ruined poor ladies!’

But the difficulties to be encountered on the way to this consummation were by no means slight, and involved great personal anxiety and pain. It was especially hard to her that she should be known by her own pupils to be in opposition to any who had been set over them. It was hard to feel that many with their partial knowledge of facts must misunderstand her, or childishly attribute her actions to commonplace motives of jealousy and love of power. Some part of these difficulties became fully public in 1882, when the College was involved in a libel case, and a lawsuit which was settled by arbitration. Exoneration from all blame followed in both instances. In the arbitration case the judgment was delivered by Mr. Justice Charles, and placed in a sealed envelope with the injunction that either party might open it on payment of £350. The Council did not think it necessary to pay this money. Eventually those who had brought the action against the College did so, to find that the judgment had been pronounced against them on every count. It was a victory for the College and the Principal, but it had not been achieved without great toil and suffering on Miss Beale’s part. She dreaded the cross-examination with all the nervousness of a sensitive nature. Speaking of it afterwards, and of all it had cost her, she ever associated with the pain the remembrance of the immense help and sympathy she had received from her friend Mrs. James Owen, then a member of the Council, and would say, ‘Mrs. Owen said I should not be scorched in the fire.’ She was also upborne by the loyalty of her fellow-workers, both teachers and boarding-house mistresses, who signed a joint expression of their sympathy with her in her time of anxiety. Miss Buss gave more than words of sympathy, she was present herself in the arbitration-room when the case was tried. When it was over she wrote to her friend to this effect: ‘Yesterday I made the personal acquaintance of Miss ——. I fell in love with her because she is so intensely loyal to Cheltenham and to “dear Miss Beale.” I think if you could have heard her talk, unknown to her, you would have felt that the severe trial you have had to go through was more than compensated for by the love and loyalty it has called out to you and the College.’

The increase in the number of the boarding-houses, with their slightly different characteristics, brought an obvious advantage to the College. It led the way to still cheaper houses, and to the promotion of that work so dear always to Miss Beale, helping poor students and training teachers. Never heartily sympathetic with what is generally called charitable work, afraid of seeing money given without a really equivalent return in usefulness and good work, there was one appeal to which she never turned a deaf ear. Probably she never knew any case of a girl honestly trying to improve herself, and failing in the effort for want of means, without trying to help her. Her usual plan was to advance money, which she found was almost invariably returned to her in the course of time. She would, wherever it seemed right, ask for its return on the ground that it might be of use to others, and because she was ever careful to make those she helped recognise that the possession of money is a stewardship only. But it was offered and lent and sometimes given in such a way that there should be no personal feeling of obligation and debt. ‘There is a loan fund,’ she would say when there occurred a question of the removal of a promising pupil from the College on the score of expense. And hardly any one ever heard her say more than this of the large system of help which she initiated and to a very great extent sustained alone. Some of the boarding-house mistresses generously took one girl free, or for very low terms, but the work was quietly done, known only to few.

The establishment of scholarships did not fit into Miss Beale’s educational schemes. She was not wholly opposed to them. One, in 1870, was accepted for the College, when Colonel Pearce bestowed a gift of £1000 to found the Pearce Scholarship for the daughter of an army officer, and Miss Beale in the last year of her life established one for Casterton. But she had a great horror of a system by which one school or college could buy promising pupils from others, and she held that it was hard on earnest students who were not naturally quick to see assistance given only to ability. ‘I have refused,’ she said at a later period, ‘all scholarships except one, the chief condition of which is poverty. Three scholarships have been offered unasked, and an endowment for two prizes, which would have formed a good advertisement, every year, but I have refused all.’

As the College grew, Miss Beale felt more and more the need of a house where those who were trying to train themselves to be teachers could board inexpensively, and in 1876 was made that beginning which, as she said, was ‘full of blessing to the College, and of much use beyond its bounds.’ This was before the Maria Grey Training College was opened, and when there was no institution at all in which women could receive definite preparation for becoming teachers in secondary schools.