Among the friends gathered for this opening ceremony was the founder of the Ladies’ College, Cheltenham, Canon Bellairs. He welcomed this house in Oxford, though he would have named it differently.
‘I am very glad to hear,’ he had written a month before, ‘that you are starting what will no doubt become a veritable College. You should christen it at once. St. Clare would be appropriate. She founded an Order, and your College will be the foundation of an order. I do hope the G. W. R. will alter its time-table to suit your convenience. It would do so if it had as high an opinion of your excellence as the Father of your College, and your Pupils and all that know you have. Fancy, thirty-five years since we first met! What a period for evolution.... I should like very much to have a chat with you to see where you are now.’
After five years, St. Hilda’s, Oxford, was recognised by the Association for the Education of Women in Oxford as St. Hilda’s Hall. Miss Beale finally, in 1900, connected it with St. Hilda’s, Cheltenham, by presenting it to the Association of that College.
That Miss Beale was fully alive to changes that must come in the course of time to such an institution as St. Hilda’s Hall, and could be content to see her own personal wishes set aside in everything that did not affect the essential life of the place, is clear from the following letter to Mrs. Wells in January 1903:—
‘Thanks for your nice letter and the suggestions. I think with you that the giving of scholarships will have to be reconsidered, and some clear rules made. I am, however, no less strongly opposed to the modern slave trade than before, and should be much grieved if we entered upon it. I see you would limit the giving to those who need help. Of course I see that I can no longer have the freedom I had in choosing scholars when the house was mine, and I alone was responsible for all expenses, and Mrs. Hay allowed me to dispose of her gifts, but I do hope we shall go on somewhat the same lines.
‘1. That we shall not ask for money.
‘2. That we shall not advertise in order to get scholars.
‘3. That we shall not pledge ourselves to choose merely by intellectual pre-eminence.
‘4. I think we are justified in giving the preference to Cheltenham girls.
‘Might we not say that a scholarship should be offered on certain fixed conditions to certain girls, say to associates and to those who, not having been long enough to gain this, should have taken a high rank in the Cambridge room.’