Believe me,
Yours truly,
Sophia Jex-Blake.”
So Mrs. Anderson joined the Council, taking no part in the daily life and work of the School, but bringing to the new venture excellent qualities in which S. J.-B. was lacking, among them the valuable gift for bearing in mind who are the people worth conciliating,—the people with whom one simply must not quarrel.
S. J.-B., on the other hand, brought an amount of practical capacity and experience which the reader can estimate for himself. We have seen what she expected—and got—from her solicitor in the matter of the draft of a Parliamentary Bill: it is not to be supposed that she was less successful with printers, nor with plumbers, carpenters and others. She knew exactly how quickly a proof might be expected in an emergency, and she knew what the printing ought to cost. If there was anything about the printed page that struck the eye as “odd,” she had her finger on the technical defect in a moment, and saw that it was put right. She loved drawing up specifications for tanks, etc., and making her drawing to scale: carpentry was an unfailing joy,—nuts, bolts, staples, screws were as familiar to her as were bourgeois, pica, leads, and other mysteries of the printer’s craft. “I like working for the Doctor,” an Edinburgh joiner said in later years, “she knows what she wants, and she knows when it is well done”; but of course it was only a competent and conscientious workman who could rise to this view of the case. Fortunately life provides a good many of these: when S. J.-B. met one, she valued him as he deserved.
Recalling the early days of the School at a meeting of the Governing Body more than twenty years later, Mr. Norton said:
“Miss Jex-Blake had come to him in 1874 after leaving Edinburgh, and he had then expressed the opinion that if funds were raised and a school established of which all the teachers were recognized by the Examining Boards,—the Apothecaries’ Society would be obliged to admit its students to examination. By the middle of October Miss Jex-Blake had succeeded in obtaining £1300 and in renting 30 Handel Street for the purposes of a School of Medicine for Women. It was her great energy which succeeded in so promptly carrying out the work of starting the School.”
“Mrs. Anderson said she recollected that in those early days she had been timid and had considered the time had not yet arrived for establishing a separate School of Medicine for Women. To organize a School on the slender sum of money raised by Miss Jex-Blake required great optimism....”
So it did. It required much more than optimism. It required a unique capacity for directing and supervising every atom of work done, a unique capacity for getting a full and fair penny’s worth out of every penny, a unique capacity for finding workers who would put their shoulder to the wheel, and do things for love. Chief of these workers always was herself.
After the first Prize-giving Miss M‘Laren writes: