included a students’ house where women from a distance could be lodged. Two students applied in the autumn term of 1870 for permission to reside in Cambridge, and were received into private houses in the town. Meanwhile in response to an appeal, originating with Mrs. Fawcett, exhibitions of £40 for two years for students attending the lectures had been given by John Stuart Mill and Helen Taylor, and before the year closed it was found necessary to open a house of residence. In March 1871 the post of head of a house of residence was offered to Miss Anne J. Clough.
Anne Clough.
We know more about Miss Clough than about any founder or first principal of a college on which he or she left a personal mark. Of the life and thoughts of others, with the exception perhaps of Bateman in the xiv century and Fisher in the xvith, we know singularly little. Anne J. Clough was born on January 20, 1820, at Liverpool. Through her Newnham received, what Girton missed, the impress of a strong individuality, now placed by “great death” at a distance which enables us to focus and appraise it. Her father’s family was of Welsh origin and traced itself to that Sir Richard who was agent to the great merchant-adventurer, Sir Thomas Gresham. To her Yorkshire mother, Anne Perfect, she and her brother, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, owed their literary interests. In appearance she was of middle height and spare—an old woman of that Victorian epoch in which she was born, out of whose eyes looked the soul of the twentieth century, and after. She seemed indeed to have two personalities—the white hair and an uncertain gait typified the one, but the eyes, very dark and very bright, would lift unexpectedly in the midst of a conversation, and then the visitor would receive a revelation; he would see no more the old woman but the woman who must always be young, the stamp of an inexhaustible energy, that shrewdness with an unconquerable idealism close behind, an atmosphere about her of uncouth poetry.
For she was no artist. She had not that which separates the artist from the man of ideas, or the dreamer, or the seer—expression. No poetical imagination was ever more tongue-tied. She spoke by actions, and used words only as indications of thoughts. Her speech was compared by a former student to the works of early painters, before command over the material had been obtained, but where “sheer force of character and feeling had risen over the difficulties.” She was an idealist, but she could never understand the value of an abstract principle. Her interest was always in the individual, in the career, and she came to no matter, to no person, with a store of general principles ready for the case. She wanted to give women not merely learning, but a life of their own, to call out interests, to satisfy their individuality. She liked to find in them many and marked vocations, for she understood the dignity of all work and had no disdain of common things. She wanted every one to have a place and an office in life, and must perforce fit the squarest bits into a round hole, so intolerably pathetic was it to her that they should have no hole. You could not “hand her the salt or open the door for her” without receiving “some recognition of your individuality” a student said of her. This recognition of the individuality of women and of the human and practical sides of higher intellectual training was her contribution to the movement in which she took so great a part. And the contribution was all important.
She had besides a strong belief in the value of academic advantages. It was in order that some crumbs of things academic might fall to the teachers in elementary schools, that she arranged the summer meetings of University Extension Lecture students. Miss dough’s belief in happiness—in people’s right to happiness—was the source of most delightful qualities. She had waited, she said, for her own till she was fifty years old, and it had come to her with Newnham. She insisted on the little pleasures “which bring joy by the way.” Nothing was too small to engage her own attention, and her educational qualities lay in awaking similar interest in others, as her moral disposition led her to share and so to increase the common stock of interests and supports in life. And so on the rare occasions when she left the college boundaries she would recount to the students at her table or in her room all that had interested her during her absence. She busied herself over the minutest details of their health or well-being, and finding that two students made a simple supper upstairs on Sunday, she arrived at the door carrying a good-sized table, because she had noticed there was none convenient for the purpose. Newnham was for her a big house, and the students were grown-up daughters in a delightful family not yet realised elsewhere, each of whom had her own place in the world, her own personal life, its rights and liberties. Yet the “head” who habitually intervened in small college matters (with a total lack of power of organisation, which in the administration of Newnham she left to others) and who was frequently agitated and over anxious about them, balanced these things by a life-long habit of interest in large public affairs, and, what was more strange, by a very real serenity. She did not think the individual should be sacrificed to the college, or “to a cause, however good.” She never lived in a small milieu—even Newnham.
She constantly exercised a simple diplomacy, not divorced from sympathy—with independent-minded students, with university dons who viewed Newnham with disfavour, and in generally vain attempts to conciliate high theory with prudent practice. It was here that her characteristics sometimes jarred on the early students, among whom were many ardent spirits, people whose presence there at all was the consequence of a struggle à outrance with convention and prejudice; and who resented Miss Clough’s temporising ways, as though the first maker of Newnham were a backslider in the matter of first principles. They thought her indirect and timid. She was neither. She had real courage, not only as her biographer has said “audacity in thought”[466] but audacity in execution. She was staunch and tenacious, and might be found taking an individual’s part against the whole college; and whether the help she gave was moral or financial, no one ever knew of it but herself. Neither did she always prefer the most brilliant or useful student, but would take under her wing the apparently most insignificant. She had no fear of the unusual, though the younger students thought so, and it was “her indifference to abstract principle” which made them sometimes judge that she despised ideals. She had also a singular frankness—a singular directness—when speaking with others face to face; her important things were said at odd moments, odd moments were her opportunities. Neither did she compromise; she went all the way round and came out at the same place. This expedient made it quite unnecessary to override obstacles, and her aphorism “my dear, you must go round” was received with hostile scorn by a student seated on the high horse of abstract considerations. Indeed Miss Clough was not a fighter in the sense that she could neglect the quantity of others’ feelings: and her desire that people should not be offended was part of a sympathy, not of a timidity, which could not be conquered. The working of her mind is shewn in the saying: “If we watch, we may still find a way to escape”—because to her there was no inevitable where her sympathies were engaged. Her diplomacy led her to keep her notions to herself, so that they should not be nipped in the bud by the frost of hostile criticism.
“My dear, I did wrong” was the disarming reply to a very young student who asked her “as one woman to another” whether she considered she had been justified in a certain course of action. Her singleness of purpose—the absence of all vanity—a complete disinterestedness, shone on all occasions. Her never failing search after the right course she once tried to express by saying to a student: “You must remember that I try to be just but I don’t always succeed”; and she criticised the performance with complete detachment from the personal equation.[467]
Among the ideas which seethed in her brain was the training of students as doctors to work among Hindu women; and one of the last things she interested herself about was a school for girls at Siam. She wanted teachers trained to teach.[468] She urged students to know at least one country and one language besides their own. Her liking for new people, her interest in foreigners, especially in Italians, and in travel, was part of a spirit of adventure with which she was largely endowed. She liked old students to go to the colonies, and her interest in such doings never flagged. Her hold on the xx century was foreshadowed in the interest she took during the last years in the Norwegians, and in Japan. She felt very special sympathy with elementary teachers who receive small encouragement for highly important and difficult work. Even the monotonous life of the country clergy claimed her attention, as did a Sunday class for working men inaugurated by one of the students—which she visited, taking the keenest interest in the handwriting of the men, in the books they read. Her relations with her servants were always delightful, and she found time in the midst of a busy life to teach the Newnham house boy to write.
She sometimes spoke at the college debates, and usually, as a student remarked, “spoke on both sides.” On college anniversaries she would make short addresses, and point the connexion of study with life—“examinations demand concentration, presence of mind, energy, courage,” qualities which “come into use every day”: or she would tell students “to bear defeat, and to try again and again”; or she would quote the American who said we should not complain about things which can be remedied, or which cannot be remedied; and add: “there is great strength in these words.”
Her religion was unconventional like her mind; full of aspiration, but lacking in definiteness. She spoke of it as “a longing towards what is divine,” as “arising from the contemplation of the divine.” She spoke of “bringing our hearts into a constant spirit of earnest longing after what is right” and added in language which discovers the burning thought and the halting utterance that made strange partnership in her: “There is no occasion, then, of kneeling down and repeating forms to make prayers.”