[450] Incorporated from 1872 as Girton College.
[451] Two or three of the Cambridge colleges were built at a distance from the schools and the centre of the town: thus Alcock described Jesus College as “the college of the Blessed Virgin Mary, S. John Evangelist, and S. Rhadegund, near Cambridge.” Hitchin in Hertfordshire, the first site of Girton, was one of the homes of the English Gilbertines, a double order for men and women which was also established in Cambridge. i. p. 19 and n.
[452] This was followed by a bequest of £10,000.
[453] It is interesting to find the names of Dillon and Davies continuing in the case of the first college for women at Cambridge the Irish and Welsh traditions of college founders. It is perhaps still more interesting to find that on her mother’s side Lady Stanley was descended from the companion-in-arms of de Burgh the “red earl” of Ulster, and that a Dillon intermarried with the heiress of the 2nd earl of Clare, names honoured as those of the woman founder of one of the first Cambridge colleges.
[454] See the original committee supra pp. 317-18 n. The existing members elect the majority of new members. The first official recognition of the existence of the college was made in 1880 when the Council of the Senate elected three members of the college from among its number, and so exercised a power conferred on it in the original articles of association.
[455] The college still prepares for this examination; at Newnham it must be prepared for at the student’s own expense. It is however now usually taken by all students before coming up.
[456] Classics: R. S. Cook (Mrs. C. P. Scott) and L. I. Lumsden. Mathematics: S. Woodhead (Mrs. Corbett) senior optime.
[457] This was in 1882. First class honours in this tripos did not become usual until women came up better prepared from schools. A Cambridge man, however, writing in 1873 declares that a man may be a wrangler when his mathematical knowledge was contemporary with his admission to the university, but that “no one was ever placed in any class of the (classical) tripos who came up to the university knowing only the elements of Greek grammar.... The classical man, if plucked,” (i.e. in mathematics) “loses 10 years’ labour”—the time spent in classics from early school days. Women, nevertheless, belied this dictum from the first; many have not known even “the elements of Greek grammar” when they came up, and few indeed have 10 years’ Greek studies on their shoulders when they take the tripos.
[458] The Claude Montefiore prize was founded in memory of the donor’s wife, who was at Girton. The Agnata Butler prize is awarded to classical students by the Master of Trinity and his wife. One of the early scholarships, offered by Mr. Justice Wright, was described as “a year’s proceeds of an Oxford fellowship.” Dr. W. Cunningham, fellow of Trinity College, assigned, in 1898, the entire profits of his book Growth of English Industry and Commerce towards a fund for publishing dissertations of conspicuous merit written by certificated Girton students. The above-named city companies have always been generous donors to the women’s colleges.
[459] The committee of 1862 had had (as we see) for its avowed object the “obtaining the admission of women to university examinations”: the subsequent committee (of December 1867) was formed “for the establishment of a college holding to girls’ schools and home teaching a position analogous to that occupied by the universities towards the public schools for boys.” The following was the reply given by the first named committee when approached in March 1868 with a view to a joint memorial asking for “advanced examinations for women”:—“That this committee, believing that the distinctive advantage of the Cambridge University Local Examinations consists in their offering a common standard to boys and girls, and that the institution of independent schemes of examination for women exclusively tends to keep down the level of female education, cannot take part in the proposed memorial to the university of Cambridge for advanced examinations for women above the age of eighteen.”