WONDER GRADUATES
Writer pays tribute to heroines in musical
They were the students who blazed a trail for equality in an education system that didn’t want them because they were women.
Now the story of the Edinburgh Seven, a group of pioneering females whose determination to make university access universal irrespective of gender, is being told in a musical and staged on the site of one of their most important stands.
Actor, musician and writer John Kielty and his wife Jordanna O’Neill are behind the new production about the first group of women to be enrolled in medicine at a British university.
The women – Sophia Jex-Blake, Isabel Thorne, Edith Peche y, Mat i lda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson and Emily Bovell – insisted upon access to study at Edinburgh uni in a high-profile dispute in 1869.
The Edinburgh 7 musical tel ls how they suffered for their progressive attitudes in Victorian Scotland, from being forced to pay higher tuition fees and organise their own lectures to being rejected for scholarships despite gaining top marks.
The women faced outrage from entitled male students, who threw mud at them, slammed doors in their faces and let sheep loose in their exam hall.
They forged ahead but their education was halted when the Court of Session ruled against their right to study.
Yet the women would go on to graduate after further studies in countries such as Switzerland and Ireland. They would also go on to practise around the world.
After running the London School of Medicine for Women, leader Jex-Blake returned to Scotland to establish a simi lar col lege in Edinburgh.
The musical’s first performance will be staged at Surgeons’ Hall on Friday as part of the UK-wide
Museums Night programme, fol lowed by two rehearsed readings performed on Saturday.
John said: “The story we strove to tell is the story of the supporters as well as the detractors.
“A lot of people had it in for them but they had a lot of support from people like Charles Darwin and James Young Simpson (the first doctor to use chloroform as anaesthetic).
“The women did so well, it put the professors’ noses out of joint and they refused to teach them.
“The professors did all sorts of things to oust them. They got the students to accost them in the street. They had to do extramural classes at Surgeons’ Hall across the way from the university and protesters started a riot when the women were going to sit their anatomy exam.
“They put a sheep into the exam hall to put them off and the riot went on throughout. They came out at the end and the riot was still happening. “A group of Irish guys got round them and walked them home. And they all passed the exam.
“The support they had in Edinburgh is the reason why we’re staging it there.” The event will be held at the Playfair
Bui lding in Surgeons’ Hall, where the women sat their anatomy exam as dissent raged outside.
For John, the work meant following in the footsteps of the story’s heroines by hitting the books in – and out – of Surgeons’ Hall, now a museum in Edinburgh.
He said: “Surgeons’ Hall gave me access to the library and I have been reading about the women for two years.”
John has written the work as a musical, with contributions from his brothers Gerry and Martin. He hopes in time to scale up for bigger stages with higher- production values and the possibility to tour the story around the country.
Hi s pas t work inc ludes appearances in River City and writing songs for the National Theatre of Scotland’s musical production Glasgow Girls.
John was also one of the co-writers of the opening song for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in 2014.
He said: “I’ve always written musicals. Initially, it wasn’t my intention to tell this story as a musical but, the more I read about it, the more I thought of it that way.
“It’s such a big story, it takes places over three years and there are advantages to using song to help tell the story.”
The first outings for the work will see 11 actors play the roles, with John taking the role of Alexander Russell, an Edinburgh journalist who publicly supported the women’s cause.
Although it refers to events which took place 160 years ago, the story has a troubling resonance with events in modern society.
He said: “There was a scandal in Tokyo recently where it was discovered that they had been deliberately mark ing down women’s grades to stop them flooding the profession and they had to publicly apologise.
“There really was a fear. Back in the 1870s, there were only male doctors. A lot of women wouldn’t go, for reasons of modesty.
“One of Sophia Jex-Blake’s driving ambitions was to give women an alternative to male- only practitioners. A lot of practitioners were scared that the women would take the cream of the practice.”
John’s wife Jordanna helped inspire her husband to tell the story. She works as events manager at Surgeon’s Hall and, when she learned of the women’s struggle, it sparked conversations at home.
She said: “When I came across the story, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been told in any theatrical form.
“We started discussing how it would work as a stage production. My background is in visual theatre and I work a lot in musical theatre.
“We felt, when reading the history, that there were parallels which were recognisable today, issues that these women were facing then that some face now.”
Edinburgh University f inally allowed women to graduate in 1894, with the first female doctors graduating in 1896.
John added: “It is a tremendous success story. But it’s also really heartbreaking to see what they all went through.”