2017 So what would Dorothy and Margaret make of the antics of young women at Oxford today?
The newly discovered diary of two of the first middle class girls to go to Oxford depicts a lost world of chaperones, ankle-length skirts and tiddlywinks
FOR young ladies fortunate enough to be given the chance of a university education at the turn of the last century, it was a prickly dilemma indeed.
What to do if one was invited out to a concert or an evening ‘sociable’ but had no chaperone? Stay in college and eat half-penny buns by the fire? Or venture out into the dimly-lit streets and risk finding oneself among hordes of male undergraduates?
Such were the concerns of room-mates Dorothy Hammonds and Margaret Mowll as they embarked on their studies at the all-female St Hugh’s Hall at Oxford in the autumn of 1905.
The two Edwardian bluestockings recorded their thoughts in an extraordinary diary recently unearthed among papers at what is now St Hugh’s College — the prestigious alma mater of Prime Minister Theresa May, former Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, glamorous lawyer Amal Clooney and last — but not, I hope, least — yours truly.
The black cloth-bound diary offers an intriguing insight into an era when the women’s education movement was still gaining momentum. But it also provides a stark and timely contrast to the wild partying, binge drinking and casual sex that appear to have become hallmarks of student life for so many of today’s female undergraduates.
Only this week reports emerged of female freshers at Christ Church in Oxford stripping down to their undies after necking 50p cocktails with their male counterparts. The alcohol-fuelled event apparently got so out of hand that the college authorities had to call in bouncers.
Goodness only knows what Dorothy and Margaret would have made of such sleazy behaviour. Turn back the clock to October 1905 and according to their delightfully witty diary, they were celebrating Halloween with other female students at St Hugh’s Hall by apple-bobbing and raisin-digging.
They wrote of the excitement of roasting chestnuts on a couple of borrowed candles and the ‘dangers of sitting perilously close to their exploding skins’.
Away from the watchful gaze of their parents for the first time, these two spirited young women, both former pupils of Clapham High School in South London, immersed themselves in academic life with relish, ‘communing with the muses’ as they referred to their studies.
Ironically, when reading this charming diary, it is hard not to feel that these bright friends were in some ways far more independent-minded, far more liberated than many of today’s female undergraduates.
For a start, they didn’t have the pressures of social media, the constant diet of sexualised imagery that sends out the subliminal messages that all women should look — and behave — in the same laddish fashion.
Instead what survives is the witty musings of two sparkling minds — women filled with purpose finding their own way in the world with a huge amount of enjoyment and satisfaction.
THESE young ladies were too busy studying and expanding their minds to worry about anything as shallow as fashion.
Their attire, according to the sketches which Dorothy also drew in the diary, included anklelength skirts with hour-glass waists and high-neck blouses. Hair was worn up. Hats were donned for outings.
And yet they occasionally, often waspishly, observed the appearance of other girls in Hall.
In May 1906, they record a new arrival ‘whose lengthy toilette of an hour and a half did not produce a worthy result — plain, prim and pink.’ On another occasion, they mocked the appearance of a ‘well-travelled’ visitor to college. ‘She looks like it, with weather-beaten visage and flowing moustache.’
Written in the main by Dorothy, who referred to each of the young women by their initials, DMH and MKM, the pages are also filled with entertaining snippets about the young male undergraduates who caught the girls’ eyes.
But in the main, evenings at St Hugh’s back in 1905 revolved around such tame past-times as games of charades and tiddly winks and lantern slide shows as well as hastily-assembled, unsophisticated ‘scratch teas’ often consisting of only bread and butter. Strong drink? In the evenings, there were occasional ‘cocoa parties’ in the girls’ rooms.
Hockey matches, played against rival girls’ halls or even housemaids, and tennis matches, were also approached with gusto. The girls were allowed to row on the river — in suitable modest attire, of course. What the diary shows above all is the pluckiness and independent-mindedness of these two middle-class girls at a time when women were still unable to vote and when their right to education was still in its infancy. Women weren’t allowed to study at Oxford until the 1870s but then were finally admitted, thanks to the pioneering work of the Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women.
Even then, they were not allowed to take degrees or become full members of the university until 1920.
The earliest women’s institutions were Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville, which were set up in 1879 — the former offering a strictly ‘Anglican’ education, the latter, a non-denominational one. But even these colleges only catered for the bright daughters of aristocrats and the very wealthy. St Hugh’s Hall was opened in 1886 by Elizabeth Wordsworth, the great-niece of the poet and daughter of the Bishop of Lincoln, on a shoestring, to educate poorer female students who could not afford the education on offer next door at Lady Margaret Hall. Many of them, like Dorothy and Margaret, were the daughters of Anglican clergymen and among the first middle-class girls to be offered a university education — not to mention the chance to leave the confines of their parents’ home without having to marry first. At the time they arrived, there were still only a few hundred women studying at the university compared to thousands of men. As ‘lady students’, Dorothy and Margaret had to ask permission to attend lectures. They took separate exams to men. And yet it is clear that they regarded themselves as highly fortunate and embraced all that university life had to offer. Unlike many of today’s young women students, they took nothing for granted. But that didn’t mean that their lives were unexciting. Despite the strict rules and regulations that governed their lives, Dorothy and Margaret excitedly recorded sightings of young male undergraduates they admired using nicknames such as ‘the Earwig’ and ‘the Rat’ and ‘the Fish’. November 1st: ‘Rat seen in Corpus Quad by MKM’. November 25th: ‘DMH on her return from Prof N at 1 o’clock had the supreme pleasure of seeing “the Earwig” eating his lunch, or rather we should say drinking.’
But the greatest object of their desire appears to have been the undergraduate they christened ‘the Pride of all the Beauchamps’ — the Hon Henry Lygon of Magdalen College, the younger brother of Earl Beauchamp who was said to be Evelyn Waugh’s model for Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited.
A coloured ink sketch made in the diary by Dorothy shows a golden-haired, handsome and debonair young man cycling with a pile of books under his arm.
November 21, 1905 was clearly a day of great excitement for both the girls.
‘This is indeed a day of days, MKM has actually seen Face to Face the Pride of all the Beauchamps. This is the first time he has been seen accidentally in the flesh — Thus the need of capital letters.’
In December it was Dorothy’s turn: ‘DMH has astounding luck, the Pride of the Beauchamps again crossed her path, looking, she is sorry to say, horsey and common but nevertheless charming.’
BUT it was when venturing out that life became more problematic. Chaperones were required wherever the girls might come into contact with male undergraduates — at lectures, at the theatre, at debates at the Oxford Union Society.
The women who fulfilled this role were not always readily available and, annoyingly, sometimes they didn’t turn up.
On November 16, 1905, Dorothy and Margaret feared they might have to pull out of attending an Oxford Union debate but were saved at the last minute by the leniency of their Vice Principal, Eleanor Jourdain.
‘An awful rumour reached us that there was no chaperon handy, and therefore no Union for us. Now we had tickets, and we wanted to go. However, E.J arrives with the welcome news that we may dare “unchaperoned to gaze” upon the members of the School for British statesmen.’
Having attended the debate and sat watching their privileged male counterparts, they delivered withering verdicts on
the men’s performances, concluding that ‘if the speakers of tonight are England’s embryo statesmen, the prospects of the country are small indeed’.
In a pre-suffrage era, the girls themselves were clearly politically-minded and devoted much time, for example, to debating the merits of the Liberal Education Bill of 1906. One undergraduate from Magdalen was further savaged: ‘His politics were fanciful and savoured of the nursery. His style easy and boyish, not to say infantile.’
The girls’ interests went beyond politics, however.
Barred from that bastion of male privilege, the Oxford Union Society, they attended their own women’s debating groups, discussing topics such as whether ‘environment determines character’.
One diary entry recalls how men were barred from a production of She Stoops To Conquer ‘except those who have reached the supreme position of a grandfather. We sorrow to relate that out of a packed assembly, only three lone grandfathers could be mustered.’
On another occasion, December 7, 1905, the girls, accompanied by the Vice Principal, were allowed to venture even further afield, attending a rather risqué ‘Smoking Concert’ at St John’s College.
Such events were usually attended by an all-male audience who would smoke and discuss politics while listening to live music.
As the girls concluded later that evening: ‘It doesn’t sound very respectable but the VP cast a cloak of propriety over “the proceedings” or rather over our presence there.
‘DMH meets her old friend Charles who tries to renew his Christian name acquaintance, and also sings — We are advised to go at the end of the first part of the programme because you never know how rowdy they may get in the 2nd part but we were given a foretaste of what was to come by a Comic, not to say Music hall Song, illustrated by a fandango, and accompanied by some excellent whistling.
‘The VP is pleased as punch and roars with laughter. DMH fancies she hasn’t caught the words.’
Much is written about how cold it was at St Hugh’s not to mention the food — the ‘worried’ breakfasts they endured — kedgeree described as ‘bony, stringy, oniony’ and, if they were lucky, sausages.
Simple teas were made up of bread and butter and half-penny buns. They had cake if they were lucky.
As the pressure of their academic work grew, the diary eventually dwindled. Margaret left Oxford in 1908 with a Second in History and became a teacher, initially at the girls’ old school in Clapham. She died age 60 in 1945 while teaching at Repton School in Derbyshire.
Dorothy left a year earlier in 1907 with a Second in English Language and Literature and secured a position as a lecturer at an Anglican establishment for the training of women school teachers.
SHE later become a school inspector, rising through the ranks until she was one of six chief inspectors at the Ministry of Education. She was awarded a CBE and when she died in 1974, her obituary appeared in The Times.
Her diary was handed to St Hugh’s by her godson soon after and languished in the college archives until it was rediscovered by an eagle-eyed librarian.
Tellingly, neither woman married. To have done so would have probably meant an end to their careers in education and, inevitably, to their independence.
Today’s female undergraduates — fully enfranchised, sexually liberated — might well consider Dorothy and Margaret’s lives to be dull and oppressive.
But perhaps the greatest irony of all to be found in the pages of this diary is that it is clear neither of the young women felt that to be the case.
As they reflected on November 13, 1905 despite having endured a somewhat dull dinner in Hall: ‘We now feel H-A-P-P-Y because we’re F-R-E-E’.
Above all, they had purpose in their lives — something which, some might argue, many of today’s students are all too sadly lacking.
Professor George Garnett, Tutorial Fellow in History at St Hugh’s, who has edited the diary and published it as a book, puts it thus: ‘They would put most modern undergraduates to shame.’
n Dare Unchaperoned To Gaze: A Woman’s View Of Edwardian Oxford is published by St Hugh’s at £20. www.st-hughs.ox.ac.uk