TYPING A WAY TO THE TOP by Penny Dolan

How often does one understand something you should have known all along? 

While working on my Mary Wollstonecraft story for the Daughters of Time anthology, I started thinking about education for girls, and especially my own mother’s education. So today, because May was her birthday month, let me tell you a little about the schooling of Evelyn Gladys Rose, fourth child and only daughter of an army family. 

I knew where she went to school, because I went to the school myself : Noel Park School, Wood Green, North London. The school is one of the generation of imposing “triple-decker schools” familiar in urban areas, built to last. The healthily high-ceilinged rooms have large windows to let in plenty of light but set well above any inattentive child’s eye level. The schools have large halls and, as any current staff would agree, a quantity of staircases. Sometimes one can still find “Boys” and “Girls” carved in stone above the once-segregated entrances. Noel Park School, when I knew it, still had a “Boys” playground and a “Girls & Infants” playground, divided by a high brick wall and each with its own outside lavatory block. We never went to the top of the school..

In 1921, the school-leaving age was raised from 12 to 14, but it was the 1926 Hadow Report on Education and Adolescents that led to pattern of classrooms that my mother knew. 

Her Noel Park School taught Infants on the ground floor (5-6 years) Juniors on the middle floor (7-11years) and the Seniors (12-14) up on the top floor. The division at age 11 was chosen for practical reasons. Some of the boys, 
I believe, went to a nearby secondary school, where the emphasis was on technical education. 

There was, however, one way out of Noel Park. After a year, able children could win a scholarship to Glendale Grammar School. Among my mother’s “treasures” is the letter offering her a coveted place, but  - a familiar tale of the times - she did not go. The uniform was expensive and the overall cost would be too much. 

My grandfather, she hinted, refused to give his permission. One of the reasons she gave was that it was because she was a girl.  My mother only mentioned this disappointment a couple of times, but I wonder if the incident drove her on all her life. So she studied typing and shorthand, becoming a formidably accurate typist, and during World War II, she left home and joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and was in the typing pool at High Wycombe, across the corridor from the office of Arthur “Bomber” Harris. 


My mother never really stopped working. Her typewriter was her identity. With her toddler in the back seat, she cycled the country lanes of then-rural Cheshunt and Nazeing, collecting and delivering freelance typing.  

Later, she got a job as a typist and then secretary at the impressive Woodhall House, home of the local gas company but now the Wood Green Magistrates Court. One afternoon, aged around eight, I went up the drive, through those polished doors, edged up to the Reception desk and asked to see her. 

In an era when female office staff hid any hint of “children”, my mother the secretary was not at all pleased to see my after-school face, especially when my reason was too complicated to explain. I think I had wanted to prove to my friend that my mum really did work in such a palatial building.

My mother kept at it. Eventually became the personal secretary to one of the top “Gas Men” up in London and after retirement worked on at the St John Ambulance Brigade Headquarters. Such determination! Even as she lay dying, she was struggling to get out of bed to go to work. (What would I get out of such a bed for, I wondered? Soon after that moment, I started trying to write.).

My mother had always wanted me to achieve, too. She wanted me, her daughter, to have the education she hadn’t had. She was the one who was keen on my education, the one who pulled all the strings she could to get me into the local single-sex Convent Grammar School. She was also the one who picked up the pieces between one disastrous school incident and another, the one who pushed me into becoming a teacher. Before the second wave of feminism, my mother was determined to show everyone that girls are just as good as boys and just as deserving of their education and place in the world. Maybe she echoed some of Mary Wollstonecraft's ideals?

However, back to that WAAF typing pool. I recently met up with my mother’s best friend. Shortly afterwards, she sent me two pages from her autograph book of that time. On the left page is a verse by Johnnie, a man who was often calling in to the pool, giving his view of the WAAF typists. On the opposing page is my mother’s spirited reply. Both verses are below.

The Song of the Airman

Beauteous maidens, garbed in blue,

Hindering those with work to do,

Drawing pay for doing naught,

Doing things they didn’t ought,

Powdering noses, apeing fashions,

Eating much more than their rations,

Affected girls with silly laughs

Useless, muddling, blundering W.A.A.F.S.

The W.A.A.F.S Lament

Stalwart he-men, big and strong (?)

Boasting, bragging all day long,

Thinking they do all the work,

Walking round with saintly smirk,

Trying to behave but finding

This ordeal much too binding.

Unfortunately they’re not rare men,

There are too many b - - - - y airmen!

Apparently, she delivered standing on a chair, and to much applause by all the girls. Good on you, Gladys!

Penny Dolan

ps. I do know, and my mother and father certainly knew, that that war took many lives, especially of airmen, so I hope you will read this verse in the context of the post and the time. Thanks.

Harriet Who? and the Education of Girls - Joan Lennon

I had the feeling I'd heard the name some place, sometime, but that was about it. When, as part of the 26 Norwich Writers project,* I was paired with 19th century writer Harriet Martineau, I was starting from scratch.

I dipped into a Victorian biography, and Harriet's Autobiography, and downloaded a slew of titles by her onto my Kindle, googled about a bit - it was fun, but I was having trouble settling - until I started reading the un-prepossessing-ly titled Household Education (pub. 1848).  I'll just skim through, I thought, but I didn't.  I couldn't.  I'd like to spend from here to summer quoting bits from it but I won't.  In honour of this being a History Girl post I'll just share a little of what Harriet has to say on the subject of educating girls. 


"The footing of women is changed, and it will change more.  Formerly, every woman was destined to be married; and it was almost a matter of course that she would be: so that the only occupation thought of for a woman was keeping her husband's house, and being a wife and mother.  It is not so now ... A multitude of women have to maintain themselves who would never have dreamed of such a thing a hundred years ago.  This is not the place for a discussion whether this is a good thing for women or a bad one; or for a lamentation that the occupations by which women might maintain themselves are so few; and of those few, so many engrossed by men.  This is not the place for a speculation as to whether women are to grow into a condition of self-maintenance, and their dependence for support upon father, brother and husband to become only occasional ... What we have to think of is the necessity, - in all justice, in all honour, in all humanity, in all prudence, - that every girl's faculties should be made the most of, as carefully as boys'."

She could be speaking to our world today as pertinently as to her own.  Harriet Martineau - I salute you!

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.


* In celebration of Norwich becoming the first English UNESCO City of Literature, the writers' co-operative 26 has come up with another fabulous project - 26 Norwich Writers - in which 26 contemporary writers have been randomly paired with 26 writers from or associated with Norwich in its long history, and asked to write a response.  Watch out for the results in the coming months!


P.S.  I'm away from my computer some of this week doing World Book Day events, but will definitely be reading and responding to comments when I get home!

Bluestockings by Mary Hoffman

 

This is one of so many pejorative terms levelled at women. It used to be used of both men and women, meaning "an educated person." Elizabeth Montagu was happy to form the Blue Stockings Society in the 1750s; Sam Johnson was a member as was Edmurd Burke and Pope's friend, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (her cousin by marriage).

But over time the word came to refer exclusively to a woman and an unnatural woman at that - one who would put her intellectual pursuits and her reading ahead of the care of her husband and family. Or, worse, would refuse to have such relations.

In 2008 I went to an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, called Brilliant Women, which featured the Montagu set. Appropriately enough, I went with my two best women friends from university, though I suspect none of us has ever worn blue hosiery.

The Linley sisters by Thomas Gainsborough

It included portraits of Angelica Kaufmann and Mary Wollstonecroft, very interesting people in their own right. Richard Samuel included several of them in his study of Apollo and the Muses.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Lady Mary, who was married to the Ambassador to Turkey, pioneered smallpox vaccinations, was a gifted writer and her deathbed words were reputed to have been "Well, it has all been very interesting." Not a bad epitaph.

Mary Wollstonecroft

Angelica Kaufmann

Splendid people, all of them. But I had assigned them and their struggles to an almost mythic past. After all, I had known about Lady Mary W. M. since studying Alexander Pope at university.

Then last year I read with great interest a book called Bluestockings: The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education by Jane Robinson.

And I discovered that Cambridge awarded the first degrees to women in 1948! Now that may still seem like ancient history to many readers but it was only sixteen years before I went up to Newnham. I had no idea that the privilege I enjoyed and abused in the '60s had been so recent. Cambridge took women on as students before Oxford, though the latter awarded degrees to them in 1920. Durham did better than either, awarding degrees to women in 1895 - howway the lasses!

It is a splendid book, which is a fascinating read. Most people who know anything about women's education in the last century have heard of Miss Buss and Miss Beale - Frances Mary Buss who founded The North London Collegiate school for Girls and Dorothea Beale, who was headmistress of Cheltenham Ladies' College.

But have you heard this little rhyme?

Miss Buss and Miss Beale

Cupid's Darts do not feel.

They leave that to us,

Poor Beale and poor Buss.

And there you have it: intelligent educated women who do not marry and have children (who are not like "us") were to be gently pitied. They were immune to the natural feelings of 'real' women. Never has it been more obvious that patronising such women is a way of controlling men's fear of them..

It should be one of the glories of the twenty-first century that a woman can be educated, literate, intellectual and still choose whether or not to enter into permanent partnership with a man or another woman and whether or not to have children without giving up her work and interests. Sadly this is still not the case.