‘Thy kindred with the great of old.’ Tennyson, In Memoriam, lxxiv.
Those who had often the advantage of hearing Miss Beale speak, either in general addresses to present or past pupils, or in the more regular course of literature lessons, soon learned that there were certain heroic names which had for her an almost romantic fascination. Among those of great women who influenced her imagination are specially to be remembered St. Hilda, St. Catherine of Siena, la Mère Angélique, Mme. Guyon. Of these the most dominant, the most inspiring was that of the great Northumbrian abbess, known to those whom she taught and ruled by the name of ‘Mother,’ not by virtue of her office, but on account of her signal piety and grace.[60] Hilda, the earnest student who ‘had been diligently instructed by learned men, who so loved order that she immediately began to reduce all things to a regular system.’ Hilda, the patron of the first English religious poet, ‘who obliged those under her to attend much to the reading of the Holy Scriptures; who taught the strict observance of justice and other virtues, particularly of peace and charity.’[61] This great[227] Hilda and her work were to Dorothea Beale not merely romantic names, they were an ideal, an inspiration. And when the due time came, though for the sake of Miss Newman she hesitated for a moment over the alternative title of St. Margaret’s Hall, the name of St. Hilda was the one she chose to grace her own foundations. There are, possibly, members of the Ladies’ College who felt a pang of envy when the Students’ House became St. Hilda’s College. They could have borne to exchange the prim early Victorian title bestowed by the godfathers of 1856 for this more inspiring name. There is, however, consolation in the thought that the Ladies’ College is still free to adopt the name of its second founder.
St. Hilda’s Hall, as it was at first called, was formally opened on November 27, 1886; but its real building was a much longer process, even if dated only from Miss Margaret Newman’s death at the close of 1877. Miss Beale thought much and anxiously how she could best lay out the money which she and her staff and some friends had given in order that Miss Newman’s work might be carried on and enlarged. She advised with a few who cared for education and for the College. Among those who helped and counselled were Miss Soames, who subscribed largely to St. Hilda’s, and Mr. Brancker, some of whose letters on the subject remain. If there seems now to be little that is original in the suggestions and plans discussed by Miss Beale and Mr. Brancker, it is because they were to a great extent pioneers, and among the first to bring about a real system for attaining the educational objects they had at heart. In 1878 Mr. Brancker wrote:—
‘The object you advocate is a very desirable one, and one I have longed for many a time as an adjunct of the Ladies’[228] College—but while we were struggling upwards I could never see an opportune time to advocate my ideas on the subject. The means you suggest are very undesirable, to my mind at least, as partaking too much of the “charitable object” idea to commend themselves to me.
‘So necessary do I consider the future training of those who in their turns have to teach that for the present I should be inclined to treat every case on its own merits; as there may be many who may be anxious to get their education on such easy terms and yet have not the very least idea of imparting that knowledge to others, and in such cases the object you seek is not attained.
‘My idea, which is perhaps a crude one, would be that the capabilities of each pupil as regards teaching should be tested, and if she showed suitable powers she should be drafted into one of the boarding-houses, or if thought better into a separate house; that the fees of the College in her case be remitted, and that the expense of her board be paid all or in part by the College. That for this she should engage to become a regular teacher; that the College should have the first claim on her services, and that she should pass all the necessary examinations appointed by the College. If in a boarding-house she might assist in keeping order and authority, not as a governess but as an elder pupil,—not as a spy but by moral power, keep her position, something like a pr?postor in a public school; a great deal of evil might then be prevented by being nipped in the bud. Should she eventually wish to take a College degree she should be assisted by the College if she remained with them or under their control. My great object would be to get ladies to accept such a position, as there must be many who would come within the rules of the College as to position who would be very glad to have such a vocation in prospect, and the College ought to be in a position now, unless the funds have been unnecessarily squandered, to afford to assist such cases in the hope that in the future they would help it.
‘Such are my rough ideas on the subject, as I do not believe in the isolation of those who want a practical knowledge of human nature to enable them to become teachers worth their salt.’
In a second letter on the same subject Mr. Brancker said:—
‘I quite understand what you feel about this matter relating to the governess of the future, and it was only my fear that[229] you might be unwittingly getting into troubled waters that induced me to write you at once about it. It is a very difficult question to solve, and one that wants a good deal more thought so that no mistake may be made. My plan is to take up the idea of a “pupil teacher” in Government Schools, and from that form some plan for the education of those who aspire to be the teachers of the future. I should then carry out the idea I have always entertained of giving a preference to our own pupils, and working them up to our standard. I have always regretted that we missed Bessie Calrow, as she was a born teacher and would have delighted in the work. It seems to me that as you do not take these pupils until they are seventeen, you have a great chance among your own pupils, and would certainly know their own character better than any stranger; therefore, to any one who had passed through the College—could pass the necessary examination, and was willing to be such pupil teacher—I would pay the College fees and half the boarding-house expenses, or all if you like, and would give her a fair trial, and if at the end of twelve months, or longer as might be thought desirable, it was not satisfactory to all parties, let her depart and no harm would be done. This is a far better and more dignified position than being educated by charity; and the person enjoying it would lose nothing of her dignity, if it was not even added to by the position. If the plan is to do any good it must be grafted on to the College, and I for one should be very sorry to see that obliged to go to the public for any funds it requires to do good. I would make the pupils sign nothing on my plan, my hold upon them would be their association with the College. I can quite understand the difficulties raised by the boarding-houses about new pupils at that age, but with old ones that difficulty is at once removed; as, like the pr?postors, they would have certain privileges, but at the same time they must submit to the discipline of the house. My plan may be, and no doubt is very crude, but these are the lines I should start from and feel my way tentatively, so as not to destroy the independence of the individual. Look where you get the best masters of public schools:—The man who succeeds is a scholar and very likely Fellow of his College; he may have been Bible-clerk, sizar, or undergraduate, and so has worked his way upwards and obtained his position from hard work, thus adding to his dignity and power of teaching. And I should follow as much as possible in these tracks.’
Eventually the ideas expressed in these letters were[230] carried out in the arrangement of St. Hilda’s, which became not only a home for pupils who could not afford the normal boarding fees, but also a residence for senior students who needed more liberty than they could have in the other houses. By this means the house was put on a self-supporting basis. Miss Beale could have borne with no other. The Loan Fund, up to this time, had been the means of assisting over a hundred students. Miss Beale now asked a few personal friends to support it, pointing out that such a means of help was far better than any system of scholarships, which she never ceased to dislike, and against which she continually spoke and wrote. Her chief objections to scholarships have been already noted.[62] She was moreover opposed to the principle of material giving involved in the system. She only cared, at any time, to give what would embrace and ennoble character. She thought it best that people should pay for advantages received, thought they would value them more, thought it made girls more careful and self-denying when first the management of money came into their own hands, to feel that it was not their own to do as they pleased with. A mere gift seemed to her like a dead thing compared with the money which, lent and returned and then lent to others, was thus used over and over again. Yet the want of response to appeals for the Loan Fund must have been partly due to a difference of opinion on its method rather than to want of sympathy with Miss Beale’s aims. There are many who feel an objection to saddling with a loan a young teacher starting on her work, or who recognise that an unpaid loan may help to lower the standard in money affairs, and on that account shrink from giving help in this way. There[231] are few indeed who could lend money so successfully as Miss Beale could, because there are few who could so successfully command repayment. Of the first ￡500 advanced by the Loan Fund, ￡495 was repaid in a very few years. The pressure she would exercise for repayment sometimes led to the wrong notion that she cared for money for its own sake. She had at all times great skill in wringing the utmost use out of a sum of money to promote those ends for which she lived; but in the ordinary commonplace sense she was indifferent to money and the things for which it is usually exchanged. Her own personal life was as bare of luxury when she was a rich woman as it was when her capital was reckoned in hundreds only. But she did care deeply for character, and anxiously avoided all forms of easy generosity which might injure those she sought to help.
For several years before a turf was cut for St. Hilda’s College, Miss Beale was, as she would herself have expressed it, building it: student teachers were being trained in the College, and in 1881 one of these passed the Cambridge Examination in the Theory and Practice of Education. Gradually she gathered an increasing body of students in a separate house—a house which was as unlike as any could possibly be to the beautiful home which was shortly to be opened. She waited year after year for money with which to build without interrupting the work she had begun in assisted education, and for the reasons named made no public appeal for it. It was enough, she maintained, to state the real needs—to show the value of a work by the way it was done—and thus let it make its own appeal for support. She had a horror of plant which might be a mere empty shell, or which in its establishment might become a[232] diversion of energy from spiritual work. She felt this especially in the matter of church building, as may be seen in the following extract from a letter: ‘What I disapproved of was the amount of begging for the Cathedral. I do not disapprove of it, but I think you know what I felt. However, the Bishop will do all he can to make it a strong spiritual centre. I can never get over the feeling of spiritual destitution at one very beautiful cathedral.’ It was also, perhaps less consciously, a principle not to take money except from those who were willing for her to carry out her own ideas. She wrote to one friend in 1888:—
‘As regards our Students’ Home, I have given up the idea of a public meeting. It seemed not right to refuse the offer at first. But I shall go on with the work, and I doubt not the money will come. There is such a great need for training teachers. If we had a meeting things might be said and money be given in a way which would pledge us, or be thought to pledge us, and now we shall be free.’
And again in 1884 to one who helped her Oxford scheme:—
‘I grieve over that Protestant spirit which forbids people to read books, to associate with people, who do not think precisely in their way. Is this done in Science? No; we put various theories before the student and show why we accept them. But we don’t ever want to impose our beliefs; so I want not to impose mine in religion, but to bring the learner to the “fountain of living water.” Any transferred opinion is without root, and cannot endure the storm. Teachers must, if they are to help, gain the sympathy they need by entering into the religious modes of seeing and feeling of many different souls. I think in a University town they would come in contact with various influences, and in a house like St. Hilda’s I should want thoughtful people who have gone through some of the experience of life,—old teachers to help the young. There is a little more of my dream, but I am quite content to wait. If it be God’s will that such a house should grow up, the way will be pointed out. I felt I could not say all this to you when we meet, and I have got to care that you should not misunderstand me.’
[233]
As the time to begin the actual erection of the house drew near she had no exultation over the fulfilment of a dream. Yet in the beginning of August 1885, surrounded by young teachers from her own and other schools drawn together for a Retreat and a brief educational conference, her mind was naturally full of that dream. Some few of her own thoughts about it she wrote down; such as the following, with their characteristic heading:—
‘Sunday, Aug. 2, 1885—on St. Hilda’s. Some thoughts at church.
‘God fulfils Himself in many ways. Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
‘How often have we seen endowments thus rendered injurious, not helpful. So it is with many of the institutions around us. Can we hope better things from this one? No, we can only hope for it not a perfection but a temporary usefulness. “He, after he had served his generation according to the will of God, fell on sleep”;—so it is with men, so with institutions, they need not a body but a spirit. As long as the spirit lives the body is the instrument of all good works. When the spirit dies, the body becomes the source of disease and corruption. For this reason I have cared more to awaken the spirit than to gather funds and build first. The spirit will, I hope, shape the body.
‘Now what we want is a body of women whose one desire is to consecrate themselves to the ministry of teaching.
‘“Get work in this world.
‘Be sure ’tis better than what you work to get.”
‘Ye are the salt of the earth,—light of the world, said the Lord to the teachers He sent forth.’
The first stone of St. Hilda’s College was quietly laid by Canon Medd (one of the trustees and a member of the Ladies’ College Council) in 1884. The opening, which took place on November 27, 1885, was far more dignified than that its illustrious parent had known in 1856.
‘The ceremony of opening the institution,’ so ran the[234] account in the Cheltenham Examiner, ‘which was performed by the Bishop of the diocese, took place at three o’clock, and was attended by a large and influential company, who assembled in the study, a spacious—but on this occasion none too spacious—apartment on the ground floor.’ Among those present were the Dean of Winchester,[63] then Chairman of the College Council, who conducted the short service, the late Bishop of Ely, and many of the clergy of the town, besides the friends and benefactors of St. Hilda’s. On entering the study the eye was caught at once by the words which Miss Beale quoted so often that they seemed like the motto of her work: ‘Knowledge puffeth up, but charity buildeth up.’ Here, in this ‘Godly Place,’ as he called the house, the Bishop of Gloucester, who since 1875 had been both nominally and actually Visitor of the Ladies’ College, gave an address full of sympathy for the ideals of the founder.
Thus the first resident Training College for teachers, other than elementary, was planned, and built, and opened. In order to make its position more permanent it was constituted into a separate College with a Council of its own. In 1886 a statue of St. Hilda was presented and placed in the hall. On unveiling it, Miss Beale spoke of the Saint’s life, and especially of her work as a teacher. She concluded with a thought, the deeper for the personal touch in it, of memory of what she had had to bear in the past, and indeed in later years also, of misconception and misrepresentation.
‘Shall I touch in conclusion upon the mythical elements in St. Hilda’s story? Myths are truths expressed in poetry. You see the ammonite at her feet, one of the serpents that she, like St. Patrick, is fabled to have turned into stone. There may[235] have been, once, at Whitby, serpents who, with the poisoned tooth of calumny and evil-speaking, wounded and slew. I think she turned them into stone with her look of sorrow. We have not represented the wild geese, whom she is said to have destroyed because they wasted her lands. I half believe that story too; I feel sure that all these disappeared from her abbey lands, but perhaps they were turned into swans.’
St. Hilda’s College was scarcely built and opened before it was necessary to enlarge it by adding a new wing. It was not until this had been done that Miss Beale felt free to devote herself to another foundation, which also was to bear the name of the sainted Abbess.
As early as the year 1882 Miss Beale, attracted by the increasing facilities offered to women by the elder universities, had purchased three acres of land in north Oxford. These she retained for building uses should the right moment or a definite reason for such a purpose occur. But no one showed much sympathy with the scheme, there was no offer of money, and for long much of her own capital was absorbed in St. Hilda’s, Cheltenham. Impulsive to a fault as she often was, Miss Beale could school herself to wait. After five years came an opportunity of purchasing a ready-made college in Dr. Child’s beautiful house on the Cherwell. It seemed well to accept this, and begin there the new house of education.
There were many reasons why Miss Beale allowed so long a time to elapse between her purpose and her act. Her own ideas and her aims for her Hall at Oxford shaped themselves but gradually. Somerville College[64] and Lady Margaret Hall were still in their first youth. Miss Beale’s scheme seemed uncalled for where there were already so many workers for the cause of women’s[236] education in the field. Her educational experience had been different from that of those whose minds had developed among university surroundings; her methods were unacademic, unconventional. Consequently there were some to warn her as she prepared to take her new step: ‘The University may easily receive a shock from which it will take long to recover.’
It may well be asked even now, as it was often asked at the time, why Miss Beale wanted to come to Oxford at all, and particularly while she was uncertain of the value of University Examinations for women. But she valued even more than the certificate gained by taking schools the atmosphere of Oxford. She saw that the students of St. Hilda’s, Cheltenham, missed this. When she founded that institution she had written of it, that she hoped it ‘would be a Hall similar to the Halls at Oxford and Cambridge.’ Now she felt the need of what only the older universities could give. She hoped her new house might become a place of intellectual enlargement and refreshment such as Oxford could best supply to some who had already begun their work of teaching, and who needed new thoughts and inspiration, more time for thought, a higher intellectual standard. She thought that a year at Oxford could supply that feature in education which is sometimes more developed at home.
‘I have often felt ... that a year in which they should be allowed to expatiate in intellectual pastures in a way that we older women used to do before examinations for women existed, would be of great value. And they can do this best in some University town, where they can have libraries and museums and such lectures and private help as they most require—both hearing and asking questions, rather than being asked and answering.... Many could take one year who could not take three.... The students of St. Hilda’s (Oxford) will have the same opportunities of attending lectures and offering themselves for examinations as at the other Ladies’ Colleges—but we[237] should not press examination upon any who can do better work without. Of course we must be assured that those who come to us will work seriously.’
Yet these reasons were secondary. The purchase of three acres of ground at Oxford was a definite result of her own suffering of mind in 1882. As she emerged from that she at once began to build in vision a house where teachers should be established in the faith, where they should learn to feel that their calling was not to do mere journeyman work, but to deal with the deep problems of life.
Finally, it may be added that, whether conscious of it or not, she could not keep herself out of the great movement which was enabling women to share with men many of the incomparable advantages of University life, she had also her own conception of what University life might do for women, and by means of a College at Oxford for her own College at Cheltenham. For Cheltenham the connection would be of great value. Seeing all that might be won by a well-placed move, she planned that move, waited, then made it at the right moment. ‘I bewail your news,’ wrote an Oxford friend to whom she communicated the fact that St. Hilda’s was about to be opened, ‘and disclaim all responsibility for your mistake.’ Miss Beale opened her Hall and begged the students to accept the words Non frustra vixi as their motto, that being the thought which the ammonite at the feet of St. Hilda’s statue now suggested to her.
In October 1893 seven students took up their residence at St. Hilda’s. Mrs. Burrows, who had had a College boarding-house at Cheltenham, came to be head of the new Hall, assisted by her daughter, who had been a student at Lady Margaret Hall. The house was[238] formally but quietly opened on November 6 by the Bishop of the diocese, Dr. Stubbs, who placed himself at Miss Beale’s disposal for all arrangements. ‘I will keep,’ he wrote, ‘November 6 free for Miss Beale, but she must let me hear what, when, and how what is to be done’; and to Miss Beale, ‘You do not want me to bring robes on the 6th, do you? A line to reassure me would be grateful.’
On the occasion of the opening, after the little service conducted by the Dean of Winchester, the Bishop of Oxford spoke a few ‘grave and weighty words’ on the duty of ‘self-culture of the whole mind, soul, and spirit.’ The Dean, who thanked him for his address, said that ‘the new venture of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College was by no means so ambitious as the Bishop seemed to think.’ He spoke of the way in which it might prepare women to be of real service in their generation, and added: ‘One cannot think of this opening day for the Oxford St. Hilda’s without strong emotions of gratitude and hope. This is the crown and highest result of all that work for women’s education which has been carried on under Miss Beale’s wise rule at Cheltenham these many years past; the College, with its varieties of activity, and its eight hundred students, justly claims to be represented here in the home of highest education.’
 
Photo. W. H. Rogers
S. Hilda’s Hall, Oxford.
 
Among the friends gathered for this opening ceremony was the founder of the Ladies’ College, Cheltenham, Canon Bellairs. He welcomed this house in Oxford, though he would have named it differently.
‘I am very glad to hear,’ he had written a month before, ‘that you are starting what will no doubt become a veritable College. You should christen it at once. St. Clare would be appropriate. She founded an Order, and your College will be[239] the foundation of an order. I do hope the G. W. R. will alter its time-table to suit your convenience. It would do so if it had as high an opinion of your excellence as the Father of your College, and your Pupils and all that know you have. Fancy, thirty-five years since we first met! What a period for evolution.... I should like very much to have a chat with you to see where you are now.’
After five years, St. Hilda’s, Oxford, was recognised by the Association for the Education of Women in Oxford as St. Hilda’s Hall. Miss Beale finally, in 1900, connected it with St. Hilda’s, Cheltenham, by presenting it to the Association of that College.
That Miss Beale was fully alive to changes that must come in the course of time to such an institution as St. Hilda&r............