Cheltenham’s Girls College

 During my stay in the beautiful Regency town of Cheltenham, this summer,  I passed many a time one building you simply cannot miss: the legendary Cheltenham’s Ladies College. Founded in 1853, this college has been at the forefront of girls’ education for almost 160 years. It has a worldwide reputation for academic excellence and is one of Britain’s leading schools. It has a distinguished past. Dorothea Beale took on the post of Principal of this college in 1858, a post she held until her death in 1885.  She was a suffragist but above all an educational reformer. She was one of eleven children and it was under her leadership that Cheltenham’s became one of the most highly regarded schools in Britain. As in so many other girls’ schools the traditional education of girls had emphasized the development of accomplishments such as music and drawing. But she was determined to provide a much more academic education.  She also eventually founded St Hilda’s College in Oxford, where, if my memory serves me right, Maria Grech Ganado followed her university studies.

It was not easy for Miss Beale to make changes in the curriculum of this school. Her ideas on teaching fostered at Queen’s College London, a place of higher education for women, were ahead of Cheltenham parents who only wanted their daughters groomed to catch good husbands. She tried to be tactful, introducing learned subjects gradually but even arithmetic was suspect. Mothers feared that knowledge would turn their girls into boys. “It’s all very well for my daughter to read Shakespeare but don’t you think it is more important for her to be able to sit down at the piano and amuse her friends?”

But a determined woman Miss Beale was not one to turn her back on any aspect of life and did not shrink from having her senior girls taught Latin…. “One needs to have one’s moral fibre braced by the poetry of the Hebrews and of England and Germany if one would remain unaffected by writings saturated with heathen thought.” The idea of bracing the moral fibre of girls was new and was to change the pattern of female education. Women the world over have a great deal to thank Miss Beale for.

In one of her addresses she spoke ardently of the need to continue the work she and others had begun: the country was still in need of women, ‘thoughtful, disciplined, self-controlled with the confidence and persistence of faith, not a few but a great army, to contend with the evils which are undermining the foundations of society.

Matters have become worse since the days of the formidable Dorothea Beale and more than ever we need properly educated women around the world. She should be living at this hour…

I had never met anyone who had attended Cheltenham’s Ladies College. But a very sad event, the death of my dear friend and former colleague at the University of Mauritius, Chantal Lau Kwen Wing, was to bring me into contact with just such a girl.

More about dear Chantal next week but after her funeral her husband Jacques organized a dinner for some 60 of those present, including members of her family who came from Vancouver where they have lived for several years.

At dinner, in the course of conversation with the two ladies on my right when I said that I had come down from Cheltenham the elder woman told me that her daughter had lived in Cheltenham as she had attended Cheltenham’s Ladies College.  Linda Lan, for that was her daughter’s name, told me that she was at CLC from the age of 13 to 18 years. She recalls that there were many girls from Hong Kong although there were English girls too, about half were boarders and the other day girls. Linda also remembers a princess from Burma who seemed to find it hard to fit in and who was constantly followed by a bodyguard and helper.  Linda, who now works with HSBC in London, looks back on her school days with fond memories “apart from the terrible homesickness.” But the school had provided for her good foundation on which to build up her independence and at the same time learn discipline.

How did she finish up at Cheltenham’s Ladies College? Her father is an engineer and works for an oil company in the Middle East, going from one country to another. So it seemed a better idea to send his daughter to Cheltenham rather than change schools every time he and his wife Helen changed countries.

Anthony and Judith Duvivier

I met Anthony Duvivier in the ‘60s. At the time he was studying medicine at Barts and came here for a stage at St Luke’s hospital.  One of my brother-in-laws who was studying medicine here as well brought him home one day and asked us to take care of him as he was traumatized by what he saw in the gynaecology ward in St Luke’s. He immediately vowed that one branch of medicine he was not going to take was midwifery and gynaecology. In fact he became a consultant in Dermatology and has written a world renowed Atlas of Dermatology.

I had not seen Judith, also a doctor and Anthony since the ’70. This visit to Malta has rekindled our friendship. More next week.