Rosa Morison 1841 – 1912
Educationalist, suffragist.
5 June 1841 – 8 February 1912
Rosa Morison: Lady Superintendent of Women Students at University College London: A tribute by Georgina Brewis, Professor of Social History, UCL
Rosa Morison (1841-1912) arrived at University College London as the first ‘Lady Superintendent of Women Students’ in 1883. It was one of the first such roles in UK higher education, combining admissions, pastoral care and student discipline. Her job became the model for many similar lady tutors or ‘tutors to women students’ that were to remain commonplace in co-educational institutions until well after the Second World War.[1]
Rosa Morison was born in Hammersmith in June 1841 and attended a private school in Greenwich followed by the pioneering girls’ school Queen’s College, Harley Street. In 1866, Rosa started teaching German, Italian, and Latin at Queen’s College and it was there, a few years later, that she met the woman who was to become her life-long companion: Eleanor Grove (1826-1905). Rosa and Eleanor bonded over their love of the German language as well as their shared enthusiasm for the higher education of women. In 1881 they both resigned from Queen’s College and spent several months travelling in Germany. In 1882 they returned to help establish College Hall, a hall of residence for women students that was opening around the corner from University College in Byng Place. After a year of unpaid service, Eleanor Grove was appointed Principal and Rosa Vice-Principal. Rosa and Eleanor spent many happy years together living at College Hall. The two women helped to make College Hall a success, with students’ warming to Miss Grove’s ‘personal magnetism’.[2] College Hall strove for a familial, homely atmosphere and it was always ready to welcome old students back to visit. As Eleanor’s health began to fail, they retired at the end of the summer term 1900, moving to set up home together in nearby Tavistock Square.
University College had experimented with admitting women students since the 1860s, initially through a voluntary organisation called the London Ladies’ Educational Association, following the model of similar bodies elsewhere.[3] Though taught by University College professors, these first classes met separately from the men students and started on the half hour whereas the men’s ran on the hour. From 1878 women could take University of London degrees and could study alongside men on any course at University College except medicine, which was not opened to women until 1917. As Carol Dyhouse argues, there was a ‘dual market’ in higher education in this first generation of women in universities – the students included ladies of leisure, many of them married, in pursuit of general culture as well as those seeking training for a professional career, most often in teaching.[4] In 1883, when there were about 250 women students at University College, the Council appointed a committee to investigate ‘the position of the female students of the College’. This committee reported back that ‘better accommodation’ including a reading room ought to be provided in addition to the existing common room. The first space allocated to women had been distinctly inferior. A ‘little door’ on the north side of the Portico opened directly onto a lecture room which was given over for the use of the women students. Students of the early 1880s remembered the hat pegs hung round the walls and the ‘big bare tables’ where waiters would hurriedly enter to serve food before beating a hasty retreat. Writing in 1918, the Women’s Union Society joked that this door remained ‘a sacred object to every student’ although the original room had long since been turned into a cloakroom and made part of the refectory.
The committee’s major decision, however, was a call to appoint a ‘Lady Superintendent of Women Students’ to exert ‘general supervision over women students’, to act as a go between the women students and the Professors, and to oversee a revised admissions process for women which now required ‘satisfactory evidence of respectability’. From 1883 to 1919 this so-called ‘passing in rule’ stipulated that all prospective women students needed to present an ‘introduction or reference’ acceptable to the Lady Superintendent. Rosa Morison was appointed at a salary of £100 a year, which in 1908 rose to £150 a year. One controversial episode that occurred a first few months into the job was when free-thinker Annie Besant and Alice Bradlaugh, daughter of Charles Bradlaugh, applied to register as students. Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant had been the subject of a sensational trial in 1877 for reprinting and circulating a birth control pamphlet. Rosa’s refusal to admit the students was backed up by the College Council, despite a student petition protesting their exclusion.
Under Rosa, women students gradually gained new reading and writing rooms alongside improved common room and cloakroom facilities. Before the First World War, however, the separation of the social life of men and women students prevailed, with student societies segregated on gender lines. Rosa Morison supported women students to founding the Women’s Union Society (WUS) in 1897. Various groups including the women’s Debating Society and a number of sports teams flourished under the WUS umbrella before it merged with the men’s union in 1945. These societies provided valuable opportunities for self-government for Rosa was an ardent supporter of women’s suffrage. No suffragette, however, she was ‘prepared to accept slow but steady progress’ which might have put her at odds with new generations of students by the Edwardian period.[5] From the accounts we do have, which include the many condolence letters sent to the Provost after her death in 1912, Miss Morison appears to have been genuinely respected and widely liked by both students and staff, with many reflecting on her ‘cheery disposition’. By 1900, 16 per cent of students at University College were women. However, before 1912 only about a dozen women had been appointed to the academic staff, mainly in the departments of Botany, Chemistry, Geology and Applied Statistics, including Margaret Murray, who taught Egyptian hieroglyphics and history at the College for the best part of 50 years, and Ethel Thomas, Winifred Smith and Marie Stopes in Botany.
Rosa died suddenly in her office at University College on 8 February 1912 of chronic bronchitis and heart failure. Still working at 71, she had been living alone in Tavistock Place since Eleanor’s death. As her friend and Principal of Bedford College, Margaret Tuke, wrote after her death it was a ‘happy thing for her to die in harness’.[6] When her death was discovered, black edged posters announcing her death were immediately hung around the College. Her funeral was a grand affair, a sort of equivalent to a state funeral in university terms. Rosa’s funeral cortege left from the quadrangle with 14 horse-drawn carriages of mourners, including one containing suffragist royalty Millicent Garrett Fawcett and her daughter. All lectures and classes were cancelled.
The outpouring of grief at Rosa’s death was quickly turned to practical fundraising. Students, staff and former students subscribed to cast a bronze likeness of her which was used on both a marble plaque hung in the entrance to the College’s main library in 1915 and for a twin plaque placed in College Hall. A Rosa Morison medal was also cast and given out as a prize for the best performance in Arts subjects. It is still given as a faculty prize at UCL today.
In 1912, students saw an opportunity to protest over both the outdated concept of ‘passing in’ and the nature of the lady superintendent role itself. It may be that affection for Rosa had prevented any earlier challenge. The Women’s Union Society passed a motion protesting that ‘passing in’ was a ‘relic of bygone days.’ The meeting also proposed abolishing the role of Lady Superintendent in favour of a more modern and high-status post of woman Vice Provost. The women academic staff proposed the role be abolished entirely, and that her duties be divided between a matron and the women staff of the college. Both suggestions were rejected because the College Committee judged that ‘public opinion demands’ that there be someone to fill such a role. Her eventual successor, Winifred Smith, was an internal candidate who fought off an external challenger from Australia, and while she took the title of ‘Tutor to Women Students’, she was apparently always known as Auntie Winnie. It was not until changes to the social position of women during the First World War, including the extension of the franchise to women over thirty in 1918, that the ‘passing in’ rule was finally abolished in 1919.
Until relatively recently Rosa Morison and her legacy was largely forgotten at UCL. The plaque that originally hung in the library was displaced during the rebuilding after the Second World War bomb damage. The plaque ended up near the ladies’ toilets in a draughty corridor. I think this decision was taken because it marked the location of a ‘little door’ that had opened into the first women’s common room, but it rendered Rosa ‘hidden in plain sight’ on the UCL campus. Rosa merited barely a sentence in the first three editions of The World of UCL, first published in 1978. Though at least they spelled her name correctly, unlike in the 1929 history by Hugh Hale Bellot! In 1978 Negley Harte published the text of a lecture about women at UCL as separate short pamphlet, noting that women were ‘treated as second class citizens in all manner of ways’.[7] This admission did not make it into the World of UCL, illustrating how such matters were seen as marginal, perhaps interesting to discuss in a separate forum but not worthy of inclusion in the official history. In 2018, I collaborated with the Head of UCL’s Art Musuem, Nina Pearlman, to retell Rosa’s story. Rosa was featured in celebrations to mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act through a re-enactment and immersive performance and we installed an explanatory poster drawing visitors’ eyes to her marble plaque. That year the University of London opened an inter-collegiate hall of residence in Stratford named Eleanor Rosa House to commemorate the two women’s contribution to education, and, fittingly, their names are once again inextricably linked.
Further Reading
Negley Harte, John North and Georgina Brewis, The World of UCL (London: UCL Press, 2018).
Sam Blaxland, Students’ Union UCL: A Short History (London: Students’ Union UCL, 2023).
Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex: Women in British Universities (London: 1995)
Generation UCL | Students Union UCL is a research and engagement project telling UCL’s history through the lives of its students in the run up to the bicentenary in 2026. A free exhibition in UCL’s Octagon Gallery, Wilkins Building, Gower Streer is open until December 2024.
Generation UCL: 200 Years of Student Life in London | UCL CULTURE – UCL – University College London
[1] Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex: Women in British Universities (London: 1995), 60.
[2] ‘Miss Eleanor Grove and Her Work’, University College Gazette, Feb. 1901, 168.
[3] Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex, 14.
[4] Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex, 25.
[5] ‘The Late Miss Rosa Morison’, University College Magazine, 1912, 218-9.
[6] Margaret Tuke to Sir Gregory Forster, 9 February 1912, College Correspondence: Rosa Morison, Folder 1 Notices of death and letters of condolence.
[7] Negley Harte, The Admission of Women to University College London: A Centenary Lecture, (London: UCL, 1979).
MINI BIOGRAPHY
Education
Educated at Queen’s College.
Some Key Achievements and Interests
1866 Employed as a linguist at Queen’s College.
Offered her services for free at College Hall*, the first hall of residence for women students, then appointed Vice-Principal .
On the resignation of Grove and Morison, Louisa MacDonald presented a vote of thanks. Referencing life at the Hall as a former resident, she reflected:
‘At first we had very little inward life, but gradually it grew, and students began to feel that the Hall was a place where the best kind of life might be going on, the life of workers together, helping each other to perfect work.’
1883-1912 Became the University of London’s first Lady Superintendent of Women Students, responsible for women studying at UCL and the London School of Medicine for Women. (Her successor was called ‘Tutor to Women Students’ as Margaret Murray explains; ‘owing to a change in outlook, not so much in the girls as in the parents. The girls did not need and the parents did not demand for them any superintendence.’ Murray, Margaret: My First Hundred Years
Strong supporter of women’s suffrage and co-education.
Encouraged women to start their own clubs and societies as women could not join men’s; persuaded the College to provide a reading room for women students.
1897 Helped launch the Women’s Union Society at College Hall.
Legacy
Her bequest established the Rosa Morrison scholarship in the Faculty of Arts at UCL.
2018 New hall of residence named Eleanor Rosa Hall after Rosa and Eleanor Grove.
Issues
Met criticism for her relationship with Eleanor Grove.
Poor health.
As a female had to fight to go up the ranks within the university system.
Connection to Bloomsbury
Retired to a house in Tavistock Place.
Rosa Morrison Plaque at UCL.
Female networks
Lifelong partner Eleanor Grove.
Education and suffrage networks.
Further reading:
Listen/read: College Hall and Chenies Street Chambers – Pascal Theatre Company (pascal-theatre.com)