RHODA GARRETT (1841-1882), AGNES GARRETT (1845-1935), FANNY WILKINSON (1855-1951), and MILLICENT FAWCETT (1847-1929)

Millicent Fawcett standing on the doorstep of 2 Gower Street, Bloomsbury, on her way to receive her DBE, 12 February 1925/ Rhoda and Agnes Garrett 

A FULLY ILLUSTRATED TALK delivered to a packed audience at Senate House Library, on Friday 8 March 4.00pm by Elizabeth Crawford.

In the late-19th and early-20th centuries four pioneering women lived at 2 and 6 Gower Street, Bloomsbury. These houses were their homes as well as the sites of their commercial and campaigning enterprises.

The firm of ‘R & A Garrett House Decorators’ operated from number 2, which was first the home of the cousins Rhoda and Agnes Garrett. After Rhoda’s death, it housed Agnes and her sister Millicent Fawcett, leader of the constitutional women’s suffrage movement. 

Fanny Wilkinson lived and worked next door but one, at number 6. She was the first professional woman landscape gardener, responsible for laying out over 75 of London’s public parks and gardens. 

All four women were also involved, together with an intriguing assortment of friends and relations, in any number of other campaigns. All worked to improve the position of women.

REVIEW by Carole Woddis:

Bloomsbury Women

For anyone still under the impression that `the Bloomsbury set’ were the alpha-omega of late Victorian England, then look no further than a new series of talks, 19^th century Women in Bloomsbury recently initiated by Julia Pascal and her Pascal Theatre Company.

In the first of the talks – held in the beautiful Art deco Senate House library building – historian Elizabeth Crawford covered an amazing amount of ground introducing the lives of the remarkable Garrett sisters – Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to be qualified as a doctor in England – and her no less redoubtable sister, Millicent Fawcett, suffragist and campaigner, and their equally enterprising sister Agnes who with her cousin Rhoda set up an interior decorator design company under the title of R & A Garrett.

Crawford’s illustrated talk delved not only into details of their designs, unearthing existing examples of their hangings and furniture but even more strikingly, the life and work of another Bloomsbury neighbour, Fanny Wilkinson, the first female landscape designer. We owe something like 75 London green spaces and parks to the artistry and enterprise of Fanny!

Crawford, an assiduous and persuasive researcher, left us in no doubt as to the extraordinary, quietly revolutionary lives of the Garret sisters living at nos 2 and 6 Gower Street.  And Fanny Wilkinson living at 15 Bloomsbury Street (now 241 Shaftesbury Avenue).

The one thing that stood out most vividly for me was their insistence on professionalism, training, qualifications – not for them the image of the `little woman at home’. These were confident women, determined to exercise and show that their skills were to be taken seriously – professional women, to be respected and reckoned with.

Something of an eye-opener, other talks in the series will no doubt be as informative and inspiration and are warmly recommended!

Elizabeth Crawford is the author of a number of books on aspects of women’s history. Of particular relevance to this talk is Enterprising Women: the Garretts and their circle.

She has written a blog on the work of Agnes and Rhoda Garrett for the University of London to support this talk and theSenate House Library’s accompanying display: The House Decorating Firm of ‘A & R Garrett’ | University of London.

Continue reading “Elizabeth Crawford Gower Street’s ‘Enterprising Women’: transforming the home, the land, and politics, 1875-1928.”

In collaboration with RUMS (The Royal Free, University College and Middlesex Medical Students’ Association) and UCL School Gender Equality Network

The hospital almoner (or early social worker) is a position that has been widely neglected in medical history. In 1895, Mary Stewart, a former Charity Organization Society employee, was the first almoner. She was appointed at London’s Royal Free Hospital which was a charitable hospital offering free medical treatment to the ‘morally deserving’ poor.

Stewart’s role was to means-test patients so that only the ‘appropriate’ ones received free medical treatment. She was also to discover who might be able to financially contribute to their own health care to avoid abuse of the hospital’s resources.

Stewart continually reshaped the role of almoner. She developed the administrative post to the more subtle role of a medical social worker. This meant referring patients to other charitable and medical assistance, visiting patients’ homes, and training almoners for future work in other hospitals. 

Through the examination of Mary Stewart’s Almoner’s Report Book, this talk considered the circumstances of her appointment, the role she performed, the finding of her investigations and the patients she assisted.

The talk was followed by a Q & A session.

WATCH A VIDEO OF THE TALK:

Dr Lynsey Cullen is a Daphne Jackson Trust Research Fellow in the History of Medicine at the University of York. Her current research project (funded by the AHRC and the ESRC) focuses on the history of patient data from the nineteenth century to the present day. Dr Cullen’s research interests include the history of hospitals, medical women, welfare, and mental healthcare. Her PhD (funded by a Wellcome Trust Postgraduate Scholarship) carried out at Oxford Brookes University examined patient case records of the Royal Free Hospital during the early twentieth century.  Publications include themes exploring the history of hospital welfare, mental healthcare and post-mortem practice.  Dr Cullen is also a professional playwright, screenwriter and children’s book author.

Our invitation was to come and discover the extraordinary story of former Bloomsbury resident Georgina Weldon, who was catapulted into the popular consciousness in 1878. And, Emily Midoridawa spoke to a packed audience.

Although long admired in society circles thanks to her talent as a singer, Weldon had been regarded locally as something of an unstable eccentric, not least because of her belief that she could contact the dead. After a failed attempt by her husband to have her committed to an asylum, she was rewarded with an outpouring of public sympathy and her years of subsequent crusading against Britain’s archaic lunacy laws, turned her into a most unlikely Victorian celebrity.

REFLECTION ON THE TALK:

Author Emily Midorikawa featured the life Georgina Weldon as part of a series of talks to celebrate International Women’s Day at Senate House. This presentation for Pascal Theatre Company’s Women for Women project was no dry academic speech. It was a performance which dramatised Weldon’s life.

Why do we know nothing of Georgina Weldon? This was the question behind Midorikawa’s talk. An activist, a singer and escapee from the plan to incarcerate her in a lunatic asylum, Weldon was a famous celebrity. 

Her political activities helped change the Lunacy Laws after her husband plotted with doctors to lock her away in a ‘lunatic asylum’. Was Weldon mad or merely eccentric? 

Certainly she never hid her interest in the occult at a time when seances with the dead fascinated Victorian England but this hardly merits being certified.

The talk gave us a character who is one of the many Victorian women who dared fight against their secondary status. It brought Weldon out of obscurity.  Thanks to Midorikawa’s easy lecturing style and strong sense of drama, she allowed her attentive audience  to re-discover a Victorian revolutionary whose achievements should not be forgotten.

Georgina Weldon: Georgina Weldon – Pascal Theatre Company (pascal-theatre.com)

to contact Pascal Theatre Company, email: admin@pascal-theatre.com

Continue reading “A MOST UNLIKELY VICTORIAN CELEBRITY: GEORGINA WELDON: a talk by Emily Midorikawa on 14 March at Senate House Library.”

A Victorian Feminist in Bloomsbury: remembering the educational life and networks of Jane Agnes Chessar (1835-1880)

Jane Martin in conversation with Melissa Benn  21 March at 6.00pm at the Institute of Education, University College London, WC1H 0AL.

A REFLECTION

At the Institute of Education a radical Victorian educator was honoured.

A Dickensian figure in a top hat?  That would be wrong. Jane Agnes Chessar (1835-1880) was a game-changer and we can credit her with professionalising teacher training and fighting for better educational opportunities for girls and women particularly at elementary level and for the working classes. 

‘In conversation’, Professor Jane Martin and Melissa Benn, two educators who also deserve centre stage, revealed Chessar’s achievements reflecting on how the issues she tackled in the 19^th century resonate today.

The audience learned about Chessar’s struggle to improve standards in elementary schooling. What she did laid the foundations of our early years schooling.  She also trained teachers and was the brains behind the professionalism of teaching. A leading member of the male-dominated School Board, Chessar was an educational writer, networker and was elected to represent women teachers on the Council of the College of Preceptors.

During the Q&A session, questions were raised as to why nowadays early years education is less valued than secondary, why education and the teaching profession continue to have lower status than medicine and medical professions. What is to be done?  The audience was curious about Chessar’s early death. It was suggested that she may have burned out as a workaholic or had lung disease. There was sorrow and frustration that Chessar’s achievements are so unremembered. ‘Why have we never learned about this amazing woman?’ ‘How can we understand our own world if we have never heard of the women who formed it?’

Melissa Benn and Jane Martin held Chessar up as a brilliant example of a woman who had the courage to take on issues and fight for what she believed in.  Her story, like many others, is crucial for better understanding of how and why education has developed as it has and faces the challenges it does nowadays. We need to use it as motivation to continue the fight.

Chessar’s story is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, whose stories we are longing to hear.

Evening programme:

In this talk, Jane and Melissa discussed why the educator and activist Jane Agnes Chessar should not be forgotten. Born in Edinburgh in 1835, 15-year-old Chessar moved to London to become a student at the Home and Colonial Teacher Training College, Bloomsbury. Recruited to the staff straight after, she was one of the first women in England to be employed in teacher education. Politically active across her career, Chessar was at the forefront of campaigns to professionalise teaching and the quality of teacher education, she also contributed to the development of elementary schooling for the urban working classes as a member of the London School Board.

Our starting point was to map and explain Chessar’s participation in not only the job of teacher education but also the metropolitan women’s movement. Moving on, we considered the legacy of Chessar’s work and the place of women in teacher education today.

Biography