| Presenter | Catherine Freeman |
| Paper Title | “Irregular communication with the boys”, absconding and arson. Girls’ methods of being heard in nineteenth century educational institutions. |
| Abstract | Through details of girls who were in reformatory or industrial institutions during the nineteenth century, this paper presents examples of girls making themselves heard by breaking the rules. Schools’ records held at the Surrey History Centre and The National Archives for the Royal Philanthropic Society and the Surrey Girls’ Reformatory along with newspaper accounts of the Surrey Girls’ Reformatory, and the Princess Adelaide Servants Training School, provide echoes of the girls’ voices through their deeds. The girls’ actions and the adults who recorded them tell of inmates of the Royal Philanthropic Society’s school in Redhill, who wrote to “boys of the Institution” in 1836, an absconder from the Surrey Girls’ Reformatory in 1889, and arsonists at the Princess Mary Adelaide Servants’ Training School in 1893. Instances that rendered them heard. Echoes as they are not presented directly by themselves. These incidents show the girls as active in their environments, wanting to be heard for different reasons. They also present instances of the relationships between the schools’ expectations of the girls and the girls’ interests. Tahaney Alghrani, in writing about similar institutions, described “modes of resistance” as providing girls’ “voices through their actions”. These actions mean that we can still ‘hear’ them now, in conjunction with the expectations from which they deviated. |
| Biography | Catherine Freeman received her doctorate from the University of Greenwich in 2024. She is secretary to the Children's History Society, the current History of Education Society Richard Aldrich Fellow and Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her research interests are girls' education in England, mostly at the end of the long nineteenth century. |
| Presenter | Pamela June Mansell Royal Holloway, University of London |
| Paper Title | Finding pupil voices in the magazines of Maidstone, Southend, Woking and Chichester girls’ and boys’ grammar schools, 1900-1939. |
| Abstract | Finding pupil voices in the magazines of Maidstone, Southend, Woking and Chichester girls’ and boys’ grammar schools, 1900-1939. British state grammar schools in the years before the Second World War have very largely been neglected by historians since the advent of comprehensive schools in the 1970s. They are schools that have come to be seen as bastions of the middle classes but, to contemporaries, the new secondary schools of the first half of the twentieth century were more usually seen as inferior schools for the lower classes. Little work has been done on the magazines of the state-supported secondary schools, although public-school magazines have been increasingly used in recent years. My case-study grammar school magazines should be seen as primarily a ‘vehicle of institutional propaganda’ as J.A. Mangan found in using public-school magazines for his work ‘Athleticism: A case Study of the Evolution of an Educational Ideology’. Pupil voices can be found in my schools’ magazines, but as Susannah Wright warns, it was ‘the most enthusiastic and eloquent pupils’ that were likely to make their voices heard. Even when pupil voices can be heard, it is necessary to assess how far the pupils were ‘performing’ as grammar school pupils, reflecting the culture developed by the teachers and disguising the culture as really experienced by them. It is through the pupils’ sports, houses and club reports, that their grammar school experience comes through most strongly. Occasionally, and most usefully, pupils express what their identities as grammar school pupils mean to them; identities that carried class associations. |
| Biography | I am a part-time PhD student at the University of London: Royal Holloway. The title of my thesis is Culture, Class and Gender: the new state-supported grammar schools from the1880s to the 1930s. I am in my eighth year. Before beginning my PhD, I worked at Southend High School for Girls and produced the school history for its centenary in 2013. The school archives had previously been destroyed in a fire, but the school magazines still existed. In using the magazines, I began to realise what a fantastic source they were for researching the life and culture of the school. |
| Presenter | Megan Buiocchi LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science |
| Paper Title | ‘Fortunate Girls’: Youth, memory, and girlhoods of the female-centred Empire in the Schoolgirls’ Tour of Australia and New Zealand |
| Abstract | In 1934, twenty-five English schoolgirls sponsored by the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women (SOSBW) and the Victoria League travelled to Australia and New Zealand on a five-month tour of the Commonwealth. Educational tours of the Empire had long been a staple for upper-middle class schoolboys, but rarely for schoolgirls, and the tour organisers endeavoured to display their attendants as equally important actors in the future of British and international relations. The tour’s ultimate impact on the girls, however, was unclear and not well-understood as they grew up and the British world transformed. This project examines the planning, implementation, and afterlife of the 1934 English schoolgirls’ tour as a case study on imperial emotions, gender, age, and memory in twentieth-century Britain. Drawing on Sunaina Maira’s concept of the “youthscape,” I propose that the schoolgirls composed a distinct British “youth community” that allowed for unique discussions on imperialism and internationalism into the twenty-first century. The first section will discuss the interwar cultures of the SOSBW and the Victoria League and the feminist philosophies that informed their tour. Both organisations dedicated themselves to the expansion of an overtly political imperial culture through distinct and active female roles in global affairs. The second will cover the ensuing tour and compare the painstaking media coverage with the girls’ lived experiences as described in their diaries and scrapbooks. Finally, the project reflects on the girls’ recollections as adults amidst a changing British world, as well as those of their descendants. In reunions and newsletters fifty, sixty, and seventy years onward, the schoolgirls maintained youth community ties that thrived in a new post-Empire era, and saw themselves as representatives of British womanhood in their families, in their domestic lives, and on a global scale. |
| Biography | Megan Buiocchi is a masters candidate in the International and World History dual degree program with Columbia University and the London School of Economics. Megan graduated from Hamilton College (New York) with a bachelor’s degree in history, departmental honours, and an induction into the Phi Alpha Theta honours society. She specialises in the cultural and social histories of youth and childhood in the modern British Empire, and is particularly fascinated by questions of media consumption, citizenship, and lived experiences. Previously, Megan worked as an Associate Publicist for Penguin Random House. |
| Presenter | Noah Petts LSE - London School of Economics and Political Science |
| Paper Title | "Our Children those few poor lambs in ye wilderness": Children and Christianity in the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-c.1720 |
| Abstract | In 1705, Timothy Titharton wrote to the secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and described his fellow congregants in Stratford, Connecticut as 'our Children those few poor lambs in ye wilderness'. Two years later, Henry Compton, Bishop of London, described the condition of William Cordiner, trying to get to Shrewsbury, Maryland, as 'very hard, being with his wife & children six in family'. These are but two examples of the fleeting references to children, or adults being child-like, made in the early years of the Society. In the Society's archive, children variously appear as those of missionaries, of colonists, and of Native Americans and enslaved people. This paper seeks to explore the ways in which historians may recover the experiences of these children through these brief, often anonymous references, and how we may interpret the silence of their voices. In so doing, it will consider the role and importance of children in early eighteenth-century missionary work and examine the employment of religious language when discussing children. More broadly, this paper will consider what the experiences of and language surrounding children of the Society tells us about Christian attitudes towards children and the family unit, especially in a trans-Atlantic and cross-cultural context |
| Biography | Noah is a student at the LSE, currently exploring the contributions of women to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts as benefactors and wives of missionaries. He is interested in gender relations in eighteenth-century missionary work more broadly, and hopes to explore this further at a graduate level, looking at missionary masculinities, family, and material culture. He has previously worked on the material culture of the Gay Liberation Front, examining the communication of identity through badges and the long-term impacts of social movements on their participants. |