Today, Girton College is well known as a constituent college of the University of Cambridge – but did you know that it was originally sited miles away from the East Anglian city, in Hitchin, Hertfordshire? It was here, on 15 October 1869, that an ambitious plan for a college for women was realised, when Benslow House became home to some ambitious Victorian women. This establishment was the brainchild of two women – Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon, who had been involved with the Society for the Employment of Women and who wanted women to be able to attend university, and for girls to go to Oxford and Cambridge to sit the Local Examinations in those places. In 1865, 91 young women entered the Cambridge Local Examination, but the push was continued to enable women to proceed further with their education. Four years later, entrance examinations for the College for Women at Benslow House were held in London, which 16 women passed. The first term at Benslow duly started in October 1869, with Charlotte Manning as college mistress, and five girls as students.

Benslow House was a rented house – an architecturally simple but large and welcoming property that was seen as attractive because of its location, a safe and unthreatening distance away from the male bastions of the university itself. It was not the first women’s residential college – that honour going to Whitelands College, which was a higher education college for women that opened in 1841 and later became part of the University of Roehampton – but it was the first one offering a university-level education for women at Cambridge. However, Benslow House’s use as a college site was limited due to the relatively short-term lease and the growth in numbers of women wanting to be part of its educational life. Although only five women were students in 1869 – joined for one term by Charlotte Manning’s stepdaughter, Adelaide – by mid-1900, over 700 women would have been part of the college.

In Cambridge, the Tripos examinations were the means by which students gained an Honours degree. The first girls to sit the Cambridge Tripos exams, albeit unofficially, were Rachel Cook and Louisa Lumsden, who both sat the Classical Tripos, and Sarah Woodhead, who sat the Mathematical Tripos. These three, who took their exams in the Lent term of 1873, became known as ‘The Pioneers’. Louisa Lumsden, a suffragist and keen advocate of women’s education, would later receive an honorary doctorate and a damehood; Sarah Woodhead would become a headmistress and, later, a schools inspector; and Rachel Cook would marry C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, write and translate texts, and create a form of home-based university teaching as well as becoming a school governor. It was hard for these pioneering women not to maintain their involvement in education after their own had finished, for they knew what a privilege it was as a woman at this time to receive a good education.

From the start, the goal was for the College for Women to become a permanent college and, ultimately, a part of Cambridge University. Therefore, in 1872, a new site near the village of Girton was found, and the college duly relocated (Emily Davies had apparently felt that for a women’s college to be in Cambridge itself would be improper). Here, on a 33-acre site a couple of miles out of Cambridge itself, a red-brick complex was built over the next 15 years, and there was plenty of room for the college to expand. In October 1873, students and staff relocated from Hitchin to Girton, and the College for Women was renamed Girton College; the new term started with 13 female students.

There was now a long-term battle for Girton’s women to be admitted to the university’s examinations. In its first term in Cambridgeshire, the college’s women could only get admittance to lectures given by 22 of the university’s 34 professors, although over the course of the 1870s they gained access to an increasing number of intercollegiate lectures. The relative lack of access meant that the girls were still reliant on lectures given at Girton either by its own female lecturers or by other Cambridge men who would visit the college to lecture the female students.

Girton in the records
Census returns at TheGenealogist.co.uk provide a useful means of looking at those women – and men – who were involved with Girton over its first decades. They record not only the staff and students, but also the less remembered individuals: those who worked in service at the college, ensuring that students were fed, kept warm, and housed in clean, tidy accommodation.

The 1881 census records 42-year-old Bristolian Marianne Bernard as mistress of the college (as she had been since 1875; she would leave in 1884, when she married a widowed Cambridge professor), with 37-year-old Irishwoman Elizabeth Welsh, Constance Anne Herschel, 25, and Charlotte Angas Scott, 22, working as college lecturers. Elizabeth was from County Down, and was one of Girton’s first students, studying there from 1872. She then became a teacher at Manchester High School, before returning to Girton as a classics lecturer. Marianne Bernard had given her vice-mistress duties from 1880.

Constance Herschel, the daughter of mathematician and astronomer Sir John Herschel, and granddaughter of the famous astronomer William Herschel, was one of several sisters; she would marry Sir Neville Lubbock – director of the New Colonial Bank – and herself become the mother of several daughters. But her intellectual abilities were the most significant aspect of Constance; as befitted her family history, she was an astute scientist and mathematician, and her job at Girton was as a lecturer in both mathematics and natural sciences.

Her colleague Charlotte Scott was similarly a mathematician, who was admitted to Girton in 1876, but who had to fight to take the Mathematical Tripos exam at Cambridge in 1880, before women were formally allowed to sit them. She came eighth, which should have entitled her to the honour of being ‘eighth wrangler’, but as a female student, she was not allowed to attend the awards ceremony or be acknowledged. The male students present, though, all shouted her name when it came to the place where she should have been rewarded, and afterwards women were formally allowed to take the examinations, although their results were not included in the overall rankings. She lectured at Girton until 1884, the year before she was awarded a doctorate, and then moved to America, where she became a professor. She returned to Cambridge when she retired, and died there in 1931.

Students of the college in 1881 included Maria Mabel Anelay, 22, from Lewisham; Ann Edge, 25, from Staffordshire; Beatrice Lindsay, 22, from Manchester; Elizabeth Dorcas Drought, 33, from Northamptonshire, and Edith Aitken, 19, from Yorkshire. Ten years later, Beatrice Lindsay was listed on the Isle of Man census as an editor, scholar and lecturer; Maria Anelay married Edwin Brownlow, a civil servant working for the Inland Revenue, in 1892 and settled into domestic life; Elizabeth Drought, who was the daughter of a clergyman (her father Thomas had performed her baptism back in 1848) moved to Ireland by 1901, to live with her older brother George, and younger sister Jane. She never married, and died in Wicklow in 1929 – in the same year, Maria Brownlow also died.

In 1899, eight women were permanent staff of Girton – mistress Elizabeth Welsh, along with a junior bursar, a librarian, and five lecturers. The domestic side of the college was better staffed: there were 20 servants, including cook, maids, a housekeeper and a matron. Not all the staff were female, though, as houseboys and gardeners were also needed. Another decade later, and the college’s mistress was still former lecturer Elizabeth Welsh, who was now aged 57. She would retire two years later. In 1901, the college registrar and librarian was Gertrude Gershon, 29 and from Manchester. These two women were joined on site by a range of female staff – including servants based in the dining hall, and others restricted to the servants’ hall, as well as by one male servant, John Smith, a 15-year-old house boy. The age range of those working at Girton spanned the decades up to the late 40s, but John was not the only 15-year-old there. Maud Watson was a housemaid the same age, and two 16-year-olds – Jessie Ashman and Kate Bishop – joined her, Jessie working as a housemaid, and Kate as a scullery maid. A marginally more interesting job was that of laboratory maid, a position held by 21-year-old Georgiana Craske, who was known as Annie or Anna. Did she find her interest piqued by what she saw when she worked in the lab, or did she simply find it incomprehensible why women – or anyone – would want to study in this environment? It certainly broadened her horizons: Annie would marry and emigrate to Canada, but she sadly died there of influenza in 1918. That was the year, of course, of the Spanish Flu pandemic.

The college was a major employer for the area, and the 1911 census lists 37 female servants between the ages of 15 and 35, as well as a housekeeper (Agnes Murdoch, a 49-year-old Scotswoman), a matron (Isabella Marshall, also originally from Scotland), and a librarian (Vera Cochrane, 32, from Southsea). Living at Girton’s lodge was widowed William Bonwick, 62, who had been the college’s head gardener for at least a decade. Girton’s mistress at that time, Constance Jones, should have filled in the 1911 census for the students and staff, but another census return shows that Constance was away from Cambridge at this time, and staying at the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras, now the luxurious St Pancras Renaissance Hotel.

Girton College, for much of its youth, was a ‘recognised institution for the higher education for women’, and was neither officially a college nor a part of the university. Although the 1920s saw the institution gain a charter, it only became a full member of the university, with the status of a university college, after the end of the Second World War, in 1948. However, Cambridge was still ahead of Oxford when it came to women’s education; Girton was founded in 1869, whereas in Oxford, Girton’s sister college, Somerville College, only started – as Somerville Hall – ten years later (Oxford’s Lady Margaret Hall also opened its doors that year). In both Oxford and Cambridge, women’s admittance to these halls and colleges was on a basis that was not equal to men, and they had to fight to be seen as students equal in rank and intellect to the male students.

The censuses give historians a valuable insight into the lives of these women’s colleges; from them, you get a picture not only of the staff and students who were lucky, and talented, enough to be there at a time when women’s education was still being negotiated and argued for, but also of those behind the scenes who undertook less glamorous and remembered work ensuring that life at Girton, and elsewhere, ran smoothly.