Month: January 2017

The other Mary Ward

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Newnham Hall students in 1878, Newnham College Archives PH/10/1 (Mary is fourth from left in back row, wearing a white shawl)

Mary Jane Ward (née Martin) (1851-1933) was born in the county of Armagh in Ireland on 6 June 1851, the third of a growing family of twelve children. Her father was a Congregationalist minister, and although money was not plentiful, Mary’s brothers were able to go to school thanks to scholarships for the sons of the clergy. Mary was a studious child and this must have struck her as unjust, but she learned much from her mother who calmly ‘piloted the family ship’ (Lawson Dodd, 39) with a volume of Dante propped up against the mixing bowl and a baby on her lap.

The family moved to England, and when she was fifteen Mary left home and spent a year as a pupil-teacher in Hampstead. From the age of 16 she worked full-time as a governess, teaching and supporting herself while her older brothers studied at Cambridge. But Henry and James did not forget their bright and hardworking sister. Lectures for women had begun at Cambridge, and her brother Henry Newell Martin, by then working as a biologist with Thomas Huxley, promised to support Mary’s living costs if she passed the entrance exam. She did, and in 1876 Mary became a student at Newnham Hall, later College.

Mary was ‘a delicately pretty woman of 25, but looking much younger’ (Lawson Dodd, 40), but her fragile appearance belied her passionately political character. Her ‘quick Irish speech bubbled out when she was excited,’ her daughter observed years later. ‘Life was full of the urge of things to fight for’ (Lawson Dodd, 41). While a student at Newnham, Mary fought for women to have greater access to university education, and to take Cambridge’s final examinations. She was the first woman to gain a first-class honours in the moral sciences tripos, albeit unofficially, as women would not be awarded Cambridge degrees for many years to come. Mary was appointed resident lecturer at Newnham, and she and her colleagues celebrates when in 1881 the University members voted by 366 votes to 32 to open its examinations to women as a right, not as a courtesy. Mary continued to teach and support women students at Newnham after her marriage in 1884. She became a member of the Cambridge Ladies Dining Society in 1890, and in 1891 she was one of the twenty-four signatories of a letter asking the University to give women readers greater access to the University Library.

(If her name sounds familiar, it might be because of her namesake, Mary Augusta Ward (née Arnold) who as Mrs Humphry Ward, became England’s highest-earning novelist after her novel Robert Elsmere was published in 1888. She was awho helped to organize the first women’s lectures at Oxford and llso a social reformer; she belonged to the ‘play centres for children’ movement to enable working-class mothers to go out to work, a legacy that continues in the valuable work of the Mary Ward Centre in London today. But if the ‘Oxford’ Mary Ward, once so famous, is remembered at all today, it is less for her considerable achievements than as being on the wrong side of history. In 1908 she became the leading spokesperson for the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League (see John Sutherland’s article about her, ‘The suffragettes’ unlikeliest enemy’.)

At the same time that the Oxford Mary Ward took up arms to prevent women from getting the vote, the Cambridge Mary Ward was becoming a prominent suffragist. In 1905 she was appointed Honorary Secretary for the Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association, as plans became more ambitious for women’s suffrage in the region. In 1911 she helped to found the Eastern Counties Federation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and she held lively meetings at her house. In 1908, as Mrs James Ward, she published her play Man and Woman: The Question of the Day. This lively play was very popular with suffrage societies for the next few years, with the main character, Helen, telling a female anti-suffragist ‘Women may let politics alone, politics don’t let them alone’. Although she disagreed with the militant tactics of the suffragettes, Ward was horrified by the government’s policy of force-feeding prisoners and the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ of 1913, and resigned her long-held membership of the Liberal Party in protest.

Mary Ward never lost her urge to fight for women’s rights. In July 1913, at the age of 62 and beginning to suffer from ill health, she was one of the leaders of the group who marched from Cambridge to London as part of the huge countrywide pilgrimage of NUWSS supporters. She also never lost her Irish accent, her self-deprecating humour, and her interest in others: ‘”now tell me”, she would begin, with shining blue eyes; and then she would listen, appreciatively, relishing all the details, and recounting her own experiences with gusto, all the more gaily if they were disastrous’ (Lawson Dodd, 46).

© Ann Kennedy Smith

Please reference as follows: Ann Kennedy Smith, ‘The other Mary Ward’ https://akennedysmith.wordpress.com/(Accessed: day/month/year)

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Mary Ward in Newnham College Roll Newsletter, January 1934, frontispiece

Sources: H.M. Lawson Dodd and others, ‘Mrs James Ward (Mary Jane Martin) Newnham Hall 1876-1879’ Newnham College Roll Newsletter, January 1934, pp. 38-47; ‘Ward, Mrs Mary (1851-1933) in E. Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928 (1999); ‘A Petticoat Pilgrimage’ Cambridge Daily News (21 July 1913); Cambridgeshire Archives CWSA Papers 1884 –1919. With thanks to Newnham College for permission to use the photographs of Mary Ward.

The Cambridge Psychics

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I’m delighted to include this guest blog by the writer Jane Dismore about the early years of the Society for Psychical Research, founded 135 years ago in January 1882. Eleanor Sidgwick () was a member of the Ladies Dining Society and an active SPR member along with her husband Henry Sidgwick. 

(c) Newnham College, University of Cambridge; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900)

‘It was a dark and stormy night….’ This famous opening to a Victorian novel is today considered purple prose and often used humorously to start a spine-chilling story. Its author was the acclaimed and hugely popular novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), a friend of Charles Dickens, and the book was Paul Clifford (1830). The novel was not in fact a chiller, although the author’s literary career would come to include science fiction and occult fiction, for Bulwer Lytton was a respected occultist. His interest began when he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge (where he also won the Chancellor’s Gold Medal for English Verse), and he became known for his passion for predictions using a crystal ball, and for the casting of horoscopes. In 1854 Bulwer Lytton was visited by Eliphas Levi, a French occult author and magician, who considered him to be one of the principal exponents of occult studies in Britain. At around that time there began a huge increase in the practice of spiritualism and a resulting explosion of paranormal claims throughout the Western world and in all parts of society. Now mediums made their first appearance, claiming contact with the dead. At the same time science-based naturalistic explanations increasingly challenged the old religious world view. Lively debate raged, which pondered whether these alleged phenomena could be fully accounted for in naturalistic terms or whether they pointed to aspects of consciousness which were not yet known to science.

Bulwer Lytton did not live long enough to see where the debate led but he surely would have been gratified to see that it was taken seriously, and at his alma mater, too. Exactly 135 years ago, in January 1882, a conference was held in London to consider the viability of setting up an organisation to carry out formal scientific research into alleged paranormal phenomena. In February the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded, the first organisation to conduct scholarly research into human experiences that challenge contemporary scientific models. Its first President was Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), Professor of Moral Philosophy at Trinity College and a man of great standing in intellectual circles. His chief associates in the early stages were Frederic Myers, a classical scholar with wide-ranging interests, and Edmund Gurney, who would develop a pioneering interest in hypnotism and psychological automatisms.

Prominent early members of the SPR included the Balfour brothers: Arthur (Britain’s Prime Minister from 1902-1905), who had been Sidgwick’s pupil at Trinity; and Gerald, a Trinity Classics scholar and later MP and President of the Board of Trade. In 1884 their sister Eleanor, a mathematician, joined the SPR. With Arthur she had been a member of a group set up before the SPR to investigate spiritualism claims. Through the group she met Henry Sidgwick, whom she married in 1876; along with the paranormal, they shared a passion for women’s education. Henry had helped found Newnham College in 1871, of which Eleanor served as Vice Principal, then Principal, and between them they succeeded in enabling women to sit University examinations, although lost their fight to allow them to take degrees. All three Balfours served as President of the SPR: Arthur in 1893; Gerald 1906-1907; and Eleanor 1908-1909 and again later. Another sister, Evelyn, married the Nobel Prize winner (for physics), John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh. He was another graduate of Trinity and became President of the SPR in 1919.

Shortly after its creation the SPR created a methodological and administrative framework, including a scholarly journal in which psychical research could be reported and debated worldwide, to which the Sidgwicks and the Balfours made significant contributions. In July 1882 another Balfour sibling, Francis, was killed while climbing Mont Blanc. He was 30 and regarded as a brilliant biologist, a successor to Darwin. Francis appears in psychical research literature as a communicator in an important case investigated by the SPR, ‘The Palm Sunday Case’, which focussed on Arthur Balfour and his dead lover.

Gerald Balfour’s wife, Elizabeth, was a granddaughter of Edward Bulwer Lytton. Evidence of Bulwer Lytton’s interest in the occult can be seen in the gothic and sometimes unsettling features of his home, Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, still occupied by his descendants. Eleanor Sidgwick’s active involvement in the SPR continued into the 1930s, long after Henry’s death in 1900. The SPR continues to be active today, promoting and supporting the main areas of psychical research.

© Jane Dismore, January 2017 (Please reference as follows: Jane Dismore ‘The Cambridge Psychics’ https://akennedysmith.wordpress.com/(Accessed: day/month/year). The author is a freelance writer and biographer. Details of her work can be found at www.janedismore.com . She was briefly a member of the SPR while at Cambridge. 

See also Ann Kennedy Smith, ‘Eleanor Sidgwick’s hidden figures’