Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Mary’s good qualifications ensured that she got a teaching post, first at
Westonbirt and then at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. As she suspected, she
was never to marry.
Schoolmistresses had been long defined by their spinsterhood; it was
what deterred Winifred Haward from working in a school till she could
avoid it no longer. The figures tell their own story. In there were
, women teachers; during the war , more women joined the
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profession and by the number had risen to nearly ,. By that
time, the average woman teacher’s pay was £ a year. True enough, that
was £ less than the average male teacher; nevertheless, though life might
not consist of rose-coloured carpets on five pounds a week, it could be a
lot better than starvation and bed bugs.
The unequal pay levels were the product of an ironic kind of double—
think by the powers that be. Men must be paid more in order to support
their families, ran the argument, and a single woman has only herself to
support; but at the same time women must be deterred from breaking free
of motherhood and the home. High remuneration would encourage the
bachelor girl to escape her destiny as breeder of the race, so the differentials must be maintained in the interests of demographic stability.
This manipulative attitude to pay prevailed for decades; nevertheless
teaching remained,
par excellence
, the profession for middle-class single women – per cent of women teachers in the s and s were unmarried. Servants, typists, mill-girls and shop-assistants might view their employment as a way of marking time till they married, but teaching carried
the heavy stigma of spinsterhood.
So, if you hoped for a man, you would go to great lengths to avoid
admitting you were a teacher. ‘That would put off every man in sight,’
lamented one of them, ‘. . . so young teachers . . . said they were secretaries or something like that.’ Magazine editors did nothing to dispel the negative image of the schoolmarm. ‘What a pity Mrs Brown has allowed her daughter to go in for teaching! She will
never
get married!’ was the view aired in an article in
Woman’s Weekly
in entitled ‘Do Teachers Make Good Wives?’ Men viewed intellectual women with alarm, and teachers were
inevitably labelled ‘clever’, ‘blue-stockings’.*
Woman’s Weekly
deplored their narrow minds, their domineering manners, their dowdy and frumpy appearance. The accompanying illustration showed them in high-buttoned
blouses, long skirts and scraped-back hairstyles. If they couldn’t find a
husband, they had only themselves to blame.
Worse, in an increasingly sexualised society, there was actual hostility
towards the spinster teacher, who was seen as sex-starved and sour, and
therefore ill-equipped to have charge of small children and adolescents.
Many schoolmasters suspected the schoolmarms of conspiracy to take over
the schools, and in the process harming the boys. A generation of young
* Clever women still have to put up with this kind of prejudice. A survey reported a per cent drop in women’s marital prospects for every increase of sixteen points in their IQ.
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men had fought for their country imbued with patriotic ideals impressed
on them by their classroom mentors – all male. ‘It would be a national
disaster if the education of our boys were delivered entirely into the hands of ‘‘jaundiced spinsters.’’ ’ At a schoolmasters’ conference in one of the delegates fulminated that feminist teachers were hell-bent on ‘the
Not sexy: the ‘scholastic woman’ as depicted by
Woman’s Weekly
, October
canonisation of the spinster’. ‘The virile boy had a right to a teacher of his own sex, and the effeminate boy required it no less.’ (One assumes his remarks were taken at face value, in those days before the spectre of
paedophilia stalked the nation.) Walter Gallichan joined the chorus of
disapproval, denouncing the spinster teacher as intellectually insincere,
censorious and unbalanced, and the ‘progressive’ educationist A. S. Neill
(who should have known better) criticised her for her anger, shrillness and
vindictiveness, while strongly advising her to go out and get herself a sex
life – not exactly a practical proposal for a hard-working schoolmistress
with the next day’s lessons to prepare.
Teachers often felt defenceless against such onslaughts. A article
quoted a teacher in despair at her nun-like existence: ‘I know I’m becoming
thwarted and spinsterly and my pupils despise me secretly for it . . . I would rather be married to a drunken collier who beat me every weekend than live as I am doing at present.’ But in the world of the Surplus Woman,
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becoming a schoolmarm was as good as abandoning all hope of catching a
husband.
However, if by some miracle, despite being frumpy, frigid and domineering, you did find someone to marry you, you lost your job. In the interwar years, most local authorities imposed a marriage bar on teachers. The
argument was that married women did not need to work, and if they chose
to do so, they were depriving necessitous single women who needed the
money. In this, the Education Boards’ ruling reinforced the traditional
assumption that the man’s role was to provide, the woman’s to keep house
for him and bear his babies. The sad case of Elizabeth Rignall testifies to
the unfairness of these assumptions. It also testifies to the way in which
teachers were often condemned to single lives by their profession. A woman
like her, from a poor background, could advance socially and better herself
financially if she took up teaching – but often only at the expense of
marriage.
Lizzie Rignall probably never expected her autobiography to see the
light of day. She wrote it at the age of seventy-nine, her memory for the
past still crystal clear, though her body was by then crippled with arthritis.
She had been a teacher all her life. Lizzie was born in into a hard-up, hard-working family; her father was a painter and decorator who frequently found himself out of work. Her mother, a forthright Yorkshirewoman, let
lodgings in their house in south London. Looking back from , her
childhood seemed to have taken place in a different world: the happy
pre-war days on her grandparents’ farm in Haworth, her father playing the
euphonium in the Salvation Army band, the street hawkers of Lavender
Hill and the itinerant Italian with a dancing bear.
Lizzie was a very pretty child: petite, flaxen-haired and blue-eyed. She
had admirers from the age of five: ‘Mummy, Jackie Brown kissed me in
the playground this afternoon!’ Later, when a magic lantern projector was
set up on the common near their home, Lizzie and her current heart-throb
would find a back-row seat to watch the flickering screen; they held hands,
and willed the projector to break down so that they would be plunged
into the thrilling darkness. Her ‘god’ was the dashing star of Putney’s
roller-skating rink: dark, handsome dreamboat Leslie Stephens, the elder
son of a major-general. ‘There was nothing he could not do on a pair of
skates.’ It never occurred to Lizzie that someone as glamorous as Leslie
might be attracted to someone as humble as her, but later it struck her that this was indeed the case. With hindsight, his habit of escorting her and her brother home after skating, and his manner of farewell, were signs of obvious partiality.
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Lizzie was ambitious, however. She knew she was clever, and by the age
of sixteen had set her sights on a scholarship to Girton. Letting lodgings
like her mother was not her idea of a bright future: ‘You see, I had not yet resigned myself to lesser things.’ Unfortunately, French let her down in the exam and Cambridge eluded her. In Lizzie, ‘nothing daunted’, took her place at St Katharine’s Church of England Teacher Training College,
and by the age of twenty-one was teaching slum children at an elementary
school in the Walworth Road for a wage of £ s d a week. This was
. On so little, work at the Ministry of Munitions seemed both a more
patriotic and a better-paid option, so for the duration Lizzie became a little cog in the great war effort; then after the war it was back to the classroom.
Her family now relied heavily on Lizzie’s financial contributions; it was
essential for her to stay in paid employment. In the early s she moved
to Buckinghamshire and took a job at a village school. For four years the
diminutive Miss Rignall was a familiar sight on the country lanes astride
her Velocette motorcycle, got up in government surplus cord breeches,
black leather knee boots, a brown leather helmet and a pair of goggles.
Every evening, the headmaster would come and help her shove the bike
to start it – tiny, at only four feet eleven-and-a-half, Lizzie just couldn’t manage to get it going. But four years of village life was enough; in
she was ready to move back to London, and applied to be interviewed for
a post at a school in Kensington.
And it was here and then that I found the great love of my life. I was one of six chosen to be interviewed. I had reached Campden Hill Gardens and was searching for the meeting-place. As I hesitated, scanning the numbers that were visible, ‘Can I help you?’ asked a pleasant voice, and I turned to see a tall, slim, red-gold giant, with intensely blue eyes and an immense hooked nose . . . my heart missed several beats as I gave him the number.
‘I’m going there myself, so perhaps you will allow me to escort you?’
Long, long afterwards he told me that he too fell at that moment, as I did.
Lizzie got the job, and the giant, Bob, turned out to be her headmaster.
But not for another four years did either of them dare to confess their
feelings to the other. For Bob, the strain was finally too great. A large
upstairs classroom doubled as his office and storeroom. One day, when the
room was empty, Lizzie had to fetch an item of stationery from the cupboard. Turning to leave, she saw Bob entering; he held the door open for her. As she passed, he put his arms around her from behind, and bent his
lips tenderly to the nape of her neck.
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We stood thus, quite still, for a long moment, then his arms fell away and I darted out of the room like a frightened rabbit. Down the stairs I scuttled and into my own classroom, breathless, my heart thumping. When school ended that afternoon and as I donned my outdoor clothes he came into the room.
‘Thank-you for not raising the alarm, my dearest. You know now, don’t you?’
Speechlessly I nodded.
In love, and loved, life should have given Lizzie more than it did. She
was now thirty-five. But the London County Council had strict rules and,
under them, women teachers had to leave the service if they married. If
Lizzie gave up work, her parents would have to ‘go on the Parish’. Bob,
too, had heavy commitments to his family. It was impossible for them both
to live on his salary and support their dependants.
And so for six years the affair was secret. It was difficult, as initially Lizzie was still living at home. Even after she managed to afford a flat nearer to her work, there was the constant fear that they would be found out. Weekday rendezvous were risky, so their time together was confined to weekends.
After a year they both felt it would be better for her to leave the school in Kensington, and she reluctantly got a post at a school in Wandsworth. For five years they continued seeing each other, yet always knowing that they
could not be married. Looking back at the end of her life, Lizzie was more
puzzled than bitter – ‘I have often wondered since how widespread in the
profession was the immorality this led to. Nowadays of course it is no
longer considered ‘‘Immorality’’ and premarital relations are not frowned
upon . . . But at that time things were very difficult for such as we were.’
It came to an end in . After six years of this provisional, unblessed,
furtive arrangement, Bob got cancer and died. She neither gives details, nor refers to her own altered prospects. There was to be no husband, no babies, no home of her own. Lizzie was now in her forties, and life had to go on.
In the Second World War she went to live with her brother and sister-in-law. She got a job in Scunthorpe, then a headship in Avebury. In her fifties she moved to Sussex and ran a secondary modern school in Heathfield.
The last couple of decades after her retirement get scanty treatment, but at nearly eighty Miss Rignall continued to hold her own in the educational field: ‘They still call on me for part-time teaching, for coaching, and even for home tuition.’ There was no anger or resentment at the unjust hand life had dealt her. Nearly forty years had passed since Bob had died, and
perhaps the passage of time had blurred regret. Patient, modest and discreet as ever, she concluded her memoir of the past in , giving it the title ‘All So Long Ago’:
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I have had a good life. It has been really varied if undistinguished and I can look back now in unalloyed pleasure at both the failures and small successes I have had . . .
I can say, with complete honesty, that I think the life I have had was right for me.
And yet how much more fulfilled it might have been.
*
A closer, and more distinct picture of the emotional reality of a teacher’s