War Classics

by Flora Johnston

  Education was valued not just on Christina’s father’s side but also on her mother’s. Katie Bruce was without doubt a very intelligent woman. My father remembers that he and his family were in Thurso on holiday at the outbreak of the Second World War. In the uncertainty of those early months they decided to stay on in Caithness rather than return to Edinburgh. Katie took on the education of her young grandson, and when sometime later he did return to his school in Edinburgh, he was far ahead of his fellow pupils!

  At the age of forty Peter Keith, now a successful solicitor, bank agent and factor to the local landlord, apparently decided it was time to get married. The story goes that he was considering one local girl and took someone into his confidence. This friend is said to have asked him if he hadn’t considered Katie Bruce – she might not have the material advantages that the other girl had, but she was a very clever young woman. Peter took the advice, and they were married in April 1888.

  But what was Katie’s own story? Like her husband she was of Caithness heritage. On her mother’s side she was descended from a family of some wealth and local influence – her grandfather lived in Freswick House and farmed 200 acres. But Katie’s own childhood was not an easy one. In 1875, when she was just eleven, her father died of pneumonia, leaving her mother a widow with two children. William Bruce, whose origins were humbler than his wife’s, was a wine merchant who had expanded at some point before his death into keeping a hotel. In the 1881 census his widow was continuing to run the hotel, and her 15-year-old son was working in the bank. It might have been expected that 17-year-old Katie would be helping her mother in the hotel – but no. In another of those signposts which point forward towards the role education would play in the next generation of this family, Katie Bruce was not in Caithness at all, but was living more than 250 miles away in Great King Street, Edinburgh, enrolled in ‘Miss Balmain’s Establishment for the Board and Education of Young Ladies’.

  At this time there were many girls’ schools in Edinburgh offering an education to the daughters of the middle classes. Some were larger institutions but many, like Miss Balmain’s school, were substantial private houses which took a small number of boarders and perhaps some day pupils. While their brothers were being prepared for university in academies and grammar schools, the emphasis in most girls’ schools was on languages, music and dancing. Visiting masters offered tuition in some subjects, while others were the domain of the resident female staff. In 1881 Jemima Balmain ran her school along with three other female teachers, one of whom was German. They had eight resident pupils, and four servants. Miss Balmain advertised her school in the following terms:

  The number of Young Ladies received as Boarders being very limited, the most careful attention is paid to each in regard to health, moral and religious training, the preparation of their various studies, and their comfort in every respect. The First Masters attend to give instruction in all the branches of a thorough education and accomplishments, and Miss Balmain is assisted by Foreign and English Governesses. French and German conversation daily. 3

  So despite difficult circumstances at home, by the age of 17 and probably earlier, Katie was living in Edinburgh in order to receive ‘a thorough education and accomplishments’, in a move which surely influenced the approach she and Peter would take to the education of their own children a generation later.

  In 1888 at the age of 24, Katie married Peter Keith. The bride, the groom and their wider families all lived in or around Thurso … and yet the wedding took place far away in St John’s church, Southall, in London. Some members of the family made the long journey down to London, for two of the witnesses were Katie’s younger brother John, and William Keith, Peter’s oldest brother. Peter gave his place of residence as Thurso, but Katie said she was living in Southall. We cannot be sure what she was doing there, but the third witness at the wedding was a young woman of Katie’s own age called Mary Etherington. Mary was a teacher of music at a girls’ school in Southall which her mother, also Mary, ran. Perhaps Katie was also teaching at the school? By the time of her marriage at the age of 24, Katie Bruce had lived in both Edinburgh and London, and she would pass those wider horizons on to her own children.

  After a honeymoon in Paris, Peter and Katie returned to Thurso, and Christina was born the following year. They soon moved into the Bank House, a large home built above the premises of the British Linen Bank. This was where they lived in the winter months, but they spent their summers in ‘The Cottage’, above the shore beside Thurso Castle, where Peter Keith was factor to Sir John Tollemache Sinclair.

  In 1913 Peter Keith purchased Olrig House, which was the ‘big house’ in the parish in which he had grown up, but by this time Christina was living away from Thurso. Many years later, writing to her mother, Christina said, ‘I love the Cottage – it is quite the nicest house we have.’ She was conscious of the influence her childhood surroundings had had on her. She remembered how her father, who had been factor to the owners of Barrogill Castle (now the Castle of Mey) for many years, had stepped in when the castle and its contents were to be sold, and had purchased portraits of the 14th Earl of Caithness and his first wife, the Countess Louise, after whom he and Katie had named their second daughter. These portraits hung on the walls in the Bank House:

  So the portraits moved to another home, to be landmarks for other children, who found, to their surprise, a subtle atmosphere of gaiety and splendour and high distinction somehow wafted from their presence. Living with ‘the ancestors’ had nothing everyday about it. They swept you up into their own lively world.4

  The family grew. When Christina was two, her little brother David Barrogill, known in the family as Barr, was born, followed the next year by Catherine Louise. Barrogill and Louise would both follow their father into law and would practice in Thurso. Barrogill later became Sheriff Substitute in Kirkwall, but his first love was art, and while training to be a lawyer he also studied painting at the Académie de l’Écluse in Paris and drawing at Edinburgh College of Art. Barrogill too had absorbed the family passion for an education which was genuinely stimulating. Writing for his school’s former pupils’ magazine (which he helped to found), he observed:

  Education has become too lop-sided – so much attention is given to memorising, so little to thinking. This cannot but adversely affect individuality. Burns would never have been Burns if he had been a slavish imitator of Shakespeare.5

  In qualifying and practising as a lawyer in the 1920s Louise, like her older sister, took her place in a world which had very recently belonged exclusively to men. The John o’Groats Journal from December 1928 illustrates Louise’s achievement perfectly. A photograph of the Caithness Society of Solicitors, taken at Olrig House during a garden party, shows Louise surrounded by thirteen male colleagues including her father Peter and her brother Barrogill. The photographer has positioned her in the centre of the group, his eye drawn perhaps to the dramatic contrast created between her simple, light-coloured blouse and hat, and the dark suits of the men. It is a desperate tragedy that Louise, the lightness amid the sobriety in that image, would die within a year of the photograph being taken.

  Peter and Katie’s next two children were both daughters, Julia and Mildred. They too studied at Edinburgh University and both worked in Paris as typists at the peace conference at the conclusion of the First World War, living in the Grand Hotel Majestic. They regularly saw the leading political figures of the day, including Lloyd George, Churchill and Marshal Foch, at dinner, and witnessed first hand many momentous events such as the victory parade through Paris in 1919. When Christina hoped to visit ‘my sister in Paris’ from Dieppe, it was Julia and Mildred she had in mind. Julia later returned to Thurso, but Mildred’s long career would take her to cities including Warsaw, Prague and Buenos Aires. She wrote each week to her mother, and those letters today offer a fascinating chronicle of Foreign Office diplomatic society between the wars.

  Of the four youngest children, William had a successful career in the
navy, and my grandmother Patricia shared Barrogill’s passion for painting, studying at art college. Archibald died as an infant in 1904. Edward, the youngest, was born in 1908, and thus was nearly twenty years younger than Christina. He too followed a successful legal career.

  Scattered as they were, Katie wrote to each of her children every week and kept many of the letters they sent in reply. There were the burdens, strains and disagreements of life in a large family. There is no doubt Peter and Katie put a great deal of pressure on their children to succeed academically, and that pressure perhaps suited some of them more than others. All the children were encouraged to achieve, but it was Christina, the eldest, whom the family believed to be truly exceptional. In the daily routine of family life this led to some irritation, as she was exempted from chores which the others were expected to perform, but above all they were proud of her. Christina, the eldest, was the pioneer.

  Notes

  1. Henrietta Munro, ‘A Caithness School in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Caithness Field Club Bulletin, 1981

  2. Records of the Edinburgh Ladies’ Education Association, Edinburgh University Archives

  3. Edinburgh and Leith Post Office Directory 1880–81

  4. Christina Keith, The Romance of Barrogill Castle

  5. Allan Lannon, Miller Academy History and Memories for the Millennium

  2

  ‘An Edinburgh and Newnham girl’

  Christina was born in 1889, the year of the Universities (Scotland) Act which would pave the way for the admission of women to Scottish universities from 1892. Thus, by the time she started school as a little girl in Thurso, a door had recently been opened through which she would gladly walk some years later.

  Things were changing, but slowly. The traditional curriculum which educated girls for their assumed domestic role, be that as servants, as wives and mothers, or as ladies of leisure, persisted for a long time, excluding girls from entering university by denying them the required classical subjects. The financial commitment involved in supporting daughters towards and through university – particularly when many bursaries were only open to boys – also deterred some parents from encouraging their daughters into higher education. For although various professions now admitted single women, they remained firmly closed to married women. Why pay to educate a daughter who would not be able to pursue a career once she had married?

  Christina was privileged to have supportive parents who encouraged her in her education and who had the financial resources to help her. Without these two factors it would have been hard if not impossible for her to achieve what she did. Many intelligent women of her generation were unable to pursue their dreams – equality was a long way off. But Peter and Katie not only approved of education, they actively encouraged it. One obituary to Peter Keith on his death in 1936 emphasised his passion for learning:

  His chief outside interest may, however, be said to have been education, and for many years he was a leading member of the Thurso School Board, helping not a little to raise the prestige of higher education in the north of Scotland. … He had a firm belief in the value of education and his own family consisting of three sons and five daughters lived up to his belief.1

  Christina began her schooling at the Miller Institute in Thurso, and her potential was quickly apparent. In 1903, aged 14, she was dux of the school, and it was around this time that her parents decided to send her south to continue her education, presumably with a view to qualifying her for university. She was sent firstly to St Leonard’s School in St Andrews, which opened in 1877 as the first girls’ school in Scotland run along English public school lines, and which offered a full curriculum. This was Christina’s first experience of living in an all-female institution, the type of environment in which she would spend much of her life, but she was unhappy. We cannot be sure why, but she may well have disliked the games which were an important part of school life at St Leonard’s – ‘I never am any good at running,’ she observed, after sprinting to catch the train in Amiens.

  Christina left St Leonard’s and moved to a school in Edinburgh which had echoes of Miss Balmain’s establishment, her mother’s former school. Miss Williamson ran a boarding and day school in Abercromby Place, just a few streets away from the property which had housed Miss Balmain’s school. But a generation had passed since Katie came to school in Edinburgh, and those decades had been significant ones for women’s education. Miss Williamson’s school emphasised the opportunities available for women at university, offering ‘university-trained mistresses’ as well as visiting masters, and stating that pupils would be prepared for the required exams for Edinburgh University and for Girton and Newnham Colleges in Cambridge.2

  The Keiths must have been satisfied with Miss Williamson’s school, which later became St Serf’s, for some of their younger daughters were also sent there. Christina sat the necessary preliminary examinations and entered Edinburgh University. She had by this time learned Latin, and announced her intention of studying for Honours in classics – despite not yet even knowing the Greek alphabet. So during her first year at university, alongside her other classes she learned the basics of Greek, and in her second year picked it up at university level, taking the class medal at the end of the year. The professor of Greek at the time was A.W. Mair, who was described by Christina’s brother Barrogill as ‘the brightest, dearest and most twinkling in all that glorious firmament’.3

  During her time at the university, Christina lived in Masson Hall, the women’s hostel in George Square which had opened in 1897. It was named after David Masson, professor of rhetoric and English language, who had been an influential supporter of the campaign for women’s higher education and had provided lectures in English literature to the Edinburgh Ladies’ Education Association. The warden of the hostel was Frances Simson, who was herself one of the very first women to graduate from Edinburgh University and who was involved in an unsuccessful campaign all the way to the House of Lords to obtain the right for women graduates to vote for the University MP. Masson Hall not only provided accommodation for those women students who, like Christina, had come from further afield, it also offered a place of communal focus for all women students, who were able to meet there and use the facilities.

  In 1920 Peter Keith had cause to write to The Scotsman about a dispute which was taking place within Masson Hall after the retirement of Frances Simson, and he expressed his satisfaction with the living arrangements of his daughters at Edinburgh University:

  As the parent of one of the 33 young ladies presently in residence in Masson Hall, I am personally interested in the matter. Other members of my family have been in residence in that Hall for the last twelve years, almost without a break. It is gratifying to be able to say that, without exception during all that long period, while the late Warden was in charge, the young ladies in the Hall were most comfortable and happy. The discipline during her time was perfect, and there was never any trouble. Of course, in an institution of the kind it is absolutely essential that there must be proper discipline.4

  That ‘proper discipline’ would have included strict regulations about meeting with men, particularly in private spaces. A way of life bound by regulations and conventions was one to which Christina would become accustomed and, as a tutor to young female students, one in which she later no doubt participated as a chaperone and figure of authority. It was in part the freedom from this ‘discipline’ which she found so exhilarating in Dieppe.

  On 31 March 1910, Christina crossed the floor of the McEwan Hall, a small, slight figure, and was ‘capped’. Peter and Katie were probably watching among the assembled relatives and friends as their eldest daughter graduated with First Class Honours in Latin, Greek and classical archaeology – subjects which so recently had been considered a waste of time for a girl to learn. Of the ten others in her class graduating that day, nine were men. For her parents this was surely not only a moment of immense pride but the fruit of their own commitment to education which had reached
back to the days when the doors of the university were firmly closed to women.

  But for Christina this first degree was not the culmination of her education, but a stepping stone to further study. She had decided by this time to pursue a career in classical scholarship and academia, which was still a highly unusual path for a young woman to take. It is probably significant that at this point Christina took steps to continue her studies under the guidance of the two pioneering women in her chosen field, Eugénie Strong and Jane Ellen Harrison.

  Along with another Edinburgh student Christina was awarded the Rhind Classical Scholarship, which was worth about £85 a year for two years. Before her graduation in March she also travelled down to Newnham College, Cambridge, and sat the exam for a separate Classical scholarship. She was successful, and was awarded an additional £50 a year for three years.5

  Having secured this funding, Christina was set to return to Newnham in the autumn, but she had an adventure to undertake first. She left Edinburgh soon after her graduation, and early in April she arrived in Rome, where she would spend the next few months studying at the British School at Rome. This research institute had only recently been established, in 1901. Its assistant director was Eugénie Strong, an archaeologist and leading scholar of Roman art. The school’s Annual Report for 1910 records Christina’s time in Rome: