Miss Christina Keith, MA, University of Edinburgh, reached Rome early in April, and devoted herself to the study of sculpture. Towards the end of her time she began under Mrs Strong’s direction to specialise in Archaic Greek Sculpture. Miss Keith has recently gone to Newnham College, Cambridge, with a scholarship, but it is hoped that this promising young student may return to the School to resume her archaeological studies.
It seems Rome was just an interlude, an opportunity for twenty-one-year-old Christina to spend time living abroad and to develop her research interests. It speaks of her spirit of adventure and her readiness to welcome new experiences, an eagerness which would carry her to France and the army just eight years later, when the pleasant landscapes of Europe had become a vast field of death, grief and pain.
From Rome in October 1910 she returned to England and to Cambridge, where she would spend the next three years as a college scholar at Newnham. She excelled academically, just as she had done at Edinburgh, and was placed in the First Class in both parts of the Classical Tripos (Cambridge Honours examination). But there was one significant difference with Edinburgh. Neither Cambridge nor Oxford were yet prepared to award degrees to women. Christina was allowed to sit the exams, and was awarded a grade, but received at the time no formal qualification for her years of study at Cambridge. The awarding of degrees to women was fiercely and aggressively resisted, and was a topic of controversy during the time Christina was a student in Cambridge. The letter pages of The Times include many examples of strongly held opinions on both sides of the argument, including this letter from May 1913, written just as Christina was completing her Classical Tripos examinations to a level which would surpass many of her male contemporaries:
If the ladies of Girton, Newnham, Somerville and the rest of them want to stand on an equal footing with men, why on earth don’t they cut the painter with Oxford, Cambridge &c., link their colleges into an All-England Female University, and issue their own female degrees? The kind of parasitic prestige they are out for at present involves a humiliating confession of sexual inferiority.6
The unequal status of men and women at Cambridge created an atmosphere very different from the one Christina had known in Edinburgh. Because the battle was still to be won, female students knew that any apparent failure on their part, be it academic or moral, could damage their cause.7 Strict regulations governed the conduct of female students. Chaperones were often required to accompany them to lectures. Walking in the street with a man was forbidden – which was sometimes awkward when moving together from one class to another. A woman could only entertain a brother or a father in her room, and in those circumstances her friends would not be allowed to be present. Propriety was everything.
There is no suggestion that Christina was inclined to rebel against these rules; rather, it was because she was so accustomed to a life in which the rules of respectability were understood by all that her six months in France involved such a sense of transformation. A natural and gifted student, she relished all that Cambridge had to offer her academically without, at that time, apparently being frustrated by its conventions. One outstanding figure from whom Christina could learn was another pioneering academic, Jane Harrison. Like Eugénie Strong, Jane Harrison’s unconventional life demonstrated to her students that it might be difficult to be a successful female classical scholar but it was not impossible.
Jane Harrison had held a research fellowship at Newnham since 1898. She taught students in Part II of the Classical Tripos who were specialising in her own research interests of art and archaeology. She almost certainly taught Christina. She was an unconventional and inspirational teacher, whose methods were perhaps best suited to the most gifted students. Her second significant publication on Greek religion was published during Christina’s time at Newnham, and her work has since been highly influential. At a time when academic women were under great scrutiny Harrison became a controversial figure, and was criticised not only because of her feminist approach to her work but also as a pacifist and an atheist. Harrison formed a very close friendship with a student, Hope Mirrlees, who would have been well known to Christina as they arrived at Newnham in the same year, although Hope never completed the Tripos.8
Christina left Newnham, and took the next step in her own career as a professional female academic by applying for the vacant post of lecturer in classics at Armstrong College, Newcastle, which was part of the University of Durham. She and four other candidates were interviewed on 16 June 1914 by Professor John Wight Duff, who recorded in his diary, ‘My new assistant to succeed my “second-in-command” is an Edinburgh and Newnham girl.’9
Professor Duff spent some time that day explaining to her what her duties would be when she took up her position in October. Perhaps he showed her round the college itself with its grand buildings, parts of which were newly completed, and took her into the college library. A few months later, Christina believed, she would be walking these corridors and lecturing in these halls.
But Christina would never teach in the buildings she saw that day, and would never use the college library. By the time she returned to take up her post in October 1914, war had broken out and everything had changed.
Notes
1. The Scotsman, 19 December 1936
2. Advertisements in various editions of The Scotsman, 1903–08
3. David Barrogill Keith, ‘Bygone Days at Edinburgh University’ in University of Edinburgh Journal, spring 1965
4. The Scotsman, 30 June 1920
5. The Scotsman, 1 April 1910; The Times, 6 August 1910
6. The Times, 23 May 1913
7. See, for example, anecdotes in (ed.) Ann Philips, A Newnham Anthology, 1979
8. Annabel Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison, 2002, and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ‘Jane Ellen Harrison’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
9. Diaries of John Wight Duff in Newcastle University Archives
3
‘How fine their sense
of duty has been’
In October 1914, when Christina came to Newcastle to take up her first post as a lecturer, her brother Barrogill had already enlisted in the army and was at a training camp in Nigg in the north of Scotland. Young men from Armstrong College whom she would have otherwise taught had similarly left their studies to become part of the British Expeditionary Force. The college buildings had been requisitioned and turned into a military hospital, and would not be returned to the university until the war was over, by which time Christina had moved on.
Professor Duff returned from his summer holiday and spent a busy few weeks putting arrangements in place to allow his courses to continue in these drastically altered circumstances. He arranged for students to use the public library, and for lectures to take place in the Literary and Philosophical Society building in the town. Books, chairs and blackboards needed to be transported to the new venue. Every time he wanted access to his own college rooms to remove papers or to the college library he had to apply for a special permit. Duff’s diaries clearly reveal how irritating he found this set of circumstances, but he also recognised his inconvenience was inconsequential when compared with the tragedy just beginning to unfold in the trenches of the Western Front. A few weeks after term had begun, Duff took Christina with him into the old college:
I took Miss Keith, my lecturer, to Armstrong College or as it is now ‘The Northern General Hospital’. We spoke to several men wounded as recently as last Friday near Armentiers and round Lille in the stubborn fighting against the Germans – ‘Scots Greys’, Irish cavalrymen and Northumberland Fusiliers.
One of the men to whom they spoke that day told them that ‘three of his friends had been shot close to him, and much that he had seen he could not forget’.1
Christina’s first experiences as a lecturer were dominated by the war. Each week more and more young men left for the front, and over the months word came back of students and former students who had been injured or killed. Those who did not leav
e were the subject of suspicion and even scorn, such as Christina’s fellow lecturer in the classics department who tried and failed to gain military exemption:
One of my former Honours students appeared in the khaki of a second lieutenant to say goodbye before leaving for four months’ training. Every other week men like him look in to see me, and tell me of their whereabouts. How fine their sense of duty has been: so the old nation is not decadent – except for logic-chopping objectors like my miserable lecturer.2
All those young men Christina had known, from Thurso, from Edinburgh, from Cambridge and now from Newcastle, all of an age to fight in this terrible war and many of them never to return. Of her own brothers, Barrogill was fighting in the trenches with the 12th Scottish Rifles and Willie was in service with the navy, seeing action at the Battle of Jutland. Little Edward was still a child at home in Caithness. The war dominated their world, and yet in other ways ordinary university life continued. At the end of Christina’s first term the staff of the classics department met to mark exams and work out class lists. Duff noted in his diary that they continued late into the night ‘to enable Miss Keith to leave at 1.31 in the morning for her home in Thurso – a journey north of 15 hours’. She left him with a Christmas present of a brace of grouse, presumably sent down from Caithness.3
In March 1916 Christina read a paper on ‘People one would have liked to meet at Rome’ to the Northumberland and Durham Classical Association, a paper which Duff described as ‘a tastefully conceived and composed effort of historical imagination’.4 Although overshadowed by war, her years in Newcastle appear to have passed successfully. By May 1918 she had applied for and been accepted as classics tutor in St Hilda’s College, Oxford – a return to the female collegiate life she had known in Cambridge. She was now twenty-nine years old. But at this point her career as a lecturer took an unexpected and dramatic turn. In July 1918, Sir Henry Hadow, Principal of Armstrong College, was appointed Director of Education for the Forces in France. Whether he made a direct approach to Christina, or whether she merely heard about the scheme and in typical style decided this was something of which she wanted to be part, she changed her plans. St Hilda’s agreed that she could delay her arrival in Oxford in order to take up a position as staff lecturer with the troops in France.
Christina was off to Dieppe.
Notes
1. John Wight Duff diaries, 28 October 1914
2. John Wight Duff diaries, 3 March 1916
3. John Wight Duff diaries, December 1914
4. John Wight Duff diaries, 4 March 1916
4
‘The meeting of mind with mind’
In the summer of 1918 the War Office appointed the YMCA as agent to put in place a systematic scheme of voluntary education for the troops in France. The YMCA had already demonstrated its commitment and ability to provide education alongside other aspects of its work with the army, and the backing of the War Office enabled the establishment of a more comprehensive scheme than had been possible before. The best educationalists and lecturers were to be put at the disposal of the army.
As Director of Education, Sir Henry Hadow recruited a series of sub-directors who would implement the scheme in different geographical areas. Christina was based in Dieppe, working under sub-director Henry Brooke, whom she refers to as ‘the Chief’, and travelling out to huts and camps across the area. As well as having its own local base, ‘the School’, Dieppe was the location for the headquarters of the whole scheme and for the central library of books – probably a good place to be based. The papers of Albert Percy Braddock, sub-director at Abbeville, give an insight into the day-to-day running of the scheme. They mirror much of Christina’s account, but also reveal frustration with the logistical problems of setting up such a scheme – lack of staff, lack of equipment and books, and lack of transport.1
Sir Henry’s first few months were so successful that in October he was transferred to become an adviser on education at the War Office, and Sir Graham Balfour was appointed as the new director. Graham Balfour, cousin and biographer of Robert Louis Stevenson, was Director of Education for Staffordshire. Some months into her time in Dieppe Christina was given a role organising correspondence classes, and was given an office in General Headquarters, based in the Hotel des Étrangers on the seafront – in which, ironically, Robert Louis Stevenson had stayed. She noted, ‘I was installed in a beautiful big room on the first floor, directly opposite the Education Chief himself.’ This was Sir Graham Balfour.
Of course, when the YMCA and the War Office worked together to set up this scheme in the summer of 1918, they could not know that the Armistice would be signed in November. This did not bring an end to the scheme, but it brought a significant change to the type of work that Christina and her colleagues had imagined they would undertake. Sir Graham Balfour wrote, ‘Owing to the unexpected developments of the War, to the sudden Armistice and the accelerated Demobilisation, the whole scope and nature of this Education was different from what both administrators and teachers had been led to expect.’2
Many of the men recognised the wisdom of taking advantage of an offer of free training, be it vocational or academic, before returning to rebuild their lives in Britain after the war. As one writer in the YMCA magazine The Red Triangle noted, some young men had ‘not only risked their lives in the great cause, but sacrificed educational opportunities which are not likely to fall to them again’.3 In September, 234 men attended lectures in the Dieppe and Le Tréport area. By November, when Christina’s work was in full swing, this stood at 813. The classes reached their maximum in December, with 2,296 attending, then began to fall away as men were demobilised, returning to 661 in February.4
In the spring of 1919, the War Office decided to take over the organisation of education in the army, and the YMCA scheme was wound up. It was a programme of education which, although it lasted for only a short time, impacted the lives of many men and influenced the future educational structure within the army. It was described as ‘the largest system of adult education which has ever at one time been launched from this country’.5 Ideas about education were at the forefront of wider discussions as Britain looked towards creating a new peacetime society. The founding principle on which Peter and Katie had raised their children in distant Caithness – the value of true education – was spreading out to reach male and female, rich and poor, with consequences far beyond any they might themselves have imagined:
The war has done such a lot for education; it has forced us to think about things … Once you get people really thinking and discussing together the results of their thinking, there is no knowing what may happen. It is the meeting of mind with mind which really changes the face of the world.6
Notes
1. Papers of Albert Percy Braddock in the University of Birmingham Special Collections
2. Letter from Graham Balfour among the Papers of Albert Percy Braddock
3. The Red Triangle, August 1918
4. A Short Record of the Education Work of the YMCA with the British Armies in France
5. Ibid.
6. The Red Triangle, June 1918
Part 2
Christina Keith’s Memoir
A Fool in France
To the nicest of all the pippins
Who sleeps near La Bassée.
Author’s Preface to the Reader.
I have been asked whether this book is true. To maintain that it is so is not, as Socrates said once long ago, worthy of a wise man. It would take a fool, as you will agree, to write it. And for its truth? I can only remind you of what Bismarck did, when he wished not to be believed. He always told the truth.
Christina Keith
Our little hour, – how swift it flies
When poppies flare and lilies smile;
How soon the fleeting minute dies,
Leaving us but a little while
To dream our dream, to sing our song,
To pick the fruit, to pluck the flower.
The Gods
– They do not give us long, –
One little hour.
(by Leslie Coulson, 1889–8 October 1916, in From an outpost and other poems, published in 1917 by his father)
1
How I went out
Of all the sideshows run by the British Army in the field, the most entertaining – as it is in general the least known – was surely its system of education. Lest ‘entertaining’ be misunderstood, I hasten to add that the War Office itself places education under the head of Amusements. Much has been heard – and deservedly – of the canteens that fed the men and gave them games and cinemas, of the concert parties and dramatic parties that performed at every base and at most of the camps behind the lines, but early in 1918 there came a glut of all these. The men were not satisfied with being merely fed and amused. And then there dawned the ‘preposterous’ idea of education. Why should the men not be taught something when they came weary out of the trenches, or when they lay at rest camps, or in their leisure hours at the Bases? No idea could seem more ridiculous at first sight than that Thomas Atkins and his officers should go back to school again in the intervals of their fighting. But go back again they did – many of them at least – and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
War Classics Page 3
