Pioneering Women: Riddel Hall and Queens University Belfast

By Gillian McClelland

Few topics have produced more heroines than the struggle of women for their right to education. Foremost amongst the pioneers of third-level education for women in the north of Ireland were Eliza and Isabella Riddel. Never themselves having had the opportunity of university education, in 1913 they founded Riddel Hall as a residence for women students. Ruth Duffin, the hall’s formidable first warden, had very strong ideas about citizenship, culture and physical exercise that proved to be visionary in every sense. The personal chronicle she kept, recording how she realised her ambition to bring culture and self-empowerment to sometimes reluctant female students, is one of the fascinating features of this book.

The reports of two of Ruth’s successors as wardens, and the reminiscences of former students, outline how the challenges posed by the new educational order in the post-World War Two era and into the swinging sixties were met. Later events and a series of problems leading to the eventual closure of what had remained a haven of sanity in a quickly-changing educational world, are recounted with the help of the recollections of former students, in a sensitive and affectionate narrative.

In its last phase, the Hall was occupied by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. This short but intriguing interlude is recounted by Marcus Patton. And, of course, no-one is better placed than Patton to describe the physical attributes of a building that holds warm memories for thousands of students and which played not only a formative role in their young lives but also provided a crucial facility for women’s third-level education in Northern Ireland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ulster Historical Foundation
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781908448842

Gillian McClelland

Gillian McClelland graduated from Queen’s University Belfast with a BA (Hons) in Social Anthropology, and subsequently, a PhD in 2000. She currently teaches at the University in the Schools of Anthropological Studies and of Sociology, Social Policy and Women’s Studies.

Book preview

Hadden

INTRODUCTION

It all began with two large leather suitcases.

In 1975 Miss Molly Dawson retired as Warden and Riddel Hall closed. Miss Dawson packed the last remaining important archives into two suitcases and brought them to her new home on the Stranmillis Road. I called to see her from time to time, and, much later, she gave me the two large and heavy suitcases. After a brief look inside at the books and papers, they went up to my attic. But my conscience did not let me forget.

In 2003, three previous Riddel Hall students, Lesley Calderwood, Margaret Gowdy and myself, founded the Riddel Hall Heritage Association with the sole purpose of researching the archives of Riddel Hall and publishing the results. Professor Leslie Clarkson, with his wide knowledge of social and economic history, supported the project from the start, and through him we found Gillian McClelland who with great enthusiasm set to work on the archives; these included papers at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and in an old filing cabinet at Queen’s University Belfast.

At the start I called this book ‘The Riddle of Riddel Hall’. Why did it not survive when similar halls at other universities are still flourishing? Later, when we felt we might know the answer, the riddle for others became, ‘Where is it?’ Not many seemed to know, not even the students who studied in Stranmillis College next door and walked past the old Riddel Hall gateway every day. This book and the associated exhibition in Queen’s University should help to put Riddel again on the map.

But the story of Riddel Hall begins in the mid-nineteenth century with the pioneers who struggled for women to be educated, then to be admitted to university. Queen’s College Belfast was one of the first to admit women, earlier than Trinity College Dublin, and far before the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The Misses Eliza and Isabella Riddel had no chance of any higher education, yet were the first to support the concept in founding Riddel Hall for women students at Queen’s. At that time there was no hall of residence, even for men.

Miss Ruth Duffin, the somewhat autocratic first Warden, had a personal mission to educate reluctant Riddel girls in culture and an appreciation of art in all its forms. ‘Without a vision the people perish’ was one of her firm beliefs. We need her now to answer the final riddle. What lies in the future for Riddel Hall?

Diana Hadden

1

A Riddel Hall Chronicle

Many noble Irish women

Have been honoured in times past,

Two there are of special glory,

The Misses Riddel of Belfast.

Two sisters, rich in this world’s wealth,

Still more with heart and wisdom blessed.

They did enduring good by stealth,

And never were by pride possessed.

They saw how women students came

To Queen’s from far away: and stayed

In digs, in loneliness, with none

To help, encourage, watch, or aid.

They saw the need, they heard the call,

And looking not for thanks nor praise,

Built and endowed the Riddel Hall,

For women in their student days.¹

Riddel Hall was founded and endowed by Eliza Riddel (1831-1924) and her sister Isabella (1836-1918) as an independent hall of residence to provide accommodation for ‘female Protestant students and teachers of Queen’s University Belfast’. From the arrival of its first cohort of students in September 1915, until it closed in June 1975, more than one thousand young women had a ‘home from home’ during their time at Queen’s. At a time when the education of sons was the priority for most families the bequest allowed female students to benefit from facilities well below their real cost. The presence of this safe, monitored environment would now be recognised as empowering for women, as many parents would not have permitted them to attend university if it meant leaving home and living independently. Most students in 1915 were men, which meant that young women were even more isolated as the sexes were discouraged from mixing.

The personal account or ‘Chronicle’ of Miss Ruth Duffin, the first Warden, recording thirty years of the life of the Hall and written after her retirement in 1943, has been a rich source of information on her ‘ideals’. She wanted the account to be continued by her successors, but neither Miss Joyce Power Steele nor Miss Molly Dawson did this. Miss Duffin’s records constituted the Warden’s reports to her employers, and as such should be recognised as a sanitised version of Hall life. Miss Dawson’s written records such as annual addresses to the governors and the monthly minutes of the Permanent Committee became increasingly reflective over the decades. The words of the three wardens entrusted with the running of the Hall provide what might be termed the official history of the imposing red brick building and its successive cohorts of inhabitants. All three wardens conscientiously updated the student records with marriages, birth announcements and career details gleaned painstakingly from letters, Christmas cards, the press and the Queen’s Women Graduates’ Association (QWGA) magazines. These primary sources are particularly valuable for tracing changing career patterns of this large group of university-educated women from the end of the Great War until the beginning of the twenty-first century, and to reconstruct a picture of life in Riddel Hall from 1915 to 1975.

The official accounts have been enhanced – and occasionally modified – by interviews with former students for whom life in Riddel Hall resulted in lifelong memories and enduring friendships. Oral history is a valuable way of augmenting the written records with the memories of students who made it their home, although it has its dangers. When they talk about their lives, people are likely to embroider, exaggerate or get things wrong, although the thrust of what they say remains true.²

Reminiscences allow hidden characters to emerge: two less obviously powerful members of staff have been identified in this way. They both served the Hall for more than twenty-five years. The much-loved Matron, Miss Boyd, and the head parlour maid, Lily Gaston, are central characters who left no written records. Past students remember their overall experiences in similar ways but have very different impressions of personalities. Miss Duffin and her successors thought of the staff and residents of the Hall as a family and, as in all families, siblings’ memories and the actual experiences of their parents differ. The rise and fall of Riddel Hall’s fortunes are closely related to the change in status of the family in society.

The members of the Riddel Hall Old Students’ Association (RHOSA) have kept in contact with their peers and the Hall since graduation, and have been happy to contribute their recollections of life in the Hall. No one admits to a negative experience in Riddel Hall, although some recall that there were a few girls who left after only a term. They appear to have been very much in the minority. The overwhelming memory was that their stay in Riddel was a special time between childhood and adult life. It was a place where they were part of a ‘nurturing community’ of women and, perhaps most significantly, made lifelong friends.

Miss Duffin, seated left, after she retired, in a family group outside Summerhill

Carey Ramsay

Over the sixty years of Riddel Hall’s existence the position of women and the career opportunities available to them changed significantly, as did social and economic conditions. Its residents were not a representative sample or cross-section of society, but the Riddel bequest contributed in its way to the development of a society where educational ability became valued more than background, gender or wealth. For young women who gained the necessary academic qualifications to enter the University, but whose parents were in reduced circumstances, bursaries permitted them to stay in the Hall either free or at a reduced rate of fees. In this way Riddel Hall can be viewed as a microcosm of a society undergoing dramatic cultural change and this book aims to put its story and the experiences of its residents into the wider context.

When the Hall opened in 1915 the Great War was in its early phase, and although women had not yet gained the parliamentary vote, the British suffrage movement had suspended its campaign for the duration of the war. Higher education for women was still in its infancy; the first five women to graduate from Queen’s College Belfast had done so in 1884.

Early photograph of Queen’s staff and students. The number of students and the presence of eight women suggests the occasion was Graduation 1886. Queen’s College Belfast was the first university college in Ireland to admit women Queen’s University Belfast

Between 1881 and the 1911 census the percentage of Irish women defined in the census as ‘indefinite and unproductive’ (i.e. not in employment) fell from 80 percent to less than 70 percent. There was an increase of 5,561 females in the ‘liberal and learned professions’ – schoolmistress, nun, hospital-certificated nurse and midwife – between 1901 and 1911, but this figure was artificially inflated since nurses, previously categorised as domestics, were now included.³ Nevertheless, 26 percent of the Irish female workforce were in this category, although in Belfast only 4 percent of the female workforce were in the professional class (many of these women were teachers), compared with 73 percent in industry, reflecting the strong manufacturing base of the city.⁴ In those professions not seen as an extension of women’s ‘natural’ role of mother and carer, women had made few gains. In Belfast in 1911 there were only six women doctors (there were only thirty-three qualified women doctors and sixty-eight female medical students in the whole of Ireland), and no female solicitors or accountants.

The early residents of Riddel Hall were pioneers in achieving their ambitions to become doctors: fourteen of these young women qualified in medicine before 1920. The first female solicitor in Ireland was a Riddel student who qualified in 1926; two of the first cohort of students became lecturers on the staff of Queen’s University.

The Home Rule crisis was ongoing when the Hall was founded, and Ireland was partitioned in 1920-21. Twenty-six counties became the Irish Free State and the six northeastern counties remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. Throughout the inter-war years, worldwide economic depression, compounded by marriage bars in professional employment, kept women’s career options narrow. Most women had to choose either marriage or a career. Winning the vote (for women over thirty years old in 1918, and on equal terms with men in 1928) had led to a belief that equality between the sexes had been achieved. Feminism was largely in retreat.

The Second World War offered some temporary opportunities for women to move outside traditional gender roles, but post-war reconstruction was associated with a return to domesticity for many married women. The introduction of the Welfare State in 1948 would eventually provide more employment options for professional women. The Education Act of 1947 introduced free second level education for all children over the age of eleven and raised the school leaving age to fifteen. This Act created the tri-partite system of grammar, secondary and technical schooling based on academic ability rather than on the ability of parents to pay fees.

The early 1950s were a time of austerity and the trend toward marriage was combined with a ‘baby boom’ associated with the reassertion of ‘domesticity as never before’. By the end of the decade the desire for increased material prosperity was encouraging women to work to improve the lifestyles of their families, but this was still seen as a temporary expedient, not a vocation, and was viewed as unacceptable for the mothers of young children. In 1951 only 26 percent of married women in the United Kingdom were employed outside the home. Nevertheless, young women were benefiting from the expansion in secondary and tertiary education; state scholarships for university education were becoming more widely available throughout the decade. Young women in Britain also benefited from the expansion of university education as a result of the 1963 Robbins’ Report, which decried the wastage of female talent and stressed the need for equality between men and women.⁵

In Northern Ireland the Lockwood Report in 1965 extended the Robbins’ principles to the Province. The increase in female participation was reflected in Riddel Hall, which had its full complement of students. Indeed, the length of the waiting list led to the governors making plans for expansion.

Throughout most of the period covered by this book young men and women were not legally adults until they were twenty-one years of age. Consequently, the University and the governors of Riddel Hall acted in loco parentis. Traditional power relationships and the patriarchal order were largely accepted until the1960s. In this decade amidst ‘a seemingly unstoppable demand for sexual and civil rights and disillusionment with political and religious institutions, challenges to the status quo were mounted with increasing determination’.⁶ In Western Europe and North America many women felt that the time was right to ‘claim ownership of their bodies and control over their political and economic destinies’.⁷ The availability of the contraceptive pill from 1961 allowed women to make new choices. In 1975 a group of women from Queen’s University formed the Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement, which aimed to ‘spread a consciousness of women’s oppression and mobilise the greatest number of women on feminist issues’.⁸

The immediate focus of the group was for the extension of British equality legislation to Northern Ireland. In this decade all remaining marriage bars to employment ended, legislation outlawed sex discrimination in employment and equal pay for equal work was introduced. Women finally had won the right to work in any job or profession they chose and were entitled to be paid at the same rate as their male counterparts. Legal equality had been achieved – even if in practice society remained relatively male dominated.

Not only gender and social inequalities, but in Northern Ireland religious inequities were challenged. In the late 1960s there was an increasing awareness of the discriminatory nature of the old Stormont regime. In 1972 the Ulster Unionist Government was suspended and the Province became subject to Direct Rule from Westminster. It was in this atmosphere that the exclusion of Catholic students from the Hall was ended by a successful application to the High Court in 1972. There was also an exclusively Roman Catholic residential hall for girls – Aquinas Hall, on the Malone Road – although this was smaller and its history unrecorded, and it too has closed its doors. Up to that time there were actually more ‘official’ residential places for women than for men students at Queen’s University.

Charles Lanyon’s original coloured sketch showing his design for Queen’s College Belfast. The college opened in 1849, one of three Queen’s Colleges of the Queen’s University of Ireland, the others being in Cork and Galway

Queen’s University Belfast

The introduction of grants for all qualifying students also led to a more socially mixed student body. This new financial independence and the centralisation of university applications within the United Kingdom at the end of the 1960s resulted in more young people leaving the Province for their education. The onset of the ‘Troubles’ in the late 1960s hastened this trend. By the early 1970s it was becoming impossible for the Hall to fill its places with Queen’s students alone. Riddel Hall closed in 1975 as it was no longer financially viable and was seen as ‘old fashioned’ by a new generation of students. The proceeds from the sale of the building were used to construct modern self-catering student accommodation adjacent to the new tower blocks. Bursaries for needy students are still funded by Eliza and Isabella Riddel’s endowment and thus the Riddel sisters’ generosity continues to assist female students today.

2

Pioneering Women

The only expectation of middle-class girls of Eliza and Isabella Riddel’s generation was to learn to be ‘ladies’. Ladies were to be imbued with the domestic ideal (this differed from working-class domesticity in that ladies gave orders to servants but did not do domestic chores); the home was to be their domain. Paid work was viewed as demeaning to themselves and a slur on their male providers. The Victorian lady was to be ‘accomplished’ in social graces, and to conduct herself with modesty and decorum, which would ‘render her competitive on the marriage market’.¹ In her spare time, she could engage in ‘good works’. The Victorian women’s movement began in the 1850s, principally to address the issues of middle-class women’s access to education and career opportunities.

These ideals of femininity were reinforced by evangelicalism and influenced Victorian values. It was argued that ‘evolution had placed women in the home, and that the dictates of social survival necessitated rigidly defined sex roles and male domination’.² Acceptance of these theories influenced educational policy well into the twentieth century. Indeed it was even suggested that mental development would render women completely or partially infertile. It would therefore be detrimental to society to allow female education to advance beyond the most basic level.³

Nevertheless, ideologies can be manipulated or changed. Pioneering English campaigners were instrumental in including girls’ education in the Taunton Commission on Secondary Education. It reported in 1867 that female secondary education was composed of ‘pretentious smatterings’. The commissioners deplored the state of female education, recognised that male and female intellectual abilities were ‘essentially the same’ and stated that women should be entitled to further education.

In response to this report, the Women’s Education Union (WEU) was formed in England by Maria Grey to provide funds for new girls’ schools, and within ten years it had educated over 2,800 pupils.⁴ Pressure from Emily Davies, the founder of Girton College, Cambridge, leading girls’ school principals such as Miss Frances Buss of the North London Collegiate and Miss Dorothea Beale of The Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and more than a thousand other teachers, won the right for the formal admission of girls to the Local Examinations of Cambridge University.

This was a momentous victory in England, as prior to this no girls were permitted to sit for public examinations, which were essential passports to a university education. Women were not allowed to attend lectures at Cambridge University with men; sympathetic dons often gave the same lecture twice. It was not until 1948 that women were allowed to take Cambridge degrees. By contrast, Oxford permitted women to take all examinations except medicine in 1894, and finally allowed women to graduate in 1920. Degree courses gradually became more widely available to women in England during the final decade of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century.⁵

Meanwhile in Ireland educational pioneers such as Margaret Byers, who founded the Ladies’ Collegiate School (later Victoria College Belfast) in 1859, Isabella Tod of the Belfast Ladies’ Institute and Anne Jellicoe, founder of Alexandra College, Dublin, had been fighting their own battles with the Irish educational authorities. These women, who had close connections with English organisations, carried on campaigns appealing to Queen’s College Belfast and Trinity College Dublin for the admission of women to university degrees.⁶

These three women were also involved in religious and philanthropic work. They were founder members of the Irish Women’s Suffrage Movement, and argued that women, as a consequence of their moral superiority to men, should be educated in order to fulfil their duties to the community, and be empowered by the vote to reform society. Margaret Byers pointed out to her pupils in their school publication in 1893 that education was defective if

Mrs Margaret Byers, founder of the Ladies’ Collegiate School in 1859, and pioneer of education and university admission for women

Victoria College Belfast

It produces women possessed of information, but selfish and devoid of innate and true refinement… There is a loud call at home for the ordinary, common-sense woman who, experienced and capable in home management, can be trusted, as intelligent Christian men are trusted to help in the direction of varied charities and philanthropies so essential for the comfort and improvement of working women and girls, never to speak of hospitals and workhouses in a great and growing city like ours.⁷

Mrs Byers’ Victoria College Magazine is a useful source of information about women’s involvement in social work, both voluntary and professional. It provides evidence of how women were recruited into these activities. The domestic model was commonly employed to justify women’s work beyond the home. Women accustomed to ‘directing their households and servants’, could use these skills in social service. By the end of the century, that same virtue was used to justify their reappearance in the public sphere. The Belfast Health Journal stated in 1893 that women had a duty in regard to health:

Ladies’ Collegiate School, Lower Crescent, later to become Victoria College Belfast. The opening of this building in August 1874 coincided with the meeting in Belfast of the British Association for the Advancement of Science

Victoria College Belfast

We know that every household, whether large or small, rich or poor, is guided by a woman’s head and hand, and in the majority of them its concerns are wholly or chiefly managed by her hands… To make the cause of sanitation a success our women require – more systematic instruction in the scientific facts upon which hygiene is based, access to suitable books and lectures, and the popularisation of such knowledge by women among their poorer sisters.⁸

Margaret Byers believed that ‘the home is not only the unit of the nation, but the cradle of civilisation’. Thus women’s association with the home was perceived to be empowering rather than restricting.

Class was as significant as gender in deciding the type of education a young woman would receive. Isabella Tod, secretary of the Belfast Ladies’ Institute, which campaigned to extend higher education to Irish women, pointed out that although ‘girls of the lower classes’ had schools provided by the state with trained teachers, ‘on looking higher all is changed’. For working-class girls the national schools provided an elementary education to fit them for their station in life as domestic servants or respectable wives for working-class men. In contrast for middle- and upper-class girls there were only ‘scattered and experimental attempts at anything of the sort’.⁹ As it was not considered desirable for the classes to be educated together, the educational pioneers’ challenge was against gender difference in educational opportunities and they decried the lack of appropriate educational provision for women of the middle class.

Miss Isabella Tod of the Belfast Ladies’ Institute campaigned to extend higher education to Irish