Chapter 1: William Allen and Edward Grubb: Decades Ahead of Their Time
-
Published:13 Sep 2024
-
Special Collection: 2024 eBook Collection
Allies of Pioneering Women Chemists
Download citation file:
In this prequel chapter, we will look at an era – the early to late 1800s – before there was much thought of women’s education going beyond basic schooling. Even then, there were some male chemists who saw their role in life as the chemical education of young women. Here, we have chosen to discuss two chemists, William Allen and Edward Grubb, who taught chemistry at academic-focussed Quaker girls’ schools.
1.1 Quaker Girls’ Schools
It was the Quaker girls’ schools, back in the early-to-mid 1800s, that were specifically amenable to the teaching of chemistry. For example, at least as early as 1820, chemistry was specifically part of the curriculum at Sarah and Harriet Hoare’s Quaker school in Frenchay, near Bristol. Jane Heath, a student at the school, wrote in 1820 to her mother:1
We rise a little before seven and study Geography till eight with dissected maps. After breakfast we make our beds and into school again by nine… I have then to write a page of English and Natural History, lectures on Chemistry, Botany, etc., besides parsing and a slateful of exercises so that I cannot always finish before dinner.
Why were Quaker schools unique in teaching chemistry? The Act of Uniformity of 1662 had denied the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and other Dissenters the ability to found their own schools. However, by 1691, at least 15 Quaker schools existed, and many more by the 1800s. Geoffrey Cantor pointed out that controlling schooling for Quaker children ensured that there would be future generations of Quakers.2 The strong academic framework often included science studies, long before they were incorporated in national school curricula.
To Quakers, there was a fundamental link between their faith and science, in that science revealed the wonders and beauty of the universe and therefore gave them a deeper insight into God’s works. In fact, several influential Quaker women, such as Caroline Fox, had a fascination for chemistry.3 While at the Natural History sessions of the 1838 Newcastle meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, it was reported by Rev. Robert Owen that:4 “… lots of ladies, mostly Quakeresses…” were present.
1.2 William Allen
One of the early chemistry teachers at a Quaker girl’s school was William Allen. Among his many interests was that of progressive education.5 To accomplish his goals, he founded a school for girls which included chemistry in the core curriculum.
1.2.1 Early Life
Born in 1770, William Allen was the eldest son of Job Allen, silk manufacturer, and Margaret Stafford. He was educated at a Quaker school in Rochester, Kent. As a teenager, he gave up consumption of sugar, as a protest to the Atlantic slave trade.6 This was his first step towards his high-profile activism in the fight for the abolition of slavery.
Though Allen initially entered his father’s business, he developed an interest in science, attending meetings of scientific societies, including those of the Chemical Society of Guy’s Hospital. In 1795, he acquired the Plough Court Pharmacy,7 and its associated chemical manufacturing facilities, from prominent Quaker, Joseph Gurney Bevan. Then, in 1802, he assisted William Babington with his chemistry lectures at Guy’s Hospital. The following year, on the advice of Humphry Davy and John Dalton, Allen accepted an invitation to become a lecturer at the Royal Institution. Then, as a result of his research there on the nature of diamond,8 Allen was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society.
Another of Allen’s many crusades was that of progressive education. This focus led him to the founding of a Quaker girls’ school, the Newington Academy for Girls,9 in 1824 and to teach chemistry at the school, as we discuss below.
1.2.2 Newington Academy for Girls
In the early 19th century, Quakers came to live in Stoke Newington and, in fact, Stoke Newington became the largest concentration of Quakers in London.10 Thus, there was an urgent need for a Quaker girls’ school. The Newington Academy for Girls occupied Fleetwood House, and the first Headmistress was Susanna Corder. Allen had met Corder, a progressive school teacher, during a visit to Ireland in 1820. After his marriage to his third wife, long-time friend, wealthy Grizell Birkbeck, Allen and Birkbeck oversaw the administration of the school.
In Adam Shirren’s Chronicles of Fleetwood House, the original school Prospectus is included. It stated:11
The course of Instruction shall comprehend a Grammatical knowledge of the English language, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, Astronomy and the Use of Globes, Ancient and Modern History, Elements of Mathematics, of Physics or Experimental Philosophy, Chemistry, Natural History–The French Language and Needlework.
Allen’s biographer, James Sherman, noted:12
He [Allen] went through a course of lectures, which he annually repeated, on mechanics, chemistry, and natural and experimental philosophy, … by familiar explanations, and by a variety of experiments with his extensive and valuable apparatus.
One of the students, Louisa Stewart, later recalled:13 “The school was a pioneer of true high-class education… William Allen gave the girls lessons in his own house in chemistry…”.
In her memoirs, Three Score Years and Ten, Sophia Elizabeth de Morgan (née Frend) described how she had attended some of Allen’s classes:14
I made acquaintance with William Allen, who kindly allowed me to attend the lectures on chemistry which he gave, with experiments, to a class of young girls. From him I learned the meaning and importance of Dalton’s discovery. The atomic theory, then beginning to be understood, was the first step in the raising of chemistry to the rank of a science. Mr. Allen’s quick perception of facts was greater than his power of following out extensive inferences. He was a good observer and classifier, but stopped at facts and phenomena.
1.2.3 Later Years
It is not known when the Newington School closed; however, Allen continued with his interest in pharmacy. Up until the 1840s, anyone could sell medicines. In April 1841, some concerned pharmacists, including Allen, met at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in central London.15 He suggested forming a new society: the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. This would be an independent association, that would only admit members with a recognised qualification. The motion was agreed to, and Allen was elected the first President of The Pharmaceutical Society that same year.
Allen also became interested in the combination of an ‘agricultural colony’ with industrial schools. He helped to found a ‘colony’ at Lindfield in Sussex, which he frequently visited to superintend its working. In fact, Allen died there in 1843, and was buried in the Quaker burial-ground at Stoke Newington.
1.3 Edward Grubb
Later in the 19th century, Edward Grubb followed Allen’s path in teaching chemistry at Quaker girls’ schools.
1.3.1 Early Life
Edward Grubb, born in 1854 in Sudbury, Suffolk, was the son of Jonathan Grubb, banker and Quaker minister, and his second wife, Elizabeth Burlingham.16 He was mostly home-schooled until he spent three years at (Quaker) Bootham School, York. It was there that Grubb decided to follow a teaching career, attending Flounders Institute, Ackworth, the teacher-training school for Quakers. At the Institute, he gained enough confidence to take studies in philosophy and political economy at University College, London, graduating with a BA in 1876 and an MA in 1880. That same year, he accepted a position as Visiting Master at the Quaker girls’ school, The Mount, in York. To supplement his income, he taught younger teachers for one half-day each week at Ackworth Friends’ School in Pontefract, Yorkshire.
1.3.2 The Mount School, York
The students had been encouraged to study chemistry at the Mount School at least as early as 1835. The evidence comes from letters written in that year by the schoolgirl, Anne White. These letters were, in part, reprinted in Winifred Sturge and Theodora Clark’s school history, The Mount School, York:17
Well we went yesterday evening to the boys’ school [Bootham Quaker boys’ school]. H[annah] Brady [Head Mistress of the Mount School] came with us and we took tea with the brothers and cousins of the girls. … After tea we looked at pictures until John Ford [Headmaster of Bootham School] was ready to show us some chemical experiments. We then went to the dining-room where we found 10 or 12 more boys sitting and were shown a great many more experiments, most of which I saw before, but I was very glad to see them again. John Ford showed us phosphorus and sulphur burning in oxygen, potassium jumping about in water, phosphorus dissolved in water and boiled in a flask, several striking affinities, particularly making plaster of Paris, which I do not think I ever saw before. … I spent the pleasantest evening I have had since I came.
Grubb taught at the Mount School from 1882 until 1892. He recalled:18 “It was only about this time that, though I had been a teacher for nearly ten years, that I first began to discover what teaching was as distinguished from lecturing-not pouring information in but drawing knowledge out and clearing it by questions”.
However, Grubb’s attempts at chemistry experiments were not always successful:19
To his lectures [Edward Grubb’s] on chemistry his audience came in a mood of prophetic sympathy, awaiting the experiment: “Will it? Won’t it?” It generally wouldn’t! Why should it? For before the laboratory was built in 1884 there was no science equipment worth the name.
The Grubb family, particularly the three children, had suffered with ill-health in York, and Grubb and his wife decided that they had to move from the city. In 1885, he accepted a Visiting Master position at the Westlands (Girls’) School in Scarborough, where they found the climate much more amenable.20 He was able to continue teaching at the Mount School for two days each week.
1.3.3 Polam Hall, Darlington
When Grubb’s teaching contract at the Mount School ended, he was appointed as a one-day-a-week Visiting Master at another Quaker girls’ school, Polam Hall, Darlington, while continuing to reside in Scarborough. Polam Hall School had been founded in 1847 as Jane, Barbara, and Elizabeth Procter’s Boarding School for the Daughters of Friends.21 In an advertisement for the school in 1850, and again in 1851, it is stated that:22 “A Lecture on some branch of Natural History, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, &c., is delivered weekly to the Pupils by James Cooke”. An aged hand-written timetable of a student at the school has also survived. Chemistry is shown for Thursday, 10:50 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and Friday from 5:30 p.m. to 6:50 p.m.23 Though undated, it is most likely from the 1892 to 1895 period when Edward Grubb taught chemistry at Polam Hall.
1.3.4 Later Life
In 1895, Grubb accepted a Visiting Master position at Brighthelmston School, a Quaker boarding school for girls in Southport, Lancashire.24 Increasingly involved in his spiritual and religious interests, in 1901, Grubb terminated his teaching career and moved to London. Upon his arrival in London, Grubb was chosen as Proprietor and Editor of The British Friend, a Quaker monthly magazine.
When Grubb had been working on his MA in 1879, he had found difficulty reconciling traditional Quaker beliefs and modern science. Over the subsequent years, through his ministry and his published books, he developed a new vision of Quakerism.25 Thus, The British Friend enabled Grubb to spread his progressive views to a wide audience until the magazine ceased publication in 1913. He devoted the remainder of his life to the Quaker movement,26 dying in 1939 at Letchworth.
1.4 Reflections
In this chapter, we have focussed upon two of the earliest chemists who taught at girls’ schools. Towards the later years of the 19th century, chemistry became part of the syllabus more generally in academic girls’ schools. Some women-supportive chemistry professors taught part-time at these. As an example, George Samuel Newth, Demonstrator and Lecturer at the Royal College of Science, South Kensington from 1871 until 1909, concurrently taught a chemistry course at Princess Helena College, London.27 An issue of 1890 of the Princess Helena College Magazine reported that:28 “Mr. G. S. Newth, of South Kensington Science Department, gives the Chemistry Lectures, and makes them most interesting to his class by his numerous and beautiful experiments.” As another example, teaching at the Manchester High School for Girls had a major influence on Arthur Smithells, Professor at the University of Leeds (see Chapter 8).