Introducing Mrs Maclaren
Or how to be properly grounded...in Greek!
This is the story of the founding of an institution which survives and prospers to this day: a prestigious preparatory school coaching boys for the entrance examinations for the great British Public Institutions of Eton, Harrow and the like. But its origins are surprisingly humble, and almost entirely attributable to an extraordinary woman, Gertrude Maclaren.
Gertrude Talboys was born in Oxford in 1833, the daughter of David Alfonso Talboys, a well-known printer and bookseller associated with the University . When she was eleven, her older sister Charlotte married a young Scot newly-arrived in the City, a fencing master named Archibald Maclaren. He was twenty-four, his bride was just nineteen - but tragically within three months of the wedding, Charlotte was dead. In August 1851 Archibald married again, this time by special licence in London. His bride was the seventeen year old Gertrude. Marrying your dead wife’s sister, which was thought to be against biblical teachings, had been made illegal in England in 1835, hence the secrecy involved, but Archibald, we can assume, was a very determined young man.
Maclaren had visited France as a teenager where he had studied fencing, gymnastics and medicine. On his return he had settled in Oxford to teach fencing and made friends with Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris. The three artists would visit his house to discuss their plans for the famous murals they were creating at the Oxford Union. Burne-Jones and his fiancée Georgiana Macdonald became very close to the family: this is an extract from an illustrated letter he wrote to Gertrude Maclaren shortly after the birth of her second daughter. If the two little girls are her daughters Mabel and Mary, maybe the woman in the second drawing is Gertrude?
In 1858 Archibald had a gymnasium erected in central Oxford, and word spread of his methods for improving fitness: in the wake of the British Army’s poor performance in the Crimean War, this attracted the attention of the authorities and led to his being asked to develop a new system of physical training for the troops, and gyms built to his design were erected at Aldershot Barracks and elsewhere. At some point around this time he was introduced to Alexander Macmillan, the publisher, and by 1861 the Macmillan and Maclaren families were good friends, with Maclaren contributing articles to Macmillan’s Magazine. His piece ‘Girls’ Schools’, published in 1864, was an impassioned plea for improvements in exercise, in clothing, in ventilation and in diet to improve the mental and physical wellbeing of girls in education. Much of the theory might have been shocking to Victorian parents, but Archibald Maclaren had his standing with the British Army to recommend him.
In the spring of 1863, Shirley Brooks, the Punch journalist, came to Oxford to consult Gertrude Maclaren about the health of his two young sons, Reginald and Cecil, aged nine and seven. So impressed was he by her sound good sense that he asked her to take charge of them. Alexander Macmillan, a mutual friend, suggested that she make a little business of it in her parlour, taking also his boys George and Maurice, the two sons of his good friend, a South African clergyman John William Hoets, and Robert and John Hughes, sons of Tom, the author. The school had its home in a picturesque house in the middle of a large and beautiful orchard garden in the Summertown district of Oxford. Georgiana Burne-Jones described it as ‘a low white house with rose-covered veranda and a garden like a small paradise.’ Schoolrooms and bedrooms were added year by year as the establishment grew and grew. Summerfields, as the Maclarens’ house was known, became Summer Fields School, which flourishes today. Archibald was the first headmaster until ill-health overtook him and he died in 1880. Meanwhile Gertrude, a classical scholar, taught the fifth form and scholarship classes herself. She looked after the education while he kept the boys fit. Alexander Macmillan was always keen to boast of the school which had done so well for his boys: but his admiration in particular for ‘Mrs’ was boundless. Under her tuition a boy could achieve success ‘not by cram but by sound education…not by any special ability or industry, but the thoroughness with which he is grounded.’
The couple were pioneers of a different sort of preparatory school education, with a liberal approach in advance of the times. The school motto, Mens Sana In Corpore Sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body, certainly reflected the type of education they had in mind. Physical fitness was deemed as important as academic progress; the pupils’ letters are full of trips to the gymnasium, hockey, cricket and races. They learnt to swim in the river. The earliest Macmillan boys at the school, Maurice and George, both thrived, becoming the first to win scholarships from Summer Fields: Maurice went to Uppingham in 1866, and George even more prestigiously won an Eton scholarship in 1868. Further Macmillan generations would attend this preparatory school, not the least of whom was Harold Macmillan, Maurice’s son. Coincidentally, the current headmaster, David Faber, is a grandson of Harold Macmillan.
Alexander developed an enormous respect for both Mr and Mrs Maclaren, writing in 1869 to Josephine Butler:
He is my special friend, and a man of very noble nature, fine natural gifts of head and heart – not omitting the body. But she is the scholar and maker of scholars and a high moral could be pointed from the fact. My Geordie went to her knowing nothing, or next to nothing, of either Greek or Latin. He was under ten. She taught him entirely. He got last August, when under 13, an Eton scholarship…A friend of mine, a scholar of Balliol, took charge of three of her pupils a few months since and he said that he rarely if ever, met with boys so thoroughly grounded as they were. I dwell on these points because it is tolerably certain that some writers, if they were dealing with the question of the function of women in Education, would submit that they could give a little flimsy knowledge, but could not lay any solid basis for science. This is not the only, but it is the strongest, disproof of this notion that has come under my notice.
Gertrude was only twenty-nine when the school was founded: her happy ability to teach the classics to the standard of the Eton scholarship examinations was combined with a soft and motherly side, tucking the pupils into bed and kissing any homesick boys on their first night away from home. Her daughters Mabel and Margaret shared the lessons with the boys. Later they would both marry masters at the school who went on in turn to become headmaster.
By the 1890s, the management of the school had passed to the next generation, but new boys were still presented to Gertrude on arrival. She was only in her early sixties, although of course to the boys she was ‘an old and distinguished-looking lady with white hair.’
A boy who was at the school in 1896 when Gertrude died, aged 62, wrote home:
At ten minutes to one just before she died when all her relations were standing round her they wanted to give her beef tea and port wine to restore her but she said ‘Please let me go to Him whom I love and do not keep me back.’…On Thursday we three boys could see the hearse pass. I never saw so pretty a sight. It was drawn by two horses and did not look like a funeral. The whole hearse was covered with violets (her favourite flowers) and lilies and sorts of white flowers and it did look lovely. The church and the graveyard were crammed with people. The Mrs’s grave was all lined with moss and in it there were violets, primroses and snowdrops.
There is nothing particularly unusual about a woman starting a school in her parlour in Victorian times: ‘dame schools’ were well known and allowed many widows and spinsters to support themselves. But they did not aim to coach little boys for the Eton scholarship exams, and they do not survive to this day as Summer Fields has. Other more famous women did establish schools that have endured, Cheltenham Ladies College owes its survival to an early headmistress, Dorothea Beale, appointed in 1858, and Frances Buss effectively created the North London Collegiate School for Ladies in 1850.
Miss Buss and Miss Beale, Cupid’s darts do not feel
How different from us, Miss Beale and Miss Buss
But Gertrude had not had the benefit of an education at FD Maurice’s Queen’s College in London, as these other women had. She was married with small children of her own. And she wasn’t teaching ‘ladies’, but boys. I believe she deserves to be better known!
Postscript: In 1964, Summer Fields commissioned an ‘old boy’, Richard Usborne, to edit a collection of reminiscences from other former pupils and masters to mark the school’s centenary. His introduction alone is worth reading: this was a man well-versed in the wit of PG Wodehouse:
Going through the Register of Old Boys, looking for names and descriptions of everybody who, if alive, might have something to say and be able to spell, I scrounged contributions in all directions and spent a great deal of the school’s money on stamps…If anything sour or savage has been toned down, left out or left in, that was my decision. I can be horsewhipped on the steps of any good club by appointment.
Second PS: Reginald Brooks, the second boy to be enrolled at the school, became a journalist like his father. According to Wikipedia, ‘It was while writing for The Sporting Times in 1882 that Brooks published a spoof obituary of English cricket, following the England side's defeat in a Test match against Australia. His mild satire resulted in subsequent cricket series between Australia and England becoming known as "The Ashes". ‘
Thanks for the restack!
This is a lovely piece. Is there any description of her pedagogy? Is it still followed today?