The girl from the Forest goes to Oxford
'It was an exceptional time'
In October 1936 18-year old Edna Edmunds boarded a ‘red-and-white’ bus in her home town, Coleford, in the Forest of Dean, bound for Gloucester. There she took another bus which would deposit her in a city she had never even seen before, further than she had ever travelled - Oxford. Her trunk had gone on ahead by rail, carried to the station by her two older brothers. She left behind a widowed mother and a couple of sisters, to embark on a brave journey that would change her life.
The Forest of Dean, as Edna later described it, is an ancient and magical area, some 24,000 acres of oak, beech and bluebells, between the rivers Severn and Wye. Edna, her mother and her two brothers and two sisters lived in a small cottage in the little market town of Coleford, with three bedrooms, two of which were in the attic, and an outside privy. The only heat in the house came from the coal fire in the kitchen. Drinking water came in pails from a standpipe in the street, water for washing from a pump in the back kitchen; there was no electricity and Edna studied for her exams by oil lamp, wearing her coat. Her father worked as a crane driver in the local stone quarry until his early death when Edna was in her teens.
At the age of four, Edna was sent to the Church of England primary school across the street from her house, and then the junior school further up the hill. However, she felt that these schools made little impact on her imagination, and the most important influence in her childhood was the Coleford Baptist chapel and Sunday School. Coleford boasted nine public houses, but even more chapels and churches, with non-conformity the principal religion. Legend goes that the Baptists in Coleford dated from the English Civil War when they had been infected with this creed by Cromwell’s soldiers. For little Edna, the chapel was the centre of the community, imparting not just religious and moral education but ‘treats’ such as outings and parties, concerts and brass band parades. At the age of fourteen she was baptised, undergoing full immersion in the pool in the chapel.
In 1929, Edna won a scholarship to Bell’s Grammar School, an institution with history dating back to the fifteenth century. It was unusual for its time in being mixed sex, and in Edna’s day there was no library; the teachers would travel to Gloucester or Cheltenham to find books for the pupils. However Edna, in her green gymslip and blazer, her panama hat held on with elastic under the chin, benefited, as only the luckiest children do, from the support and encouragement of three inspirational teachers. These kind souls suggested that she was good enough to go to University and coached her for the examinations. No-one in her family had ever experienced higher education: her school had only produced one undergraduate that anyone could recall, a girl who had gone to Bristol.
Applying to Oxford required Edna to learn Latin, and to run the gauntlet of community disbelief and disapproval. ‘Why go to University when you are just going to get married?’ And then there were the fees: but Miss Davis, the English teacher, persuaded Edna’s mother that the school and the local education authority could cobble together enough grants, loans and bursaries to cover them. The plan was to get a degree and then a teaching diploma. Despite warnings from the Baptist minister that she would not fit in among the public school boys, and the girls from Cheltenham Ladies College, Edna filled in the forms and sat the exams.
Women students had only begun to arrive and study in Oxford from 1879, when Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall opened. St Hugh’s, where Edna went, opened in 1886, and St Hilda’s in 1893. None of these residences were accepted as Colleges into the University hierarchy until 1959, but at least at Oxford women students were permitted to graduate with a degree from 1920 (it took until 1949, nearly thirty years, for women at Cambridge to win the same right). The number of women opting for higher education was slowly rising, from 16% in 1900, but still less than 25% of undergraduates were women in 1939. However, there were an increasing number of working class children like Edna taking advantage of bursaries offered by schools and local councils.
As the numbers grew, the women’ s colleges saw their role to absorb these girls from such different social and educational backgrounds, and to smooth the transition between sheltered girlhood and modern adulthood. They provided well-furnished rooms, and encouraged socialising, with tea parties and dressing for dinner. Girls from poor families arriving in Oxford had never eaten so well, been so warm, had a room to themselves or a library and somewhere to study, let alone ‘butter AND jam at teatime!’. Girls on limited budgets such as Edna’s shopped at Marks and Spencer, and managed with limited wardrobes, dressed in drab coats, skirts, hats and stockings. There would be no trousers before the war.
In 1939, a book was published about Oxford which spoke in withering terms of the 750 women students:
Though their numbers are so small, a casual visitor to Oxford might well gain the impression that the women form an actual majority. They are perpetually awheel. They bicycle in droves from lecture to lecture, capped and gowned, handle-bars laden with note-books, and note-books crammed with notes. Relatively few men go to lectures, the usefulness of which was superceded some time ago by the invention of the printing press. The women, docile and literal, continue to flock to every lecture with medieval zeal, and record in an hour of longhand scribbling what could easily have been assimilated in ten minutes in an armchair…After dark, in their own college libraries or in their comfortless little rooms, they huddle for hours on end, stooping and peering over standard textbooks…
The author, a man called Christopher Hobhouse, had clearly never spoken to Edna Edmunds. Edna threw herself into college life: ‘I was free, for the first time in my life, in the most beautiful city I had ever seen. Yes we worked - who would not, surrounded by the unimagined riches of the Bodleian Library? But we also walked on Cumnor Hill and punted on the river…the sheer joy of my first room…This was the first room that I’d had all to myself.’ She played hockey, and joined the Bach Choir and the Baptist John Bunyan Society. She attended glorious lectures by CS Lewis and Neville Coghill and was tutored by the poet Edmund Blunden.
But it was in her second year that she began to be drawn in to the world of politics: and what a time to be at Oxford, as the Spanish Civil war raged, as Germany armed, and Mussolini and Stalin strutted. ‘Never again would good and evil, right and wrong be so clearly differentiated’. Edna joined the Labour Club: for a while she was a Communist: ‘It seemed that only the Communists…took seriously the growing menace of Fascism. We were ‘bed and breakfast Communists’, joining on Spain and leaving when Russia invaded Finland.’ She rubbed shoulders with the young men who would become some of the most famous politicians of the 1960s and 70s - Roy Jenkins, Ted Heath, Tony Crosland, Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford). Harold Wilson was also up at that time, but found the Liberal Club, and athletics, more congenial to his serious and ambitious personality. Edna dated the left-winger Leo Pliatzky, later a renowned economist and senior Civil Servant.
When war broke out, Edna, who had graduated with a second class degree and was completing her teaching diploma, was told that there was a vacancy at Keighley Girls’ Grammar School in Yorkshire. The introduction came from a fellow member of the Labour Club, a brilliant young man from Balliol who had a double first in PPE and had just been called up. His name was Denis Healey, and in 1945 Edna married him.
Edna would later combine being a politician’s wife with a very successful literary career, writing biographies of women such as Angela Burdett-Coutts, Mary Livingstone and Emma Darwin. The love of literature and history, first kindled at school in the Forest of Dean, never left her.
I loved this! Such an inspiring story. Edna was remarkable. And to have the chance to attend lectures by CS Lewis, how wonderful.
What a story! Wonderful Edna. And all that love & faith that her teachers put into her. Bless them all.