More on researching the documents...

Last month, we marked one year at our Corsham Court archive office, and took the occasion to reflect on recent research discoveries with our two new members of the team.

Alice and Carol joined us in October, and in common with all new students, read through some of the documents to get the background of our history. With each passing month there is something to add to this story, since we're growing and building the archive materials all the time. Additionally, with each oral history interview, we discover more about these rich and fascinating aspects of life at our colleges.

Since Newton Park and the Domestic Science College parts of this story were women-only (Newton Park became a mixed college in the late 1950s) we often wonder about the gendered aspects of life in those days. Our third year student, Hayley, has become interested in the ways former students and staff responded to the women's movement through the years, and which issues reverberated during the 1960s, for example.

1960s women return to Newton Park, 2013

This research also touches themes in my own PhD studies, which look at the origins of Newton Park Teacher Training College in 1946 and the tenure of our first Principal, Mary Dawson. As a single career woman of the 20th century, she witnessed many of the great social changes of those often turbulent years; the deaths of childhood friends in the First World War, the era of expanding employment opportunities for women in the 1920s, the national focus on improved education throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and the birth of an educational ideal at Newton Park in 1946.

1940s students, with Mary Dawson (second row, fifth from the left)

Yet throughout all this, the question of gender equality is never specifically mentioned. This is tantalising in itself, but the reasons for this apparent 'silence' may be even more so. Did women feel that the hard work had been done in previous generations? Were people more accepting of the status quo? Did the issues fail to bother a generation accustomed to just 'getting on with it'?

Mary Dawson, 1928

The research continues, and as more information comes to light and more reading takes place to support it, these questions may yet be illuminated. In the meantime, our glimpses of this increasingly distant time are compelling and enlightening.