Cambridge Notebook #11
On the University's secret history
In Cambridge, the season is turning and as I walked along the Backs last week, yellow leaves were twirling to the ground. The students will soon be returning, and as I passed Magdalene College (pronounced ‘maudlin’ here, for some reason1) I couldn’t resist taking a snap of the view through its beautiful oak doorway, with the promise of peaceful learning inside. Lucky students.
But those doors were firmly closed to women students when I first moved to Cambridge in 1985. I was happy with my choice of college (Queens’) but couldn’t have chosen Magdalene if I’d wanted to, as it remained all-male until 1988. It was proud of its traditions, and the last Oxbridge College to become co-educational. Of course, the academic and sporting ratings of the college improved after women began to study there, but that wasn’t the point. Keeping the women out was all about maintaining the status quo.
Such a quaint old doorway looks very different when it’s the entrance to a prison. In The Spinning House: How Cambridge University locked up women in its private prison (History Press, 2024), Caroline Biggs chronicles the rise and fall of the University’s notorious private prison. It’s set to be one of my nonfiction Books of The Year.
The Spinning House was built in St Andrews Street, Cambridge in the 17th century with money donated by Thomas Hobson, famous for the saying ‘Hobson’s Choice’.  Originally it was a workhouse where unemployed men could learn a trade – spinning flax, wool-combing and weaving - and be paid a basic wage for their work. Part of the building was used as a prison for petty offenders and women suspected of being prostitutes. In 1821, when a new town jail was built, the Spinning House was taken over by the University of Cambridge as its private court and prison. What went on behind closed doors was kept secret.
According to a special charter signed by Queen Elizabeth in 1561, any Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University had substantial powers over the town to guard his male students from what were considered as immoral temptations. This included the right to imprison ‘all public women, procuresses, vagabonds… found guilty or suspected of evil’. In practice this meant arresting any unchaperoned woman on the streets of Cambridge after dark, especially one spotted in the company of an undergraduate. Between 1823 and 1891, university proctors and special constables known as ‘bulldogs’ carried out more than 6,000 arrests.
If you were a young townswoman unlucky enough to be discovered talking to a student, you would be taken to the Spinning House for the night, and locked in a cold, damp cell. The following day you would be taken to the Vice-Chancellor’s court and, with the doors locked against the public and with no witnesses or access to a lawyer, you would be sentenced. The sentence might be a further twenty-four hours in the Spinning House, or it could mean several weeks. There was nothing that you or your family could do about it.
Then in December 1891 Daisy Hopkins, 17, was arrested for ‘walking with a member of the university’ and sentenced to 14 days in the Spinning House. She burned with the injustice of this - the married student wasn’t wearing an academic gown and had asked her directions as a chat-up line, after all - so she decided to take her case to the Royal Courts of Justice in London, and won. As a result of the ensuing publicity, the University was forced to close the Spinning House and the building was demolished in 1901.
In The Spinning House Caroline Biggs tells the stories of four women held at the Spinning House: Elizabeth Howe, Emma Kemp, Jane Elsden and Daisy Hopkins. It’s an engaging, deeply researched story of the University’s outrageous powers, and how for hundreds of years it denied townswomen their basic rights. Reading it, I was reminded of Halle Rubenhold’s prize-winning The Five (2019).
The Spinning House ‘tells a bigger story of the innate misogyny in England for three centuries when women were blamed for male indulgence and punished for imaginary crimes.’ (Philippa Gregory)
I’m particularly interested in this story because the Vice-Chancellor who was associated with the most egregious treatment of townswomen was Henry Montagu Butler. In 1888 he married Agnata Ramsey, a 21-year-old former Girton student, who the previous year had attained the highest marks in the Classical Tripos at Cambridge. Montagu Butler was deeply respectful of her achievements and in favour of women being awarded Cambridge degrees (see my post here). Yet in 1890 he ordered the Proctors to ‘crack down’ and arrest more women suspected of prostitution, all in the effort to maintain the reputation of a University fit for gentlemen.
For me that suggests some of the most paradoxical things about Cambridge: a place of learning and opportunity that for many years - like Magdalene College - prevented women from entering it and in the process, harmed itself. But it’s also a reminder of the courage and determination of women like Daisy Hopkins who insisted on speaking out, refused to give up, and helped other women to break down those weighty doors of prejudice.
‘Learned women be suspected of many’
Most intelligent, outspoken women in Tudor times were denied access to an advanced education, but a new book explores how the mid-sixteenth century in England nevertheless became a time of educational opportunity for a small number of girls, including the five Cooke sisters. There’s a public lecture and book launch on 15 October 2024 by Deborah Spring, author of Lady Anne Bacon: A woman of learning at the Tudor Court (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2024). Booking details for in-person and Zoom attendance here.
Detectives and Spies
I’m also looking forward Claire Hubbard-Hall’s debut book, Her Secret Service: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence, published in the UK by Orion Books on 24 October 2024. Sara Lodge’s The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective (Yale, 24 September 2024) promises to be revealing about the women who successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves.
Writing lives
Do you have a favourite memoir or published diary? I’ve previously written about two of mine, Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece (1952) and Lucy Boston’s Memory in a House (1973), and I also can’t get enough of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries, recently published in an unexpurgated five volume-edition by Granta in the UK. While on holiday in the Isle of Mull in Scotland this summer I loved reading Hanging On: Diaries 1960-1963, the third volume of Frances Partridge’s diaries and was amazed to discover that she published three more volumes after that.
Lots more suggestions in this post by
, including links to essays on this platform by , , and among others.In praise of ‘Spinster September’
And finally, I recently discovered that it’s Spinster September in the book world (a brilliant reading prompt devised by
), featuring novels including The Gentlewomen by Laura Talbot and The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton, who funnily enough happened to be married to each other. To celebrate I’ve removed the paywall from two of my posts: on the poet Charlotte Mew, who was unmarried by choice, I suspect, as many literary spinsters were, and Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (thank you for the reminder!) In my next post, coincidentally, we’ll be discussing The Rector’s Daughter by F.M. Mayor. ‘Mary begins as ridiculous and ends as dignified,’ E.M. Forster wrote, ‘this seems to me a very great achievement.’ Thank you very much for reading, and very much hope you’ll join us next week.Whiskey with one's tea
Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was a poet who was ‘very good and interesting and unlike anyone else’, as Virginia Woolf put it. She wrote some of the best English poems of the early twentieth century, and yet her poetry is less well known than her difficult life. As I’ve just discovered it’s
The fascinating Miss Pym
Last week I wrote about the poet Philip Larkin’s correspondence with his mother Eva. This reminded me of another important relationship in his life, with the English novelist Barbara Pym. Despite their different personalities and writing styles, Larkin was one of Pym’s most devoted fans, admiring what he described as her ‘rueful yet courageous acceptanc…
Apparently in punning tribute to the college’s founder, the not very nice-sounding Lord Audley: ‘When Audley refounded Magdalene, he gave the College seven acres of property at Aldgate in the City of London, his reward from the King for helping him dispose of Anne Boleyn… in 1542, [the college’s] choice of the name of Mary Magdalene appears to have had a touch of vanity. In many early documents, the name is clearly spelt as pronounced: 'Maudleyn', containing within it the name of Audley. The final 'e' on Magdalene was an attempt, with the advent of the postal service in the mid nineteenth-century, to distinguish Magdalene Cambridge from our sister College, Magdalen Oxford.’ (https://www.magd.cam.ac.uk/about/history)
Good grief. I had no idea about the Spinning House. How shocking.
Lucky students, indeed. I love seeing them going into Trinity or King's or St John's any College, with a carrier bag from the supermarket, stocking up for their daily life there. I hope that they are aware of their surroundings :-)