Tag Archives: British History

Birkbeck’s First Christmas

Jerry White, Emeritus Professor in Modern London History, takes us on a trip down Christmas memory lane, reflecting on the College’s inception nearly two hundred years ago and considering how Christmas in 1823 might have looked.

There probably wasn’t much talk of Christmas when the London Mechanics’ Institution was founded at a famous meeting at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, Strand, on 2 December 1823. Unlike today, when Christmas shopping and advertising begins around mid-November if not before, Christmas preparations then only began in mid-December: ‘The note of preparation is now sounding through all the different places of public Amusement, to gratify the visitors to London during the festive time of Christmas,’ the Morning Post told its readers on 19 December, and little seems to have been done up to that point. The weather didn’t help this year, with much of December unseasonably warm and humid till just a day or two before the festival, with a marked ‘mildness of weather in and about London; so mild, indeed is the season, that the writer, on Sunday [the 21^st], saw, in a private garden at Hammersmith, a wall-flower in blossom, out in the open grounds….’[1]

A festive marketplace

But once the great day approached then all minds were turned to how Christmas might be celebrated: ‘Probably there is no country where Christmas is more enjoyed by the community than in Great Britain’, patriotic newspapers claimed.[2] The real opening announcement of Christmas to Londoners had come a few days before with the first of two Monday ‘Great Christmas Markets’ at Smithfield, where the country’s cattle farmers paraded their best beasts for sale, knocked down to the butchers of Smithfield, Leadenhall, Newgate and Whitechapel. The markets were packed tight with cattle and sheep, driven on the hoof for weeks before; the animals had their last stop for grazing and rest in the fields of Islington to get them to market in peak condition. Once sold at Smithfield, though, ‘the crowded state of the market’ presented ‘an unusual difficulty in getting the Beast out; their heads are battered by two or three drovers at a time, and their eyes in numerous instances knocked out; and this from sheer necessity….’[3]

Beef was, indeed, the favourite food for Christmas dinner, with turkey (driven in flocks from Norfolk), geese, hams (from Yorkshire, Westmorland, even Westphalia) and mutton (for poorer families especially) also in much demand. So much roast meat could pose a problem to some. ‘There is no period probably when persons sympathize with those who have lost their grinders, more than at Christmas, when stews and wishy washy messes are excluded from the festive board, and the loss of teeth is felt as the greatest misery and affliction.’ Boiled plum pudding, though, could be enjoyed by all, the toothless included, and was a Christmas necessity. Great care was essential in getting it just right: ‘If the plum-pudding, from being too rich, should crumble or break, the misfortune never fails of agonizing and fretting the worthy hostess – all the eyes of the company are instantly and most unkindly directed towards her, as if darting reproach, to add to her embarrassment, and aggravate the calamity.’[4] Wine with dinner for the middle classes was followed by madeira, sherry and ‘good old Port’ after the pudding; in poorer households, beer or porter would have to suffice and the whole dinner might have to be taken to the baker’s shop for roasting in the bread oven, though a plum pudding could be boiled in the copper or in a pan on the range. But probably all homes could enjoy some after-dinner games: ‘hunt the slipper’ a great favourite, and ‘snap-dragon’ in richer families, which involved the unlikely pleasure of snatching almonds or sultanas and raisins from a shallow bowl of burning brandy. In all houses, churches and shop windows Christmas decorations seem to have relied mainly on branches of evergreen, especially holly, and candles, though no doubt the theatres and places of public resort were able to put on a bigger display. Mistletoe seemed a little out of fashion in 1823, no longer said to be hanging from drawing-room ceilings but ‘sent down stairs’ to the kitchen ‘for the benefit of rubicund cooks and rosy house-maids.’[5]

Christmas presents were no doubt personal and varied, just as now. Diaries and ‘illuminated pocketbooks’ were much in demand if the advertisers were to be believed, like ‘Friendship’s Offering; or, The Annual Remembrancer: a Christmas Present and New Year’s Gift for the Year 1824’, at a whacking 12 shillings. Dancing at Christmas was all the rage and many advertisements were directed at helping people look their best: Mrs Bell, of 52 St James’s Street, offered a ‘variety of novel and beautiful millinery, Head Dresses of almost every description, Ball and Evening Dresses’, as well as her ‘Patent Corsets, unrivalled and universally admired’; W. Rowe, at the Magasin de Nouveautes, 72 Oxford Street, offered an ‘assortment of Trinkets’, ‘just received from Paris’ and ‘adapted for Christmas present,’ like bead purses, red mohair bracelets, bone fans plain and painted, ornamental combs and much else; ‘Rowland’s Macassar Oil’ guaranteed ‘a beautiful arrangement of the Human Hair,’ for ‘the Youth of both Sexes … “To dance on the light fantastic toe”’; and music publishers offered fresh arrangements for solo piano and duets as Christmas presents, like Boosey & Co’s new editions of Rossini and Mozart operas, ‘with Italian words’. And there were Christmas foods on offer as presents, some exotic and reflecting London’s reach as the centre of world trade, like ‘Muscatels, in boxes; new Jordan Almonds … Spanish Grapes, very fine Normandy Pippins in baskets, Guimaraen or Portugal Plums, fine New Smyrna Figs in small drums,’ and much more from Hickson & Co’s Foreign Fruit Warehouse at 72 Welbeck Street.[6]

Dancing and riotous behaviour

Dancing could be everywhere, not just in the homes of the middle classes and above, and could no doubt spill into the streets, which were at their liveliest at Christmas. Perhaps this was the cause of ‘an unusual number of dissolute women brought before the [Bow Street] Magistrates yesterday morning from the watch-houses, charged with riotous behaviour in the public streets on the preceding night [the 23^rd]. They pleaded the season in their defence. They had only indulged in a little Christmas festivity. The Magistrates told them that no season could justify drunken riots in the streets; and sent two of the most obstreperous among them to spend their holydays [sic] in Tothill-fields Bridewell – Mary Baskerville for one month, and Ann Davis for fourteen days.’[7] The streets had other dangers too. For a day or two before the 25^th, apprentices, artisans of one kind or another and shop assistants would go house-to-house soliciting pennies and sixpences for their ‘Christmas boxes’. This year the ‘housekeepers in and around the metropolis are cautioned against a set of men who go about in the assumed character of Bow-street Patrol, soliciting Christmas Boxes. It is proper that it should be known such persons are impostors, and that the Bow-street Patrol are strictly prohibited from soliciting Christmas Boxes and are liable to be dismissed their situation if it be known that they do so.’[8]

Christmas boxes were one indication that charity was then as now one of the defining characteristics of Christmas, publicly lauded in the press and from the pulpit. Charity sermons were preached everywhere, with particular sections of the deserving poor in view, or for the benefit of charitable institutions like the Magdalen Hospital for ‘rescuing fallen women’, or the Asylum for Female Orphans, both in south London. There was an unusual Christmas tradition in a fast-growing part of west London where every year ‘according to annual custom, a large quantity of bread and cheese was distributed at Paddington Church amongst the poor by tickets; the assemblage was immense: until within these last three years the custom was to throw it in baskets full [sic] cut into square pieces from the belfry of the Church amongst the crowd, but owing to the confusion and many accidents occasioned by the scramble, that custom was abolished and the present mode substituted in its stead.’ This was paid for by an endowment from ‘two old maiden sisters (paupers), who travelling to London to claim an estate, in which they afterwards succeeded, and being much distressed were first relieved at Paddington on that day.’[9] The sisters were luckier than some in London that Christmas of 1823. At Marlborough Street Police Court on Christmas Eve, an ‘elderly woman, who stated that she had scarcely tasted food for the two last days’ told the magistrates that the St Pancras relieving officer had denied her relief until her case went before the guardians of the poor, who would now only meet after Christmas. The magistrate ordered that she be given temporary relief, presumably in the workhouse, until the committee should meet.[10]

Pantomimes and Christmas cheer

Of all the pleasures of Christmas 1823 it was the London theatres who offered the richest dose of Christmas cheer. Pantomimes then began on Boxing Day and ran into the early New Year. Very few opened in the run-up to Christmas, in contrast to today’s extended festival, now often beginning at the start of December. But on Boxing Day the theatres – even the grand Theatre Royal, Drury Lane – let their hair down. This year there were Harlequin and the Flying Chest (Drury Lane), Harlequin and the House that Jack Built (Covent Garden) where the action travelled from the London parks to the Tuileries in Paris and back again, Fox and Geese, or Harlequin the White King of Chess (Surrey Theatre, Blackfriars Road), Harlequin’s Christmas-box, or the London Apprentices (Olympic Theatre, Wych Street, Strand), and Doctor Faustus and the Black Demon, or Harlequin and the Seven Fairies of the Grotto (Adelphi, Strand). At the last, all did not go according to plan. Despite ‘some pretty scenery’ and ‘a lively Clown and Columbine’, the pantomime ‘tried the patience of the audience severely through a number of scenes, throughout the whole of which there were not three clever tricks, and those that were attempted were for the most part bungled…. Good humour, however, which had more than once … begun to give way, was completely revived by the introduction of a panoramic view of the British fleet under Lord Exmouth bombarding the town of Algiers, which … was warmly applauded.’[11] The patriotic fervour of a London theatre audience was a sight to behold long before ‘Jingoism’ was ever invented.

By the time the London Mechanics’ Institution opened its first premises at Southampton Buildings, Holborn, late in 1824, this first Birkbeck Christmas was just a faint memory. Among those founders at the Crown and Anchor that December, who would have thought that another 200 Christmases would be celebrated with Birkbeck still providing adult education in London that is second to none?

[1] Morning Herald, 23 December 1823

[2] Morning Advertiser, 25 December 1823

[3] Cobbett’s Weekly Register, 20 December 1823

[4] Morning Advertiser, 25 December 1823

[5] Sunday Times, 28 December 1823

[6] Morning Post, 22 December 1823 (capitalisation simplified) and Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 22 December 1823 (macassar oil)

[7] Morning Herald, 24 December 1823

[8] Morning Post, 25 December 1823. The Bow Street Patrol were a small force of police run by the Bow Street magistrates, before the formation of the blue-uniformed Metropolitan Police in 1829.

[9] New Times, 23 December 1823

[10] Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser, 25 December 1823

[11] The Times, 27 December 1823

Why a Black History Month?

To lie about History – Statues and the British Slave Trade

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Gabriel Burne, an MA History of Art student, discusses the legacy of the historical figures whose statues have been removed and how the current debates around these monuments should encourage deeper discussion about Britain’s violent and racist past.

“The air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe.” Allegedly this was said during the trial of Shanley v. Harvey, a case where a British man, Shanley, was attempting to recoup a substantial sum of money given to Harvey by Shanley’s niece on her death bed. The basis of the claim was that Shanley had bought Harvey as a child slave to England some 12 years earlier and given him to his now deceased niece. I heard it quoted during my undergraduate degree in History in a debate about the role that slavery played in the UK economy. Even though many slaves were bought, sold and owned on the British Isles, the quote was employed as evidence of Britain’s relationship to slavery being distinct from that of the United States. Whilst the quote was likely never uttered, and the sentiment it reflected false, its popularisation reflects this Island’s complex and unresolved relationship to its violent and racist past. Much of Britain’s history of racial violence is hidden, existing only as ghosts haunting the otherwise heroic narrative of Britain and its heroes. When I embarked on a Master’s degree at Birkbeck in History of Art, it was these ghosts I wanted to know more about, in an effort to reinsert the lives and horrors which these spectres recall back into popular British history.

For many of us in Britain, our understanding of racism is taught from the perspective of the United States. The civil rights movement – Martin Luther King, the KKK, Malcolm X and segregation – are all things many in the UK have an understanding of. They are core aspects of our national curriculum and whilst they teach us important lessons on white supremacy, they create a sense of separation from the problems that exist here in Britain. To learn more about how we honour and adulate those who created this system of white supremacy in the UK, I took a module called “Slavery and its Cultural Legacies.” My reading for the course took me to some of the black theorists writing in the US currently – particularly Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe. Whilst their writing was specifically speaking to an American experience, I felt there was a lot to be learned from their ideas here in the UK. Sharpe and Hartman speak of “the wake” and “the afterlife” of slavery respectively. Slavery’s violence lives on in white supremacy, a condition which is constitutive of contemporary Britain. The Research Project that I am currently writing examines the British monuments that often honour and/or neglect to acknowledge racial violence as part of the individual championed legacy.

Robert Milligan statue outside the London Docklands Museum

In February this year, I went to the London Docklands Museum organised as part of the module. We were taken through the museum’s exhibition on slavery – London, Sugar & Slavery. The exhibition itself speaks of the ubiquity and brutality of the slave trade in the UK and is situated in the very building that was a hub for receiving the imported goods from Britain’s slave plantations. Whilst the museum takes steps to foreground black voices and highlight some of these hidden histories, a walk onto the docks outside the entrance reveals some stark reminders of this unconfronted violence. A cocktail bar serves “plantation punch” as a drink on the menu. And towering just in front of that sits a statue honouring prominent British slave trader Robert Milligan, who by the time of his death in 1809, owned two sugar plantations and 526 slaves in Jamaica.

I stared up at the dead metal eyes of Milligan looking out across the docks, posed as if smiling upon an arriving ship, bountiful with the fruits of his murderous plantations. The plinth on which the statue stands illustrates his achievements with a relief that depicts Britannia seated on her tame-looking British lion, whilst the female figure of commerce offers her riches and at her feet three cherubs help carry the bounty. The mast of an approaching ship is visible in the background, the very ships whose docking in Greenwich Milligan would have cheered.

The engraving below Robert Milligan’s statue.

In romanticising the wealth men like Milligan brought lady Britannia, statues such as this obscure how this wealth originated in racial violence – the lucrative cargo carried aboard these ships, and which both Milligan and Britain celebrate, were produced by the enslaved. The continued existence of these statues’ silences new voices and alternative histories under the weight of the historical indulgence upon which Britain’s current power structures relies, that of a grotesque imperial and racially violent past located elsewhere, in far-off lands.

When I embarked on researching the Milligan statue, along with the statues of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol and Cecil Rhodes in Oxford, George Floyd was still alive. The protests catalysed by his murder at the hands of three police officers have since led to each either being removed or torn down by activists. This totally unforeseeable set of events taking place as I research these statues has left my project at an incredible crossroads that changes from day-to-day. The removal of the Colston statue in Bristol by activists, followed by its symbolically poignant casting into the harbour, prompted the Milligan statue to be removed by the local council days later. It has just been announced that the Cecil Rhodes statue that sat on Oriel College and has for years been the subject of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, will likewise be removed. Commenting on these events, the Prime Minister stated that to remove these statues is to “lie about our history and impoverish the education of generations to come.” This statement is reminiscent of the same mental gymnastics performed by the relief that sits below the Milligan statue. Rather than being moved by watching the monuments to these men fall and cheering what is, at best, a small step toward confronting this violent past, Johnson continues the exercise of obfuscation. Not once does he mention precisely what he thinks this history is, yet he claims it to be the “truth”. To engage in the actual process of discussing this history is to highlight what these statues hide: that of a British slave-trading and imperial past not confronted, and the “afterlives” of the British slave in which non-white people in this country must live.

At the time of an anti-racist uprising alongside offering solidarity to America, we must also reflect on the constitutive role slavery and white supremacy have played in British history. As the actions of many demonstrators have movingly and powerfully shown, it is imperative to reflect on what voices are hidden when men like Colston, Milligan and Rhodes are celebrated. We must remind ourselves that the enslaved also breathed the UK’s air “too pure.”

Further reading:

On the British abolitionist movement and the Haitian revolution

CLR James, The Black Jacobins, (Random House: New York, 1989)

US Black studies theorists and the afterlives of slavery

Saidiya V Hartman Lose your mother: a journey along the Atlantic slave route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2007)

Christina Sharpe In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2016)

Fred Moten In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

For British involvement in the slave trade

Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Verso, London, New York, 1993)

Catherine Hall Legacies of British Slave-Ownership (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016)

Making Monuments Matter

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As the debate about the removal of historical statues rages on, Professor Annie E Coombes reflects on the significance of statues in the discussion and commemoration of history.

Sethembile Msezane performs ‘Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell’, April 2015.

Since the 2015 call to arms of the #Rhodes Must Fall and #Fees Must Fall campaigns started on South African University campuses in a drive to get universities to finally address the legacy of racial inequalities produced by colonialism and apartheid, the baton has been taken up by other students worldwide. They have demanded that educational institutions address colonial amnesia and actively decolonize the curriculum. Birkbeck and other colleges of the University of London have slowly begun to put some energy behind addressing these demands closer to home, although some of us have always had this at the heart of our research and teaching agendas. The recent protests initiated by Black Lives Matter have reignited awareness of the deep structural legacy of racism in the wake of George Floyd’s hideous murder at the hands of Minneapolis police. The ripple effect around the globe has strengthened the long-repeated calls for legislated action to ensure equal rights and their implementation.

Here in the UK the Black Lives Matter movement has lent support to the voices of Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon OBE and David Lammy MP in their insistence on the necessity of implementing, rather than ignoring (again) the recommendations made in the numerous reports and reviews on racial inequality in Britain (including the 1997 inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s death, Lammy’s own 2017 review into the treatment of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the justice system and Wendy Williams’ review into the lessons learnt from the discriminatory treatment of the Windrush generation (2018 & 2020).

Municipal statuary has often been the visual centrepiece of these protests. For the past twenty years, I have been fascinated by monuments and their afterlives. The love, hate and ridicule they inspire, and the ways in which even those originally standing for the very worst aspects of human endeavour can become reanimated to generate a rallying cry for the most progressive solidarity. The recent toppling of the much-maligned statue of the Bristol slave trader Edward Colston during a Black Lives Matter protest is a case in point. That activism and energy were able to accomplish in one fell swoop, something that campaigners and academics in Bristol had been working towards for many years – a greater recognition of the ways in which the history of slavery has shaped the city of Bristol and the removal of celebratory monuments (including Colston’s) to the glory of that hideous trade.

Those who criticise the action as the erasure of history, fail to understand that the gesture has actually reignited an awareness of the importance of an understanding of how history shapes our experience of city spaces and either reinforces or excludes a sense of belonging in swathes of the population. In Bristol it has foregrounded the work of Madge Dresser, David Olusoga and others who have produced deep research on the often hidden histories of slavery and colonialism lurking in street names and municipal landmarks. (Dresser, Slavery Obscured: The Social History of an English Provincial Port c. 1698 – 1833, 2001) Perhaps iconoclasm and the deeper histories it draws attention to, can also enable a greater public recognition of the lives and deeds of men and women from BAME and other underrepresented communities. Or as Jared Brock says, writing on the hidden history of the ‘real’ Uncle Tom of the eponymous book – Joseph Henson, an unsung champion of the Underground Railway – “As monuments topple around the globe they leave space for worthier replacements’.

Research I conducted in Kenya at a moment when a new national history was being written in the wake of the unbanning in 2003 of the guerrilla organisation (Mau Mau) that had fought for the creation of an independent Kenya against British colonial rule in the 1950s and 60s, reinforced the potential power of monuments, but also their complicated valencies. In a quest for representativeness and a bid for national unity, following a wave of post-election violence that had rocked the country, local constituencies nationwide were asked to nominate heroes and heroines for national commemoration. While having many beneficial outcomes for some disenfranchised Kenyans, the nationwide competitiveness occasioned by the government ‘Taskforce for National Heroes and Heroines’. ended up reinforcing, rather than diminishing, the perceived and historic ethnic differences that had led to some of the worst post-election violence in Kenya’s history in 2009. ( Coombes, “Monumental Histories: Commemorating Mau Mau with the Statue of Dedan Kimathi”, 2011) But it is also true that the inauguration of these monuments (for example, to the Mau Mau leader, Dedan Kimathi in the heart of downtown Nairobi) provided the occasion for one of the few acknowledgements by the State, of the role of Mau Mau veterans in the creation of an independent Kenya.

On the other hand, perhaps it is worth considering that sometimes ‘disinterest’, can be as powerful a means of countering the hegemonic presumptions of any monument. In 1994, in the wake of the first democratic elections in South Africa, I began research on the ways in which histories were being re-thought and re-written in the public sphere in relation to different kinds of visual commemorative practice (monuments, memorials and museums). I took a photograph, later used on the cover of my book, History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (2003). It shows the gigantesque bust of J.G. Strijdom, Prime Minister from 1954 -58 and member of the white supremacist wing of the ruling National Party which established formal apartheid.

At the time the picture was important to me because it showed Black South Africans walking through the square, oblivious to its original significance, to the extent of using the space as an expansion of the entrepreneurial informal economy and setting up market stalls in the shade of Strijdom’s bust. It seemed to encapsulate a complete lack of interest in the overbearing sculpture commemorating a brutal figure in the apartheid regime. I wondered if the act of ignoring the violent history embodied in the monument and the square’s name, could be seen as constituting in and of itself, a form of resistance. In a neat and entirely appropriate twist to this tale, the monument (the head and the surrounding arch) subsequently collapsed, apparently of its own accord ! It has now been renamed Lillian Ngoyi Square after a member of the multi-ethnic crowd of 20,000 women activists, who marched on J.G. Strijdom in the Union Buildings in Pretoria, to present petitions against the extension of the hated Pass Laws to black women in August 1956 – which finally in 2000, gained its own monument commemorating the bravery of the womens’ action, “The Monument to the Women of South Africa”.

Looking back at a moment twenty years ago when monuments were similarly the visual flashpoints at the centre of protest in the UK, what struck me then seems as pertinent in the current statue debate: “… monuments are animated and reanimated only through performance and … performances or rituals focused around a monument are conjunctural. The visibility of a monument is in fact entirely contingent upon the debates concerning the reinterpretation of history that take place at moments of social and political transition. Their significance is consequently constantly being reinvented but always and necessarily in dialogue with their past”. (History After Apartheid, p.12) Thus the knowledge provided by the historian and art historian is absolutely crucial to a more complex understanding of that past and the lived experiences that contribute to its various and often competing interpretations in the present.

If living in Covid times has taught us anything, it is the value of social connectedness, of ‘community’ sought and found in unusual places, of the street as a valuable locus of social interaction. With this in mind, monuments and public memorials could play a critical role in reclaiming those streets and making many who have been disenfranchised and dislocated from British society feel more ‘at home’.

Annie Coombes is Professor of Material and Visual Culture in the Department of Art History and Founding Director of the Peltz Gallery. In Summer term 2021, she will be teaching the MA seminar option ‘Curating Difficult Histories’ as part of the MA Museum Cultures and MA History of Art.

Lillian Penson: the first PhD in the University of London

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Lillian Margery Penson was the first person in the University of London to be awarded a PhD. In this blog, Joanna Bourke discusses the life and achievements of Penson. This blog is part of a series that celebrate 200 years since Birkbeck was established and International Women’s Day on Sunday 8 March.

Lillian Margery Penson (1896-1963) was an outstanding scholar and university administrator. She was the first person (of any sex) in the University of London to be awarded a PhD; she was the first woman to become a Professor of History at any British university; and she was the first woman in the UK and Commonwealth to become a vice-chancellor of a university, at the age of only 52. She owed her undergraduate and doctoral education to the History Department at Birkbeck.

Opinions about her were divided. Was she the “foremost woman in the academic life of our day” (The Scotsman), a “remarkable woman” (The Times), and someone who exuded “charm, tolerance, and a sense of humour”? Or was she an “imperious grande dame”, “très autoritaire”, and “too trenchant”? The answer is probably “a mixture”. Although Penson “could on occasion be brusque and even intimidating”, she “had a happy knack of getting to know people quickly”, was “an excellent judge of wine and loved good company”, and projected “a wealth of genuine kindness”. In other words, Penson was probably trapped in that familiar double-bind experienced by powerful women in male-dominated fields: she was admired for her intellect and determination, yet disparaged as a woman for possessing those same traits. One newspaper report on the achievements of “the professor” even referred to Penson using the masculine pronoun: “he”.

Who was Penson? She was born in Islington on 18 July 1896. Her father worked as a wholesale dairy manager and her family were of the Plymouth Brethren persuasion. Indeed, one colleague observed that the “marks of a puritanical upbringing were never effaced” and her “belief in work and duty” meant that she was always made uncomfortable by “flippant talk”. She never married.

From her youth, Penson was intrigued by diplomatic history, colonial policy, and foreign affairs. Her intellectual talents were obvious. In 1917, at the age of 21 years, she graduated from Birkbeck with a BA in History (first class). The war was at its height, so she joined the Ministry of National Service as a junior administrative officer (1917-18) before moving to the war trade intelligence department (1918-19). At the end of the war, Penson returned to her studies of history at Birkbeck and became, in 1921, the first person in the University of London to be awarded a PhD.

Penson’s achievement was even more remarkable because of her gender. After all, throughout the period from 1921 to 1990, only one-fifth of PhD students in history were female. Penson was also young. The average age for history students to complete their doctorates was their mid-30s; Penson was only 25 years old. Birkbeck immediately offered her a job as a part-time lecturer, during which time she also taught part-time at the East London Technical College, now Queen Mary University of London. In 1925, she was given a full-time lecturing post at Birkbeck.

More notably, she was the first female Vice-Chancellor of a university in the UK and the Commonwealth. Indeed, the second female vice-chancellor would not be appointed for another 27 years (this was Dr Alice Rosemary Murray who was appointed Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge in 1975). Then, in 1948, the University of Cambridge agreed to award degrees to women. The last time they had tried this (in 1897), there had been a riot. In 1948, however, the Queen, Myra Hess, and Penson became the first women to be awarded honorary Cambridge degrees (in Penson’s case, a LL.D or Doctor of Laws). The Scotsman decreed Penson’s academic and administrative talents to be “unsurpassed even in the annals of that great institution”.

Many of the values that Penson promoted were those at the heart of the Birkbeck mission. She spoke eloquently on the need to offer university education for “virtually all comers”, with no restriction based on religion, race, or sex. She was keen to insist that the job of the university teacher was to “do something more than impose upon the memories of our students masses of detailed information”.

As with many powerful women, she has largely been forgot. After her death, a University of London Dame Lillian Penson fund was established to provide travel money between scholars engaged in research in one of the universities of the Commonwealth, especially Khartoum, Malta, the West Indies, and new universities in African countries. This seems to have disappeared. All that remains is a bricks-and-mortar legacy in the shape of the Lillian Penson Hall, which still exists next to Paddington Station in Talbot Square, providing accommodation for over 300 students.

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Tag Archives: British History

Why a Black History Month?

Lillian Penson: the first PhD in the University of London