Speaking up for Alice Stoneman

Earlier posts about the memories of pre-war pupils of the Park School portrayed a very unpleasant institution, particularly for working-class girls. And according to the girls, the person most to blame for that unhappy environment would seem to have been the school’s first headmistress, Alice Stoneman.

And yet a totally different impression of the school and its headmistress appears in the memoirs of another old girl, Dorothy Marshall, who had moved with her family to Thornton, near Blackpool. Dorothy joined the school during the First World War, left to attend Cambridge and went on to enjoy a career as a leading historian.

Lynne Cowperthwaite, secretary of The Park School Old Girls’ Association, supplied me with the following information:

‘It had originally been decided to send her to one of the well-established girls’ boarding schools. Meanwhile for a year as a stop gap, she went as a weekly boarder to a private school in Blackpool. She can remember nothing in its favour! The approach of the First World War saved her from having to go away to boarding school and her father decided to explore local possibilities and decided on the Park School, Preston, though it meant a train journey, followed by a long walk.

‘Dorothy, in her memoir, speaks highly of this decision, the school and the headmistress Miss Alice Stoneman. Dorothy went on to Girton College, Cambridge where she read History. In her memoir she acknowledges in detail the debt that she owed to Miss Stoneman the first Head of the school. Miss Stoneman had followed the Girton path and she won over Dr Marshall [Dorothy’s father] to the idea of Dorothy’s enjoying the benefits of Cambridge.’

Shortly after her arrival at Cambridge Dorothy wrote an account of university life which was published in the 1919 issue of the Park School magazine (pictured).

Her old headmistress was born in London in 1870, the daughter of John and Elizabeth Stoneman, and attended Girton from 1890 to 1893. She trained as a teacher and began her career at the High School in Barrow-in-Furness before arriving at the Park School in 1907, where she was headmistress for twenty-three years. When she retired to live in Tunbridge Wells she published a short history of the school.

An interesting side note to the career of Dorothy Marshall is that she played an influential role in the early life of the future politician Roy Jenkins, as his biographer reveals. Jenkins left school in 1937 with ‘indifferent’ Higher Certificate results and spent a year at University College, Cardiff, where Dorothy was a lecturer and where he was ‘crammed’ to get a place at Balliol College, Oxford (he omitted this period from his Who’s Who entry). Of his time at Cardiff ‘he mainly remembered writing nineteenth-century history essays for Dorothy Marshall … whom he credited with teaching him to write in the approved Oxford style.’

She probably did little for his spelling and punctuation, since her own was idiosyncratic, as she reveals in one of her books. Dorothy was editor of a social history series entitled Development of English Society to which she contributed a title, Industrial England 1776-1851. In her series editor’s preface she expressed her grateful thanks ‘to my old friend Ethel Tattersall Dodd, whose knowledge of my very individual spelling and punctuation goes back to our days together in the Upper IV, and who, despite this knowledge, gallantly undertook the task of both struggling with my typescript and correcting my proofs.’