Those who had often the advantage of hearing Miss Beale speak, either in general addresses to present or past pupils, or in the more regular course of literature lessons, soon learned that there were certain heroic names which had for her an almost romantic fascination. Among those of great women who influenced her imagination are specially to be remembered St. Hilda, St. Catherine of Siena, la MÈre AngÉlique, Mme. Guyon. Of these the most dominant, the most inspiring was that of the great Northumbrian abbess, known to those whom she taught and ruled by the name of ‘Mother,’ not by virtue of her office, but on account of her signal piety and grace.[60] Hilda, the earnest student who ‘had been diligently instructed by learned men, who so loved order that she immediately began to reduce all things to a regular system.’ Hilda, the patron of the first English religious poet, ‘who obliged those under her to attend much to the reading of the Holy Scriptures; who taught the strict observance of justice and other virtues, particularly of peace and charity.’[61] This great Hilda and her work were to Dorothea Beale not merely romantic names, they were an ideal, an inspiration. And when the due time came, though for the sake of Miss Newman she hesitated for a moment over the alternative title of St. Margaret’s Hall, the name of St. Hilda was the one she chose to grace her own foundations. There are, possibly, members of the Ladies’ College who felt a pang of envy when the Students’ House became St. Hilda’s College. They could have borne to exchange the prim early Victorian title bestowed by the godfathers of 1856 for this more inspiring name. There is, however, consolation in the thought that the Ladies’ College is still free to adopt the name of its second founder.

St. Hilda’s Hall, as it was at first called, was formally opened on November 27, 1886; but its real building was a much longer process, even if dated only from Miss Margaret Newman’s death at the close of 1877. Miss Beale thought much and anxiously how she could best lay out the money which she and her staff and some friends had given in order that Miss Newman’s work might be carried on and enlarged. She advised with a few who cared for education and for the College. Among those who helped and counselled were Miss Soames, who subscribed largely to St. Hilda’s, and Mr. Brancker, some of whose letters on the subject remain. If there seems now to be little that is original in the suggestions and plans discussed by Miss Beale and Mr. Brancker, it is because they were to a great extent pioneers, and among the first to bring about a real system for attaining the educational objects they had at heart. In 1878 Mr. Brancker wrote:—

In a second letter on the same subject Mr. Brancker said:—

Eventually the ideas expressed in these letters were carried out in the arrangement of St. Hilda’s, which became not only a home for pupils who could not afford the normal boarding fees, but also a residence for senior students who needed more liberty than they could have in the other houses. By this means the house was put on a self-supporting basis. Miss Beale could have borne with no other. The Loan Fund, up to this time, had been the means of assisting over a hundred students. Miss Beale now asked a few personal friends to support it, pointing out that such a means of help was far better than any system of scholarships, which she never ceased to dislike, and against which she continually spoke and wrote. Her chief objections to scholarships have been already noted.[62] She was moreover opposed to the principle of material giving involved in the system. She only cared, at any time, to give what would embrace and ennoble character. She thought it best that people should pay for advantages received, thought they would value them more, thought it made girls more careful and self-denying when first the management of money came into their own hands, to feel that it was not their own to do as they pleased with. A mere gift seemed to her like a dead thing compared with the money which, lent and returned and then lent to others, was thus used over and over again. Yet the want of response to appeals for the Loan Fund must have been partly due to a difference of opinion on its method rather than to want of sympathy with Miss Beale’s aims. There are many who feel an objection to saddling with a loan a young teacher starting on her work, or who recognise that an unpaid loan may help to lower the standard in money affairs, and on that account shrink from giving help in this way. There are few indeed who could lend money so successfully as Miss Beale could, because there are few who could so successfully command repayment. Of the first £500 advanced by the Loan Fund, £495 was repaid in a very few years. The pressure she would exercise for repayment sometimes led to the wrong notion that she cared for money for its own sake. She had at all times great skill in wringing the utmost use out of a sum of money to promote those ends for which she lived; but in the ordinary commonplace sense she was indifferent to money and the things for which it is usually exchanged. Her own personal life was as bare of luxury when she was a rich woman as it was when her capital was reckoned in hundreds only. But she did care deeply for character, and anxiously avoided all forms of easy generosity which might injure those she sought to help.

For several years before a turf was cut for St. Hilda’s College, Miss Beale was, as she would herself have expressed it, building it: student teachers were being trained in the College, and in 1881 one of these passed the Cambridge Examination in the Theory and Practice of Education. Gradually she gathered an increasing body of students in a separate house—a house which was as unlike as any could possibly be to the beautiful home which was shortly to be opened. She waited year after year for money with which to build without interrupting the work she had begun in assisted education, and for the reasons named made no public appeal for it. It was enough, she maintained, to state the real needs—to show the value of a work by the way it was done—and thus let it make its own appeal for support. She had a horror of plant which might be a mere empty shell, or which in its establishment might become a diversion of energy from spiritual work. She felt this especially in the matter of church building, as may be seen in the following extract from a letter: ‘What I disapproved of was the amount of begging for the Cathedral. I do not disapprove of it, but I think you know what I felt. However, the Bishop will do all he can to make it a strong spiritual centre. I can never get over the feeling of spiritual destitution at one very beautiful cathedral.’ It was also, perhaps less consciously, a principle not to take money except from those who were willing for her to carry out her own ideas. She wrote to one friend in 1888:—

And again in 1884 to one who helped her Oxford scheme:—

As the time to begin the actual erection of the house drew near she had no exultation over the fulfilment of a dream. Yet in the beginning of August 1885, surrounded by young teachers from her own and other schools drawn together for a Retreat and a brief educational conference, her mind was naturally full of that dream. Some few of her own thoughts about it she wrote down; such as the following, with their characteristic heading:—

The first stone of St. Hilda’s College was quietly laid by Canon Medd (one of the trustees and a member of the Ladies’ College Council) in 1884. The opening, which took place on November 27, 1885, was far more dignified than that its illustrious parent had known in 1856.

‘The ceremony of opening the institution,’ so ran the account in the Cheltenham Examiner, ‘which was performed by the Bishop of the diocese, took place at three o’clock, and was attended by a large and influential company, who assembled in the study, a spacious—but on this occasion none too spacious—apartment on the ground floor.’ Among those present were the Dean of Winchester,[63] then Chairman of the College Council, who conducted the short service, the late Bishop of Ely, and many of the clergy of the town, besides the friends and benefactors of St. Hilda’s. On entering the study the eye was caught at once by the words which Miss Beale quoted so often that they seemed like the motto of her work: ‘Knowledge puffeth up, but charity buildeth up.’ Here, in this ‘Godly Place,’ as he called the house, the Bishop of Gloucester, who since 1875 had been both nominally and actually Visitor of the Ladies’ College, gave an address full of sympathy for the ideals of the founder.

Thus the first resident Training College for teachers, other than elementary, was planned, and built, and opened. In order to make its position more permanent it was constituted into a separate College with a Council of its own. In 1886 a statue of St. Hilda was presented and placed in the hall. On unveiling it, Miss Beale spoke of the Saint’s life, and especially of her work as a teacher. She concluded with a thought, the deeper for the personal touch in it, of memory of what she had had to bear in the past, and indeed in later years also, of misconception and misrepresentation.

St. Hilda’s College was scarcely built and opened before it was necessary to enlarge it by adding a new wing. It was not until this had been done that Miss Beale felt free to devote herself to another foundation, which also was to bear the name of the sainted Abbess.

As early as the year 1882 Miss Beale, attracted by the increasing facilities offered to women by the elder universities, had purchased three acres of land in north Oxford. These she retained for building uses should the right moment or a definite reason for such a purpose occur. But no one showed much sympathy with the scheme, there was no offer of money, and for long much of her own capital was absorbed in St. Hilda’s, Cheltenham. Impulsive to a fault as she often was, Miss Beale could school herself to wait. After five years came an opportunity of purchasing a ready-made college in Dr. Child’s beautiful house on the Cherwell. It seemed well to accept this, and begin there the new house of education.

There were many reasons why Miss Beale allowed so long a time to elapse between her purpose and her act. Her own ideas and her aims for her Hall at Oxford shaped themselves but gradually. Somerville College[64] and Lady Margaret Hall were still in their first youth. Miss Beale’s scheme seemed uncalled for where there were already so many workers for the cause of women’s education in the field. Her educational experience had been different from that of those whose minds had developed among university surroundings; her methods were unacademic, unconventional. Consequently there were some to warn her as she prepared to take her new step: ‘The University may easily receive a shock from which it will take long to recover.’

It may well be asked even now, as it was often asked at the time, why Miss Beale wanted to come to Oxford at all, and particularly while she was uncertain of the value of University Examinations for women. But she valued even more than the certificate gained by taking schools the atmosphere of Oxford. She saw that the students of St. Hilda’s, Cheltenham, missed this. When she founded that institution she had written of it, that she hoped it ‘would be a Hall similar to the Halls at Oxford and Cambridge.’ Now she felt the need of what only the older universities could give. She hoped her new house might become a place of intellectual enlargement and refreshment such as Oxford could best supply to some who had already begun their work of teaching, and who needed new thoughts and inspiration, more time for thought, a higher intellectual standard. She thought that a year at Oxford could supply that feature in education which is sometimes more developed at home.

Yet these reasons were secondary. The purchase of three acres of ground at Oxford was a definite result of her own suffering of mind in 1882. As she emerged from that she at once began to build in vision a house where teachers should be established in the faith, where they should learn to feel that their calling was not to do mere journeyman work, but to deal with the deep problems of life.

Finally, it may be added that, whether conscious of it or not, she could not keep herself out of the great movement which was enabling women to share with men many of the incomparable advantages of University life, she had also her own conception of what University life might do for women, and by means of a College at Oxford for her own College at Cheltenham. For Cheltenham the connection would be of great value. Seeing all that might be won by a well-placed move, she planned that move, waited, then made it at the right moment. ‘I bewail your news,’ wrote an Oxford friend to whom she communicated the fact that St. Hilda’s was about to be opened, ‘and disclaim all responsibility for your mistake.’ Miss Beale opened her Hall and begged the students to accept the words Non frustra vixi as their motto, that being the thought which the ammonite at the feet of St. Hilda’s statue now suggested to her.

In October 1893 seven students took up their residence at St. Hilda’s. Mrs. Burrows, who had had a College boarding-house at Cheltenham, came to be head of the new Hall, assisted by her daughter, who had been a student at Lady Margaret Hall. The house was formally but quietly opened on November 6 by the Bishop of the diocese, Dr. Stubbs, who placed himself at Miss Beale’s disposal for all arrangements. ‘I will keep,’ he wrote, ‘November 6 free for Miss Beale, but she must let me hear what, when, and how what is to be done’; and to Miss Beale, ‘You do not want me to bring robes on the 6th, do you? A line to reassure me would be grateful.’

On the occasion of the opening, after the little service conducted by the Dean of Winchester, the Bishop of Oxford spoke a few ‘grave and weighty words’ on the duty of ‘self-culture of the whole mind, soul, and spirit.’ The Dean, who thanked him for his address, said that ‘the new venture of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College was by no means so ambitious as the Bishop seemed to think.’ He spoke of the way in which it might prepare women to be of real service in their generation, and added: ‘One cannot think of this opening day for the Oxford St. Hilda’s without strong emotions of gratitude and hope. This is the crown and highest result of all that work for women’s education which has been carried on under Miss Beale’s wise rule at Cheltenham these many years past; the College, with its varieties of activity, and its eight hundred students, justly claims to be represented here in the home of highest education.’

Among the friends gathered for this opening ceremony was the founder of the Ladies’ College, Cheltenham, Canon Bellairs. He welcomed this house in Oxford, though he would have named it differently.

After five years, St. Hilda’s, Oxford, was recognised by the Association for the Education of Women in Oxford as St. Hilda’s Hall. Miss Beale finally, in 1900, connected it with St. Hilda’s, Cheltenham, by presenting it to the Association of that College.

That Miss Beale was fully alive to changes that must come in the course of time to such an institution as St. Hilda’s Hall, and could be content to see her own personal wishes set aside in everything that did not affect the essential life of the place, is clear from the following letter to Mrs. Wells in January 1903:—

The year marked by this crown and result of labour was saddened by the death of Miss Catherine Newman at Mayfield House. It was a death which caused not only personal sorrow, but extreme perplexity and loss to all connected with the Mission. They found themselves at the end of four years’ trial of their scheme without a head, with a scattered band of workers, and an insanitary house. No one felt the sorrow of it all more than Miss Beale; no one was more courageous in meeting it. The necessary, difficult, and toilsome work which was the result of the crisis did not indeed fall to her share, but to that of some members of the committee on whom the responsibility specially pressed. But such difficulties to be met, such a death for a cause, were exactly what roused Miss Beale to feel the worth of it as she had never done before.

A small untiring sub-committee was formed, with Mrs. Batten as secretary, to re-arrange the work. The cost of efficient drainage operations was so heavy that at first it seemed better to seek a new house for the Settlement than to undertake such a great expense. A long search in the neighbourhood for such a house proved fruitless. It therefore became a question whether the Guild members should move their work from the place they had deliberately chosen at a large general meeting, or go to the expense required for making Mayfield House fit for habitation. However, an appeal to the surveyor resulted in the cost of the drainage work being thrown upon the landlord, who consequently made harder terms for his tenants. The question whether to stay or go came before the Guild in 1894, and a vote for continuing the work at Mayfield House was passed by a large majority. After an interval of some months the house was re-opened under a new Lady Warden, Miss Corbett,—no Cheltenham worker having been found to undertake it.

In her first report Miss Corbett was able to show a full complement of workers. There was no falling off, but in less than two years it became evident that a more complete change must be made. The Oxford workers, who by a temporary arrangement lived at first in Mayfield House, had now a prosperous Settlement of their own—St. Margaret’s—in the very same square as Mayfield House. This Settlement of the Ladies’ Branch of the Oxford House could not well be in any other neighbourhood. It was seen to be ludicrous that two large communities of women workers should concentrate their energies on one small corner of the vast field of London work. Added to this, the high rent and rates of Mayfield House pointed to the need of a change, and at the Guild meeting of 1896 it was definitely proposed to move either to East Ham or Lambeth. Finally, however, Shoreditch was chosen, a district having sore needs, and near enough to Bethnal Green to enable those members of the Settlement engaged there in Board School management, charity organisation, and other extra parochial work still to carry it on.

Then came the question of a house. There was none. It was clearly necessary to build, but for so large an undertaking the reserve fund was insufficient. Miss Beale, always averse to begging for money, refused to make any definite appeal for charity, but as a happy inspiration, the idea came to her that the Guild should meet the difficulty with the same kind of means used by Mrs. Grey in starting high schools in 1874. This idea took shape in February 1897. Miss Verrall, who had been Treasurer of the Settlement from the beginning, sent out notices to members of the Guild to inquire whether shares for £3000 would be taken up, and a ready response was given, all the shares being quickly appropriated within a fortnight. This, which seems to be a mere business transaction, was really a great deal more. It was rather a channel for interest and help which had been so far unable to force their way freely. The money was subscribed in the form of debenture stock at three per cent., repayable at the end of eighty years. £3800 was subscribed within a fortnight by 310 subscribers. A large part came from women to whom the sacrifice of control or recovery of the capital made it practically a gift. To most the yearly-paid few shillings of interest meant little in comparison with a few pounds available for immediate expenditure. Of the money subscribed, over £400 has now been released by gift from the holders. Other holders have authorised the Council of St. Hilda’s East to retain their interest. This brings in about £30 a year. The transaction was a fine example of Miss Beale’s use of this world’s goods, as means to great ends, and a fine instance of the response she could command from those she had led to her own point of view. Generous aid came also from Mr. Dutton, whose sister was an old Cheltonian,[65] and who undertook all the legal business gratuitously; also from the honorary architect, Mr. Philip Day, the husband of an old pupil, who volunteered his services for the new house. The workers found temporary quarters during the building, which took less than a year; and on April 26, 1898, the house was opened by Dr. Creighton, the Bishop of London, under the name of St. Hilda’s, Shoreditch. For Miss Beale remained faithful to the name and all the ideas it implied for her. On the letter of a friend who wrote, ‘Could not the new house be called Cheltenham House or some such, binding it to the College? It would be better than a picturesque saint’—she wrote, ‘I disagree.’ Mrs. Reynolds, an old pupil, became head of the Settlement during the busy time of furnishing and organisation of work in a new centre. A year later she was succeeded by another old pupil, Miss Bruce, the present Lady Warden, who had worked in the Settlement from the first. Since that time the house has twice been enlarged. The growth of the Settlement, as its beginning had been, was marked by the loss through death of an enthusiastic worker when Mrs. Moyle, who was for a time its secretary, died in July 1899.

As the permanence of the Settlement became assured, and the interest of both past and present pupils increased, being augmented by the organisation of shares, and by the formation of St. Hilda’s Association, Miss Beale’s own interest in the work grew. She regarded St. Hilda’s East less as a centre of help for the poor than as a place of training for workers. In this aspect it appealed to her as rightly an integral part of the work of the College. In the year 1898, which she said might be called for the College an annus mirabilis, she was able to point to the three institutions bearing the name of St. Hilda, each firmly established, flourishing, and full of promise of future usefulness.

‘This year St. Hilda’s, enlarged from six to sixty students, is full and free from debt.

‘This year the link with the University of Oxford, so early formed, has been made permanent by St. Hilda’s, Oxford, becoming a Hall of the University.

‘Above all, this year St. Hilda’s East has been built by the spontaneous co-operation of past and present girls, and this has specially cheered us, that those who have left us for other spheres, the Heads of other great Schools, still stretch out their hands to us, work with us in the Guild and the Mission, and the old ties are not broken.’