Jane Suffield (cont.)

Description:The Suffields were nonconformists, and believed in the importance of education for women as well as men. Birmingham’s free school, King Edward’s, only taught boys, and pupils had to be recommended by a governor from the Church of England. Many of Birmingham’s town councillors were nonconformists, and they began to demand a wider provision of education from King Edward’s. In the 1830s the King Edward’s Foundation set up several elementary and middle schools in the town for girls as well as boys. By the late 1870s when the council were providing basic education through the Board Schools they asked King Edward’s to offer secondary education to a wider range of pupils. Jane’s older brother Roland was a pupil at King Edward’s at this time[4]. In 1883 several grammar schools were opened. The old boys’ grammar school in New Street became a High School, with a High School for girls next door.

Jane took the entrance exam for the High School in November 1884 and passed, one of twenty ‘Pupils Admitted from the Examination held on the 25 day of November 1884’. She was a fee-payer, ten shillings entrance fee, then nine pounds tuition fee per annum. Miss Creak, the new Head Mistress, aimed to enable girls to have a good scientific, as well as artistic, education. A forceful woman, she did not wish to see the girls associating with boys. Her influence was such that even brothers and sisters had to separate one hundred yards from the two schools so they would not arrive together! Jane did well at school; she was the first pupil to attend extra physiology classes at Mason College, the forerunner of Birmingham University. The professor was concerned that Jane should not meet any male students; if a class of male students was arriving she had to leave hastily by the back stairs.[5]

Jane continued to attend classes at Mason College after she left school in 1892. She began teaching at one of the King Edward’s Girls Grammar Schools in Bath Row.[6] During this time she was taking a degree in botany and geology by correspondence course from the University of London. This was often the only choice for women who wished to study at university; there were very few places for women at Oxford or Cambridge, or even at the new redbrick universities such as Bristol or Durham. It also meant they could live at home.

After gaining her degree in 1895 Jane moved to Liverpool in 1896, to develop the teaching of science to girls in the High School there. In 1899 she returned to Birmingham to take up her post at Bath Row again; the only teacher on the staff fortunate enough to have been able to take a degree. J.R.R. Tolkien remembered that she had coached him in geometry for the King Edward’s School admissions exam – he gained a place in June 1900.