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About St Mary’s

History of St Mary’s School Cambridge

by Sister Gregory IBVM (1993)

Sister Gregory Kirkus

Though the IBVM house in Cambridge was founded from the Bar Convent, York, as late as 1898, we have very little documentary information about its beginnings. There is an oral tradition that the Archbishop of Dublin asked the York nuns to open a hostel for Irish girls coming to Cambridge to train as teachers. It appears that the York community agreed but made scant preparation. The Bishop of Northampton gave his permission for a foundation, on vaguely educational grounds and a house, Furness Lodge, overlooking Parker’s Piece, was purchased. An evasive answer was given to the university authorities when they inquired into the purpose of the purchase.

At this point the story is taken up by a shabby little exercise book with marbled cover and dog–eared leaves. It begins laconically with “Sept 1st 1898. S M Stanislaus, S M Bernard, S M Berchmans, S M Magdalen and S M Aloysius left York by the 6.50 train for Cambridge, arrived at their destination about 11.30. The furniture arrived at 2pm.” An important visitor was Miss Hughes, Principal of the women’s training college that was later, for long, to be known as Hughes Hall. Obviously hopes were high that she would provide students for the projected hostel. At first, all seemed to be well. “Miss Hughes was well satisfied with what she saw on Sept 17” but her co–operation went no further; so the nuns’ plan was doomed to failure.

Furness Lodge

At some point a decision must have been made to abandon the hostel project and to open a school because on Oct 4th the mustard seed was planted and we read: “We admitted two little children as day pupils. Dorothy and Daisy Moore, of Chesterton. They come from 9 o’clock till 1. Dorothy is eight and Daisy five. They are quaint little children.” And it must have been a quaint little school, since there were no more admissions for the rest of the year.

“Tuesday, the Feast of All the Saints. Took our little pupils the Moores to Mass. Afterwards they came back and we had school.”

The nuns had already undertaken the Sunday School at Chesterton and several of the young sisters were studying for examinations.

On 20th November an additional member arrives: “Janet O'Donoghue, Sr M Xavier, came to pursue her studies here.” She was a very young novice in 1898. Some readers may remember her as a wonderful and venerable old nun who died in Cambridge in 1972.

The next term there were four new children, one of them a little boy. But the school grew at a snail’s pace, for the turnover rate was alarming. The two Miss Hardings left in July 1900 and in fact seven others who entered the school in 1899 left at some date during the following year. Was the food unacceptably poor? Were the drains of Furness Lodge not above suspicion? (There were several septic throats.) Or was the teaching below standard? Whatever the causes, whatever the effects, the nuns pressed on courageously. The authoress of the diary in the marbled exercise book, presumably recalled to York, bows herself off the scene with a few pages of “notes for my successor”, which provide some interesting financial information. The day children’s fee is £1.10 per term, though a plan seems to be afoot to raise it to £2.20. Miss Murphy’s salary is £80 per annum, while “Fraulein Grete Mayre is on mutual terms; agreed to pay her expenses back to Vienna when she leaves.”

So there is some kind of secular staff, grossly under–paid, even in terms of real money.

Entrance to the Elms

There is a gap of six years in the Journal but it is a delightful surprise to learn, from elsewhere, that by 1903 Furness Lodge had become too small for the school and community and a larger house was needed. The Elms, a property adjoining the Botanical Gardens, came onto the market and was acquired in 1900 by the nuns, who built an additional storey to it and moved in before the builders moved out.

From 1868 to 1889 the house had belonged to Dr Benjamin Kennedy, the Regius Professor of Greek in the University who was very much in favour of the higher education of women. At a time when no men’s college would allow a woman to attend lectures given within its gates, Dr Kennedy and a handful of like–minded dons repeated their university lectures to the women in their own colleges. These students were always welcome at The Elms, and when they were ready to sit the Tripos examination (from which of course, they were officially excluded), it was in Dr Kennedy’s drawing–room, now the Convent Chapel, that they wrote their papers. In 1881 he made an impressive speech to the Senate, begging it to sanction the admittance of women to the Tripos. “There are no idlers among them”, he assured it, and he went on to appeal to “the honour of the University”. His eloquence and the running of a special train to bring supporters to Cambridge, won the day, and from then on women were examined in classes in the Tripos.

He had been dead some fifteen years when The Elms became the property of the nuns on March 25th 1904, but we hope that something of his generous spirit and confidence in the education of women lingered and still lingers in his old home.

When the Annals re–open in 1910 it is clear that Paston House with its Ruskinesque brick–work has been purchased and the boarding–school at The Elms, with 24 children, is quite separate from the day–school, with 19 pupils. This curious separation was maintained until the early 1930s, when it became unacceptable academically, socially and economically, and the two schools were amalgamated under the name of Paston House. Meanwhile the numbers remained ludicrously small, by modern standards. In 1914 there were still only 30 day–children but what they lacked in quantity they made up in calibre. Then came a phenomenal growth. The 100 mark was reached in 1920 (malicious historical gossip has it that the holiday promised was never given), and by 1930 the number was 200, and still the increase continued till the post–World War II conditions pushed the total up to over 300.

Paston House

Accommodation had to keep pace with numerical growth. The two Houses, Paston and The Elms, were separated by an entrance to the Botanical Gardens and access from one to the other was via the street only. The University turned a deaf ear to entreaties that the school should purchase the intervening area, or build a bridge, or even make a tunnel. At last, in the 1950s, the authorities agreed to exchange the coveted strip for a piece of the convent garden, where a new entrance to the Botanics was made. The nuns became the owners of the area between the two houses, together with a fine specimen of magnolia tree, which they preserved by building the cortile round it. In a burst of construction classrooms and hall and laboratories went up. But these were only material symptoms of a far more important development. The post–war influx of Poles into the area was important, it increased greatly the number of Catholics in the school.

In the 1960s the school became double–streamed and, with breathtaking speed, the boarders increased from 25 to 120, with single-room accommodation built for the sixth–formers and a large house (Mary Ward House) purchased for the middle–school boarders. The Junior School was moved into Babthorpe House, off Hills Road, and so had its own premises.

The 1970s saw further consolidation, with a third stream working its way up the school and occupying yet another new block of buildings. In 1975 Mary Ward House and Babthorpe House, which were both about a mile from Bateman Street, were sold in exchange for Nos 7 and 8 Brookside. These two houses, conveniently near the parent school, provided accommodation for the Junior School and about thirty boarders.

More revolutionary were the changes of the 1980s. In 1984 the school was made into an independent charitable company, with lay Trustees serving in partnership with IBVM sisters. The change of status was signalled by a change of name, to St Mary’s School. Two years later the Junior School was closed and the community moved into Nos 7 and 8 Brookside, leaving all the accommodation in Bateman Street for the school. This was even further increased by the purchase of the neighbouring house, No. 47. The needs of the under–eleven children were met by a consortium of parents who founded St Catherine’s School in a house belonging to the Botanical Gardens, and a happy relationship exists between the two schools.

When the last IBVM Headmistress, Sr Christina Kenworthy–Browne retired in 1989 she handed over to her secular successor a school of 600 with a reputation that ranked high even in the rarefied academic atmosphere of Cambridge. It has been a long road, trodden by many generations of children and nuns, from “satisfying the examiners of the College of Preceptors” (which to young ears sounds like something out of Dickens) to achieving a success rate of over 90% in A–level GCE, and sending some 30 students annually to Oxbridge and other universities.

If the ghosts of Dorothy and Daisy Moore should walk up Bateman Street, they would hardly recognise their old school, but they would have reason to be proud of it.