" Steamboat Ladies": ferried to academic certification 1904-07

A ferry to and from Ireland by Norman Wilkinson, 1905.

‘The journey was a remarkably pleasant one, and the entrance to the exquisite Bay of Dublin forms a fitting conclusion,’ wrote Lilian Haigh of her June 1905 ferry ride over from Holyhead to Ireland. (pp246-7) 

But she was travelling to appropriate a far more interesting ‘conclusion’: a piece of paper that would act as her passport to professional respect - a move towards DEI in education.

Lilian had studied at Somerville College, Oxford (pictured, right) and was one of the 300-odd ‘steamboat’ ladies’. 

Why were they so called, and with slightly mixed feelings?  Because of their reason for briefly hopping over to Ireland in the 1904-07 period. 

These Oxbridge women had already studied for and gained MAs and BAs. Over  250 were from Girton College, Cambridge (pictured left). 

However, women were excluded from formal membership of universities at that time. They had the substance (all the knowledge gained by studying)  but not the bit of confirmatory parchment. 

Steamboat ladies’ solution? They took the opportunity offered by Trinity College Dublin to award them – for a fee of £10, about £1,500 in today’s money –  ad eundem degrees. The term means the honorary granting of academic standing or a degree by one university to another. 

Trinity College Dublin was already friendly to the right sort of ladies. The college (pictured right) had begun admitting 40 female students in January 1904. 

But this degree-granting connection with women who’d graduated from other universities was controversial.

Susan M Parkes, the world expert on the steamboat ladies, explains that at the time some people considered this selling of ‘“the Dublin degree” as a “betrayal” of the women’s cause …

'They argued that instead women] should keep up the pressure and hold out for their own universities to award degrees.‘ (p248).  

Routinely by train and ferry

What was their trip like for those who decided to proceed? In early summer 1905 Lilian Haigh, like the two previous tranches of steamboat ladies in June and December 1904, would have ridden the Irish Mail train from London’s Euston up the North Wales Main Line to Holyhead on the Isle of Angelsey. The rail trip took about eight hours. 

Trains and the linked ferries were operated by the highly successful London & North Western Railway, which had been carrying passengers and mail profitably across to Ireland in a very routinised way for decades. 

Ferry operations had been long-established. Staff were used women passengers, including elite ladies with agency, even with imperious attitudes, who’d already been travelling the world.

The vessels the steamboat ladies used were almost certainly the newish LNWR railway steamers the Anglia, Cambria, Hibernia or Scotia. 

From Anglesey (pictured) some steamboat ladies sailed overnight, so as not to lose time off work. 

The 108-mile crossing to Dublin took eight to twelve hours, depending on conditions.  Passengers were in the hundreds, not thousands. I believe there was a communal Ladies’ Cabin, as on ocean liners, at that time, as well as smaller private cabins. 

Susan M Parkes found that many steamboat ladies sailed with a group of colleagues set on the same goal. They joined ships that were male-majority crewed. One or two stewardesses were routinely employed (see picture of one on the Hibernia.) 

As usual stewardesses, uniformed like maids, attended to any woman passengers  suffering debilitating seasickness en route. I devoutly hope that none of our steamboat ladies needed such ministrations before their big day.

But could any passenger confidently predict that she would have a standard voyage and arrive in fit shape for the award ceremony? No. The sea creates uncertainty. Irish ferries had sunk before, drowning people in gales.  

300 tickets to transformed status

What did this 45-hour-plus excursion, that enabled such an official transformation, cost women?  The total would be at least £50, or £7,600 in today’s money. Costs included: 

• £3 12s 6d to rent a cap, gown and hood
• £27 for the train and boat ticket
• 9s for one night in a Dublin hotel 
• £10 3s for a Batchelor of Arts fee, or £9.16s for an MA (over £1,300 today).  

It was an investment. Could women afford it?  Fortunately, many were from wealthy backgrounds. Graduates already in prestigious jobs were not necessarily well-paid: in 1905 a headmistress got roughly £85 pa. Her ‘Dublin degree’ would therefore cost at least half her annual salary.  

What was the money used for? Trinity spent £10,000 of the controversial fees as the principal funding for a hall of residence for the new women students: Trinity Hall, 3 miles away in Dartry. 

Miss E Margaret Cunningham became the first warden of the hall, 1907- 40. She’d graduated from Girton in 1891 and been a steamboat lady. The picture shows her  in 1911, in black with her academic hood, fifth from left, front row. She's next to Miss Gwynn, the first lady registrar (from 1908), who is in a grey costume with dark collar and white blouse. 

They're outside the Hall, which still stands today. Male students were admitted after 1972.

Destination Dublin

Once arrived at Dublin North Wall Lilian and other steamboat ladies would have taken some refreshment, and perhaps settled their bodies after all the ship’s motion. 

Maybe in a quayside hotel like the London and North Western railway hotel (pictured) they’d have left ther luggage. 

Then they’d have taken a cab south west across the River Liffey towards the college, about 27 minutes walk away. 

Somewhere they dressed in the rented regalia for the ceremony. 

Miss Lucy P Gwynn, the Lady Registrar, (pictured, later) then escorted the steamboat ladies to the College Examination Hall, in an all-female posse that attracted attention. 

These were by no means girlies out strolling in a rudderless way: Emily Penrose, for example, the famous women’s education campaigner, and a steamboat lady of the 1904 vintage,was 46, the distinguished principal of Bedford College and a professor of ancient history. 

There at the Halls  the women attended the long ‘commencements’ ceremony (which also included doctors, such as steamboat lady Dr Ellen McArthur,  and people being awarded honorary degrees). 

At the back of the hall (pictured) the male undergraduates sometimes barracked. They were ‘keeping us gay with their wit. It was a lively scene, but not as distinctly Irish as I had hoped,‘ wrote up-beat Lilian. 'Banter' in the college tyically included jokes about 'Spinsters of Science' and 'Mistresses of Arts.' 

Afterwards, the male Provost usually hosted them for luncheon in the newly-desegregated Dining Hall (pictured). (The first female provost was elected only in 2021). Then women posed on the steps for a photo. 

Afterwards, divesting themselves of the vestments, most women quickly turned back to home. Women undergrads had a 6pm curfew.

It’s not known how many of the steamboat ladies stayed for a few more hours or days, acting on Lilian’s advice ‘not to leave without sightseeing’. 

Voyage over, the steamboat ladies returned to, or went on to, successful careers, especially as leaders in education. 

Emily Penrose became Principal of Somerville 1907-26. She is not recorded as having sailed again but I suspect that this is just an administrative error. 

Progressing after the disembarkation

It’s no accident that the Somerville Suffrage Society was founded at the steamboat ladies’ time, in 1907, and the Oxford Women Students’ Society for Women’s Suffrage in 1911.  Educated women wanted respect and rights. Some women won the vote in 1918; all women were awarded it in 1928.  

Painting by FW Helps, 1922
Somerville College.

Oxford began awarding degrees to women in 1920; Cambridge in 1947. Emily Penrose (pictured) was one of the five Oxford college principals to have an MA conferred upon them by Oxford University Convocation in October 1920. 

What the voyage meant personally

There had been women at Oxford colleges since 1879 and at Cambridge Colleges since 1869. Emily Penrose had completed her course in 1889, fifteen years before making the Dublin trip. She may have just regarded the trip as irksome. It was a poor use of time for a busy and established professional, and s trip only necessitated because of conservative sexism.

Somerville graduate Lilian Haigh’s details are unknown. We may never know what the journey really meant to her.  In 1905 Girton graduate Ellen McArthur,  (pictured) was the first steamboat lady to be awarded the 'Dublin' D.Litt. The follwoing years she was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS). 

By contrast, one of the very first steamboat ladies in June 1904, Sophie May Nicholls, had graduated from Girton in 1892. She was already climbing Welsh mountains with male mountaineers by 1897 (see picture), the year that Cambridge women took action. By 1911 she had been to Palestine as one of early Frances Mary Buss Travelling Scholars. 

Sophie Nicholls  (not identified) and climbing party outside the iconic Pen-y-Gwryd climbing inn,  Llanberis, 1897, seven years before she became  a steamboat lady. 

An acclaimed traveller,  Sophie was an early female member of the Royal Geographical Society in 1914 (to which women had first sought admission in 1847). Misogynistic institutions and a mere ferry trip over to Dublin would have been a very minor matter to her. 

I myself feel very proud to have two slight connections to this steamboat lady, even though my principles probably wouldn’t have let me buy a ‘Dublin degree.’ 

1. Pioneer of women's education, Frances Mary Buss (pictured), Sophie’s travel funder, was my godmother’s great aunt. 

2. And I have worked in that Pen-y-Gwryd hotel, outside which Sophie is pictured. Wearing a uniform like the stewardesses on her ship I’ve mopped those PYG steps. And I surely cleaned the room Sophie used 70 years earlier, before I went off for an afternoon's mountain climbing, in her Snowdonia footsteps. 

Thanks to the efforts of pioneers like her, gender discrimination lessenned. I gained all my degree certificates without having to go to Ireland and spend half a year’s pay on it.  I am an FRHistS like Ellen - no prob. 

And my education later meant that during conferences I've dined in Trinity College’s once-segregated dining hall, as Lilian, Emily and Ellen did too. No prob. 

There is not yet a plaque to those blue-hooded steamboat ladies, to my knowledge.

References:

Susan M Parkes, ‘Trinity College Dublin and the Steamboat ladies’ in Mary R Masson and Deborah Simonton, eds, Women in Higher Education, Past Present and Future, Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen, 1996, pp244-250. 

The Cunningham and Gwynn picture is from: