Slater, Miss Maud, 23 Lisson Grove. Plymouth
Maud Isabella Mary Slater[1] (1868 – 1963) was born in Plymouth on 26 June 1868, the daughter of Daniel Slater and Ellen Augusta, née Trevor. She had three brothers and three sisters, coming fifth in the family. Daniel Slater was the headmaster of a private school for boys and a Fellow of the College of Preceptors. Before Maud was born he ran a small school in Torrington Place, then moved to Braidwood Terrace, North Hill (1871) where the school was described as a grammar school,[2] and finally settling up beyond the city boundary in Seymour Avenue, Mannamead where he called the school ‘Cheveley Hall School’[3]. In 1881 the school had 13 pupils boarding there, all over the age of 11, a resident assistant master and three resident servants. A prospectus amongst the family papers quotes its attractions as ‘large and well-ventilated schoolrooms … and very large and airy dormitories .. all enjoying a south aspect’.[4]
James Musson has identified the way in which ‘[l]earning dominated the family’ and how the Slaters passionately pursued education for themselves and others, with their learning becoming both ‘teaching as well as a away of earning a living[5]. In the family papers Maud is described as remembering ‘stoning currants at the kitchen table for the weekly plum duff, her Greek grammar propped open in front of her at irregular verbs’.[6] Although her mother, who had been a teacher at her sister’s ‘School for Ladies in Bonn’, could teach her much, including French and German, it was decided that Maud should go away to be taught at the school her aunt, Ellen Trevor, had then opened in England, Leigh Court School in Torquay. Her residence there is recorded in the 1881 census. After her stay in Torquay she came back to Plymouth and attended the Plymouth High School for Girls from which she matriculated in January 1888, and enrolled at the University of London.[7] There is no evidence, however, that she actually took her degree there. She was a student at Plymouth College of Art in 1888-9[8] and seems to have attended university extension classes, as she was a member of the Plymouth and District Students’ Association. She acted as secretary to the Association, resigning in 1895 and being then elected to the committee.[9] She was still a member in the early 1900s when she is noted as having read a paper on ‘Some Romances Chaucer might have Read’ at a Students’ Association meeting.[10]
At some point in the 1890s she and her elder sister Gertrude learned the new skill of typewriting which was becoming indispensable in office life. Maud is listed on the 1901 census as a ‘Typist and Translator’, working on her own account. At that point she was staying with her younger brother Eric, a widower with two small children living in Colchester. She returned to Plymouth later that year and by 1901 was advertising her business; ‘Typewriting promptly and accurately executed. Specifications a specialty. Experienced translator, French, German, Spanish, Italian’.[11] Brother Eric was assistant borough surveyor in Colchester, and it may be that it was while living with him that she developed the skilling of typing specifications.
The address Maud gave for her business was 69 Connaught Avenue, Mutley. This had now become the family home for the Slaters, their daughters and Emily’s sister Edith Trevor, finally retired from teaching. Daniel Slater had himself retired with health problems in 1898, selling up Cheveley Hall School and finding places for the boys at The Hoe Grammar School.[12] He still took some private pupils and taught classes at the Technical School.[13] Gertrude was described in 1901 as a ‘reviewer’ and Edith, the youngest, as a private teacher. Edith had taken a mathematics degree at Cambridge, and offered classes in Mathematics and Mechanics.[14] Maud decided she would work more effectively with offices in the town centre and by 1902 was advertising (‘business letters a specialty’) her work from 14 Old Town Street.[15]
Daniel died in May 1902. The family seem to have remained at 69 Connaught Avenue for a while before moving to 23 Lisson Grove, and they also had a holiday house out on the edge of the moor at Yelverton, which Gertrude and her mother increasingly used as a their home. Maud and Edith, perhaps influenced by her brother Gilbert’s political leanings as a member of the Fabian Society, were drawn to politics and became members of the Plymouth Women’s Liberal Association. In 1902 Maud was treasurer of the branch and Edith the secretary.[16] Maud also spoke on behalf of the WLA: she addressed the Heavitree Men’s and Women’s Liberal Association’s annual meeting in 1903, an audience of about 300 people. In her speech she referred to disparagingly to the Tory government’s recent Education Act but praised them for their new Licensing Act. The scope of this she compared to the legislation in New Zealand, which had been influenced by women voters (women had been able to vote in New Zealand since 1893); thus, she said, ‘women claimed a share in the credit of the Government’s one good deed’.[17]
It was no surprise, therefore, to find that Maud became involved in the movement for women’s suffrage in the UK. She joined the Three Towns Branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) for which she became treasurer,[18] and represented the branch a meeting of the South West Federation in May 1911[19] There is no trace of her on the 1911 census, suggesting she may have been one of those who ‘slept over’ at the house of Annie Ramsay (q.v.) to avoid being counted in the census. She wrote to the newspapers from her business address, by this time Clarence Chambers, 107 Tavistock Road, to join in answering points made by a spokesman for the League Against Women’s Suffrage.[20] She also gave her time that summer to a campaigning tour in Cornwall (the NUWSS encouraged women to give up some of their holiday to the cause of women’s suffrage) and has left an entertaining account of what it felt like to be doing the ‘warm-up’ act for the main speaker in a Cornish village in the rain with a handbell, a sugar box and an initial audience of two boys and a girl.[21]
The principal speaker on that tour of Cornwall was the Rev Hatty Baker (q.v.) one of the first ordained women ministers, and a founder member of the Free Church League for Women’s Suffrage. Maud’s family were members of the Sherwell Congregational Church in Plymouth, and it is likely that this link resulted in an invitation to Hatty Baker to visit Plymouth in her church capacity early in 1912. Slater, Dr Mabel Ramsay (q.v.) and Baker teamed up as a deputation to Plymouth MPs A. Shirley Benn and Waldorf Astor to lobby them about their plans for voting during the debate on the Conciliation Bill and the Reform Bill. Slater wrote an account of the outcome of this as a letter to the Western Daily Mercury.[22]Her final paragraphs show how exasperated she felt: “On being reminded of his vote in favour of the Conciliation Bill of 1911 he [A. Shirley Benn] added that up to the last moment his Parliamentary friends did not know how he would vote on that occasion… Mr Waldorf Astor was equally uncertain as to what his views might be on any franchise question that might arise.’
Slater also found herself laid siege to, on a Saturday afternoon working in Clarence Chambers’ by a Baker and a group of supporters of the Plymouth branch of the Free Church League for Women Suffrage, and consented to become the branch secretary.[23] She then became involved on the branch’s behalf in protesting about the showing of cinema pictures which had a ‘degrading tendency’, seeking action in the interests of children.[24] She also took up the cudgels against Earl Percy who had claimed that the Church Leagues ‘attack the accepted code of morality/, pointing out that the Church Leagues sought to raise the standard for men rather than encourage ‘moral laxity’ in women. Nor did she accept his charge that the pamphlets about the White Slave Trade distributed by the organisations were ‘undesirable reading for girls of 15 or 16 [25]
At the outbreak of war the League were concerned when they heard that the Plymouth Watch Committee wished to seek to re-introduce the Contagious Diseases Acts for the control of prostitution in areas where there were large numbers of troops. In the view of local suffrage activists all the reasons that had led to the repeal of the Acts in 1886 still held good, and the branch prepared to mobilise public support in opposition to any such move. Fortunately the move was quashed by the Prime Minister and the Town Council, and further action was not necessary. The Free Church League branch wrote to thank the Prime Minister for his action, and to warn him that if this position changed – they did not entirely, of course, trust the word of the man who had worked so hard to deny them the vote – they would be ready to take action.[26]
During all this time Slater had continued to run her business, by 1912 known as the Clarence School of Commerce. As well as typing she began to offer ‘shorthand (Pitman’s) taught in half the usual time’ and book-keeping, and made time for classes both in the day and in the evening.[27] When the war began, Slater took Hatty Baker as a partner in the business, which became ‘Misses Slater and Baker’, 107 Tavistock Road.[28] By 1916 the demand for women clerks with office skills had substantially increased. Under the heading ‘War Service for Women’ Slater and Baker advertised a ‘Clerks’ Emergency Course’, citing the ‘unprecedented demand in commercial employment’.[29] They expanded and moved from 107 Tavistock Road to 5 Headland Park, North Hill, and then to 3 Bedford Park Villas.[30] Slater learned a new form of shorthand, Dutton’s, but continued to teach Pitman’s which was widely examined, and offered tuition in it to the Mutley Grammar School boys.[31] It appears that Slater had also taken on some additional war work as her letter to her sister-in-law Violet in July 1918 refers to having to give it up as she had ‘touched her absolute limit’ but regretting that she had to do so as the work ‘which I took over from a man, will lapse again into the hands of another man’.[32] It has not so far been possible to discover what this work comprised.
After the initial grant of parliamentary suffrage to women in 1918 Slater and other NUWSS members were invited to attend a discussion about the possible application of Proportional Representation to Plymouth voting. She and Clara Daymond (q.v.) both spoke in favour of it and indicated other suffrage societies local felt the same.[33] In practice this was taken no further. Slater also became a founder member of the Plymouth Citizens’ Association for which she chaired a meeting in December 1919.[34] She became secretary to a committee constituted in July 1919 to identify how Plymouth could assist the starving people of Europe, the forerunner of the Save the Children Fund.[35]
During the 1920s Slater and Baker retired from their Commercial College and went to live at 4 Horn Cray, Plympton, where they were living in 1939. Slater decided to write the biography of the Slater aunt for whom she had been named ‘Isabella Price – Pioneer’. Isabella was a missionary pioneer who went out to Cameroon with her husband and young children and died there in 1860. This was published in 1931.[36] Baker died in 1947 and Slater on 21 June 1963, leaving just over £430.
Entry created by Julia Neville, January 2019
[1] Family and census information from www.ancestry.co.uk
[2] The term ‘grammar school’ did not imply a charitable foundation, but described the syllabus which was focused on the teaching of the classics.
[3] Best known nowadays for the part it played in the early years of Plymouth Argyle football club, see http://greensonscreen.co.uk/argylehistory.asp?era=1890-1895 , accessed 29 Jan 2019.
[4] Margaret Bonfiglioli and James Musson (eds), Full of Hope and Fear: the Great War Letters of an Oxford Family, Oxford University Press, 2014, xxxi-ii.
[5] Bonfiglioli and Musson, xxxiii.
[6] Bonfiglioli and Musson, xxxiii.
[7] University of London General Register, Part 2, 1899, p. 146.
[8] Her examination success and exhibitions are noted in Western Morning News (WMN) 3 & 19 Sep 1888; 21 Sep 1889.
[9] WMN, 26 Sep 1895.
[10] WMN 6 Oct 1902.
[11] WMN, 7 Dec 1901.
[12] WMN, 31 Dec 1898.
[13] WMN, 21 May 1902.
[14] WMN, 24 Mar 1900.
[15] WMN, 21 Jan 1902.
[16] WMN 17 May 1902.
[17] WMN, 20 Feb 1903.
[18] WDM,. 20 Mar 1912.
[19] Common Cause (CC), 4 May 1911, 11.
[20] WMN, 16 May 1911.
[21] CC, 7 Sep 1911, 377.
[22] WDM, 11 Jan 1912.
[23] WDM, 15 Jan 1912.
[24] WDM 28 Mar 19112.
[25] WDM, 30 Jul 1912.
[26] Free Church Suffrage Times, 1 Nov 1914.
[27] WDM, 17 Jan 1912.
[28] WMN, 14 Sep 1914.
[29] WMN, 20 Sep 1916.
[30] WMN, 31 Aug 1918; 1 Sep 1921.
[31] Maud Slater, letter to sister-in-law Violet, 14 Jul 1918 in Bonfiglioli and Musson, 134. ; , WMN 19 Dec 1919.
[32] Slater, 14 Jul 1918, 134.
[33] WMN, 27 Mar 1918.
[34] WMN, 12 Dec 1918.
[35] WMN, 21Jul 1919.
[36] Maud Slater, Isabella Price – Pioneer, London, Livingstone Press, 1931.