Tierney, Miss Caroline, 10 Tamar Terrace, Stoke, Devonport
Caroline Amelia Tierney[1] (1862 – 1919) was born in the first quarter of 1862 in West Teignmouth, the fourth daughter of Phillip and Georgina Tierney. Georgina was the daughter of Captain George Rivers Lake, Royal Artillery. Phillip was employed in Her Majesty’s Coast Guard Service, which transferred to the management of the Admiralty during the 1850s. The service retained the policy of regularly posting officers to different stations and the birth places of Caroline and her siblings (there were seven children in all) reflect postings in Plymouth, Dorset, Kent, Teignmouth and finally back to Plymouth where Phillip retired as Chief Officer in the 1880s.
At the 1881 census the family were living at 58 Union Street. The four girls were all described as shop assistants. By 1884, however, they had moved to the larger premises of 160 Union Street, where Georgina junior, eldest of the daughters, was running G.E. Tierney’s Fancy Repository, selling jewellery and toys.[2] Union Street had been set out as a modern main road leading from Devonport into Plymouth and was well travelled by seamen arriving into the port and looking for somewhere to spend their money. Although they frequented the pubs and entertainment venues they would also have been interested in spending their money on presents for the family.
Although Caroline continued to live with her parents and sisters she turned from shop work to teaching. At the 1891 census she was listed as a ‘governess’, which was a term that could have applied as much to an assistant in a school as to someone teaching in a family home. In her obituary she is said to have been associated with Stoke Public Girls’ School since 1883.[3] The Stoke Public Girls’ School had its origins in a charitable foundation for a school for poor boys and girls, set up in the early nineteenth century. After the 1876 Education Act it was reorganised and became the Stoke Public Higher School with separate boys’ and girls’. A new endowment enabled extra places to be created for 80 girls, and this was in use by 1881.
In 1901 Tierney was listed as an ‘elementary schoolmistress’, but in fact she had been headmistress of the Stoke Public Girls’ School since at least 1893.[4] This was the date when the school leaving age was raised to eleven, and more classes were needed. One specific part of Tierney’s job was to develop post elementary education for girls, including entering them for public examinations such as the Cambridge Local Examinations and those of the College of Preceptors, although not, of course, at the expense of ‘cultivating their moral nature and studying good manners’.[5] Previously it seems that the only national examinations for which the girls were entered were the Queen’s Scholarships enabling them to attend teacher training colleges. Tierney changed this: the first student successes reported in 1895 and the proportion of girls entering for such examinations increasing.[6] By 1900 there were 330 girls at the school (but over 600 boys). She also took the lead in establishing additional funded scholarships through money raised at sales of work and public entertainments. That in 1900 was so successful she was able to provide for four scholarships for 1901 and 1902 and still fund one scholarship for the boys.[7]
It is unclear whether Tierney had received formal training before starting her teaching career. She herself, however, probably became conscious of the importance for future appointments of a formal qualification and determined to take the external examinations of the University of St Andrews which would provide her with the title of LLA, Lady Literate in the Arts, a qualification of degree level.[8] She is first referred to as LLA in 1900.[9] She had been for many years involved in the Plymouth Shakspere (sic) Society, reading, performing and discussing papers, which would have given her the habit of critical study.[10]
Education in Devonport received a considerable shake-up in the early years of the twentieth century. The Stoke Public Schools had been run by a committee of management, which used a combination of charitable endowment, government grants and fees to fund the operation of the school. The Education Act 1902 brought all elementary education under the control of a local education authority, the board supervised by Devonport Borough Council. That body sent two representatives to join four foundation managers in a new management committee. The accommodation was unsatisfactory, but even so there was a waiting list to gain admission to the girls’ school.[11] In 1906 the Stoke Public Schools transferred entirely to the Devonport Education Authority. New schools were to be built in Keppel Place, and these opened in 1909 as the Stoke Higher Elementary Schools for children aged 12 and over. They formed part of an integrated system of schools in Devonport: elementary, higher elementary, secondary, and technical.[12]
Tierney expressed her ‘peculiarly upsetting emotions’ at the last meeting in the old schools: ‘She thought with great pleasure of the grand building they were going to have, but she also felt a great deal of regret at parting with the dear shabby old building they had now’.[13] She was appointed to the new post of headmistress of the Stoke Higher Elementary School, at a salary of £200 p.a. (The head master received £300.)
In the meantime, Tierney’s parents had both died: Georgina in 1895 and Phillip in 1897. The three single girls, Georgina, Mary Ann and Caroline, stayed on at 160 Union Street until 1904, when Georgina decided to sell the fancy goods business and retire.[14] They moved to a ten-room house at 10 Tamar Terrace, close to the school. In 1911 Georgina, who filled in the census form, recorded herself and Mary Ann, both living on private means, and one resident servant. Georgina also wrote across the form. ‘The rest of the family have left the house for the night to avoid being counted. As they do not ‘count’ they refuse to be counted.’
As that note indicates, Caroline was a strongly committed suffragist. On one occasion she spoke in support of women’s suffrage at the Three Towns Parliamentary Debating Society,[15] and she also supported Miss Frances Sterling at a National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) public meeting, where she said that …’there was now no need for further evidence that women wanted the vote, but even if they did not want it they must have it. The fight for suffrage had done women much good. It had increased a spirit of comradeship The time had now come for the co-operation of all societies.’[16]
Tierney’s suffrage support is most clearly shown in accounts of what she said at professional meetings. She was a member of the Devonport Head Teachers’ Association, which she chaired in 1911,[17] the Plymouth Teachers’ Guild,[18] and also of the Plymouth, Devonport and District branch of the National Union of Teachers. It was in the latter forum that women’s suffrage was debated, taking the guise of sending to the national annual conference motions expressing sympathy with female colleagues for being debarred from exercising the Parliamentary vote. This was debated in February and in October 1912. At the latter meeting Tierney, who proposed the resolution said ‘I could talk till tomorrow morning my convictions are so strong’.[19] The motion was carried.
When the First World War broke out the school buildings were requisitioned almost at once as a Red Cross hospital to support Devonport Military Hospital in the care of wounded soldiers. Classes were first held all over the borough, then at a neighbouring elementary school during the afternoons only, and finally in different sets of Sunday School premises in Ford.[20] It must have been a taxing time for Tierney and her staff. The school did not move back into its own premises until September 1919. By that time, however, Tierney was ill, and compelled to offer her resignation.[21] She died in November 1919 and her funeral service at St Michael’s, Stoke was attended by all the girls and staff. She was 57, and had been at the school for 36 years.[22] She was buried in the Plymouth Old Cemetery, and her estate, for which her executor was her brother Samuel, retired master mariner, was valued at over £1170.
Entry created by Julia Neville, January 2019
[1] Census and family information from www.ancestry.co.uk
[2] The property is described when the freehold was sold in 1901 as ‘shop and premises let to Miss Tierney, viz, basement kitchen etc., shop, sitting room and drawing room and 5 bedrooms over’ (Western Morning News (WMN) 31 August 1901).
[3] WMN, 14 Nov 1919.
[4] She appears as headmistress in the account of the prize-giving in December 1893 (WMN, 27 Dec 1893).
[5] Western Daily Mercury (WDM), 23 December 1895.
[6] WDM, 1 Mar 1895; 23 Dec 1895.
[7] WMN, 28 Nov & 21 Dec 1900; 12 Dec 1903.
[8] Described on the University of St Andrews website, see https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/library/specialcollections/aboutus/faqs/ Accessed 26 Jan 2019.
[9] WMN, 29 Sep 1900.
[10] WMN 25 Oct 1888 is the first mention of her as one of the readers of Macbeth. She later became secretary (WMN 29 Sep 1900) and vice-president (WMN 19 Sep 1902) of the Society.
[11] WMN, 12 Dec 1903.
[12] WMN, 3 Sep 1909.
[13] WMN, 31 Jul 1908.
[14] Her stock in trade was advertised for sale on 9 Jan 1904.
[15] WMN, 1 Dec 1909.
[16] WMN, 9 Jul 1910.
[17] WMN, 27 Nov 1911.
[18] WDM, 28 Feb 1912. In the discussion she maintained that it was ’impossible to teach children without religion’.
[19] WDM, 10 Feb & 26 Oct 1912.
[20] Brian Moseley Old Devonport, http://www.olddevonport.uk/Stoke%20Public%20Higher%20Elementary%20School.htm . Accessed 24 Jan 2019.
[21] WMN, 31 Oct 1919.
[22] WMN, 14 Nov 1919.