Caroline Cassandra Graveson (1874 - 1958)

Born 1874 in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England, United Kingdom

Ancestors

Died 1958 at about age 84 in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom

Biography

Caroline Graveson is Notable.

Caroline Graveson was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England.

Caroline Cassandra Gravesdon 1874-1958 THE MISTRESS OF METHOD

British educator and Quaker who was born in Cheshire Birkenhead 1874. She was the 4th child of Michael Graveson and Hannah Holme^[1]

She lived with her parents and siblings in Cheshire where her father had a grocery store.

Liscard Town Centre

Caroline Cassandra Graveson was born into a Quaker family on 16th June 1874, and was one of six children of Michael T Graveson and his second wife Hanna. Michael was a widower with no children when he remarried. They ran a grocer’s shop in Liscard Village, Birkenhead near Liverpool.

It must have been a successful enterprise because the 1881 census shows Mr. Graveson was able to employ an 18-year-old apprentice grocer, George Cooper, who was living with them along with two servant girls aged 16 and 21. ^[2]

1) She was the first woman’s vice-principal of Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. 2) Caroline Graveson’s appointment as women’s Vice Principal of Goldsmiths’ College in 1905 received national newspaper exultation. Note: During the Great War, Goldsmiths became virtually an all-woman’s place with most men students and staff joining the armed forces. By 1916 the roll call of students was 268 women to 20 men.

It was a pioneering training college centre for educating teachers and also the first to be co-educational and non-denominational. This meant it could admit students with non-Christian backgrounds such as Jews and Muslims, and it partnered with the prestigious Art School and thriving adult evening educational programme started by the Goldsmiths Company’s Technical and Recreative Institute in 1891. The University of London- the most important and influential university in Great Britain outside Oxford and Cambridge also helped with the running of this programme.

The Goldsmiths Company’s Technical and Recreative Institute was founded in 1891 by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, a medieval guild for goldsmiths, silversmiths and jewelers'. It later became part of the University of London and is now known as Goldsmiths, University of London^[3]

Caroline remained one of the most important women in British higher education during the Edwardian period, through the First World War and continuing through the 1920s and 30s until her retirement at the end of 1934.

Caroline was one of the first women members of the British Psychological Society and spoke fluent German because she had been a student at German universities for two years between 1896-98.

She wrote several books during her career and was also an international traveler with trips to Algiers in 1913 and the USA in 1938.

Caroline in modern terms could be described as a quiet feminist radical who traveled the country attending speech days at state secondary schools to encourage girls to be ambitious. She wanted them to challenge the public-school domination of the professions and elite institutions.

Photographs and written accounts reveal a person who was physically small, slightly built, who did not dress or live ostentatiously, but had a voice described as ‘superb’ with perfect elocution. 'This enchanting voice' could, without the microphone, penetrate to the remotest corner of the Great Hall of Goldsmiths’ College.’

Caroline Graveson was also a pioneer of progressive education that baulked at over-disciplinary and retributive regimes of punishment:

Swarthmore Lecture is one of a series of lectures, started in 1908, addressed to Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). and in 1937 Caroline spoke on Religion and Culture^[4]

Caroline and her three sisters all pursued professional teaching careers and remained unmarried as mentioned in their father's probated will. ^[5]

It may be the case that these impressive women decided that their commitment to public service and teaching was far too important to sacrifice on the altar of romantic entanglements and marriage. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries women faced a discriminatory marriage bar in the teaching profession which meant they had to surrender their careers on marriage.

Caroline’s education and professional career paralleled the immense struggle for equality and the right to vote by the women’s suffragist and suffragette movements.

Caroline was educated at the famous Friends boarding School, Ackworth in Pontefract, Yorkshire, the Jersey College for Girls in St Helier, Jersey in the Channel Islands, and took a first-class degree at University College, Liverpool between 1892-96 which in those years could only be validated by the University of London.

For the next two years she travelled and studied in Germany where she gained fluency in German while at the University of Jena. ^[6]

She gained her first-class Teacher’s Diploma and distinction Frobel certificate in theory and practice at Cambridge Training College between 1898-99.

She began her lecturing career at the University of North Wales in Bangor moving onto the University of Liverpool between April 1900 and September 1905.

Personality and character In college archive photographs it seems Caroline does not like being photographed as she was always pulling a face, looking in the distance, or away from the camera.

Another former student, L.R. Reeve remembered that she was ‘one of those exceptional women whose integrity, judgment, fairness, and dignity were suggested immediately one met her, and one always felt that any of her interpretations was likely to be the right one.’

In the memoir he added: “Then, too, she was fearless in her decisions. She wouldn’t, she couldn’t, choose an easy way out of a difficult situation. Her self-respect permitted no relaxation, and compromise was possible only when no principle was involved.”

In later life Caroline moved to Malvern where she lived with her two sisters until she eventually moved to a Nursing Home in Southsea, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England where she died. Caroline C Graveson

• Death date July-Aug-Sep 1958

Death place Portsmouth, Hampshire, England Age 84^[7]

Sources

1. ↑ GRO Reference: 1874 S Quarter in BIRKENHEAD Volume 08A Page 554
2. ↑ England and Wales Census 1881
3. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldsmiths,_University_of_London
4. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarthmore_Lecture
5. ↑ Cheshire England & |Wales, Index of Wills and Probates 1853-1943
6. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Jena
7. ↑ England & Wales, Death Index, 1837-2005 Volume 6B Page 395