Goldsmiths’ 120 year anniversary- 1905 when it first opened its doors to students

Goldsmiths as a University body first opened its doors to students 120 years ago in September 1905.

That was the year when the first staff were recruited. Its first chief executive with the title of ‘Warden’, William Loring, was appointed on April Fools’ Day- 1st April of that year.

Goldsmiths’ College was certainly no joke and neither was William Loring.

Goldsmiths appointed a clergyman’s son, King’s Scholar at Eton, First Class in both parts of the Classical Tripos at Cambridge University, Fellow of King’s College Cambridge, Director of Education for West Riding, decorated and wounded soldier from the South African War with the Distinguished Conduct Medal for bravery, archaeologist, qualified barrister, somebody fluent in modern Greek, and a sharpshooter on the firing range.

To use modern parlance, ‘You did not mess with Mr Loring.’  Goldsmiths’ Archives and Special Collections has his handwritten application and curriculum vitae in copper-plate fountain pen script.

It runs to ten pages including accurate copying of glowing references.

1905 was the year when the first academic course began.

It was set up to run for two years to train and educate ‘Certificated Teachers.’

The burgeoning state education sector had a desperate need for Elementary and Secondary school teachers.

The first Vice Principal in charge of women, Caroline Graveson said:

‘We were the first Two-Year Training College to be owned and governed by a University. It gave all of us, down to the youngest students, a sense of dignity and space to grow, a noblesse oblige to live up to.’

Those clichés about being run ‘on a wing and a prayer’, ‘flying by the seat of their pants’, and ‘improvised chaos’ or even ‘a chaos of improvisation’ were rather apt.

The academic staff recruited to teach the students had not been appointed until the very month the students arrived to be taught.

Loring was a leader in education, but not an educationalist. Two leading academic experts in the practice and method of Education- Caroline Graveson and Thomas Raymont, as respective Vice-Principals for women and men, did not arrive until September.

They had less than a fortnight to draw up the timetable, formulate and agree the syllabus. The students had been largely recruited by the County Councils of Kent, London, Middlesex, and Surrey and the County Borough Council of Croydon.

Local authorities in other parts of the country; particularly Wales, were also sending student teachers to be trained in New Cross.

They were picked on the basis of academic achievement, prior experience of working as ‘pupil teachers’ in schools already from the age of 13, and also as proud emblems and representatives of their areas.

They were fully grant funded- fees and subsistence for two years because on qualification and certification they were expected to return to the local council schools to teach the growing populations of children now being state educated.

The librarian, Edith Nellie Burgess, was in place by July 1905- with just enough time to anticipate the books that would be needed for the first academic year.

The buildings and campus had not been properly converted from vocational technical and recreative institute for adult education into a new and very unique college of the University of London.

For the first three years teaching took place while the building was going on around them.

There were no student hostels. They would begin to be acquired and opened over a year later. So all the students needed to be found affordable and ‘respectable’ lodgings in New Cross, Deptford, Brockley and Lewisham.

The beginning of Goldsmiths is a remarkable narrative of success, achievement and significant progress in the history of British education.

This dimension of the Goldsmiths’ History project is being written online as a matter of progress after several years of research in the University’s outstanding Special Collections and other public archives.

The ‘work in progress’ process provides flexibility so that relatives and descendants of the people who were at the very beginning of the Goldsmiths’ story can, if they so wish, add family narratives, images and documentary material to enhance the history.

By being online it is accessible and available for all and information can be added and mistakes corrected.

It is a remarkable story. There is no university like it and it is unlikely there ever will be.

It was also created in the context of a pretty ugly and threatening cauldron of conflict and tension.

Owned by the University of London, but with many snobs in the University not wanting a college in South London to rival their august Colleges in North London; resented by London County Council who believed the City of London’s Goldsmiths’ Company should have offered it free to them first; located in the Borough of Deptford whose council believed it should have been offered to them first or at least been made into the South East London Polytechnic or special university for South London; in a local community where many people were upset that a popular technical and recreative institute for the working classes where they could take courses in virtually anything with the yearly enrolment of seven thousand people was being turned into some university place for the ‘lah-di-dahs’, and there were even many in Britain’s military establishment who yearned for the revival of the Royal Naval School to meet the increasing threat of Kaiser’s Germany which was determined to compete in the Dreadnought arms race and challenge of the British Empire’s dominance at sea.

At the heart of ‘University of London, Goldsmiths’ College’, as it was now officially called, was the new Training Department for teachers.

This had the highest number of staff, resources and funding from the big County Councils in London and the Home Counties, and central government’s Board of Education.

There were many more naysayers. The Training Department for teachers was non-denominational; one of the first and certainly the biggest of such teacher training establishments in the country independent of Church of England Christian liturgy, and what was not said publicly, in a society with prevalent antisemitism.

Goldsmiths meant Jewish people could now be enthusiastically admitted to teacher training and qualify as professional teachers in a College which respected their religion and culture. There would be no teaching or sports activities on Saturday mornings.

Such a progressive move took place in a country blighted by the moral panic of Jewish migrants fleeing in their thousands every year from the murderous pogroms in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Tsarist Empire and Eastern Europe.

Events in English history had also been the source for blood libels and antisemitic mythologies. Full parliamentary emancipation had not been achieved until the passing of the Jews Relief Act of 1858.

1905 might have been the beginning of Goldsmiths, but it was also the year of the 1905 Aliens Act declaring that ‘undesirable immigrants’ would be denied entry to Britain with restrictions mostly levied and purposed against Jewish and Eastern European immigrants.

Goldsmiths was also going to be  ‘co-educational’ with men and women student teachers taught and studying together. They still had separate entrances though for men and women at the front of the main building with the men’s corridor to the south east side and the women’s corridor to the south west side and mezzanine floors directly leading to the grounds at the back.

These would be patrolled by prefects for many years. There were separate common rooms for men and women. The men’s common room had a snooker and billiard table and other board games. The women’s common room was furnished with soft chairs and flowers laid out on the tables.

The conservative-minded were wondering ‘Goodness gracious me whatever next?’ Wags at the Board of Education (the predecessor of the Ministry/Department of Education) were predicting that at least half the women students would get married, become pregnant, or both.

Because this usually meant the forfeiture of employment for women, mischievous tongues warned that the whole purpose of Goldsmiths being set up to be the biggest teacher training centre in the country would be defeated.

Those prejudiced minds had not appreciated that it was more than likely the young women pursuing a professional future in a society that discriminated against women would go out of their way to avoid such risks.

Furthermore, the bigoted thinking of the time was not capable of acknowledging many women and men did not have a romantic interest in the opposite sex that they wished to pursue to any potential and problematic conclusion.

What was continuing from the Goldsmiths’ Company’s Technical and Recreative Institute, was Goldsmiths Art School which began in 1891. The school’s headmaster Frederick Marriott was still in charge and would remain so until 1925.

He was one of only three full-time staff members in the Art School. All the others, and they rarely exceeded the number of fingers on one hand, were part-time.

The Art School was thriving but in limbo. Would it be teaching art in the context of Higher Education, or was it to continue the practical crafts of teaching design, illustration and art for commerce? Would it be doing both and teaching teachers how to teach art as well as making it?

The presence of art and artists and student teachers, many of them women, was another major concern for the traditionalists in education comfortable with their Victorian attitudes and values and having difficulty coming to terms with the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

They would whisper the phrase as though revealing the greatest threat to human civilisation- ‘Life Drawing.’  The idea of decadent artists with beards, paint-spattered smocks and brushes, and sharpened pencils corrupting the souls of young people with naked life models provoked moral apoplexy and institutional tut-tutting in Whitehall and South Kensington (headquarters of the University of London) which could be heard in New Cross.

Student teachers did, of course, need to learn drawing so as to teach it. It may have been somebody in the building trades part of the College who came up with the solution: bleached and passion-killing white plaster casts.

Goldsmiths would be filled with them- in the classical style of Achilles, Doryphoros, Hermes, Aphrodite and Venus. Trainee women teachers could now be safe and secure doing their ‘life drawing.’

The plaster casts were even complete with accurate though rather small representations of the wiggly bits of male anatomy.

‘Life Drawing’ class with student teachers at Goldsmiths in 1907 with plaster casts as models

The Goldsmiths’ Company of the City of London remained hugely generous by committing £5,000 a year for five years to subsidise the art and night classes. This had the value of just over half a million pounds a year at the time of writing.

They were also paying for the squaring of the end of the main building with what became known as the Blomfield Building for the Art School- completed by the spring of 1908 at a cost of £8,000.

The architect, Sir Reginald Blomfield, would be responsible for designing the Menin Gate monument bearing the names of soldiers killed on the Western Front including Goldsmiths’ alumni.

A large proportion of the Adult education dimension of the former Institute was also continuing with London County Council funding for night classes.

This means building, engineering, surveying and other technical skills would continue to be taught through the Science Department, the Engineering Department, and the Building Trades Department.

And there would be the option for students to enrol for the BA and BSc pass degree of the University of London.

On 28th September 1905, The Training Department’s first student teachers arrived- 103 men and 147 women making 250 in total though one woman student withdrew due to ill-health.

They would call themselves ‘The Aborigines’ on the basis they were the original student teachers. They were not conscious of the current practice of using the more inclusive and respectful  ‘Indigenous’ and ‘First Nations People’ terms.

The first students were not ‘boys and girls.’ They were men and women and very much young adults already experienced in the world of work and living away from home. The average age of the women was 20 and 21. The average age of the men was nearer 18 and 19.

On 25th September 1905, The Art School and Evening Classes commenced which was an intense and large-scale day and night teaching and learning operation.

There were 1,612 students taking all kinds of combinations in classes.

57 were in the Art School during the day. 92 came in at night.

After 5 p.m. there were 419 men and women coming into Goldsmiths to study science classes, 456 to attend the engineering classes and 229 learning the building trades.

It was said at the beginning ‘You couldn’t make it up.’ The question to be answered was: would it ever work?

Many people had sleepless nights working round the clock with exhaustion every day for the first two to three years to make it work.

It was no accident that Goldsmiths staff took on the metaphor of working in a Blacksmiths’ Forge. Vice Principal for men, Thomas Raymont was indeed a blacksmiths’ son from Tavistock in Devon.  Vice Principal for women Caroline Graveson wrote the Goldsmiths’ hymn to be sung at morning assembly.

The first verse rhymed ‘work’ with ‘lurk’ and ‘shirk’:

‘In the vapour of the furnace he must wrestle with his work,

Where amid the unwrought metal countless forms of beauty lurk;

To shape them and adorn them is the task he may not shirk:

The smith is working on.’

The Goldsmiths’ certificated teacher needed the stamina and tenacity of blacksmiths working morning til night in the heat and fire of social progress in town, city and rural council schools more often than not poorly resourced, under-funded and inadequately staffed.

Identifying and building sociological profiles of Goldsmiths staff and students between 1905 and 1907 depends on the survival of documents and records in the archives.

54 student records of the first 250 Training Department trainee teachers enrolling in September 1905 have survived.  About half of the personnel files of the first members of staff have been preserved.

However, there are no records for the 1,612 students studying art, science, engineering and building trades.

There were Black and Asian communities throughout Great Britain at this time though they were proportionately much smaller than those developing in post Second World War Britain; particularly after the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush in 1948.

And it is more than likely they participated in the Goldsmiths educational experience and culture. In the early years of the new century young men and women in the country’s black and ethnic communities were spiralling upwards in terms of social mobility.

In the neighbouring South London Borough of Battersea, ratepayers would elect John Richard Arthur as a councillor in 1906 who would become Alderman and Mayor in 1912. He was a leading figure of the Pan-Africanist and Labour movements and African Progress Union which was growing and active across the Capital.

Goldsmiths’ College had an active resident staff photographer, Mr J Wilkinson, who actually taught an evening photography course- in those days with plate-glass cameras, and this is why there is such a rich archive of still photographs of Goldsmiths in its early years.

Mr Wilkinson would also produce Goldsmiths’ College postcards which he sold to staff and students who would then use these to write short messages to friends, family and colleagues. This was a version of Edwardian Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, Facebook and email.

It is possible to research the lives of the women students in Group B enrolling in September 1905. Their student records have not survived, but public archives enable us to trace their lives.

For example, Ida Beatrice Godden is most likely the young woman standing at the back second from the right in the photograph. Upon qualification as a certificated teacher in 1907, she would have a career as an assistant schoolmistress employed by London County Council.

Her Teachers Registration Council record reveals her first post was with Victory Place School in Walworth for a year until 1908 when she joined the staff of the London County Council school at Alton Street in Poplar where she taught until 1917.

She moved to the Lawrence Boys School in Mansford Street, Bethnal Green in 1917 and remained there for ten years until her untimely death in 1937 at the age of 51.

In 1914 she married Samuel George Broom, a book-keeper for a typewriter company in Holborn. Ida would leave probate of £1,331 to her younger spinster sister Enid Godden which would be worth £76,925.60 in December 2024.

In 1905, Goldsmiths Admissions did not record information about ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. Gender would be recorded in the two categories of male, men/female, women. The monochrome photographs of Training Department students and the lists of names are certainly not reliable indicators of ethnicity.

We can be sure that the first overseas students from Africa enrolled for teacher training at Goldsmiths in 1907 were two gentlemen funded by the Egyptian Ministry of Education in Cairo.

Remembering those first few years- Caroline Graveson and Thomas Raymont

When Goldsmiths College had been resuscitated after the catastrophes of the Second World War, the first Vice Principals, Caroline Graveson and Thomas Raymont were invited to reflect on what it was like to be there at the beginning.

Caroline Graveson (Vice-Principal [1905-35]) said:

‘Seeing that to every set of students “Ours were the days”, I am aware of needing some forgiveness for seeming to prefer the opening years of the College to the other periods of the thirty years I spent there. My excuse must be that starting an enterprise has always a special thrill, and that none of us are now left on the staff who knew those 1905-14 pre-war days.

In September 1905, the College met. Students and staff were new to themselves and each other. They lost themselves in the vast, wandering building; they had no hostels, no organised self-government, no traditions. It often seemed that Feasey, the old Porter, was our only link with the past. We were brand new, and everyone seemed to be shouting warnings at us that we were too big, too undenominational and above all too mixed.

The women students would certainly have looked very proper to students of to-day, in their long skirts, high collars, hats and gloves. But none of these things make a tithe of the difference they appear to the modern generation to make.  They certainly could not cripple our spirits. It certainly warmed our hearts, after weeks of planning, making timetables, lists of lodgings, and watching men at work redecorating and altering the buildings.

Those earlier women students were an independent sort. Practically all had served for four years as Pupil Teachers, some for much longer. Many were experienced in living away from home in rooms. They had, as a whole, a different kind of maturity from the student bought up in the shelter of secondary schools. An elementary school held no terrors for them. Their education from the age of fourteen had been mostly gained at Pupil Teacher Centres. Goldsmiths’ College was to bring them a completely new life and fresh opportunities. This gave them a great feeling of affection for it and because they had the task of starting its traditions, a peculiar sense of belonging to it. Their own instruction had been harder to get; their response to a wider kind of education was fresh and inspiring. I write of “they”, but of course they varied as do all groups of students. Looking backwards it seems to me they were highly individual, but this is perhaps an illusion of time.

Students of to-day would rightly look askance at the long distance many of them travelled daily to college or the dreary New Cross streets and lodgings in which they lived. Accommodation varied from 10/6 to 17/6 a week [equivalent of between £50 and £75 per week in 2025] for everything except for five dinners eaten at the College. (Those were the days!) But it must be remembered that all our students came from London and the Home Counties and not for some years did we widen our sources. Also year by year new hostels were started and the County Councils of Surrey and Kent and the National Society were among the first. In this way, the sense of being pioneers was kept alive among the students.

I remember well the first College Dance, the large numbers who had never danced in their lives before, but who very quickly learned; the hilarity of the polka and the Lancers, and the greater sense of unity and fellowship, engendered by a dance in those days as compared with the post-war years.

Students’ Societies and self-government came slowly but surely. A very successful Parliament, which met weekly in the Gym with all the right detail of procedure and terminology, was among the first. Entertainments, especially acting, were less rehearsed, and often revealed much unsuspected impromptu talent and humour. But I remember a Welsh student named Jones (did he come from London or did we have some Welsh men students in those earlier days?) who insisted on the College Dramatic Society, giving a presentation of “Hamlet”, taking the name-part brilliantly himself and giving two or three outside performances in the City. He raised the College standard and fired its ambition. May he be long remembered!

Thomas Raymont (Vice-Principal 1905-14, Deputy Warden 1914-15, Acting Warden 1915-1018, Warden 1918-1927) said:

‘My service at the College lasted twenty-two years, from its beginning in 1905 until my resignation in 1927- first as men’s Vice-Principal, then, on the outbreak of the first war, as Deputy Warden; then, on the lamented death of Mr. Loring, as Acting Warden; and finally as Warden. I am nearing my eighty-second birthday, and my eyesight is weak. For these and other reasons my remarks must be brief. That a two-year training College should be owned and controlled by a great university was a new thing. We started with an excellent staff, some members of which achieved high distinction later on. The Board of Education entrusted the examinations to the College authorities, so that we were free from the nineteenth century fetish of external examinations. We had little to do with the selection of candidates for admission. They were sent to us by the contributing county authorities, who also took a lead in providing hostels.

So far, so good, but we were of our own time, and in the earlier years, I fear, rather behind the times. In time, we were a mixed college, but in reality we were not. It was as if a curtain divided the two sides of the college and the men and women could only peep over the curtain. To me, who had spent years in the freer atmosphere of one of the younger universities, this Victorian prudery was a sore puzzle. I mention this and other matters to show how much we had to live down. Again, our curriculum was restricted and uniform, paying little heed to individual differences and special abilities. As to our teaching methods, we followed the then universal lecture system. We were a great talking shop, and I have to confess that I was one of the most ardent talkers of them all. Well, to cut a long story short, our staff, led by certain exceptionally able and original members, did manage to live down these early aberrations, which had mostly disappeared when I left in 1927. I resigned at the age of sixty-three. I was a tired man, and as soon as I began to regard the changes proposed by my younger colleagues as a bit of a nuisance, I knew it was time for me to go.

The later years of my service as Warden were troubled by the desire of the L.C.C. [London County Council] to acquire the premises and turn them into a S.E. London Polytechnic. The long wrangle ended by that Institution being built farther along the Lewisham High Road. When the College celebrated its twenty-first birthday (1936), I was naturally gratified by Sir George Hume’s statement from the platform of the Great Hall, that had it not been for my exertions, there would have been no Goldsmiths’ College that day. I think my two main contributions were (1) that I was instrumental in preserving the continued existence of the College, and (2) that I did my utmost to secure the appointment of my very distinguished successor, Mr A.E. Dean.

-o-

Here are the links to the developing online features:

Goldsmiths- The origins, Why the successful Goldsmiths’ Institute became a ‘Unique’ College of the University of London

Goldsmiths- The story of the first two years 1905 to 1907 [Under construction]

The First Head of Goldsmiths- How William Loring’s ten page handwritten application got him the job of Warden [Under construction]

Goldsmiths’ First Warden- ‘He died a gentleman and soldier’ and his last letters from Gallipoli

The First Vice Principal for Women- Caroline Graveson- A founding conscience of Goldsmiths’ College

The First Vice Principal for Men- Thomas Raymont – the blacksmiths’ son from Tavistock [Under construction]

Headmaster of Goldsmiths’ Art School, Frederick Marriott

University of London, Goldsmiths’ College- the Opening Ceremony in the Great Hall 29th September 1905

Goldsmiths in pictures as it was then in 1905 and as it is now 120 years later [Under construction]

Edwardian Goldsmiths- Cultural, Political and Social Context 1905 to 1910 [Under construction]

Ernest Leslie Jenner- one of the first students and his postcard collection [Under construction]

Goldsmiths- The First Women Staff 1905 [Under construction]

Goldsmiths- The First Men Staff 1905 [Under construction]

Goldsmiths- The First Women Students 1905 [Under construction]

Goldsmiths- The First Men Students 1905 [Under construction]

Goldsmiths- The First Staff Meetings 1905 to 1907 

Goldsmiths- The First Drama Productions 1905 to 1907 [Under construction]

Goldsmiths- The First Hostels for Students [Under construction]

Goldsmiths’ Art School 1905 to 1907 [Under construction]

Goldsmithian- The First Goldsmiths’ Magazine 1905 to 1907 [Under construction]

The Counter Hill Academy and Royal Naval School New Cross- education at Goldsmiths before Institute, College and University [Under construction]

Images of University of London, Goldsmiths’ College from the London Metropolitan Archives dated for the years between 1907 and 1912. They were most likely taken by Goldsmiths photography tutor J. Wilkinson for the London County Council.

Goldsmiths College front view

Goldsmiths College orchestra rehearsing in main lecture room which used to be the Royal Naval School chapel and is now the George Wood Theatre.

Fully attended concert in the Great Hall (which had a capacity for 1,000 people). The photograph being taken with an early flash gun- hence the seated people in the audience looking behind as Mr Wilkinson sets off the flash.

Goldsmiths’ College women students going through their movements in gymnastics under the directions of the gym instructor Miss Julia Andrew. The gym featured here is now the site of Goldsmiths’ refectory.

Goldsmiths’ College students ‘making a boiler test’ while studying engineering.

Goldsmiths’ College students operating machinery in their mechanical engineering class.

Goldsmiths’ College engineering students working in ‘the fitting and machinery room.’

Goldsmiths’ College students doing ‘Life Drawing’ with an actual model (fully clothed) in one of the art rooms of the main building in 1907.

Goldsmiths’ College land surveying students using equipment to take site measurements on the back field in 1912 behind the main building after the completion of the Blomfield Art School block.

Technical Drawing class at Goldsmiths’ College in 1912.

The quadrangle in the main building of Goldsmiths’ College between what is now the refectory and lecture rooms adjoining the King’s Corridor. The photograph taken in 1915 shows how it was used as hard surface tennis courts from 1905.

Goldsmiths’ College taught electrical engineering from 1905 to 1931 when the Engineering Department moved with Building Trades to the South East London Technical College further west down Lewisham Way.

Given the enthusiastic self-branding by Goldsmiths’ College with the metaphor of being a Forge of ‘Smiths fashioning the shape of the future’ with the power of hammering and moulding molten metal, the College did in fact have its own ‘Smithy’ for teaching metallurgical and welding techniques.

A dynamo test in Goldsmiths’ College Engineering Department circa 1912 with tutor and students.

Goldsmiths’ College students in a tutorial class. The style of ground floor classroom is recognisable 120 years later in the main building of the present day.

-o-

This posting is a duplicate of Goldsmiths’ 120 year anniversary- 1905 when it first opened its doors to students of the Goldsmiths History Project.

Many thanks to the staff of Special Collections and Archives at Goldsmiths, University of London including Dr Alexander Du Toit, and staff alumni Pat Loughrey, Ian Pleace and Lesley Ruthven.

The Goldsmiths History Project contributes to the research and writing of the forthcoming That’s So Goldsmiths: A History of Goldsmiths, University of London by Professor Tim Crook.

-o-

The research and writing for this project is not funded in any way. If you would like to assist covering the costs involved, do consider making any kind of donation and/or subscribing monthly or yearly using the form below. Many thanks for your consideration.

The project is dedicated to being Open Source which means free access for reading and appreciation.

Kultura Press will be publishing in book form a series of volumes preserving the research and writing called The Goldsmiths History Series. These will be a printed format of the online work for future book reading and library research.

The planned volumes are:

The origins and beginning of Goldsmiths University of London 1792 to 1914

The First World War and Goldsmiths University of London 1914 to 1919

The Nineteen Twenties and Thirties at Goldsmiths University of London 1920 to 1939

The Second World War and Goldsmiths University of London 1939 to 1946

V2 on the New Cross Road 25th November 1944

Post War Goldsmiths University of London 1947 to 1959

The Sixties at Goldsmiths University of London 1960 to 1969

Late Twentieth Century at Goldsmiths University of London 1970 to 1999

Early Twenty First Century Goldsmiths University of London 2000 to 2030

Other volumes commissioned are:

That’s So Goldsmiths

One Thousand Short History Stories and Pictures of Goldsmiths University of London

-o-