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Obscure 2 amy4/9/2023 Here she may have engaged with the nascent opportunities for women’s higher education offered by the Edinburgh Ladies Educational Association, or the Watt Institute, although so far I have found no evidence.Īmy came to Newnham in 1873, two years after its foundation, when she was 25. By the 1871 census, when her sisters were all living with their parents, Amy was teaching at a girls’ school in Edinburgh. Miss Clough characterised Amy as ‘industrious’ and ‘earnest’, though ‘interesting’, 6 but did not remark on how determined and quietly unconventional she must have been. Certainly at least three pupils from the school, including Amy’s elder brother John Lockhart,became Cambridge wranglers. The Pestalozzian emphasis on observation would have prepared Amy well for success in science and she may have gained a good mathematical grounding from the succession of teachers at St Clere that included a Cambridge wrangler Robert Tucker. It is a Divine Institution.’ 4 A corollary was mixing between the schoolmaster’s family and pupils, and John’s unconventional stand that teaching boys and girls together was the best way to ensure their social and moral development. They were strongly influenced by Pestalozzi and a belief that ‘the family must be the model of the community we form. Miss Clough, Principal of Newnham, tells us that Amy ‘received her early education under her father’s special superintendence.’ 3 This was probably along with the boys at the small boarding school that her parents, John and Sarah Ogle, ran in a rented country house, ‘St Clere’, in Kent. So, when, and how did Amy learn her physics? But women were not members, and not until 1878, two years after Amy took the Tripos, did Maxwell reluctantly permit the Demonstrator, William Garnett, to admit women for an accelerated course during the Long Vacation. In 1874 the Cavendish had opened its doors to ‘any member of the University’. But 50 was still high enough to place Amy 6th out of the 16 people (15 men) taking Part II physics. Her modest 50 paled in comparison with the 686 of the top candidate – William Napier Shaw, the meteorologist. However, what intrigued me more was that she was the only woman in the Maxwellian era of the Cavendish to obtain a respectable mark in physics. 2Īmy took six sciences in Part II, not an unusual number, coming top in zoology, second in physiology and third in botany. She acquitted herself in such a manner, as would have entitled her, had she been an undergraduate, to a place in the first-class. The Athenaeum reported,ĭuring the recent Natural Science Tripos examination at Cambridge, a lady, Miss Ogle, who is a student at Newnham Hall, the Cambridge college for women, was, by the permission of the examiners, subjected to precisely the same examination, as that which the members of the University underwent. Her college, Newnham, did know that she had gained a First, from the customary informal report sent to them by the examiners this was leaked to the press causing a brief stir. Evidence of her achievement has remained hidden in the NST mark books, apart from a brief mention in an obscure government report two years later. When Amy took the NST, women required special permission to take Tripos exams and their results were not published as the men’s were.
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