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The Birmingham Municipal School of Art and Opportunities for Women's View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Archive, E-theses Repository THE BIRMINGHAM MUNICIPAL SCHOOL OF ART AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR WOMEN’S PAID WORK IN THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT 1885-1914 BY SALLY HOBAN A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of History, School of History & Cultures, College of Arts and Law, The University of Birmingham. September 2013 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis is the first to examine the lives and careers of professional women who were working within the thriving Arts and Crafts Movement in Birmingham in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It utilises previously unresearched primary and secondary sources in art galleries, the Birmingham School of Art and local studies collections to present a series of case studies of professional women working in the fields of jewellery and metalware, stained glass, painting, book illustration, textiles and illumination. This thesis demonstrates that women made an important, although currently unacknowledged, professional contribution to the Arts and Crafts Movement in the region. It argues that the Executed Design training that the women received at the Birmingham Municipal School of Art (BMSA) was crucial to their success in obtaining highly-skilled paid employment or setting up and running their own business enterprises. The thesis makes an important new contribution to the historiography of The Arts and Crafts Movement; women's work in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the history of education and the industrial and artistic history of Birmingham. THIS THESIS IS DEDICATED TO DR FRANCESCA CARNEVALI (1964-2013) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people have helped me during the research and writing of this thesis. I would especially like to thank my colleagues in the Centre for West Midlands History at The University of Birmingham for their help and encouragement along the way, but particularly Dr Malcolm Dick for encouraging me to commence a PhD in the first place. Thanks are also due to all the staff at Birmingham Archives and Heritage, Sandwell Archives and Dr Sian Vaughan at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design for all her help whilst I was working at the Birmingham Municipal School of Art archive. I would also like to thank Martin Ellis for his help with accessing the Camm material at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. My parents Christine and Keith Hoban have supported me and encouraged me all the way through this research journey. In the process they too have got to know the women presented in this thesis and seen the joys of research. It was my parents that first introduced me to antiques at a young age and in particular the jewellery and metalwork of The Arts and Crafts Movement. As I researched the people who had designed these miniature works of art I found that information was available about male designers but very little had been written about the lives and work of the women jewellers, stained glass designers and metalworkers of The Arts and Crafts Movement. This inspired me to begin the research that culminated in this PhD, with a focus on Birmingham and the West Midlands. Finally, I would like to thank my Supervisor, Dr Francesca Carnevali. Without her, this thesis would not have been written and I hope that it is a fitting tribute to her. CONTENTS Abstract Dedication Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Accomplished Ladies or Professional Women? 6 Chapter 2 ‘Recognising their right to a free, open and equal career’: women’s educational opportunities at the BMSA. 37 Chapter 3 Women’s employment in Birmingham and the BMSA. 79 Chapter 4 ‘A profession of ‘prize gainers’ or professional businesswomen? Women in Jewellery and Metalwork in Birmingham. 100 Chapter 5 The BMSA and Professional Women Stained Glass Designers. 132 Chapter 6 The BMSA and Painting, Book Illustration, Illumination and Textiles. 160 Conclusion 197 Bibliography ABBREVIATIONS BA&H Birmingham Archives and Heritage BMAG Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery BMAG CA Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Camm Archive BMAG CSB Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Camm Scrapbook BMSA Birmingham Municipal School of Art BMSA Man-Sub-Comm Mins Birmingham Municipal School of Art Management Sub-Committee Minutes BMTS Birmingham Municipal Technical School GRO General Records Office RBSA Royal Birmingham Society of Artists The Studio The Studio Magazine UCE University of Central England V&A Victoria and Albert Museum, London TBGH The Birmingham Guild of Handicraft INTRODUCTION “The general trend of the school training bids fair to make Birmingham the Mecca of art teachers and students from all parts of the kingdom.” So wrote the critic A.S. Wainwright in 1905 in a glowing editorial about Birmingham’s Vittoria Street School for Jewellers in The Studio, the international magazine for the contemporary applied and decorative arts.1 Both the jewellery school and its parent institution, the Birmingham Municipal School of Art in Margaret Street (hereafter the BMSA), held a privileged position in the decorative arts of the last decade of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries. Throughout this period, the BMSA was the largest art school in Britain and it was generally considered to be the best equipped. In terms of examination and competition results, it was also the most successful.2 The work of students and staff from the Birmingham schools was regularly highlighted in The Studio and other decorative arts magazines, not only in terms of stylistic achievements but also in the context of the successful and innovative teaching methods of headmaster Edward Richard Taylor at the Central School in Margaret Street.3 But the Birmingham Municipal School of Art, and Birmingham’s contribution to the Arts and Crafts Movement as a whole, has been largely overlooked by history. There can of course be no single reason why, but a paucity of published research on the School and its pupils and a lingering, negative, perception of nineteenth century art and design in Birmingham based around the stereotypical idea of ‘inferior’ quality ‘Brummagem’ goods 1 A. S. Wainwright in The Studio, vol. 34, (1905), reproduced in T. Hunt, Finely Taught, Finely Wrought, The Birmingham School of Jewellery and Silversmithing, (Birmingham, 1990). 2 J. Swift, ‘Women and Art Education at Birmingham’s Art Schools, 1880-1920: Social Class, Opportunity and Aspiration’, in M. Romans (ed.) Histories of Art and Design Education: Collected Essays, (Bristol, 2005), p.92; J. Swift, Changing Fortunes – the Birmingham School of Art Building 1880-1995, (Birmingham, 1996), p.14. 3 Taylor was appointed in 1887. A detailed discussion of his teaching methods and their importance can be found in Chapter Two of this thesis. 1 have certainly been contributing factors. A general decline in interest amongst decorative arts historians in late Victorian art and design in the mid twentieth century gave way to a re- evaluation of the subject in the 1960s and 1970s, which cast English Arts and Crafts pieces (particularly jewellery and illustrated books) as reactionary and outdated. However, by the 1990s, critical and popular attention had embraced The Arts and Crafts Movement once more. Birmingham’s lasting contribution to The Arts and Crafts Movement, and its importance in the dissemination of the style and its philosophy, has never taken a central position in the extensive historiography of the Movement. Instead, designers from other cities, guilds and schools of art have been given prominence in twentieth century critical accounts, particularly Charles Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft in the Cotswolds and The Glasgow School of Art. This omission is in itself of interest, and the Birmingham Municipal School of Art should certainly be given a much higher status in the literature and history of the movement and some of its key (but currently little known) artists, designers and teachers should be recognised alongside their more critically acclaimed peers such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald in Glasgow. However, many of these currently unknown designers in Birmingham were women and it is these women, their training at the BMSA and how this education enabled them to work professionally in The Arts and Crafts Movement, that will be the focus of this thesis. Through my interdisciplinary research (which links the history of art and design with education, employment, economic and social history), I will focus on reconstructing the lives and contributions of the women artists and designers who helped to create Birmingham’s original reputation as an outstanding centre of Arts and Crafts practice. Their lives and careers give us fresh insights into women’s employment in the West Midlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, provide a new contribution
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