The Dough School

Generations of Glasgow women trained at a college the whole city called the Dough School. Its official name was the Glasgow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science, and it grew out of schools of cookery founded in the 1870s by a group of determined Glasgow women. For more than a century it trained cookery teachers, dietitians, housekeepers and managers, and it eventually became part of Glasgow Caledonian University. Its history tells us a great deal about health, food and women’s work in the industrial city.

Why cookery mattered

In Victorian Glasgow poor diet was a serious public health problem. Many working-class families lived in single rooms with a shared cooking range or none at all, food was often expensive and of poor quality, and knowledge of nutrition was limited. Reformers believed that teaching girls and women to cook cheap, nourishing meals and to manage a household could improve the health of the whole city, especially its children. The cholera and typhus epidemics described on our cholera page had made the link between living conditions and health impossible to ignore.

At the same time, there were very few professions open to educated women. Teaching cookery and domestic science offered a respectable career, and the new board schools created after 1872, described on our Victorian education page, needed trained teachers.

Grace Paterson and Margaret Black

The Glasgow School of Cookery was established in 1875 and formally opened in 1876. Its leading spirit was Grace Paterson, born in 1843, who became one of the first women elected to the Glasgow School Board and served on it for around two decades. She worked alongside Margaret Black, born in 1830, a cookery teacher who became well known in the field. In 1878 a second school, the West End School of Cookery, was founded, and for thirty years the two schools existed side by side, sometimes as rivals.

The schools ran classes for women of all backgrounds, from lessons for working girls to courses for the daughters of middle-class families, and above all trained teachers who went out to teach cookery in schools across Glasgow and the west of Scotland.

The Dough School

In 1908 the two cookery schools merged to form the Glasgow and West of Scotland College of Domestic Science. Glaswegians quickly gave it a nickname, the Dough School, a pun on its abbreviated name and on what its students spent so much time making. For most of its life its home was in the Woodlands area of the West End, on Park Drive.

The college trained women in cookery, laundry work, needlework, housewifery, nutrition and the management of institutions such as hospitals, schools and hotels. Over time its courses widened to include dietetics, institutional management and other subjects, and its graduates went on to work as teachers, dietitians, caterers and managers across Britain and abroad. In 1944 Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth II, became its patron.

The Queen’s College

In 1975, the centenary of the first school of cookery, the college was renamed the Queen’s College, Glasgow, in honour of its patron. By then it was offering a range of courses in subjects such as dietetics and health. On 1 April 1993 it merged with Glasgow Polytechnic to form Glasgow Caledonian University, which has its main campus at Cowcaddens on the site of the old Buchanan Street railway station.

The university’s coat of arms still includes elements from the arms of the Queen’s College, and its archive centre holds records of the schools of cookery and the Dough School.

A legacy of women’s work

It is easy to smile at the Dough School’s nickname, and the college’s emphasis on domestic skills reflects assumptions about women’s roles that now seem dated. But its founders were pioneers who created careers for women at a time when few existed, and who saw better food and better housekeeping as practical ways to improve the health of a city that badly needed it. The story of the city’s other great institutions for women’s education is told on our Queen Margaret College page.

Timeline