Queen Margaret College

For more than four hundred years the University of Glasgow admitted only men. Queen Margaret College changed that. It began with a series of lectures for women arranged in the late 1860s, grew into Scotland’s first college for women’s higher education, opened a medical school that produced the first women to graduate in medicine from a Scottish university, and in 1892 became part of the University of Glasgow. Its story is one of the most important in the history of women’s education in Scotland.

A dinner party suggestion

The idea is said to have been raised at a dinner party in 1868. Jessie Campbell, a Glasgow woman with a keen interest in education, suggested to John Nichol, professor of English literature at the university, that he might give lectures for women. She had been inspired by developments in England, where Cambridge had begun to open its examinations to women. Nichol agreed, and the first lectures were held in the Corporation Galleries on Sauchiehall Street.

The lectures were popular, and in 1877 a public meeting chaired by the principal of the university, John Caird, founded the Glasgow Association for the Higher Education of Women. Princess Louise, the queen’s daughter, became its honorary president, and Janet Galloway its secretary, a post in which she would play a central part in the college’s development for decades.

North Park House

In 1883 the association became a college, named after Queen Margaret, the eleventh-century Scottish queen and saint. It needed a home, and it found one thanks to Isabella Elder, the widow of the shipbuilder John Elder, who gave £12,000 to buy North Park House, a grand mansion beside the Botanic Gardens in the West End built in the late 1860s for the owners of the Glasgow Pottery. The college moved in on 3 November 1884. Queen Victoria herself visited in 1888.

Women at the college studied a wide range of arts and science subjects, taught largely by university professors and lecturers. But they still could not take university degrees, and the college campaigned for that right.

The medical school

In 1890, again with Isabella Elder’s support, the college began teaching medicine to women, with thirteen students in its first winter session. In 1895 a new medical building was opened, designed by John Keppie with the involvement of the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh, then working in Keppie’s practice.

The medical school produced pioneers. In 1894 Marion Gilchrist became the first woman to graduate from the University of Glasgow, and the first woman to graduate in medicine from a Scottish university. She went on to a long career as a doctor in Glasgow and was a prominent campaigner for women’s suffrage.

Joining the university

The Universities (Scotland) Act of 1889 allowed Scottish universities to admit women to degrees, and the question became how Queen Margaret College would relate to the University of Glasgow. The university wanted to absorb it. Isabella Elder believed she had given her money on the understanding that women would be taught separately but to the same standard as men, and when the university pressed ahead with the merger she stopped her donations.

The college merged with the university in 1892, on condition that North Park House would be used only for the education of women. Its students became students of the university, while the college continued to provide teaching, tutoring and a women’s department within it. Student numbers grew steadily, from about six hundred in 1909 to more than seventeen hundred by 1930, and women increasingly attended mixed classes at Gilmorehill.

Closure and legacy

By the 1930s the separate college had lost much of its purpose, and the university closed it in November 1935. North Park House was sold to the BBC and became the home of BBC Scotland in Glasgow for more than seventy years, until the broadcaster moved to Pacific Quay in 2007. At the closing ceremony the college’s last mistress, Frances Melville, warned that women’s educational needs might not be protected in a fully mixed university.

The college’s name lives on in the Queen Margaret Union, the student union founded by its students in 1890, which admitted men only in 1979, and in the university’s Queen Margaret halls of residence. The story of the university itself is told on our University of Glasgow page.

Timeline