Beatrice Thomas

Initially, Thomas was able to undertake some research but in later years, with the pressure of teaching and a hostility to women in the University Chemistry Research Laboratory, she focused her life on her students. A student, D.M.P., described how Thomas was a scientist and a feminist  

Victorian age, had for many ardent spirits taken the place of orthodox religion. We found her unyielding in her demands that we should put academic tasks before all other interests, that we should maintain the tradition of the earnest pioneers, who never for one moment allowed themselves to forget their goal of proving and demonstrating that no distinction can be drawn between the intellectual powers of men and women, once they are offered similar educational opportunities.44  

Thomas, who had been a chemistry student under Freund, became close friends with her former Demonstrator. Upon Freund s death, it was Thomas who organised the Ida Freund Memorial Fund and co-edited Freund s unfinished Experimental Basis of Chemistry.41 Though she taught at larger, classics-oriented Girton, her sympathies lay more with the smaller, science-oriented Newnham. There must have been some sharing between the two women s colleges, for one of her obituarists, a former Newnham student, D.M.A., commented Fortunately for Newnham science students, Miss Thomas was able to undertake our supervision in Chemistry so that we were able to appreciate her qualities as a teacher, 44 b) 

Known as Tommy by her students, Thomas demanded the highest standards. She was never perturbed by any laboratory incident. In a touching posthumous letter to Thomas, Dorothy Russell remembered  

I recall how, on one occasion, a moth elected to commit suicide in my flask of standardised acid. This naturally did not escape your eye You regarded the corpse with considerable disfavour and merely said Of course that acid will have to be re-standardised. 44(c) 

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M. Beatrice Thomas (P) [6] Lecturer, Girton College, Cambridge... 

Russell, D. S. (Michaelmas Term, 1954). In Memoriam Mary Beatrice Thomas, 1873—1954. Girton Review 14—25. 

However, after 1913, upon the retirement of Ida Freund (see below), women chemistry students from Newnham had to undertake the experimental component of their courses in the University Chemistry Laboratories. The women at Girton were able to keep their own laboratory until Beatrice Thomas (see below) retired in 1935. In the University Chemistry Laboratories, an entirely different atmosphere prevailed, as the arrival of women students was against the wishes of the male laboratory staff. They made life difficult for the women pioneers, as Ball remembered ... the lab boys took a delight in leaving some essential bit of apparatus out of our lists so that we had to walk the whole length of the lab to the store to ask for it. An ordeal for some of us, especially as they appeared to be too busy to attend to us for several minutes while we waited at the door. 32... 

As we have seen in earlier chapters, most universities had a chemistry club or society. Near one end of the scale was the Manchester University Chemical Society, which fought the admission of women until 1909 at the other end, the Chemical Club of Cambridge University, which seems to have accepted women members without comment. In fact, two of the early members, Ida Freund and M. Beatrice Thomas, presented research papers to a meeting of the Club in 1904.36... 

White, Beatrice, Cast of Ravens The Strange Case of Sir Thomas Overbury (1965). 

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