Mason College

Read at a meeting of the Mason College Union, Birmingham, February 16th 1883... 

Some KEVI students obtained permission to attend the men s classes of practical physiology at Mason College (later the University of Birmingham, see Chap. 5). Another former student commented ... 

At this point, Lloyd returned to Mason College, where she was awarded a B.Sc. from the University of London in 1892. In that same year, she applied under the name of E. Lloyd to sit the Associateship examination of the Institute of Chemistry. As the committee would have had no expectation that she was a woman, Lloyd was permitted to write the paper, which she duly passed. Once she had passed, the Institute had no means of denying her admission to the Society, and having admitted one woman, there was no feasible route of barring subsequent women applicants.16... 

The first woman Student Member of the Institute of Chemistry was Rose Stem.19 Stem graduated in 1889 from King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham (KEVI). Like Lloyd, Stern worked towards a B.Sc. (London) from Mason College, completing... 

Mason College of Science opened in 1880. At the inauguration of the new building in 1883, specific mention was made about the admission of women ... 

The Mason College Chemical Society was formed in 1884,92 and among two of the early members were the first woman Associate of the Institute of Chemistry, Emily Lloyd (see Chap. 2), and the first woman Student Member, Rose Stern (see Chap. 2). However, according to the reports in the Mason College Magazine, two Birmingham women preceded them Jessie Charles93 and Constance Naden,94 who were both very active in the Society. 

Charles, born on 19 March 1865 to Andrew Charles, a hardware merchant, was educated privately before entering Mason College in 1882. She departed for Newnham in 1890 and, after completing Part 1 of the Science Tripos in 1893, she worked in Breslau and Leipzig. In her multi-faceted life, Charles (later Mrs. White) became a promoter of the Montessori School system, authoring a book on the subject. 

Naden, who entered Mason College in 1882, led a colourful but short life. She had a long poem published in the Mason College Magazine, titled Free Thought in the Laboratory (Dedicated to the Demonstrator of Chemistry). The rhyme began ... 

Naden left Mason College in 1887, but unfortunately died in 1889, as her obituarist described "... after coming into the possession of a considerable fortune, she travelled throughout the Middle-East and South Asia. She contracted Indian demon-fever never completely recovered. During the last year, she lectured at Dartford on Women s Suffrage. 94(a) A bust of Naden overlooks the archives room of the University of Birmingham. 

Jordan, A. (1883). The Mason Science College A sketch. Mason College Magazine 1(2) 33-35. 

Anon. (1884). Mason College Chemical Society. Mason College Magazine 2(1) 21-22. 

Aston, Francis William (1877-1945) British chemist and physicist, who until 1910 worked at Mason College (later Birmingham University) and then with J. J. Thomson at Cambridge University. In 1919 Aston designed the mass spectrograph [see mass spectrometry), for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1922. With it he discovered the isotopes of neon, and was thus able to explain nonintegral atomic weights. 

The memorial plaque is not the only tribute to the early history of biocatalysis at Birmingham. The Frankland Building commemorates Percy Frankland, who was professor of chemistry at Mason College, and whose views of biocatalysis have already been noted (Frankland, 1897). The Howarth Building commemorates the leader of the group at Birmingham responsible for their synthesis of L-ascorbic acid (Scheme 1.9). 

The local interest in raw materials naturally led to Mason College having an interest in mining and indeed for the... 

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