North London Collegiate School

Having acquired formal qualifications, Buss opened the NLCS in 1850 as a day school for the education of daughters of the local middle-class community, often of limited means, such as the daughters of clerks or tradesmen.18 One of the students, Molly Hughes, had been delighted to move from a fashionable snobby school to NLCS Now at the North London I sensed at once a different atmosphere. No one asked where you lived, how much pocket-money you had, or what your father was — he might be a bishop or a ratcatcher. 19 

Buss wanted her school to give girls a very different education from that prevalent at the other girls schools she wanted her pupils to have equal opportunities to boys, and that included real science  

It [NLCS] also set out to offer their daughters an education quite different from anything available anywhere else. There was, for example, the inclusion of science within the curriculum. Science was not really taken seriously by most girls schools until well into the twentieth century. Robert Buss [Frances Buss s father] made a memorable science teacher as Annie Martinelli, an early pupil later remembered His talents were simply wonderful. His Chemistry series was marvellous, especially for smells and explosions.  

He was the first of a series of outstanding science teachers at the School where learning by rote was replaced from the beginning by encouraging pupils to learn by thinking for themselves.20 

Buss father, Robert, had taught the science classes in the early years, with the first qualified science teacher, Grace Heath,22 being hired in 1888. Heath had been a chemistry 

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Scrimgeour, M. A. (ed.) (1950). North London Collegiate School 1850-1950. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 

Watson, N. (2000). And Their Works Do Follow Them The Story of North London Collegiate School. James and James, London,... 

Anon. (July 1895). In Memoriam Grace Heath. Our Magazine North London Collegiate School for Girls 20 60. See also Eyre, J. V. 

Notes by one who was there. (December 1912). Science tea. Our Magazine North London Collegiate School for Girls (n.v.) 89-90. Copies of The Searchlight, NLCS Student Magazine for Science, survive for 1911-1912, 1912-1913, and 1913-1914 (NLCS Archives, RS 4iv). See also A Short History of Science at North London Collegiate School, unpublished, NLCS Archives. 

Anon. (1954). Death. North London Collegiate School Magazine (3) 43. 

Both Gertrude Wren,31 who had been educated at North London Collegiate School (NLCS), and Grace Neve32 became recipients of the coveted Periera Medal. 

Gertrude H. Wren, educated at North London Collegiate School, was the first woman to win the Pereira Medal, and that same year she also received the Redwood Research Scholarship. Wren was appointed Demonstrator at the School of Pharmacy, but terminated her career upon marriage in 1910. See Shellard, E. J. (August 1982). Some early women research workers in British pharmacy. Pharmaceutical Historian 12(2) 2. 

Anon. (n.d.). Frances Mary Hamer, unpublished manuscript. North London Collegiate School Archives. 

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