Owens College Victoria University

In addition to the Victoria University of Manchester, there was the Manchester School of Technology, which had been founded in 1824 as the Manchester Mechanics Institute, and which later became the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. 

Even the Owens College Library was initially off-limits, as a woman student in 1901 later recalled  

It would have been the height of impropriety [for a woman student] to enter the library and demand a book in the hardened 

As at many co-educational colleges, it was understood that certain rows in the lecture room were unofficially reserved for women students. A student, J. Harold Bailey, described in 1892 how this fact had not been imparted to a new male arrival  

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Harold attended the Central Board School in Manchester and, at the age of seventeen, was awarded a Manchester Corporation Scholarship. In 1894, he entered Owens College of the federal Victoria University, Manchester, and, three years later, graduated with a B. Sc. with First Class Honours in Chemistry. He was awarded the Levinstein Exhibition fellowship, proceeded to conduct his first researches in organic chemistry under Professor William H, Perkin, Jnr., and received his M. Sc. degree from the Victoria University in 1900, the year of his first publication. 

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