Chapter IX - VARIOUS MATTERS

Summary

A room of one's own. Economy and decoration. A dance in 1878. The garden. Methods of conveyance. The gymnasium and gymnastic dress. Acting. Games. Societies. The Girton Review, Students' Representative Committee. Labour-saving arrangements. The Roll. Summer Sessions. Reading rooms in Cambridge. The Chapel. Memorials and Portraits. Curators' Committee. Gifts to the College.

The story of the College has been told in outline down to the end of the year 1932. It remains to notice various matters of lesser importance, which for Girtonians may be worthy of record, but cannot conveniently be included in the main story.

An American traveller who visited Girton in 1879 was much impressed by the fact that each student had “a room to herself; in the lower stories, each has two rooms”. The new buildings then in progress, as he remarked, would accommodate nineteen additional students. “This new building is to cost £8000 (40,000 dols.)—a sum for which an American college would have accommodated forty or fifty pupils. But it would have been by crowding them together; and Girton may well forgo elegancies and even comforts for the sake of the health and privacy of its students.” In the first “programme” drawn up by Miss Davies for the College in 1868 she had written:

Each student will have a small sitting room to herself, where she will be free to study undisturbed, and to enjoy at her discretion the companionship of friends of her own choice.