British pre-WWII girls' boarding schools: help me find book listing them

October 11, 2019 7:56 AM

Many years ago I was stuck in a place with very little to read. There were two battered volumes, possibly from the 1930s, but very possibly older, that were sort of catalogs of British boarding schools for girls. I don't mean each was the catalog for an individual school. Each book compiled numerous entries for discrete and unrelated schools. Each entry listed characteristics of a school: there were pictures of buildings, lists of all the subjects they taught, lists of sports available, tuition, etc. Does anyone know what such volumes were called?
posted by mareli to Education (5 answers total)

Perhaps it was something published by the Girls Day School Trust, which runs 25 girls schools and was established 1872?

(I know nothing further - I'm only aware of them because they've been advertising around London lately)
posted by automatronic at 8:33 AM on October 11, 2019

Best answer: Probably a copy of the Girls' School Year Book, a directory of English girls' schools published annually by the Association of Head Mistresses from 1906 to 1985 (after which it was renamed the Independent Schools Yearbook: Girls' Schools, ceasing publication in 1991). There seems to be almost no information about the Year Book available online, apart from this bare-bones catalogue record from the Hathi Trust and a handful of secondhand copies floating around on Amazon and eBay. But there are runs of the Year Book in the British Library and other UK copyright libraries if you want to refer to it.
posted by verstegan at 12:14 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I think verstegan has it. Google Books has one unusually bad scan of the 1916-7 edition, which looks very much like you describe except no pictures (maybe in later editions).

One sample entry from the 1925-6 edition is also provided in this 2018 book Discovering Women's History.

I am surprised that there are so few digitized copies circulating out there. Google Books and Hathitrust are the normal sources for digitized versions of public domain books, but they draw upon North American university collections, very few of which seem to hold copies of any of these catalogs. The UK copyright libraries which do have copies have not comprehensively digitized their public domain holdings.
posted by crazy with stars at 1:38 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you! I'm pretty sure the Independent Schools Yearbook is what I remember. I read them in a boarding house in Vienna in the early 1960s and the memory of them has stuck with me.
posted by mareli at 1:59 PM on October 11, 2019 [1 favorite]

Best answer: My parents used the Independent Schools Yearbook of 1960-something to choose a British boarding school for me in 1973 after I won a scholarship. We were 8000 miles away in the Falkland Islands, so had to rely entirely on the descriptions in the book, as we couldn't visit the schools in person before making the choice. They chose my school because the book said explicitly that it was for girls who would be working for a living.
posted by kelper at 2:30 PM on October 11, 2019 [5 favorites]