Phyllis Monk was born in 1885 and died in 1970.  She was the pioneering first headmistress of Chorleywood College for girls with little or no sight.  This was the first secondary school set up for girls with a vision impairment to enable them to go to university and into the professions.  Chorleywood College merged with Worcester College in the 1980s to become New College Worcester.

Born in 1885, Phyllis Monk was very much involved in the initial push for opportunities for women.  She attended Blackheath School before going to Girton College, Cambridge where she took the Natural Sciences Tripos. However, this was a time when women were not allowed to graduate.  She was one of the last ‘steamboat ladies’ who exploited the opportunity available to graduates of Oxford and Cambridge to go to Dublin and be given the degree she needed to advance her career in teaching. 

Monk entered teaching at a time when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height.  She was an active Suffragist, attending meetings of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in London and Brighton and following behind the university banner amongst the 40,000 who joined the last great suffrage procession to the Royal Albert Hall in June 1911.  Although she visited May Billinghurst, a militant Suffragette who had become prominent because a childhood illness resulted in her attending demonstrations in an adapted tricycle, after the Suffragette’s first imprisonment in Holloway, Monk was not a supporter of the more radical organisation.

In her early career, Monk gained broad experience, moving between a High School and County Secondary School, as well as Roedean, a girls’ ‘Public School’, and a training college.  She spent six years as Head of Science at Roedean and the inspection report written in the weeks following her appointment praised her as having a ‘method and manner … calculated to help the pupils’.  Monk claimed that the offer to lead a new school for blind girls came at a stage in her career when she was looking to put her educational ideas into practice by taking responsibility for a pupil’s whole day.  She argued that it was vital to provide additional time for carrying out chores, and exploring objects of interest with pupils with levels of sight loss.   Her vision, as well as the ambition for special education this represented, was made clear in the first prospectus of the new College:

‘The education will be as liberal as in the best girls’ public schools, and the physical and mental development thus afforded will enable blind girls to live full and active lives at school, at home and in the professions.’ 

Gaining the students and finding to maintain the new school proved a challenge. Patricia Hart, a former student, was to claim in the Obituary she wrote for Miss Monk:

‘Like all pioneers, she must sometimes have been difficult to work with. Her colleagues from the early years recall how she made them do things they did not even know they could do. If she had been more flexible, the school would probably not have survived those early difficult and adventurous years.’

Phyllis Monk promoted access to an academic curriculum but she also believed in the importance of sport for girls, having been captain of cricket and vice-captain of hockey at school and supervising house teams at Roedean.  At Chorleywood, she created her own team games when she realised that lacrosse, cricket and tennis would not be appropriate for blind girls in their unmodified form. She adapted existing sports to create Quickit, a version of cricket, and netball-tennis, as well as a totally new game, Sport-X; this allowed girls with some sight to be fielders trying to keep a large football in play while their team’s blind runners scored runs. 

Monk retired in early 1945.  Her Quaker interests led to her moving to the nearby Jordans village, so that she was able to maintain involvement in ‘Old Girls’ events up to her death twenty-five years later.  In her early retirement, she wrote ‘Though Land Be Out of Sight’: The early years of Chorleywood College.  Although the first half was a description of the key developments, the book was aimed at providing “parents, educationists and social workers” with the information they needed to “discover the way blind children attack the stumbling blocks that lie before them as they seek to find an independence that alone will convey them into “sighted life”. Phyllis Monk was to be given an MBE in 1968 as a recognition of her work in promoting the education of girls with a visual impairment. 

Dr Normanton Erry