Edith Clara Batho
British academic administrator
Dr. Edith Clara Batho (21 September 1895 – 21 January 1986) was Principal of Royal Holloway College, University of London (RHC) from 1945 to 1962.
Education
She was educated at Highbury Hill High School, now Highbury Fields School in Islington, London. She then went on to University College, London (UCL) and graduated in English in 1915.
Career
After the First World War she taught at Roedean, returning to UCL in 1921 as an Assistant in English. She was appointed Reader in English Literature and awarded DLit in 1935.
She was appointed Principal of RHC in 1945 and chose Dr Constance West as her Vice-Principal. Her first task was to restore the college following disruption of the war years and expand the residential space as post-war demand for university places increased. (The college had been partially occupied by the women's ATS Officer Cadets' Training Unit (OCTU) during the war.) In the academic year 1946/7 numbers rose by almost 50% and almost 30% in the year following (to 330) which included eight male postgraduates for the first time.
The Royal Holloway College Act (1949) abolished the Board of Governors replacing it with a College Council chaired by Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone.
“Edith Clara Batho” enters the record as british academic administrator. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Edith, Clara and Batho can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edith Clara Batho” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.