M. K. Ashby

Last updated April 21, 2019

Mabel Kathleen Ashby (1892 – 1975) (wrote as M. K. Ashby) was an educationalist, writer and historian born in Tysoe, Warwickshire, England.

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to the west and Scotland to the north-northwest. The Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south. The country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, and includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight.

Biography

Early life

She was one of the daughters of Joseph Ashby and his wife Hannah Ashby (Ashby also being her maiden name). Her brother Arthur Ashby was a pioneer of agricultural economics.

Joseph Ashby Agricultural trade unionist

Joseph Ashby (1859–1919) was an agricultural trade unionist born in Tysoe, Warwickshire, England. “His life was remarkable, encapsulating in many aspects the ideal of the self-improving working man, and embracing most of the institutions—the nonconformist chapel, trades unionism, and working-class Liberalism—that so clearly represented social and political betterment in the later years of the nineteenth century.”. His biography was written by his daughter, Kathleen Ashby.

Arthur Wilfred Ashby, CBE was a British agricultural economist.

In 1907 Mabel won a scholarship to Warwick High School, where she became a weekly boarder. From there, she won a King’s scholarship to Birmingham University. This was a government grant conditional on undertaking to train as a teacher. She took a B.A. degree in her first three years, and stayed on to take an M.A. in philosophy. While she was at the training college, she successfully organised in her second year a women’s club for providing student amenities such as provision of common rooms and proper meals.

On leaving college she was appointed to a post as instructress of Rural Pupil Teachers in Staffordshire. This meant working in remote villages, travelling by train, bicycle or pony-and-trap, talking to teachers and giving lessons to small groups of receptive boys and girls.

After a summer term as a temporary lecturer at Bingley College in Yorkshire, in 1919 she became Warden of a Hall of Residence for teachers in training in Bristol University.

Middle years

In 1924 she answered what she regarded as a “call” to accept the post of Advisory Teacher to Rural Schools, a post created for her by Henry Morris, the famous director of Education in Cambridgeshire. After some years of this “lonely and strenuous” work (it involved frequent changes of location, and dealing with sometimes resentful head teachers), she fell ill and returned to her cottage in Shennington that she shared with her lifelong friend Margaret Philips. She spent the next year recuperating and writing The Country School: its Problems and Practice (probably the thesis she submitted for the M.Ed. degree which she was awarded by Manchester University in 1930).

She next accepted a temporary post as Education Lecturer at Salisbury Training College, and the following year she was accepted to a similar, but established, post at Goldsmiths College, London.

In 1933 she applied for and was appointed to the post of Principal of the Residential College for Working Women, usually known as Hillcroft from the name of its house at Surbiton. The college provided a year’s course of liberal education for women who had to leave school early, but who had since shown an interest in and capacity for further study.

Later life

She retired in 1946, but the next thirty years were filled with creative activity. She began to travel, some of her accounts of which were later published in Countrywoman's Occasions. She later moved, with Margaret Philips, to a farmhouse in Bledington, near Stow on the Wold. It was here that she write Joseph Ashby of Tysoe, which was published in 1961. It was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in that year. However, the accolade which she perhaps most appreciated was the tribute paid by E. P. Thompson, the Marxist historian of the English working class. He so admired the book that he made a point of seeking the acquaintance of the author, and paid several visits to Bledington. Her next literary venture was to write a history of Bledington, 'The Changing English Village.

Bledington is a village and civil parish in the Cotswold district of Gloucestershire, England, about four miles south-east of Stow-on-the-Wold and six miles south-west of Chipping Norton. The population of the civil parish in 2014 was estimated to be 490.

The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are literary prizes awarded for literature written in the English language. They, along with the Hawthornden Prize, are Britain's oldest literary awards. Based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, United Kingdom, the prizes were founded in 1919 by Mrs Janet Coats Black in memory of her late husband, James Tait Black, a partner in the publishing house of A & C Black Ltd. Prizes are awarded in three categories: Fiction, Biography and Drama.

Edward Palmer Thompson was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry. His work is considered to have been among the most important contributions to labour history and social history in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including on scholarship in Asia and Africa.

She was successively President of the Women's Institute and Chairman of the Parish Council at Bledington. She died 16 October 1975 in an Oxford nursing home.

Key works

Joseph Ashby of Tysoe. Cambridge University Press, 1961; reissued by Merlin Press, London, 1974
Countrywoman's Occasions
The Country School: its problems and practice
The Changing English Village

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References

Edith Lyle, "M.K. Ashby, a Commemorative Portrait" (privately produced, available for loan from Gloucestershire libraries)

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