The History of Norland in 13 objects: Emily Ward's copy of Mothers Songs, Games and Stories by Froebel
7 December 2022
The seventh object in our series celebrating Norland’s 130-year history is one of the earliest items in the Norland archives. Emily Ward’s copy of Froebel’s Mother’s Songs, Games and Stories, which she purchased in 1877, was also used by her sister Henrietta Francis Lord to make the first English translation of Froebel’s scholarship in 1885. Ellen Donovan, Graduate Research Intern for the Norland Archives project, explores this fascinating object, its influence on Norland’s pioneering founder and lasting legacy.
The book is a grey hard-bound A4 copy of a third edition published in 1874. Its cover displays a mother embracing her two children, with an illustration on the first page of a woman teaching a group of engaged pupils. The lithographs are by German illustrator Friedrich Unger, reproduced in Berlin. Emily Ward purchased this book a year after she founded the Norland Place School for children aged three to eight in 1876. Emily’s ethos of compassion, within the education of young children (which she later passed on to her own students after founding the Norland Institute in 1892) was heavily influenced by the works of Friedrich Froebel, founder of the ‘Kindergarten’ system. The Norland Place School was awarded a first-class commendation from the Froebel Society in 1879. By 1881, Emily Ward was a Froebel Society lecturer and a member of its committee. By 1900, she became president of the Froebelian society.
Froebel laid the foundation for the modern education of young children by recognising them as individuals. Norland has always taught respect and love for children. Corporal punishment was prohibited from Norland’s conception. Moreover, Froebel recognised the importance of love and tenderness as being central to a child’s early development. This remains central to the Norland ethos today, ‘Love Never Faileth’ remains the motto of the Norlander, and acts as a guide to underpin all practice both during a student’s time on campus and beyond. Owing to this, Norland founder’s copy of‘ Mothers Songs, Games and Stories celebrates and acts to enhance a mother’s love for her child. It is interesting that Emily Ward did not just use it in the raising of her adopted daughter, but in her professional practice and her training of Norland Nurses (as Norland Nannies were then known). Emily lived by Norland’s founding mottoes ‘Love Never Faileth’ (1 Corinthians 13:8) and ‘Strength in Adversity’.
Emily Ward thus created a new profession with this ethos, which maintained that love for the charge should be at the centre of their care. “The duty of caring for little children has always been the allotted task of women, but our Institute claims to be the first banding together of educated women with definite object of helping each other in loving and caring for the little child, under its threefold aspect – body, mind and spirit”, she wrote in her letter to the Norland Quarterly in 1913.
Central to Froebelian concepts is a focus on the education of women to “make conscious” their motherly instincts. Emily Shireff, a peer of Mrs Ward in the Froebel Society, writes in The Kindergarten at Home: “one great source of the misdirected care of the most loving mothers has been the notion that the management of young children might be safely trusted to mere good feeling, instinctive maternal affection, aided at best by common sense.” A revolutionary concept, here love and care are thought to be best brought out through the education and training of young girls, as opposed to being merely innate and natural qualities. Therefore, Emily Ward sought to embody this through her education of young women in the Norland Institute, in the hope of engendering well-rounded, happy children.
The backplate of Mothers Songs, Games and Stories displays an etching of a traditional knight-in-shining-armour surrounded by the words “pious mind”, “noble mind”, and “clear mind”, which harkens to Norland’s second motto ‘Fortis in Arduis’ (‘Strength in Adversity’). The strength of the Norland Nurse is a skill Emily Ward sought to incite through her teaching. In the Norland Quarterly of Christmas 1917, Emily Ward wrote: “we have to bring ourselves well up to date, and to provide for each generation a nurse that will be required to bring up a race of heroes in the strife between good and evil; a race of citizens alive to responsibilities and Duty”.
A glance at the pages of our object shows how well-used this book was by Emily Ward and her sister. Many pages are littered with pencil scribblings from either Emily, or her sister Henrietta Francis. It could be speculated that these were attempts to translate the original German into English as many notations are doodled question marks or an English translation of a singular word or phrase.
This copy of Froebel’s Mothers Songs, Games and Stories acts as a reminder of the crux of Emily Ward’s teachings, that it is the love for the child that comes before all else. In fact, the first core standard of the Norland Code of Professional Responsibilities is to “Prioritise children and their families”. Children are to be treated with “kindness, respect and compassion” as “individuals”, something each Norland student, Newly Qualified Nanny, and fully qualified Norlander must contractually promise to ensure throughout their practice, maintaining this pedagogy of love to this day.
