Yesterday, I became aware, rather belatedly, of a woman who edited some volumes for the Selden Society in the 1930s and -40s, the two Select Cases in the Exchequer Chamber volumes (vol 51 and vol 64). The name long familiar from catalogue searches and bibliographies, ‘M. Hemmant Ph.D.’, was, in fact Mary Hemmant, a history graduate, sometime suffragist (not, she would be keen, I am sure, to point out, a ‘suffragette’) and (amongst other things), judge of dog shows (specialising in Irish setters). I had assumed that M. Hemmant was a man, as most of the Selden Society notables were, but there she was, hiding behind an initial.[i]
A little light investigation gave me a few facts about our subject, and a few things to observe.
Mary Hemmant was born into a wealthy family. Her father, William Hemmant, had made his fortune in Australia, then served there as a politician, before returning to Britain and settling down in a very large house in Kent, named after his Australian constituency, Bulimba. The family was not ensconced in ‘Bulimba’ at the time of Mary’s birth, however: she was born in Ealing, London, in 1879.
Of her early years, I have found very little. Easily accessible records and accounts suggest that she lived the life of a privileged, though socially engaged, woman. Her good works included decoration of churches and work with the Sevenoaks Lay Association.[ii] Mary was an active member of the ‘non-militant’ pro-women’s-suffrage organisation, the NUWSS, taking charge of its Sevenoaks branch, and engaging in a lot of pro-suffrage writing of letters to newspapers.[iii] She was not a Christabel Pankhurst type, though, and was one of those signing Sevenoaks NUWSS letter deploring militant methods of WSPU in March 1912.[iv] Quite politely, she engaged with, and disagreed with, anti-suffrage arguments.[v] She bred Irish setters and judged other people’s Irish setters in competitions. [vi] Her social status clearly made her the sort of person who merited a mention in the papers, when she attended a wedding or a funeral.[vii] Apparently she was a very good tennis player, [viii] and she drove a car, from 1915 to 1964 (when she got in trouble for bad driving and gave it up for good, aged 86).[ix] She lived until 1971, as her death at 93 in a home in Ticehurst, and cremation, were recorded in a local Sevenoaks paper in that year. She was still listed as ‘Miss Mary Hemmant’ at this point, and her address was given as 8 Bradbourne Park Road, Sevenoaks.[x]
But how does the legal history writing fit into this quiet, privileged life? I was interested to see that Mary Hemmant had had a rather unusual educational trajectory, only taking up the study of history at a relatively late stage in life. She graduated with a BA in History as a University of London external student (with a second class degree) in December, 1912 – so, in her 30s, by the look of it.[xi] A secondary source tells me that she studied at the Maria Grey Training College at some point. She clearly did gain her Ph.D. in 1929 (so, around 50), at University College London, on the subject of ‘The Exchequer Chamber, being ‘the assembly of all the judges of England’.[xii] This was the topic on which she would write her Selden Society volumes in the 1930s and 1940s (in her 50s and 60s). I speculate that her family connections with an eminent lawyer, Lord Atkin,[xiii] who was president of the Selden Society in 1933, might also have encouraged her in that direction. Most of us do not have her privilege, but it is a somewhat heartening story of serious application to something very challenging at a later stage in life.
Only somewhat heartening, however, since the reception of Mary Hemmant’s work does not suggest that even this well-connected and well-off woman managed to obtain unalloyed respect from the legal history notables of the day. I found this quite telling, in terms of the treatment of ‘outsiders’ by the legal history ‘boys’ club’ of the early-to-mid-twentieth century.
It would probably not have seemed too odd to her, given that she (presumably) chose to label herself as ‘M. Hemmant’, rather than ‘Mary Hemmant’, but several of the reviews of her volumes are studiedly un-gendered. Generally, they do her the courtesy of calling her ‘Dr Hemmant’, though not always: to Samuel E. Thorne, she is ‘Miss Hemmant’ throughout.[xiv] T.F.T. Plucknett is generally positive, though pointing out some mistakes. [xv] Positive/bland reviews come from Erwin F. Meyer and Margaret Hastings.[xvi] The general view seems to be that the later volume is not up to the standard of the earlier one, but of some value (S.B. Chrimes talks of her ‘highly competent scholarship’).[xvii] An outlier in its ferocity, and surely one which must have hurt – is Samuel E. Thorne’s review of the second volume. He damns her as being ‘neither a lawyer, nor at home among medieval law reports’ (the first of which might seem a bit harsh, when we consider that she would have had considerable difficulty in becoming a lawyer prior to 1919, at which point she was forty …).[xviii] While he is not wrong in his corrections, his tone is not exactly welcoming to those trying to work on legal history without having been through the training so much more easily available to men than to women.
There we are then, that is a brief introduction to M. Hemmant Ph.D. There are some further papers relevant to her story which it would be good to see, in order to get a fuller picture of her interactions with the Selden Society, so that’s one for the backburner pile. And interim lessons for today? Well, the straightforward gender bars no longer persist, so to that extent this is a story of the past, but the practical difficulties of acquiring the necessary skills, confidence and contacts to be a successful and accepted legal historian remain significant, and certainly are still considerably more challenging to some groups than to others. Work to be done.
GS
19/11/2024
[i] See the similar mistake I made with N. Dermott Harding.
[ii] Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, Friday 21st January, 1910; Friday 27th December, 1912.
[iii] See this account.
[iv] SCKA, Friday 8th March, 1912.
[v] SCKA Friday 19th May, 1913.
[vi] SCKA, Friday 31st July, 1971; Gentlewoman, Saturday 4th June, 1921, p. 50; Buckinghamshire Examiner, Friday 22nd June,1928; Mid Sussex Times, Tuesday 9th July, 1935, p. 3.
[vii] See, e.g., See, e.g. Times, Monday 19th December, 1932.
[viii] SCKA, Friday 31st July, 1971.
[ix] Tonbridge Free Press, Friday 9th October, 1964, p. 9.
[x] SCKA, Friday 31st July, 1971.
[xi] Times, Saturday 7th December, 1912, ‘University Intelligence’. (I notice that a certain Helena F. Normanton was listed in the same place, having done a bit better, and earned a first class degree in History).
[xii] See: Successes, setbacks and stories of the unexpected from the IHR’s Class of 1921 – On History Medieval England | British History Online
[xiii] For contact with Lord Atkin, see, e.g., Times, 2nd March, 1939.
[xiv] S.E. Thorne, Yale LJ 58 (1948-9) 821-4.
[xv] EHR 50 (1935) 139-40.
[xvi] Speculum 9(1934) 334-6; Speculum 24 (1949) 623-6.
[xvii] EHR 64 (1949) 372-4
[xviii] S.E. Thorne, Yale LJ 58 (1948-9) 821-4.