Beatrice Ensor
Encyclopedia
Beatrice Ensor was a theosophical
Theosophy
Theosophy, in its modern presentation, is a spiritual philosophy developed since the late 19th century. Its major themes were originally described mainly by Helena Blavatsky , co-founder of the Theosophical Society...

 educationist, pedagogue, co-founder of the New Education Fellowship (later World Education Fellowship)http://www.wef-international.org/ and editor of the journal Education for the New Erahttp://www.wef-international.org/publications.php.

Born in Marseille
Marseille
Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...

 on 11 August 1885, Beatrice Nina Frederica de Normann was the eldest child of Albert Edward de Normann and Irene Matilda (née Wood). Her father was in the shipping business and her early years were spent in Marseille
Marseille
Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...

 and Genoa
Genoa
Genoa |Ligurian]] Zena ; Latin and, archaically, English Genua) is a city and an important seaport in northern Italy, the capital of the Province of Genoa and of the region of Liguria....

, hence her fluency in Italian and French. She was greatly influenced by a theosophical book that a visitor to her home had left. This led in 1908 to her joining the Theosophical Society
Theosophical Society
The Theosophical Society is an organization formed in 1875 to advance the spiritual principles and search for Truth known as Theosophy. The original organization, after splits and realignments has several successors...

, which came to play an important part in her life. She had two brothers - Sir Eric de Normann (K. B. E., C. B) and Albert Wilfred Noel de Normann ("Bill").

Coming to England to complete her education, she trained as a domestic science teacher and for a short while taught the subject at a college in Sheffield
Sheffield
Sheffield is a city and metropolitan borough of South Yorkshire, England. Its name derives from the River Sheaf, which runs through the city. Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and with some of its southern suburbs annexed from Derbyshire, the city has grown from its largely...

. This led to her being appointed Inspector of women’s and girls’ education by Glamorgan County Council. She became disenchanted with the regimented and passive teaching she saw but when she inspected a Montessori school in Cheltenham
Cheltenham
Cheltenham , also known as Cheltenham Spa, is a large spa town and borough in Gloucestershire, on the edge of the Cotswolds in the South-West region of England. It is the home of the flagship race of British steeplechase horse racing, the Gold Cup, the main event of the Cheltenham Festival held...

, she became very interested in the ideas of Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori was an Italian physician and educator, a noted humanitarian and devout Catholic best known for the philosophy of education which bears her name...

http://www.montessori-ami.org/ who she met and corresponded with. She attended a conference in East Runton
East Runton
East Runton is a small village in Norfolk, England situated close to the North Sea. It was once a traditional fishing village outside Cromer but is now a popular holiday destination for camping and caravan holidays. The village is within the parish of Runton that also includes West Runton. The...

 in 1914 organised by the New Ideals in Education group; the topic of the conference was 'The Montessori Method in Education'. She was a vegetarian and anti vivisectionist.

Theosophy and St Christopher School

In the early months of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 she was appointed by the Board of Education as H. M. Inspector of domestic science in South West England based in Bath. But she found civil service work uncongenial and, having played a major part in founding the Theosophical Fraternity in Education, she was invited to become Organising Secretary of the Theosophical Education Trust in 1915. In this role one of her main tasks was the consolidation of the Society’s educational work at Letchworth Garden City into St Christopher Schoolhttp://www.stchris.co.uk/, which was co-educational and boarding, with Isabel King as its Headmistress. One of the teachers at the school for a while was V. K. Krishna Menonhttp://www.tkminstitute.org/. She worked closely for a time with George Arundale
George Arundale
Dr. George Sidney Arundale was a theosophist, freemason, president of the Theosophical Society Adyar and bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church...

 who became the President of the Theosophical Society Adyar
Theosophical Society Adyar
The Theosophy Society - Adyar is the name of a section of the Theosophical Society founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and others in 1875. Its headquarters moved with Blavatsky and president Henry Steel Olcott to Adyar, an area of Chennai in 1883...

.

In 1917 she married Robert Weld Ensor, of Northern Irish/English descent, who had served in the Canadian North West Mounted Police http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/ and was then a Captain in the Canadian Army coming to England and then going on the Murmansk Expedition . It was theosophy that brought them together. They had one son, Michael, born in 1919. Annie Besant
Annie Besant
Annie Besant was a prominent British Theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator and supporter of Irish and Indian self rule.She was married at 19 to Frank Besant but separated from him over religious differences. She then became a prominent speaker for the National Secular Society ...

, Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa
Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa
Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa was a freemason, theosophist and president of the Theosophical Society Adyar. Jinarajadasa's interests and writings included religion, philosophy, literature, art, science and occult chemistry...

 and Harold Baillie-Weaver were his godparents.

New Era in Education

After the war she helped to bring under nourished Hungarian children to Britain for a spell to recover their health. She travelled to Budapest
Budapest
Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...

 and returned with the first party. For this she was awarded a medal by the Hungarian Red Cross http://www.ifrc.org/address/hu.asp. But a more enduring role to her Theosophical role was the production, with A. S. Neill
A. S. Neill
Alexander Sutherland Neill was a Scottish progressive educator, author and founder of Summerhill school, which remains open and continues to follow his educational philosophy to this day...

 for a time as joint editor, of the Journal Education for the New Erahttp://www.neweraineducation.co.uk/, which still flourishes some 85 years later. Co-operating magazines in French and German followed edited by Adolphe Ferrière
Adolphe Ferrière
Adolphe Ferrière was one of the founders of the movement of the progressive education.He shortly worked in a school in Glarisegg and later founded an experimental school in Lausanne, Switzerland, but Adolphe Ferrière had to quickly abandon teaching due to his deafness...

 :fr:Adolphe Ferrière and Elisabeth Rotten
Elisabeth Rotten
Elisabeth Friederike Rotten was a Quaker, peace activist and educational progressive.- Life :...

 :de:Elisabeth Rotten respectively.

The New (World) Education Fellowship

In 1921, together with Iwan Hawliczek, she organised a conference in Calais
Calais
Calais is a town in Northern France in the department of Pas-de-Calais, of which it is a sub-prefecture. Although Calais is by far the largest city in Pas-de-Calais, the department's capital is its third-largest city of Arras....

 on the ‘Creative Self-Expression of the Child’, with attendance of over 100. Although this was inspired by theosophists anxious to prevent another world war, what emerged was the New (later World) Education Fellowship http://www.wef-international.org/, an entirely non-political and non-sectarian forum for new ideas in education. It was not to advocate any particular method but to ‘seek to find the thread of truth in all methods’. It still has active sections in some 20 countries. Beatrice Ensor, together with the editors of the other two journals, formed the initial organising committee of the N.E.F., which held international conferences at two yearly intervals, presided over by distinguished educationists and pedagogues.

The second conference of 1923 was held in Montreux
Montreux
Montreux is a municipality in the district of Riviera-Pays-d'Enhaut in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland.It is located on Lake Geneva at the foot of the Alps and has a population, , of and nearly 90,000 in the agglomeration.- History :...

, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

 and there she met Professor Carl Jung
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...

 whom she invited to speak at a meeting in London (where she introduced him to H G Wells), Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, Professor Franz Cizek
Franz Cižek
Franz Cižek was an Austrian genre and portrait painter as well as a teacher and reformer of art education. Cižek was born in Leitmeritz, in northern Bohemia and studied painting under the German painters Franz Rumpler and Josef Mathias von Trenkwald at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna...

 and Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler
Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement as a core member of the Vienna...

.

In 1929 the conference was held in Kronborg Castle
Kronborg Castle
Kronborg is a star fortress situated near the town of Helsingør on the extreme northeastern tip of Zealand at the narrowest point of the Øresund, the sound between Denmark and Sweden...

, Helsingör, Denmark and amongst the delegates and speakers were Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori was an Italian physician and educator, a noted humanitarian and devout Catholic best known for the philosophy of education which bears her name...

, Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore , sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European Nobel laureate by earning the 1913 Prize in Literature...

, Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"....

, Kurt Lewin
Kurt Lewin
Kurt Zadek Lewin was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology....

, Adolphe Ferrière
Adolphe Ferrière
Adolphe Ferrière was one of the founders of the movement of the progressive education.He shortly worked in a school in Glarisegg and later founded an experimental school in Lausanne, Switzerland, but Adolphe Ferrière had to quickly abandon teaching due to his deafness...

 :fr:Adolphe Ferrière, Ovide Decroly
Ovide Decroly
Jean-Ovide Decroly was a Belgian teacher and psychologist.He studied medicine at the University of Ghent, with half a year at the University of Berlin where he studied the action of toxins and antitoxins on general nutrition in 1898...

, Helen Parkhurst
Helen Parkhurst
Helen Parkhurst was an American educator, author, lecturer, the originator of the Dalton Plan and the founder of The Dalton School....

, Pierre Bovet :fr:Pierre Bovet, A S Neill, Elisabeth Rotten
Elisabeth Rotten
Elisabeth Friederike Rotten was a Quaker, peace activist and educational progressive.- Life :...

, Franz Cizek
Franz Cižek
Franz Cižek was an Austrian genre and portrait painter as well as a teacher and reformer of art education. Cižek was born in Leitmeritz, in northern Bohemia and studied painting under the German painters Franz Rumpler and Josef Mathias von Trenkwald at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna...

, Dr Harold Rugg
Harold Rugg
Harold Rugg was an educational reformer in the early to mid 1900s, associated with the Progressive Education Movement. Originally trained in civil engineering at Dartmouth College , Rugg went on to study psychology, sociology and education at the University of Illinois where he completed a...

, Professor T P Nunn, and Paul Geheeb :de:Paul Geheeb.

Other conferences were held at Locarno
Locarno
Locarno is the capital of the Locarno district, located on the northern tip of Lake Maggiore in the Swiss canton of Ticino, close to Ascona at the foot of the Alps. It has a population of about 15,000...

 (1927), Cheltenham
Cheltenham
Cheltenham , also known as Cheltenham Spa, is a large spa town and borough in Gloucestershire, on the edge of the Cotswolds in the South-West region of England. It is the home of the flagship race of British steeplechase horse racing, the Gold Cup, the main event of the Cheltenham Festival held...

 and Heidelberg
Heidelberg
-Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of...

 (1925),

She was a member of the Education Advisory Committee of the Labour Party for a short while but her utopian views clashed with those of R. H. Tawney
R. H. Tawney
Richard Henry Tawney was an English economic historian, social critic, Christian socialist, and an important proponent of adult education....

 and resigned her position.

The N.E.F. and Unesco

Just as theosophy had a profound influence on the N.E.F. so the N.E.F. had a profound influence on the creation of UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=29008&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. It was described as "the midwife at the birth of UNESCO" (Kobayashi) and has been an NGOhttp://erc.unesco.org/ong/en/directory/ONG_Desc_portal.asp?mode=gn&code=635 of UNESCO since 1966 (Hiroshi Iwama). It changed its name to W.E.F. that year.

Frensham Heights School

Meanwhile problems were building up within the Theosophical Education Trust leading to tensions in the Letchworth community in which the termination of her husband’s appointment as Secretary of the Trust played a part. In 1925 Isabel King and Beatrice Ensor left to establish Frensham Heightshttp://www.frensham-heights.org.uk/, a co-educational school in Surrey
Surrey
Surrey is a county in the South East of England and is one of the Home Counties. The county borders Greater London, Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire. The historic county town is Guildford. Surrey County Council sits at Kingston upon Thames, although this has been part of...

, from Montessori to university entrance level, for which Mrs. Edith Douglas-Hamilton (one of the Wills tobacco heiresses) provided the capital. Some of the St Christopher staff and children moved to Frensham to form its nucleus. However, two years later, Mrs. Douglas-Hamilton died unexpectedly without having established the financial independence of the school that she had intended. The dramatic change produced a situation where Beatrice Ensor and Isabel King did not feel they could work. They both left but the break was without bitterness and they both remained on the board of governors for several years.

Lecture Tours and South Africa

Beatrice Ensor then concentrated her work on the New Era and N.E.F. and undertook two lecture trips to North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

 in 1926 and 1928, speaking on new movements in education in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

, Detroit, and Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

. She was also one of an educational group that was invited to tour Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

 and visited South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

 in 1927 and 1929.

Her husband had moved to Louterwater in South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

 where he acquired a large farm in a little developed valley, recently found to be suitable for the growing of deciduous fruit. The orchards he planted were just beginning to bear by 1933 when he died. This meant that Beatrice had to move to South Africa and take over the farm. This greatly restricted her educational work. She was one of a group invited to lecture in Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 in 1937, where she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Western Australia
University of Western Australia
The University of Western Australia was established by an Act of the Western Australian Parliament in February 1911, and began teaching students for the first time in 1913. It is the oldest university in the state of Western Australia and the only university in the state to be a member of the...

, Perth
Perth, Western Australia
Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and the fourth most populous city in Australia. The Perth metropolitan area has an estimated population of almost 1,700,000....

. She helped the South African section of the N.E.F. and financed and had built on her farm a school for mixed race children, for whom no provision existed in the area.

When it became clear that her son would be pursuing a civil service career, just as her brothers had done, and did not want to take on the farm she sold it and moved to a house on the coast at Keurboomstrand
Keurboomstrand, Western Cape
Keurboomstrand is a resort town near Plettenberg Bay on the Western Cape of South Africa. It takes its name from the indigenous keurboom tree which grows in the region. The Keurbooms River runs nearby.-History:...

 near Plettenberg Bay
Plettenberg Bay
Plettenberg Bay, nicknamed Plet or Plett, is the primary town of the Bitou Local Municipality in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. As of the census of 2001, there were 29149 population...

. But when her family were settled in England she moved there to be with her grandchildren, living first at Blackheath
Blackheath, London
Blackheath is a district of South London, England. It is named from the large open public grassland which separates it from Greenwich to the north and Lewisham to the west...

, then in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, at Dolphin Square
Dolphin Square
Dolphin Square is a block of private apartments and business complex built near the River Thames at Pimlico in London, between 1935 and 1937.At one time, the huge development was home to more than 70 MPs, and at least 10 lords...

, where she died in 1974.

External links



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