Reading Forrest Reid’s autobiography, I was intrigued by his mention of his early education at “Miss Grant’s School” in Belfast, before he went on to Inst. Miss Grant was based at 9 Fitzwilliam St, opposite the location of the Institute of Irish Studies when I was a Fellow there in the mid 1990s.

The only other person I could find who had been a pupil at Miss Hardy’s was someone I had never heard of, Alice Everett, daughter of the Professor of Natural Philosophy at Queen’s College Belfast (as it then was). Her story is fascinating. She started studying at Queen’s too, and got first place in her first-year examinations in 1884, but did not get the prize because the university would not award it to a woman. She then studied maths at Cambridge from 1886 to 1889 and passed the Tripos, but was not awarded a degree, because Cambridge did not award degrees to women until 1928.

She was the first woman to work at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, and then moved to Potsdam where she became the first woman to work at an observatory in Germany. After a year in Vassar College, she became fed up with the lack of career prospects for a woman in astronomy and moved back to London to help her retired father with his research on optics.

Thanks to the First World War, she got hired by the National Physical Laboratory’s optics section in 1917 and worked there until she retired in 1925. She was probably present at the demonstration of the first television image by John Logie Baird in January 1926, and applied jointly with him for a relating to television optics in 1933. She was one of the founders of the Television Society, now the Royal Television Society. She was granted a £100 civil list pension in recognition of her work on television in 1938 – better late than never, I suppose – and died in 1949.

I literally wrote my PhD thesis on Irish science at the time she was active, and I cannot remember having heard of her.

There is a brilliant interview with her from The Sketch in 1893, published on the RGO website and well worth a look.

“Observing is, then, the part of the work you like best?” said I.

“Oh, yes,” responded Miss Everett with enthusiasm. “You feel that you really are an astronomer then, doing practical business. Besides, there is a certain charm about having the handling of a fine and powerful instrument. I scarcely know why it is, but I find the hours fly when I am observing, though the old hands say it grows very monotonous in the course of years. In winter, though the roof is partly open and the dome kept at the temperature of the outer air, we are too actively employed to feel the cold much, unless it be windy. In summer, though, perhaps, the irregular hours may prove trying in time, the quiet, fresh night is much pleasanter than the hot and dusty London day. Towards dawn it is quite interesting to observe what a difference the dim light makes in the aspect of the earth.”

When I posted this on social media, QUB were kind enough to get back to me with an article by Shannon Devlin about the first women students at Queen’s, looking at the ten women in this photograph and exploring what is known about them.

Alice Everett is labelled as being second from the left on the back row. Only two of the women in the middle row are named. For some reason, the one on the left is not, but the evidence is clear – she was Florence “Flora” Hamilton (1862-1908), who did not live to an old age but is remembered as being the mother of C.S. Lewis.