'u : ■ *»?o I RURAL LIFE


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ABOVE: The Hutton campus in 1938. Inset - Chrysanthemum picking in 1947. Below - Pictures from the Myerscough College archive and (left) a Land Girl during the war


esting. Ann Turner is, indeed, the first female in the role of principal, but if you turn back the clock, she isn't the first woman to head up the institution. When it opened in 1894, on a


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147-acre site at Hutton, one of the first people to be taken on was a woman called Miss Macqueen. Initially employed as the resident


dairy instructor, Miss Macqueen went on to lead the college in her role as directress, matron and


teacher of butter and soft cheese making.


She was paid the princely sum


of £3 per week (about £300 today) and received a bonus of seven shil­ lings and sixpence (£40) for every new student she enrolled. Her package also included free accom­ modation on site and an allowance for an assistant. •Oddly, the money needed to


fund the new college came from a tax paid by publicans on their sales of alcohol. The tax, specifically earmarked for technical training, became known as whisky money. In the early days, the college,


then called Lancashire County Institute of Agriculture, was used exclusively by women. The first cohort of 10 students,


all aged over 15 and approved by committee, began their residency on May 14,1894, and were trained, over a period of about eight or nine weeks, in both dairying - using a


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mobile wooden dairy - and bread making.


. It is one of a number of signifi­ cant female 'moments' that pepper Myerscough's fascinating history. As more courses were introduced, including poultry-keeping in 1899, men did join the college and in 1912a new horticultural building was erected to accommodate more


. male students. But the arrival of war in 1914 saw the college experienc­ ing another one of those female moments. With the men away at war, wom­


en were encouraged to take over the jobs they had vacated, includ­ ing those in farming. So, while most courses at Hutton were suspended, a specialist one was introduced to help the war effort - training the Women's Land Army. Almost 500 Land Girls trained at Hutton before being placed on one of the many farms that had been left short- handed. The institution also served as offices for the War Committee and was the main


centre for national milk testing. After the war, the college faced


a number of challenges, with some courses outdated and others still suspended by the Ministry of Agri­ culture. Then the Loveday Report of 1947 decreed that the county needed to up its game when it came to agricultural training and the first of a series of significant expansions took place. Lancashire County Council


responded by buying another site at Winmarleigh, which offered full-time courses for 20 years, from 1949. The success of the college ultimately meant it outgrew its two sites and, on the recommendation of education inspectors, began looking for an alternative, single site, in about 1958. It took until 1962 before the council secured a lease on the Myerscough site and it wasn't until 1969 that it began to take students. At the time, the college was the


only one in the country permit­ ted to offer both a higher and an


IGHT years ago Myerscough College appointed its first woman principal.


The choice of title is inter­


ordinary diploma in agriculture, meaning demand was high. Initially, there were 127 residential students, but the college continued to expand throughout the 1970s, adding more laboratories and a school liaison unit and changing its name again, this time to Lancashire College of Agriculture and Horti­ culture.


By the beginning of the 1990s,


the number of students enrolled at Myerscough College had doubled in size in comparison to the previ­ ous decade and, following radical changes to the Further and Higher Education Act, the institution broke away from Lancashire County Council, becoming a corporate body in 1993. It also changed its name yet again, this time to Myer- scough College.


The vision to become one single


site was finally realised at the end of the 1990s. The college left the original site at Hutton in 1997,


103 years afterthe first lease was ^ signed, and in 1999 Winmarleigh " was sold, leaving Myerscough,


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along with its farms, as the only campus.


Since then, the college has ^


branched out once more, opening a number of smaller centres, no-


tably at Croxteth Hall in Liverpool,


Crow Wood in Burnley and Witton Park in Blackburn. Last year there were around


6,000 students... not all of them women by any means.


But there's a woman at the top


again, albeit with a different title to dairy instructor Miss Macqueen.


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