ABSTRACT
Despite eventually deciding that teaching was not the career she wished to pursue for the whole of her life, Clara did relish her time at Wyggeston, both professionally and socially. Within the first few weeks she had settled down and began enjoying life immensely. She went to socials and made friends with local people, the most important of whom were the Gimson family. Through them she became acquainted with the Leicester Secular Society to which they belonged. Mr Josiah Gimson owned a machinery manufacturing business which he had inherited from his father. Despite being fairly rich, he had a well-developed social conscience, desiring to extend co-operative activities, improve conditions in the town of Leicester, and to ‘establish equality without revolution and equalise fortunes without dynamite’,1 a view with which Clara had much in common. From his first marriage Josiah had five children and from his second a further five. All the family followed Josiah in his unorthodox beliefs. The elder boys were groomed to take over the family business on their father’s retirement. When Clara first became acquainted with the family around 1882, Mentor was 31 years of age, Arthur 29, Sydney2 22 and Ernest 18; she was the same age as Sydney and initially she was drawn closer to him than the others. At the various socials she attended she hoped to dance with either Sydney or his friend whom she names only as AH and who was two years his junior.3 Sometimes she was asked to dance: ‘We had a quadrille, AH sat next [to] me but did not ask me to dance until SG went and asked Polly, when he graciously offered his arm’,4 and sometimes she was not: ‘This time no-one asked me to dance’,5 but not being one to worry unduly she invited some young boys to dance with her and had an enjoyable evening nonetheless. On most occasions Sydney accompanied her home afterwards.
