ABSTRACT
Aged 47, Hughes retired from CTC and went to live with her younger brother, Arthur, a solicitor in Barry, South Wales.1 As she had inherited an independent income following the death of her father, she did not need to hold a salaried post again. Once away from the strains of CTC and Cambridge, simply being free to do what she wanted, restored her health almost immediately. In an article entitled ‘By a Woman of Leisure’, written for the Gild Newsletter, there is a huge contrast from the account of her broken-down state of health so recently given. Spending a month in Switzerland during which she climbed the Matterhorn, she commented that she ‘had imagined appalling difficulties, and the worst thing that befell me was frozen finger tips on account of the unusual cold’. Perhaps climbing the Matterhorn proved less difficult than achieving acceptance for teacher training in Cambridge. Other exciting new experiences recounted included ‘riding on a fire engine at full gallop…[a] wild rush in the dark night as one clings frantically to rope and rail’.2 Again, perhaps full gallops were more congenial to her nature than the endless round of administration and bureaucracy that inevitably accompanies a growing institution.
