ABSTRACT
One woman told me that when she enquired about entry in the early 1970s, she was told that they would like to take her but there was no accommodation available for women, although admittedly the situation has much improved in recent years. Surveyors were concerned about status and saw ‘education’ as rather a down-market activity with working-class associations, unless it was Oxbridge. Private correspondence and crammer courses were the main methods of qualification. The early Surveyors Institution had established entrance requirements which entitled a candidate to be articled to a practice from the age of sixteen. The range of subjects required for entrance was only available at public and good private schools in the late nineteenth century, and so one needed ‘class’ as well as ‘brains’. In 1918 an external degree of London University in estate management was established and taught mainly through the newly established College of Estate Management.
