This year, Women’s History Month (March 2025) celebrates ‘Women Educating and Inspiring Generations’. To mark both Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day (8 March), we are highlighting three women who trained generations of teachers at Strathclyde’s antecedent institution: the Glasgow Provincial Training College, known from 1959 as Jordanhill College of Education. Those featured are:
- Miss Janet Gallie, Mistress of Methods (1916-1950)
- Dr Anne McAllister, Principal Lecturer in Speech Training (1919-1958) and Director of the Glasgow School of Speech Therapy (1935-1964)
- Miss Joyce Moffett, Lecturer in Speech Training (1941-1958) and Dean of Women (1958-1971)
Significantly, Miss Gallie and Dr McAllister both taught Joyce Moffett, who qualified as a teacher in 1933 and subsequently lectured at the College alongside her mentors. The transcript of an oral history interview with Joyce (reference: Acc 95/07), conducted in the 1990s reveals the esteem in which she held Miss Gallie and Dr McAllister and the knowledge and inspiration she gained from each of them.
Janet Gallie
During her 34-year career, Miss Janet Gallie taught thousands of women students the practical techniques of primary school teaching. Through lectures in the College and demonstrations lessons in its practicing school, she showed the students how to maintain classroom discipline, convey information clearly, and present themselves confidently and authoritatively before a class of children. This basic, but essential training was forever appreciated by Joyce Moffett, who described Miss Gallie as “an excellent teacher” from whom “I got most help in the practical business of teaching”.
“I was very fortunate in being assigned to a Miss Gallie [,] who was one of the outstanding lecturers in the Methods Department at that time. From her I learned the basics that were so comfortable to people going out to teach, and who had never faced a class before: organisation of the class, pitfalls to avoid, how to handle them and maintain discipline, the techniques of marking registers and so on.”
Miss Joyce Moffett, recalling her experience of Methods training under Miss Janet Gallie.
Anne McAllister
As well as pioneering specific courses for the training of speech therapists, Dr Anne McAllister taught phonetics to aspiring primary and secondary school teachers at the Glasgow Provincial Training College. Her expertise and enthusiasm inspired many of them, including Joyce Moffett, who acknowledged that she first became interested in phonetics thanks to Dr McAllister’s classes. In 1941, several years after Joyce gained her teaching qualification, Dr McAllister, who knew of her interest in the subject, invited Joyce to join the staff of the Speech Training Department on a temporary secondment. Thus began a long and fruitful career, attributable to Dr McAllister’s influence and encouragement.
“Dr McAllister . . . was a great stimulus and I found myself constrained of my own wishes to take an LRAM [Licentiate of the Royal College of Music] and a course of study in phonetics at London University because she made me so interested in speech. Also, she was doing work in an outpatients’ clinic in speech therapy, and I became involved in that too. So, I found myself caught up in a new area in which I had had no particular interest before but thereupon I identified myself with it, studying for and acquiring the LCST [Licentiate of the College of Speech Therapists]”.
Miss Joyce Moffett, recalling the inspiration she gained from Dr Anne McAllister:
Joyce Moffett
The temporary secondment became permanent, and Joyce Moffett ultimately succeeded Dr McAllister as Principal Lecturer in Speech Training in 1951. Seven years later, Miss Moffett was appointed Dean of Women, serving as counsellor and advisor to all the women students - over 2,000 each year – who entered the College. It was a demanding and frequently exhausting role, but also very rewarding. On her retirement in 1971, the student magazine, Spectrum, observed that Miss Moffett ‘has served the students popularly and well, giving advice and direction where required, not only in the academic sense but in the personal field as well.’ She was, and is, remembered with gratitude and affection by former students and colleagues alike.
“[My role as Dean of Women was] on the human side. With the numbers of students who needed help with their courses and with their background problems. The Special Recruitment Scheme people [mature students accepted for training due to a post-World War II shortage of teachers] often had problems. They might have marital problems – invalid husbands, alcoholic husbands, they were deserted, they had families. I had a lot of work to do finding places for their children in schools in Glasgow, making contacts with nursery schools or agencies that would look after their children. That was a big part of my work. I would say my work was very largely pastoral and personal, medical and domestic. It was very rewarding but very demanding. I realise how busy I was from morning to night. But it was so absorbing and so worthwhile, I felt, that I was very sorry when the college ceased to have that kind of post.”
Joyce Moffett, recalling her experience as Dean of Women at Jordanhill College of Education.
Visit our Women's History Month display on Level 3 of the Andersonian Library throughout March 2025, during Library opening hours. Details of more activities and events can be found on Strathclyde's Women's History Month webpage.
