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by John Griffiths Pedley (Author)
Ellen Constance "Connie" Nightingale (1892-1967) was a leading advocate for women's rights and, in an age when girls' education was given scant attention, for the education of girls. Headmistress of Dr. Williams' School, Dolgellau (1924-40) and The Mount School, York (1940-8), she drove these schools forward, increasing student and staff numbers, broadening the curriculum, and alerting young women to events and cultural attitudes in the wider world, as well as career opportunities.
Born in Burnley, a cotton town in northwest England, in straitened circumstances, she attended the local Grammar School, one of the first of her gender to be admitted. Armed with degrees from the University of Manchester (B.A. 1913, M.A. 1914) in Classics, she taught at Lady Manners School, one of England's first coeducational schools, before moving to Bootham, a Quaker school in York. Her commitment to the Quaker way of life, her interest in the cause of peace, and her sympathy for refugees drew her, at the end of World War I, to the Paris Peace Conference. Helped by Ronald Burrows, her Professor of Greek at Manchester and a friend of Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, she was able to join the Greek delegation at the talks.
In Paris she met Konstantinos Spanoudis, a leader of the Greek delegation and owner of the newspaper Proodos (Progress) in Constantinople. Invited to Constantinople, she worked there both as a journalist and on the difficulties facing refugees. While returning to London in September 1920, she met Alexis Aladin, a Russian soldier with a deep history in Russian politics. Their friendship is recorded in substantial correspondence now housed in the John Rylands Library.
In retirement she devoted her time to the United Nations Association, the International Council of Women, and the National Council of Women. Her work is well described by the President of the ICW, who wrote of her "contributing much to discussion and action from the limitless resources of an erudite mind and an urbane and compassionate spirit." The principal contributions of her life-in education, international affairs, and women's rights-were clear for all to see.
