Molly Hughes

MOLLY Vivian HUGHES née Thomas (1866-1956) was brought up in Canonbury with her four older brothers; her father died when she was 13. She went to North London Collegiate School, to teacher-training college in Cambridge (as one of the first intake) and was awarded her BA in London. When only 25 she was asked to set up the new teacher-training department at Bedford College in London; but after her marriage to Arthur Hughes, a barrister, she had to stop work. They had four children in Ladbroke Grove and later on moved out to Barnet. In 1918 her husband died and Molly returned to teaching, eventually becoming a schools inspector, as well as writing several books about London. In 1934 she published A London Child of the 1870s, the first volume of what was to be an autobiographical trilogy, widely read for the then unfashionably sympathetic light it shed on Victorian England.