The story of Hannah Hotten’s “discovery” provides us with
testimony concerning the role of music in a girls' club that is unusual in
coming from the “girl” participant herself (albeit in a narrative shaped by a
journalist-interviewer) rather than a philanthropist’s account. Hannah’s story
was related in a detailed interview, illustrated with her portrait, in the
January 24, 1891 issue of the fashionable magazine, Lady’s Pictorial.
The occasion for the article was the presentation of the Sainton-Dolby
Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music. The scholarship, named for the
English contralto, Charlotte Sainton-Dolby, was open to female singers between
the ages of 17 and 20 who were not already Academy students. The interviewer,
having heard that there was something unusual in the background of the
scholarship winner, had decided to investigate.
Hannah Hotten had learned about the prize through a chain of events that began
with her participation in a musical evening at the Greek Street Girls’ Club in
Soho. Founded in 1880 by Maude Stanley, a daughter of Baron Stanley of Alderley,
the Soho club was the model for a movement that grew so rapidly that by 1883
Stanley had decided to establish a Girls’ Club Union. A friend of Hannah’s who
belonged to the Greek Street club had heard her sing while Hannah was scrubbing
benches and floors in the Gospel Temperance Mission building where he father
served as keeper. The friend invited Hannah to take part in a musical evening at
the club, where Maude Stanley, impressed by her lovely mezzo-soprano voice,
asked if she would like to study music. Hannah, as she later told the Lady’s
Pictorial, “jumped at the very idea of such a thing,” and accepted the gift of
introductory lessons from Edwin Holland, a voice teacher at the Guildhall School
of Music who taught at the Royal Academy.
Ambition was no new thing to Hannah, who had sometimes “grumbled” over her work
“and longed for a different kind of life.” Several members of her family were
musical, but had never received instruction and could play the piano and other
instruments only by ear. By the time of her interview, Hannah had moved into the
Soho club, where she lived for six days each week, a number of girls’ clubs
having added (or affiliated with) residential facilities - “homes” - for the
girls they served. Hannah ascribed the good fortune of her scholarship award to
the personal interest and kindness of Miss Stanley, and gratefully acknowledged
the help of a second philanthropist, Lady de Clifford, who invited her and
another club member for a month-long country house visit where Hannah sang to
her hostess each morning.
Hannah’s scholarship would provide her with 15 guineas each year for a total of
three years of study; she knew that would pay far less than half her tuition
fees. Unfortunately the Lady’s Pictorial article did not conclude with the
announcement of a subscription for the support Hannah would need for the
remaining tuition cost and and living expenses, ending instead with a tribute to
the Greek Street Girls’ Club whose existence was proof “of the vast amount of
good work which is being done by a few good women in ‘darkest London,’ quietly
and unobtrusively, without any flourish of trumpets or beating of drums.” Whether
or not the cause was the inadequacy of her award, Hannah appears to have dropped
out of the Royal Academy after one year.