1900-1919: The Liverpool Gymnasium Training College

The Liverpool Gymnasium Training College was established in 1900 at the Liverpool Gymnasium. Very quickly, Marsh bought a townhouse at 110 Bedford Street, where 50 students could be accommodated, expanding again in 1907 to two more townhouses on the corner of Huskisson Street. Students were required to cycle several miles away to their playing fields in Wavertree or Calderstones for hockey and cricket practice, as well as towards Chester for rowing practice along the River Dee.

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The early curriculum was highly innovative: physical education was interpreted in a very wide and, at the time, controversial way. Marsh originally followed her own systems of free movements and gymnastics until adopting the Swedish Free Movements system, in addition to the unusual use of music with exercise, within which students were encouraged to ‘make up their own exercises in order to learn the value of creative effort.’ Swimming was also taught for many years before it became established in the national curriculum in 1919.

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Marsh also worked with the orthopaedic surgeon Sir Robert Jones to introduce remedial classes to the College, fitting up a room at 110 Bedford Street where patients were sent by doctors for exercise and massage treatments. Once the College had reached 171 Bedford Street, its large and specialist Medical Gymnasium required the additional help of senior students. This included a clinic for non-paying patients treated in small classes. The Physiotherapy Department of the Stanley Hospital was also run from the College under the direction of the teacher May Hilton Royle, where students obtained experience in hospital methods, particularly during the First World War.

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In spite of these innovations, the College was still highly restrictive and elitist in its early years. Early entry requirements for students stipulated that they must be: ‘steady and reliable… not sentimental or moody,’ as ‘the frivolous or lazy girl is not wanted’; over 5’3”; of ‘good social position’ with ‘no accent’; and wear their hair long, tied up, and not in fashionable cuts such as bobs, in order to differentiate Marsh’s young student teachers from the pupils they were training to teach.