Real Lives: Jessie Reid Crosbie
Historian feature
Alyson Brown, Dan Copley and Jack Bennett uncover the life of a reforming Liverpool headmistress.
Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. We are all part of the rich fabric of the communities in which we live and we are affected to greater and lesser degrees by the big events that happen on a daily basis. Sometimes we might even play a part in the big events, although our names are not recorded, while on other occasions we are witnesses to events and times which we would now consider remarkable. Sometimes our regular lives are the perfect illustration of how people live at any given time – but all our lives matter and we want to celebrate some of those lives here. If you have any people that you think might also fit this category and would like to write about them, please do contact: martin.hoare@history.org.uk
In 1954 the Liverpool Echo (14 May) asserted that, ‘When the history of famous Liverpool women comes to be written, as some day no doubt it will, the name of Jessie Reid Crosbie MBE, MA, will stand high in the list of those working in the present century.’ In the 1960s she was so well-known that one of three new blocks of flats in Everton, Liverpool, was called Crosbie Heights after her, although these became run down and neglected until knocked down in 1987. In the twenty-first century awareness of what she achieved has become muted, but she is not forgotten. Liverpool Museum’s website has a page on her and holds her MBE, and she is the subject of a chapter in a popular history book, Mothers of the City (2007). So who was Jessie Reid Crosbie? She was an infant school headmistress in a poor area of Liverpool in the early decades of the twentieth century who influenced not only local but also national education policy...
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