In St Mary’s church, Theydon Bois are the graves of two remarkable people, both of whom had an impact on Victorian lives.
Frances Mary Buss (1827 – 1894)
Buss was born on 16th August 1827 and grew up in Mornington Crescent in Camden, North London. Her father was a reasonably successful artist and engraver, but his unpredictable earnings forced the rest of the family to find work. Frances Mary earned money teaching from the age of 14 and would go on to help her mother set up a private prep school in Kentish Town in 1845. The Buss’s school was renamed the North London Collegiate School and moved to larger premises in Camden Street on 4 April, 1850. Buss was its first Principal and remained so for the rest of her life. Under her headship, the school became a model for girls’ education. By 1865 the school had 200 day girls, with a few boarders, but was still run as a private, family concern, with her father Robert William Buss and her brother Septimus Buss teaching Art and Scripture respectively.
In July 1870 Frances Buss handed over the school to trustees, and in the following year she founded the Camden School for Girls with the aim of offering more affordable education for girls. She was the first ever headmistress.
She became the founding president of the Association of Head Mistresses in 1874, a position she held until 1894, and was also involved in establishing the Teachers’ Guild in 1883 and the Cambridge Training College (later Hughes Hall) for training teachers in 1885.
In 1869 she became the first woman Fellow of the College of Preceptors, helping to establish the College’s professorship of the science and art of education in 1872. Her election to a Fellowship of the College in 1873 was the only public recognition she ever received. She was also a member of the Council of the Teachers’ Training and Registration Society.
Buss was also a suffragist, participating in the Kensington Society, a woman’s discussion society, and the London Suffrage Committee.
She died on the 24th December 1894 and is buried at Theydon Bois.
James Theodore Bent (1852 – 1897)
James Theodore Bent was born on the 30th March 1852 in Liverpool. Traveller and antiquary. He was an English explorer, archaeologist and author. He was the son of James Bent of Baildon House, near Bradford, Yorkshire, where he was born. He was educated at Repton School and Wadham College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1875. In 1877 he married Mabel, daughter of R. W. Hall-Dare of Newtownbarry, Co. Wexford, and she became his companion in all his travels.
He went abroad every year and became thoroughly acquainted with Italy and Greece. In 1879 he published a book on the republic of San Marino, entitled A Freak of Freedom, and was made a citizen of San Marino. From this period Bent devoted himself particularly to archaeological research. The years 1885-1888 were given up to investigations in Asia Minor, his discoveries and conclusions being communicated to the Journal of Hellenic Studies and other magazines and reviews. In 1889 he undertook excavations in the Bahrein Islands of the Persian Gulf, and found evidence that they had been a primitive home of the Phoenician race. After an expedition in 1890 to Cilicia Trachea, where he obtained a valuable collection of inscriptions,
Bent spent a year in South Africa, with the object, by investigation of some of the ruins in Mashonaland, of throwing light on the vexed question of their origin and on the early history of East Africa. He now visited at considerable risk the almost unknown Hadramut country (1893–1894), and during this and later journeys in southern Arabia he studied the ancient history of the country, its physical features and actual condition. On the Dhofar coast in 1894-1895 he visited ruins which he identified with the Abyssapolis of the frankincense merchants. In 1895 1896 he examined part of the African coast of the Red Sea, finding there the ruins of a very ancient gold-mine and traces of what he considered Sabean influence.
