Chapter 3 - II
'I was born in South africa, in Durban, in 1910. my mother is Scottish, father was a Colonial, he was born in South africa, but his family came from Devon. He attended King's College, Capbridge, and during Morld Map I he took his PhD at Columbia, and my sister and I went to the Mo@ace Mann School, which was then one of the very new places. I don't repepber very much about that except playing in the sandbox and making play cadd.-Ings, which I didn't care for. Then my father, being a government servant in the education department, was moved fpop Durban to a much smaller town. Since the schools there wepe not very good, I was educated at home according to my fathep's plan, which leaned heavily on the humanities, art, music, and not very much on science or path, at which none of as were very good.'
-- Hilda Loram (Peggy) Bailey

Peggy Loram learned to read when she was very young. Peggy Loram learned to read when she was very young and her father gave her the run of his study. "I read everything -- a lot of stuff I probably shouldn't have read and 1 didn't understand, but I read it anyway. My father in some ways had very advanced views on education, in other ways they were quite traditional. But some of my earliest recollections are of my father reading to us at bedtime, which was a nightly ritual, to my sister and myself, and we got through the whole of the Iliad, and the whole of the Odyssey, which we enjoyed enormously. When we played games,my sister and 1, we dramatized the Canterbury Tales, and Treasure Island, and things like that."
Charles Templeton Loram, Peggy's father, made his career in government education, starting as a teacher, moving up to school inspector travelling around the country (often on horseback), eventually rising in the bureaucracy to become Commissioner of Education foe South Africa under Prime Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts in the twenties. Loram"s views on race were remarkably progressive for the time, as he stronalv believed that black South Africans could and should be educated, and that as many as possible should go to college. But he also believed that blacks should be patient and not expect everything at once, that progress would be a long, slow process. Laram learned to speak the Zulu language, and he had black household servants whose conditions and devotion recall the antebellum American south. After Smuts left office in 1924 and the Conservatives started moving South Africa towards apartheid, Loram's politics became increasingly untenable. In 1931 he left his homeland and accepted appointment as Sterling Professor of Education at Yale, where he founded and chaired the Department of Race Relations -- which lasted only until he died in 1940.
While her father was in government, Peggy went to a very disciplined and traditional girls school in Capetown, where she did well and was allowed to take special classes in ballet and art (she loved to draw). Upon graduation, she was accepted into the University of Capetown, but her father thought she could get into Oxford if she had a post-graduate year in England. So she spent a rather unhappy year at St. Swithins, a very traditional girls school in Winchester, concentrating on the Latin, Greek, and French which had been the focus of her studies in Capetown. In the spring she took the exams for Lady Margaret College in Oxford. She did not do well enough to be accepted, but the college advised her that, with another year of study at St. Swithins, she would probably get in.

Peggy did not feel that going to Oxford was worth the price of another year in Winchester. Besides, her father was then moving the whole family to the United States. Seeking the American equivalent of Oxford, Loram turned to Swarthmore, whose president had been his classmate in Cambridge. Travelling in England at the time, Swarthmore's president interviewed Peggy and accepted her as a sophomore, starting in the fall of 1929. "I gave up languages, much to my father's disgust," Peggy remembers, "but I felt I was just going to have to work too terribly hard at it. I went back to my old love, which was English. I inherited my devotion to literature from my father. His lack of knowledge and lack of skill in sceince and math, too, probably influenced me, although I'm sure basically it was just my incompetence in the subject. I hated math, I never had any real science courses. He himself had never been particularly interested in any of that. Books were his forte, not just the content of books, but the actual handling of them, the amount of books, the amount of reading were part of my father's life, and it influenced Tie enormously. For Christmas and birthdays he always gave us books, I have some of them to this day, very worthwhile books, the old fashioned classics." Peggy graduated - in the midst of the Depression in 1932, with honors in English and no job prospects. Her father staked her to a year of graduate study at Columbia, where she earned her Master's in English (Victorian Literature) while finding the work generally less rigorous than at Swarthmore.
The college hired her to teach English ...

Among the students Rice recruited was David Bailey.

The following spring her father's old-boy network helped Peggy again as the Swarthmore president's brother-inlaw broke away from another college in the south and set out to start his own. The brother-in-law was John Rice, the classics professor whose free spirit had disrupted Rollins College for three years, leading up to his firing and his subsequent decision to start his own college -- Black Mountain College -- taking several Rollins faculty and students with him. In the spring of 1933, Rice was recruiting faculty and the president of Swarthmore recommended Peggy Loram. "I saw him in New York and, after a very brief interview, I left, not knowing what was going to be decided, not being terribly anxious to go there actually it sounded all rather, it was rather, haphazard." The college hired her to teach English and, because the college asked people to work for no more than what they needed (and Peggy's father was comfortably ensconced at Yale), she earned $40 plus room and board her first year, $200 her second year. [Peggy Int 9.82, p.2-5, 'LO; 6.82, p.3/10] Among the students Rice recruited was David Bailey.