How a newspaper advert and the cooking of an omelette led to the creation of a Scottish university

The advert, which featured in a front page column on April 21, 1875, was accompanied by the headline: “Proposed school of cookery”.

It read: “A public meeting to consider the expediency of establishing a course of lectures on cookery with demonstrations, and relative arrangements, will be held in the Lecture Room of the Industrial Museum Today (Wednesday) at four o’clock. The Lord Provost in the chair. Ladies and Gentlemen interested in the subject are invited to attend.”

Fast-forward seven months, and more than 1,000 people were cramming into the lecture theatre of the Royal Museum in Edinburgh, now the National Museum of Scotland, and almost as many were unable to get in.

They were there to mark the public opening of the Edinburgh School of Cookery, the forerunner to Queen Margaret University (QMU), which marks its 150th anniversary this year.

“University dons, influential citizens, blooming maidens, be-spectacled blue-stockings, grave matrons, with an occasional ‘lewd fellow of the baser sort’ were to be found converging...,” it was recorded at the time of the cookery school’s opening, in The Scotsman.

“And what do our readers suppose was the cause of this remarkable excitement? The new thing that in that instance brought the whole city together was – the cooking of an omelette.”

The event was much more than a public demonstration of how to cook an omelette, however. It came at a time of growing frustration among middle-class women they continued to be denied access to higher education or professional careers.

Among the working classes, meanwhile, malnutrition and rickets were rife in the Scottish capital. The cookery school’s founders, Christian Guthrie Wright and Louisa Stevenson, were among a group behind a campaign to admit women to Edinburgh University.

The new institution was ahead of its time, responding not only to local needs, but also aligning with the broader changes brought about by advancements such as refrigeration and the influx of food supplies from America after the Civil War.

Affordable evening classes were offered for working-class women, while advanced "high-class cookery" courses were available for wealthier women, whose fees helped subsidise the other programmes.

The school was soon able to take courses across Scotland, including Perth and Stirling, and later to England. Mobile gas cookers were employed, enabling them to teach cooking classes even in remote areas with limited infrastructure.

In 1879, meanwhile, Ms Guthrie Wright was involved in producing a seminal cookery text book, selling 6,000 copies in its first print and reprinted over 30 times in the next three decades. The following year, in 1880, a public meeting was held in Manchester to discuss reopening a cookery training school in the city.

Ms Guthrie Wright attended and promised the Edinburgh school would assist with the project, while emphasising the need to teach the “poorer classes to make the best possible use of their food”.

The Edinburgh team sent staff and equipment to Manchester, and students there studied an Edinburgh diploma. It went on to become independent and is now part of Manchester Metropolitan University.

“They were sowing institutions up and down the country,” said Tom Begg, a former economics lecturer at QMU, who is the author of the book, The Excellent Women, which highlights its origins. “The influence of Guthrie Wright and the influence of Louisa Stevenson, you just couldn’t calculate it.”

Dr Begg was speaking as part of a special podcast produced to mark the university’s 150th anniversary.

Back in Scotland, the cookery school’s first permanent site was in Edinburgh’s Shandwick Place, from 1877 to 1891, before it moved to Atholl Crescent, becoming known as the Edinburgh School of Domestic Science.

Cookery classes and physical education were both made compulsory in state schools and in 1909, the School of Domestic Science was taken under direct government control to train teachers in these subjects.

All this work directly contributed to significant public health improvements, such as the dramatic decline in infant mortality and nutritional diseases like rickets by the mid-20th century.

Away from cookery, meanwhile, Ms Guthrie Wright and Ms Stevenson also collaborated in developing in Scotland the Queen Victoria's Jubilee Institute for Nurses, which was effectively the beginning of the district nursing service, a vital initiative before the creation of the NHS.

In the First World War, the Edinburgh school’s staff were involved in supporting food supply logistics, while in the Second World War, they helped design rations to ensure they were balanced.

A new campus at the Clermiston estate in west Edinburgh was built from 1968 and occupied in 1970, and in 1972 the institution changed its name to Queen Margaret College.

It went on to win degree-awarding powers in 1992, and in 1999 it changed its name again to Queen Margaret University College, before relocating to its current site at Musselburgh in 2007.

Reflecting on the impact of the institution, Dr Begg said: “This place ... it had a very, very distinguished foundation. You couldn’t be prouder, as members of staff, as you could be of Guthrie Wright and Stevenson and so on.

“These women transformed a major part of society. The way you prove that is if you go and look at the rates of infant mortality, for example. Infant mortality dropped like a stone in the 1930s, 1920s, once these teachers got to work in schools, teaching the kids.

“They transformed it. Not only that nutritional diseases like rickets, for example, fell from something like 30 per cent of kids and families in the 1890s and 1900s, to less than 1 per cent by the Second World War. That wasn’t an accident.”

QMU will be marking its 150th anniversary throughout 2025.