March 3

The “superfluous” woman was superfluous not because there was no man to marry her, but because she did not fit herself to become a wife.

This bold argument was advanced by Mrs Archibald Colquhoun in an article in the current issue of the “Nineteenth Century”.

She showed by official figures that between the ages of 15 and 35 there were only 7,000 more single women in England and Wales than single men.

“Unless middle-class young women are prepared to make marriage economically possible for young men,” said Mrs Colquhoun, “they will be condemned in increasing numbers to celibacy, not because there are not enough young men, but because men will increasingly learn to do without marriage.

It is an inevitable result of the demand of the middle-class girl to be freed from the trammels of domestic work.

She becomes a luxury which a man can only afford when he has thoroughly established himself.”

Mrs Colquhoun’s conclusion was that the best thing to do was to rear a different kind of woman.

50 years ago

Miss Ada Reeve, star of music hall, musical comedy and the theatre since her Boxing Day stage debut 85 years before, was celebrating her 90th birthday.

She was going to have a tea party, and perhaps one of her favourite cigars. Miss Reeve, one of the gayest of the Gaiety Girls, who had appeared with such famous stars as Albert Chevalier, Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd, denied that her early years in the theatre were the Naughty Nineties.

She said: “In those days to show an ankle was very daring and provocative indeed. No one drank champagne from a slipper and I was always in bed by midnight.”

Miss Reeve, who lived in Notting Hill Gate, London, first appeared on the stage on Boxing Day, 1877, in a pantomime at the Pavilion, Mile End, in East London.

25 years ago

Mrs Thatcher had stolen a march on her political rivals by announcing a ban on the use of harmful chlorofluorocarbon gases in new fridges.

She also said that all new cars in Britain must be able to take unleaded fuel by 1990. And four new nuclear power stations would be built to replace old nuclear energy ones to maintain nuclear power output.

The announcement on refrigerators had come as Labour environment spokesman Jack Cunningham was setting out his party’s plan to protect the ozone layer.

In BBC2’s Nature programme the Prime Minister would say that all new fridges made in Britain would be required to have new solvents instead of ozone-damaging CFCs.

Manufacturers were waiting to hear a date when CFCs would be banned.