Isabella Skinner Clarke–Keer

Isabella Skinner Clarke was born on 29 October 1842 on 27 Skinner Street, London.[1] It is not recorded whether her middle name was inspired by her parents’ address. Her father, Edward Clarke (born c.1805), was a clerk at the time of her birth, but recorded as a solicitor in the 1861 census. Her mother was Elizabeth Clarke (née Pemberton) (born c.1808). “Bella”, as she was known, was their third child of seven, with older sisters Elizabeth (born c.1836), Ellen Victoria (born c.1839), and younger sisters Alice Jane (born c.1845), Janet Pemberton (born c.1849), Martha Elizabeth (born c.1850) and Fanny Rebecca (born c. 1854). Annie Neve, who later served her apprenticeship with Isabella, described “a large family of happy, busy women.”[2]

Clarke passed the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain Preliminary Examination in 1874, coming 23rd out of 355 candidates, 186 of whom failed.[3] She gained the required three years’ experience partly through time spent with Elizabeth Garrett (later Anderson) (1836–1917) at her St Mary's Dispensary for Women and Children, and partly with Robert Hampson (1833–1905), PSGB Council member and champion of women’s rights. Historian Ellen Jordan has shown that both Garrett Anderson and Hampson were engaged with the Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women who had identified dispensing and pharmacy as a career into which women could be supported to enter.[4]

Clarke registered with the Pharmaceutical Society as a Chemist & Druggist on 22 April 1875. She became a Pharmaceutical Chemist by passing the higher level Major exam on 15 December 1875, the first woman to achieve this. She came fourth out of 39 candidates, 16 of whom failed.[5]

She established her own business in 1876 at Spring Street, Paddington, London. She took on a number of apprentices including Annie Neve (who was known in household as "Little Arsenic") and Lucy Boole.[6][2] In the 1870s, Clarke took female medical students for their dispensing course at her pharmacy, and was appointed as tutor in pharmacy at the London School of Medicine for Women.[6] By 1892, new facilities at the medical school included a materia medica museum used “for Mrs Clarke Keer’s practical pharmacy class.”

On 15 January 1883, she married Thomas Henry Keer (?1852-1898) in Kensington.[7] They had met when they were both students at Dr Muter’s School of Pharmacy in Kennington, passing the Pharmaceutical Society Major exam on the same day as each other, with consecutive numbered certificates.[8] After her marriage, she moved out from living with her widowed mother, dispenser sister Alice and artist sister Martha, and into 5 Endsleigh Street, Tavistock Square. She gave up her Spring Street business and became her husband’s partner in a pharmacy at 9 Bruton Street, Berkley Square. In spite of her professional achievements, she and other women employees such as Margaret Buchanan were not permitted to work visibly in the shop. Buchanan recalled that "the presence of a women would have been very detrimental to a pharmacist’s business in those days, and more particularly to the class of business which Mr Keer conducted."[6] She suffered a “crushing bereavement” when Thomas died, aged 46, on 14 January 1898.[2] After his death, she began to take in boarders, later described as a Home for Students, and also ran a shorthand and typing business in Victoria Street.[2]

She died in her sleep on 30 July 1926 at 123 Waddon Park Avenue, Croydon, aged 84. The cause of death was recorded as mitral disease of the heart and anasarca. She was buried at Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey.[2]

In tributes after her death, Margaret Buchanan, her employee and her successor as President of the Association of Women Pharmacists explained that “her indomitable energy and savoir-faire carried her through many an awkward situation, which she in after years would describe with great glee.”[6] Annie Neve, who served her apprenticeship with Clarke-Keer, was equally appreciative of her mentor: “The initiative, energy, moral courage, and enthusiasm for the advancement of pharmacy and for the betterment of the lot of all who toil and suffer, which she so conspicuously displayed during a long and beneficent life were a heartening and ennobling example to all who came within the sphere of her influence.”[2]

In 2019 she was added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.[11]

• Birth certificate
• Censuses: 1861, 1881, 1901
• Death certificate