Miss Mary Margaretta Newman, member of a family which had shown itself sympathetic and interested in Miss Beale’s work from the first, offered to take a furnished house for a small number of students, to give her services, and contribute besides £75 a year towards expenses. Miss Newman had seen, whilst helping Miss Selwyn in her school at Sandwell, how much some such assistance was needed; how many girls of good social standing were struggling to obtain the training necessary to fit them to earn their living as teachers. She therefore provided a home for a few, and by her quiet, gentle influence supplemented the College work, and won the affections of her household. ‘What we felt most was the simplicity with which she gave so much. She seemed unconscious that she was doing anything remarkable in going to live in a small house, with one servant, and undertaking all the labour such an economy implied.’[47] Miss Newman’s work went on for scarcely a year, for at the end of 1877, after a very short illness, aggravated by the burden she had willingly laid upon herself, she died, leaving the work but just begun indeed, yet full of promise, and rendered by her sacrifice and death a sacred charge to the College and the Lady Principal. So indeed Miss Beale felt it to be, and in after years she would remember the life given in the cause she herself had so much at heart, and would write in her diary on December 31: ‘I think of Miss Newman’s death. Shall I not follow her example?’ Then for the first time Miss Beale, who had always maintained and acted on the principle that the College should earn its own living, asked for money to buy and furnish a suitable house for girls who could not afford the terms of the boarding-houses. She could not bear to refuse the many applications she received from those who were too poor to help themselves. About £1200 was immediately collected, one half being contributed by the College staff. The work thus begun extended so rapidly that in little more than five years it was seen to be necessary that it should have a building of its own, and the trustees who had the management of the funds decided to build a residential College. This was opened under the name of St. Hilda’s in 1885.