The method of annual examinations was gradually improved. When there was so little money available, local examiners, some of whom had no claim to the position, were chosen. Miss Beale records her conviction that a German examiner, who was at the time teaching in a local school, was a waiter from some hotel who had come to England out of the season. One English examiner recommended that history should be taught backwards. This was then regarded as an astounding proposition. Mr. Brancker fully sympathised with Miss Beale’s wish to improve the standard by obtaining examiners from one of the universities, and obtained permission from the Council to seek them himself in Oxford. The result was that for two or three years Mr. Sidney Owen undertook the principal part of the annual examination. His name was the first of a long list of men notable for scholarly achievement or educational progress, who in later years conducted these examinations at Cheltenham. In his first report Mr. Owen said much for the moral characteristics revealed by the intellectual work it was his business to survey. He concludes a very favourable judgment by saying he must not omit to mention that there were particular instances of remarkable excellence of which the College may justly be proud. Some of the papers he said, ‘would do credit to any Institution and gain high marks in any public examination.... May the College long give the lie to the miserable and pernicious fancy that accomplishments ought to be the staple of a lady’s education, and that her reason is not designed by the Almighty to be highly cultivated.’ But he thought the papers too long. Mr. Owen was indeed the very first adventurer into that flood of response which examination questions cause to flow from uncontrolled feminine pens. Mr. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was in 1863 the first university examiner in arithmetic and mathematics.