page_title: Society of Science, Letters and Art
section_title: Secretaries
hierarchical_section_title: Society of Science, Letters and Art / Officers / Secretaries
caption_attribution_description: English: Kensington: 92 and 90, Holland Road
context_page_description: The Society of Science, Letters and Art, also known as the Society of Science or SSLA, was a soi-disant learned society which flourished between 1882 and 1902. Dr Edward Albert Sturman, M.A., F.R.S.L., owned and ran the Society for his own financial benefit from his house at Holland Road in Kensington, London. He took the title of Hon. Secretary and worked under the name of the Irish baronet Sir Henry Valentine Goold, who was given the title of President and Chairman, until Goold died in 1893.
  The Society sold the privilege of wearing academic dress and using the postnominal letters F.S.Sc. to both eminent and ordinary people around the world, without the obligation to sit an examination or to submit papers. Many members of legitimate learned societies were duped into thinking that they were being offered fellowships by a department of their own respected institution. The Society also sold diplomas and masqueraded as an examination board for schools, although it merely provided exam papers and did not examine candidates.
context_section_description: The Hon. Secretary was Dr Edward Albert Sturman, M.A., FRSL (1840–1899), and his wife was Lady Secretary. Sturman and his wife owned the Holland Road premises and the Society, and accepted all its profits, using Goold's name and rank as bait to impress and convince new paying members.
  Sturman's father was George Sturman, a gun-maker born in Tower Hamlets, Middlesex in 1800. His mother Sarah was born in 1804 in Bethnal Green, and Sturman was born in Hoxton. The 1841 census finds Sturman, at six months the youngest of eight children, living with his parents at 25 East Road in Tower Hamlets, Shoreditch, in the parish of St Leonard. In 1851 they were occupying a house at 2 Church Row, Upper Street, in St Mary's, Islington. By 1861 the family had moved a couple of doors along, to a room in number 4a Church Row, which was fairly crowded with artisan tenants. Sturman was by then aged 20 and a schoolmaster, still unmarried and living with his parents.
  In 1864 Sturman married Emma Jessup (or Webb) (1846–1918) when he was 23 and she was 18 years old. They had nine children, of whom one died young. By 1871 Sturman was aged 30, still a schoolmaster and married to Emma aged 25, a schoolmistress born in Hackney, Whitechapel, Stepney or Mile End. They had two children aged six and five years, and were living at 145 Packington Street, then a ladies' school, at St Peter's, Islington. By 1881 there were eight children aged two to sixteen, of which the eldest was a civil servant clerk, and Sturman was still schoolmastering, although they had moved out of the school and were living at 68 Upper Tollington Park, Hornsey. They had moved around somewhat, as the three youngest of the children had been born in Penge, Sydenham, and Lee Place in Lewisham. By 1891 the family had two servants, and most of them (less two children) were living at 160 Holland Road, South Kensington. Sturman was now Hon. Secretary of the Society and Emma was Lady Secretary. Their daughter Florence was a dead letter office clerk - a post which might have been useful at a Society which practised a form of pamphleting and received a great deal of returned mail. The other children were all clerks, except the youngest who was an apprentice electrical engineer. In 1899, Sturman died.
  The 1901 Census finds Emma Sturman as a widow still living with her family at 160 Holland Road. She owned the house, and was selling apartments within it. Her family appears to have been educated, stable and respectably employed. Her youngest son, Douglas, had become an electrical engineer and telephone company worker. Another son was now a civil servant and principal clerk and he had married a woman from Cape Colony. By 1911, Emma at age 65 was still living at Holland Road with three spinster daughters, two female boarders and a female servant. She and her daughter Lucy Minnie were working from their nine-room house as secretary and clerk for their own private company, the nature of which is unknown.
caption: Holland Road houses similar to the Society's headquarters (No.160 was demolished)
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