Eulalie Butts

Miss Eulalie Butts is Headmistress of the Quirm College for Young Ladies. While she was Head at the time when Susan Sto Helit was a pupil, it is unclear as to whether she taught other notable alumnae of a generation older, such as Sybil Ramkin, Miss Tick, and Serafine von Überwald.

She turns to paperwork, which she finds infinitely more dependable than people, when worried. When really worried, she turns to eurythmics* for solace.

Susan Sto Helit realised she had grown up on leaving the school she had been attending since at least age six, when she realised Miss Butts was actually elderly, birdlike, and quite tiny. Eulalie Butts is a master practitioner of schoolteachers' Boffo, in that

She had a tall bearing and a tall voice and a tall manner,and was tall in every respect except height. Amazingly, she had apparently been able to keep this a secret from people. (Soul Music, p 374)

While Miss Butts and the co-founder Miss Delcross were amazingly forward-looking for the Disc in wanting to provide an education for girls at least the equal of that which boys receive, they are quite slow off the mark in other respects regarding the psychology of adolescent girls. For instance, a stern lecture on the unspecified dangers of the city of Quirm had absolutely the opposite effect to that intended - it focused the attention of three hundred girls on getting over that wall and out there to sample those dangers for themselves, at the earliest possible opportunity. And teenage girls living a physically healthy existence, who are deprived of fried foods on the grounds that these are unhealthy, will tend to break all and every school rule for the taste of a single chip....

* No, not Annie Lennox, but Greek, or possibly even Ephebian, rhythmic gymnastics. The sort you do while trailing a length of coloured silk.