Breadcrumbs

Remembrances of the Golden Reunion 1961

Diane Goldrei (PPE, 1961)

Fifty Somervillians, from as far afield as New Zealand and the United States, assembled on 20 September for the third College Golden Reunion, a landmark in our lives to which I imagine many of us had looked forward with a mixture of disbelief and curiosity as well as pleasurable anticipation. 

We needed very little prompting over a glass of wine before lunch to start catching up with conversations which were to continue over the two days.  We then gathered in the Margaret Thatcher Centre for an informal session, entitled "Life after Somerville", chaired by Julia Higgins (Stretton Downes), in which we were invited to compare and contrast the pattern of our lives before, during and post-Somerville, and to find out if there were common threads.

Julia set the scene by asking us about our educational background and whether our parents had been to university.  It was interesting to discover that half of us had come from grammar schools and that in half our cases, neither parent had been to university.  Ten of us had mothers who had been to university, and only one quarter of us had mothers who worked.  Clearly, our schools had been instrumental in encouraging us to apply to Oxford, and some us remembered that it was a particular teacher who had suggested Somerville.

The University Careers Advisory Service was not remembered as being helpful; apparently in our era, there was a different office for men and women, and someone recalled being asked if she was a member of the established Church, in which case she might consider applying for a minor public school.   But finding work with an Oxford degree was not difficult in the early 1960s, and several people were grateful to have been pointed in the right direction or even given introductions by Dame Janet Vaughan, the Principal, or tutors.  Perhaps not surprisingly, only half went on to careers which were in the field of their Somerville degree, and many found their career path changed, sometimes because their husband's job required them to move, sometimes because their interests changed.  Most of us had had to be flexible; we responded to changing circumstances, from divorce to husbands' foreign postings or the need to combine work with parenting, and were generally ready to create and make the most of new opportunities.

The class of ‘61 certainly came up against more than a glass ceiling in our professional lives.  It was still the case that a woman in the Foreign Office had to resign if she married, and was advised only to apply for clerical grades in the civil service because as a woman she would not be flexible.  Jacqueline Wilson (Herbert) told us that in the Patent Office women were not sent on training courses, and that the men could decide whether or not to have a woman in their team.  When Julia Higgins (Stretton-Downes) became a professor at Imperial College in 1989, she doubled the number of women professors.  Hilary Callan (Flashman) reported that as the wife of a diplomat she had encountered hostility to the idea of Foreign Office wives having jobs; Lyn Robertson told us that her employer, the British Council, did not consider women suitable for foreign postings.   For many of us, it was the passage of Equal Opportunities legislation which finally opened doors.  Several  spoke of their aspiration to achieve, regardless of obstacles, inspired in some cases by their mothers, their schools and not least by Somerville, and in particular by Dame Janet.

A sad note was the disproportionate number of our contemporaries who had died, and inevitably we found ourselves remembering and talking about these friends during the two days we spent in College.  A shrub with a commemorative plaque was planted in the gardens in their honour.

That evening we assembled in hall for a group photograph, drinks and a formal dinner hosted by the Principal, Dr Alice Prochaska, who gave an address along with Caroline Cracraft ( Pinder).  Musical entertainment was provided by Polly Ionides (Richter) who sang two folk songs, and a version of "In Dublin's Fair City" written for the occasion by Daphne Drabble (Fielding) and Anne Charvet.

The next day began with a question and answer session with the Principal, who when asked about the pastoral care at the College, gave a moving account of how she and the SCR responded to the death in a road accident of a first year student, finding ways of giving support not only to his family but to his fellow students.

A highlight for many of us was the tour of the new student accommodation on the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter site.  We were dazzled by the standard of the rooms, all with en-suite facilities, and furniture and fittings designed in accordance with suggestions from students.  We all asked to be accommodated there on any future visit to the College.  The last formal event in the programme was an illustrated talk by Pauline Adams, recently retired College Librarian, and her husband, Robert Franklin, an architectural historian, on College architecture.  This was fascinating, as, in effect, they gave us a history not only of the individual buildings but also of the college itself. 

The day finished after lunch with optional guided visits to the Bodleian Library, the Botanical Gardens or the Ashmolean Museum.   I imagine that, as in my case, fellow participants will have left Somerville with much to reflect on.  Friendships renewed, memories evoked, lost friends remembered, perhaps new bonds formed, as we revisited a brief but pivotal and intense period of our lives.