Eminent Somervillians

Agnes Maitland came to Somerville Hall as its second Principal in 1889. Her background was in domestic science: she had studied cookery at the domestic science training school in Liverpool 1880-1885, and she later acted as an examiner of teachers trained in the Northern Union Schools of Cookery.

Domestic economy for Maitland was not about cosiness, but about improving the conditions of life. Margery Fry (a student at Somerville and later its Principal), said of Maitland that ‘from first to last, education in all its grades appealed to her most strongly as a preparation for the conduct of affairs and for the business of ordinary life’. While at Somerville, Maitland continued with her public service work, pressing, for example, for more school inspectors. She was an experienced public speaker, and she also set about the task of regulating teaching more effectively, not least by ensuring that tutors were recruited on a longer-term basis. Under her principalship, Somerville more than doubled in size, growing from 35 students to 86, and Maitland urged all students to take the full degree course in their chosen subject, even though this was not a requirement at the time.

Did you know? Agnes Maitland’s published works included The Afternoon Tea Book (1887) and What Shall We Have for Breakfast? (1889).

Alice Prochaska came to Somerville in 1965 to study Modern History. She also took her doctorate at Somerville before beginning her career as a curator, archivist and librarian. Prochaska has managed large staffs of scholars, librarians and archivists and her board-level experience includes government committees, the boards of learned societies and roles as a governor and trustee of university bodies.

Prochaska worked as Director of Special Collections at the British Library and director of the library at Yale University before returning to Somerville in 2010 to take up the principalship.

Energetically involved in fundraising for the college, her tenure saw Somerville’s endowment more than doubled. She also was instrumental in establishing the major new initiatives of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development and the Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust, and was known for her particular focus on the wellbeing and academic progress of students and staff.

Prochaska is a Fellow and one-time Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society. She has been chair of the Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust and the Institute of Historical Research Trust and is a commissioner of the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission, member of the General Federation of Trade Unions Education Trust, and adviser to the OP Jindal Global University and a number of other organisations in India. Her current scholarly interest focuses on the history of cultural restitution, and the relationship between national heritage and national identity, with a special interest in the period of the Second World War. Prochaska is an Honorary Fellow of Somerville.

Did you know? Alice Prochaska’s care for the welfare of college members led Somerville’s students to line up in front of the college library in her last term, holding up huge sheets of cardboard that spelled out ‘Thank you, Ali P’.

Educated in Oxford, Alison Wolf came to Somerville in 1967 to study PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics). She spent her early career after graduation in the United States as a policy analyst for the government, going on to work as a guest professor at the Institute of Education in London.

Wolf is the Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College London. She specialises in the relationship between education and the labour market. She has a particular interest in training and skills policy, universities, the medical workforce and gender issues. She is closely involved in policy debate and currently advises the government as an expert on skills policy. Her publications include The XX Factor: How Working Women Are Creating A New Society (Profile Books 2013), Does Education Matter? Myths about Education and Economic Growth (Penguin 2002) and Remaking Tertiary Education (Resolution Foundation 2016). Wolf is also a presenter for BBC Radio 4’s Analysis.

In 2011, Wolf completed The Wolf Review, a review of vocational education. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2012 she was appointed a crossbench life peer and took her seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Wolf of Dulwich.

She is a member of the House of Commons Advisory Committee for Education. Wolf is an Honorary Fellow of Somerville. She is also President of the Somerville Association and Chair of its Committee.

Alison Wolf on Somerville ‘Somerville was and is an Enlightenment endeavour… I came up to Somerville knowing nothing whatsoever about why it bore its name. What I did know was its reputation as the most intellectual of the women’s colleges, so going there meant you were aiming very high’.

Ann Schlee was born in Connecticut in 1934 and raised there by her American mother alongside her grandparents until the end of the second world war. From 1945, Schlee moved to Africa and lived with her parents in Egypt, Sudan and Eritrea respectively. After her time in Africa, Ann attended boarding school in England, before coming to Somerville in 1955 to read English.

After Graduation, Ann married the artist Nick Shlee with whom she had 4 children. She was a teacher for several years, beginning after graduation from Somerville at Rosemary Hall, Connecticut, before continuing her teaching in England at various schools and tutoring school refusers. 

It was during this period that Schlee’s literary career began with The Strangers (1971), the first of five book Schlee wrote for children. Her final children’s book, The Vandal (1980) was also the most successful of her youth aimed work; it was a runner up for the Carnegie Medal and winner of the 1980 Guardian Prize for children’s literature. 

Ann Schlee’s most successful publication overall, however, was Rhine Journey (1981). This lapidary novella explores the interior life of Charlotte Morrison, a repressed middle-aged spinster aboard the eponymous Rhine river cruise during the 1850s, for whom a chance encounter opens the floodgates to desire, regret, and possibility. The novel, described by The Guardian as “a little period gem of feeling and clarity” was Booker-nominated in the same year Salman Rushdie scooped the gong for Midnight’s Children. Today, it is discovering newfound popularity and critical praise for its discreet radicalism and the subtly incendiary interior life of its protagonist. Schlee’s grandson, Sam, for instance has noted that reading the novel is to realise that, beneath the seemingly conventional surface, the novel is ‘an explosive device…and it is a shock to realise that your grandmother is a bomb maker.’ 

In addition to her writing and teaching, Schlee ran a popular youth group at her local church until her death in November 2023. 

Did you know?

Ann wrote her first five books by waking up at 5AM and writing before embarking on the school run for her 4 children.

Anthea Bell OBE (1936 – 2018) was an English translator of literary works widely hailed as practising “the art of translator at its best”.

Anthea Bell was born in Suffolk on 10 May 1936. She later attributed the lateral-thinking abilities essential to her work as a translator to her father Adrian Bell, the first Times cryptic crossword setter. After boarding school in Bournemouth, Bell read English at Somerville College, Oxford (matric. 1954). She was married to the publisher and writer Antony Kamm from 1957 to 1973, and the couple had two sons, Richard and Oliver.

Anthea Bell’s career as a translator began at the end of the 1950s when the German publisher Klaus Flugge asked Kamm if he knew anyone able to translate Der kleine Wassermann, a book for children by Otfried Preussler. Kamm recommended his wife; Bell’s English version, entitled The Little Water Sprite, was published in 1960. Eventually, she translated Preussler’s entire works.

Bell specialised in translating children’s literature, and is particularly famous for her translations of the Asterix books, which The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation praised for displaying “the art of the translator at its best”. Bell first began translating Asterix in 1969, coming up with some of the series’ best jokes and puns. In her version, Obelix’s small dog Idéfix became Dogmatix, and the druid Panoramix became Getafix.

In addition to her translations of children’s literature, Bell also translated into English many adult novels, including W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Kafka’s The Castle and Władysław Szpilman’s memoir The Pianist. Her translations of Zweig and Sebald are said to have transformed both those writers’ reputation among anglophone readers. Of Sebald, Will Self commented that, “It’s doubtful that the eminence of WG Sebald would be quite so great in the English reading world were it not for Anthea Bell’s magnificent translations of his works.”

Self went on to say that he had read Bell’s translations all his life, and that when he convened a translators’ symposium to discuss the “vexed problem” of translating Kafka, Bell shone. “Particularly inspiring was her analysis of his humour as a writer – incomprehensible to English readers until mediated by this very fine and very great mind,” he said. “In an era when Britain seems once more to be winding itself yet tighter into its immemorial and monoglot garb, we’d do well to remember the huge importance of literary translation as a vector for our understanding of – and empathy with – other peoples.”

The winner of a host of literary awards, Bell was also awarded Germany’s Verdienstkreuz (Cross of Merit) in 2015, and was appointed OBE in 2010. She believed that translations should “read as if they were not only written but also thought in English”, telling a conference in 2004: “All my professional life, I have felt that translators are in the business of spinning an illusion – the illusion is that the reader is reading not a translation but the real thing.”

Did you know? Bell’s translation of ETA Hoffmann 1819 book The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr…, the supposed autobiography of a poetically pretentious tomcat which gets swapped with the biography of a composer, helped rebuild Hoffmann’s reputation?

Averil Cameron grew up in North Staffordshire and came to Somerville in 1958 to study Literae Humaniores (Classics). She went on to do a PhD at Glasgow University and then taught classical languages and literature as an assistant lecturer at King’s College, London. In 1970, she was appointed Reader in ancient history. She also worked for brief periods in the US. Cameron was Professor Late Antiquity and Byzantine History at King’s College London, where she was also the first Director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies. In 1994, she became the first woman Warden of Keble College, Oxford.

Cameron has been Editor of the Journal of Roman Studies, President of the Roman Society and Chair of the Society for Byzantine Studies. She held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship in the Faculty of Theology 2011-13 and from 2009-14 was President of FIEC (Fédération internationale des associations d’études classiques). She is Chair of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, President of Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and an Honorary Fellow of Somerville. She was made a Dame in the New Year’s Honours, 2006.

You can read a review of Dame Averil’s recent essay on the formation of her philosophy and subsequent scholarly journeys here. 

Averil Cameron on Somerville ‘No one from my family or my school had gone to Oxford, but [a] teacher took me to a summer school in Greek led by John Pinsent of Liverpool University, and he told me I must go to Oxford and to Somerville College, so that is what I did. For all I knew about either, they might as well have been on the moon.’

Bolanle Awe (Yoruba: Bọ́láńlé (Fájẹ́m̄bọ́là) Awẹ́) is a Nigerian and Yoruba history professor and pioneer of feminist history, intersectional thought and decolonisation.

Professor Awe was born on January 28, 1933, in the town of Ilesa, Nigeria. After taking a Master’s in History from St Andrew’s, she came to Somerville to read for her DPhil in 1958. She returned to Nigeria in 1960, where she became the first woman formally appointed to academic office in a Nigerian university. Following a stint at the University of Lagos, she returned to Ibadan, where she was promoted to Professor of Oral History in 1976.

Awe’s work is ground-breaking on several fronts. Her interest in oral history has made her a pioneer in documenting the pre-colonial histories of Nigeria and the Yoruba people, as well as an early advocate for the decolonisation of African history. She is also pioneering as a feminist historian, where her use of oral history helped restore the narratives of previously overlooked or misrepresented women such as Efunsetan Aniwura.

Awe was one of those pioneering women who began to use the master’s tools of academic knowledge and power to demolish the house built on male hegemony.’

Toyin Falola, Honorary Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Awe was also one of the first people to critique the Western, liberal feminist position which universalises women’s subjugation under patriarchal rule. As an advocate of nuanced intersectional thought, Awe argued that we can better serve women’s causes by understanding the history of oppression from culture to culture. In 1983, Awe was made an Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. She retired from teaching and government roles in 1998. In 2005 she became the Pro-Chancellor of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, and in 2018 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Ibadan on its seventieth anniversary.

Did you know? Efunsetan Aniwura, the famous ‘Iyalode’ (high-ranking female chieftain) of Ibadan was consigned to a tragic role by the playwright Akinwunmi Isola until Awe revisited her story?

Catherine Duleep Singh grew up in India until her father was deposed as ruler of the Punjab. He was offered sanctuary in England, and Duleep Singh and her sisters lived in Buckinghamshire and then in London. Catherine Duleep Singh and her sister Bamba both came to Somerville in 1890.

Along with her younger sister, Princess Sophie, Duleep Singh was an active suffragette. She joined the Esher and Moseley branch of the WPSU and continued to support the women’s movement long after the vote had been gained in 1918. Between the wars, Duleep Singh lived in Germany with her former governess Lina Schäfer, but in 1938 they were forced to flee back to England.

Did you know? Catherine Duleep Singh and Lina Schäfer used their house in Penn, Buckinghamshire to offer sanctuary to German-Jewish refugees before and during the Second World War.

Claire Janet Tomlinson was a trailblazing English polo player and pony breeder who defied convention to become one of the most garlanded players in the sport she loved.

Claire Lucas was born on 14 February 1944, as the daughter of Ethel (née Daer) and Lascelles Arthur Lucas, who founded Woolmers Park Polo Club in 1949. Her father was instrumental in the revival of polo in England after the Second World War.

She went from Wycombe Abbey to take A-levels at Millfield and, while there, was selected for the British junior fencing team. Going on to study agricultural economics at Somerville College in 1963, it was not long before the young Lucas was awarded a squash blue and a fencing half-blue, and was short-listed for the Olympic fencing team. When she was told that the Oxford University Polo team (OUPC) was short of players, her father’s approval was obtained, and she took up polo seriously. Her participation in the 1964 Varsity Match as the first female player was a milestone in the history of the match; the club, fearing an outcry, had cautiously entered her as ‘Mr Lucas’. In 1966, she became the first female captain of OUPC. 

After Oxford, she travelled for her first job to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to buy horses alongside her brother, John. Her standard of polo improved to such an extent in Argentina that, on her return to England, she formed ‘Los Locos’ (the Mad Ones) polo team with a cavalry officer, Simon Tomlinson, whom she later married.

In the ’70s and ’80s, Claire Tomlinson became synonymous with excellence in polo, as she smashed successive glass ceilings and set new records, many of which still stand. During the ’70s, she became the first woman to win the County Cup (1972) and the Queen’s Cup (1979), having fought for her participation after the Hurlingham Polo Association (HPA) repeatedly denied her entry to the high-goal tournaments. She also swept away the rule forbidding women to play high-goal polo, becoming one of the sport’s few true masters of the number one position and, in 1986, the first woman in the world to rise to five goals.

Alongside her exceptional competitive career, Tomlinson was also a powerful advocate for polo. She was chairman of the Beaufort Polo Club, Gloucestershire, which she and Simon re-established in 1989, and where she taught both Princes William and Prince Harry. In 1993, with Hugh Dawnay, she instigated and set up a coaching system for the H.P.A. from scratch, which had a lasting impact on how players are taught. Finally, Tomlinson was a noted breeder of polo ponies, having begun a breeding programmes in the UK and Argentina during the 1970s.

Claire and Simon Tomlinson had three children, all of whom are active in the sport of polo. She died in 2022 at the age of 77.