Eminent Somervillians

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.

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?

Joyce Gutteridge CBE was the first female legal adviser to the Foreign Office, whose varied career plumbed not only the limits of human behaviour, but the depths of the ocean and the farthest reaches of space.

Joyce Ada Cooke Gutteridge was born on the 10^th July 1906 in Bromley, Kent. Her father was Harold Cooke Gutteridge (1876-1953), first Professor of Comparative Law at Cambridge and author of the first English-language textbook on the subject. After attending Roedean, Joyce won a place to read History at Somerville in 1925. She matriculated just five years after Oxford women, prominently led by Somerville’s Principal Dame Emily Penrose, won the right to receive their degrees, and six years after the ‘Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919’ allowed women to be called to the Bar. Despite these breakthroughs, Joyce was not called to the Bar until 1938. Little is known of her biography in the years between graduation and her call.

In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, Joyce became an army lawyer with the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). Her wartime work led to her recruitment to the Foreign Office (as it was then known) in 1947 by Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice, in the temporary role of legal researcher. As a member of the British delegation to Geneva in 1949, she played a pivotal role in drafting the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Her work on the Conventions sparked a lifelong interest in the work of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.

In 1950, Joyce was made ‘Assistant Legal Adviser’ to the FO, the first woman ever to hold that position. It was during her time as Assistant Legal Adviser to the Foreign Office that she represented the UK government in the 1958 Convention on the Continental Shelf, which sought to codify the rules of international law relating to claiming sovereignty over and the right to exploit the continental shelves. Joyce later spent considerable time in Iceland dealing with fisheries disputes between the UK and Iceland known as the Cod Wars, and her aptitude to acquire new practice specialisms such as Law of the Sea, and advise on factual situations that did not fall neatly into textbook legal categories, is one of the qualities which her legal colleagues esteemed most highly.

In 1960 she was promoted to the role of Legal Counsellor, in which capacity she served at the UN Permanent Mission in New York (1961-1964). This was at the height of space exploration, and Joyce duly came to specialise in the Law of Outer Space, becoming one of the pioneers in the field and helping to draft the highly influential 1966 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.

Having been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1962, Joyce continued to perform her legal duties as a Legal Counsellor until her retirement in 1966. She maintained an advisory role with the Foreign Office, including a significant role in drafting the UK’s legal position following the 1967 SS Torrey Canyon oil spill off the coast of Cornwall, one of the first incidents of its kind. On her retirement, Joyce Gutteridge was the highest-ranking woman in the British Diplomatic Service. After her death, she became one of only two women posthumously memorialised in the British Yearbook of International Law (correct as of 2025).

Did you know? Joyce Gutteridge’s pioneering work with the UN Outer Space Committee earned her the affectionate nickname ‘Our Lady in Outer Space’ among Foreign Office colleagues.

Please note: this profile is indebted to Luiza Leao Soares Pereira’s article ‘Working From “Rooms of Their Own”: For a Realistic Portrait of Joyce Gutteridge CBE and Other Trailblazing Women’ in Immi Tallgren (ed), Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces (OUP 2021). Read the full article here.

Janet Dean Fodor was Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her primary field was psycholinguistics, and her research interests included human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 (first-language) acquisition.

Dean Fodor grew up in England and received her BA in 1964 and her MA in 1966, both at Somerville. At Oxford, she was a student of the social psychologist Michael Argyle, and their ‘equilibrium hypothesis’ for nonverbal communication became the basis for affiliative conflict theory: if participants feel the degree of intimacy suggested by a channel of nonverbal communication to be too high, they act to reduce the intimacy conveyed through other channels.

Dean Fodor received her Ph.D. in 1970 from MIT with a thesis on the challenge posed by opaque contexts for semantic compositionality. She came to the Graduate Center at CUNY from the University of Connecticut in 1986 as a distinguished professor of linguistics. In 1988, Fodor founded the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Fodor supervised ca. 27 dissertations of students from both City University of New York and the University of Connecticut.

She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992, was made President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1997 and was named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2006. In 2014, she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. A volume of papers in her honor, Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing, was published in 2015. Professor Dean Fodor was married to the American philosopher Jerry Alan Fodor until his death in 2017.

Summary of major publications

A New Two-Stage Parsing Model
Fodor and Lyn Frazier proposed a new two-stage model of parsing human sentences and the syntactic analysis of these sentences. The first step of this new model is to “assign lexical and phrasal nodes to groups of words within the lexical string that is received”. The second step is to add higher nonterminal nodes and combines these newly created phrases into a sentence. Fodor and Frazier suggest this new method because it can transcend the complexities of language by parsing only a few words at a time. Their model is based on the assumption that initial parsing occurs via the length of the phrase, not the syntactic meaning.

Comprehending Sentence Structure
Through a series of sentence analyses, Fodor found that the “WH-trace appears in mental representations of sentence structure, but NP-trace does not”. WH-trace is the placement of interrogative words (who, what, where) in a sentence. Her findings did not support those of McElree, Bever, or MacDonald, but she acknowledges that there are different types of sentences that are going to create linguistic issues that linguists don’t know how to deal with yet. Using this same data, Fodor also finds that passive verbs are more memorable than adjectives during language production.

Psycholinguistics Cannot Escape Prosody
In this article, Fodor emphasizes the importance of integrating prosody into research on sentence processing. She argues that past research has focused on syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences, but people use prosody when reading, which affects reading comprehension and sentence analysis. She also brings up the idea that people use prosody when writing, not just reading, which further affects sentence production and sentence structure. She blames technology for this new need, largely because of the newfound availability of information.

Did you know? 

Janet Dean Fodor’s work with Lyn Frazier in the 70s and 80s did much to uncover the strong, perhaps universal, biases in the process of assigning hierarchical structure to linear sequences of words which is known today as ‘implicit prosody’?

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.

Susan Cooper grew up in Buckinghamshire and studied English at Somerville from 1953-1955, during which time she was the first woman to edit the undergraduate newspaper the Cherwell.

Following her time at Somerville, Cooper went on to work as an reporter for the Sunday times, whilst writing in her spare time. During this period, she began work on Under Sea Under Stone, the first story in her five-part series The Dark is Rising. She also published Mandrake in 1964, her second novel. In 1963, she moved to the United States to live with her husband Nicholas J. Grant, a professor of Metallurgy. Whilst living in America, she experienced very strong homesickness, which influenced her writing. 

Cooper was influenced by her headmistress at high school to go to Oxford. Although Cooper failed her Latin entrance exam, her headmistress convinced her to take another year to study Latin, and then retake the exam. After being tutored by the local vicar’s wife, she succeeded, and spent three years reading English at Somerville. When studying at Somerville, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were teaching in Oxford, and although she never met them, she attended lectures given by them. 

Read Susan Cooper’s reflection on her Oxford days

Did you know? When writing for the Sunday times, Cooper wrote for a column put together by Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books, who was just starting work on them.

June Raine came to Somerville in 1971 to study Physiology. She then went on to do an MSc in pharmacology before taking her medical degree in 1978 and becoming a member of the Royal College of Physicians.

Raine’s interest in drug safety led to career in public health, and in 1985 she joined the Department of Health and Social Security in the Medicines Division, whose work moved to the newly formed MHRA in 2003. In 2006 she was appointed as the Director of Vigilance and Risk Management in the Medicines Division. In 2012 she was elected as the first chair of the European Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee and she is also co-Chair of the WHO’s Advisory Committee on Safety of Medicinal Products. She has particular interests in risk communication. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2009, and in 2019 she became Chief Executive of the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), playing a crucial role in approving the vaccines against Covid-19. Recently Raine has been leading a programme of work on medicines for women’s health.

Did you know? In 2020 June Raine spoke on behalf of the MHRA when it gave emergency authorisation for use of the very first COVID-19 vaccine, developed by BioNTech/Pfizer.

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?

Farhana Yamin grew up in London and came to Somerville in 1983 to study PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics). After graduation, Yamin qualified as a solicitor and worked as an environmental lawyer, becoming a climate change and development policy expert. In 2001, she helped to deliver the Marrakech Accords, the international rules needed to complete the Kyoto Protocol and she has been advising leaders and countries on climate change and development policy for 30 years.

Yamin has taught in UK universities since 1995, including as a Visiting Professor at University College London. She stepped back from the world of academia and UN negotiations in 2018 to focus on non-violent civil disobedience and social justice movements challenging capitalism. As a Political Coordinator of Extinction Rebellion for a year, Yamin played a key role in the XR April 2019 protests, gluing herself to the Shell HQ offices in London, alongside thousands of other activists. She is a champion of community-based action and co-founded Camden Think & Do, where she is experimenting with radical inclusion & concepts of spatial justice by supporting communities create pop-up action hubs in high streets and public spaces. She also sits as an expert on various Commissions including Camden Renewal Commission and IPPR’s Commission on Environmental Justice. She serves as trustee or an adviser to a number of organisations working on the intersection of social, racial and ecological justice, including Greenpeace UK, WWF-UK and Julie’s Bicycle an organisation working on supporting artists and the cultural sector tackle climate and sustainability. Yamin is currently a Senior Associate at the UK think thank company Systemiq and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).

Did you know? Farhana first broke the law in the name of climate justice in 2019, when she glued herself to the ground outside the Shell headquarters in London. Her protest formed a central part of the 2021 film Rebellion, which relates the inside story of XR from grassroots activism to international impact.