Eminent Somervillians

Julia Higgins grew up in London and came to Somerville in 1961 to study Physics, staying on to complete her doctorate. From 1976 she has been based at the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London where (since 2007) she has been Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Investigator. Higgins’ scientific work has concentrated on the investigation of polymers with neutron scattering, on which she has co-authored a monograph (Higgins & Benoit 1997).

From 1998 to 2003, Higgins was chair of the Athena Project, which aims for the advancement of women in science, engineering and technology (SET) in Higher Education. She is now the Patron of the Athena Swan Awards Scheme. Between 2003 and 2007, she was chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. She was president of the Institution of Chemical Engineers 2002-3, and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science 2003-4. Higgins was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1995 and was its Foreign Secretary 2001-6.

Higgins chaired the the Royal Society’s State of the Nation Report Steering Group and (between 2008 and 2012) the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (ACME). She currently Chairs the Royal Society project (funded by BIS) on increasing diversity in the scientific workforce. She is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the City and Guilds of London Institute, of which she is also Vice-President. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1995, she was awarded a CBE in 1996 before being named a dame in the 2001 Queen’s Birthday Honours list. Higgins holds honorary degrees from a number of UK Universities and also from the University of Melbourne, Australia. In 1999, she was elected as Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She is a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States. Higgins was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2001. She is a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur and an Honorary Fellow of Somerville and of the Institute of Physics.

Did you know? As part of 2021’s Oxford International Women’s Festival, Julia Higgins gave the Dorothy Hodgkin Memorial Lecture, ‘Seeing is Believing’.

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.

Kathleen Kenyon grew up in London and came to Somerville in 1926 to study Modern History. While she was a student she became the first female president of the Oxford University Archaeological Society. She also won a Blue in hockey. It was the then-librarian  (and later Principal) of Somerville Margery Fry who suggested to Kenyon that she take up a career in archaeology.

After graduation, Kenyon’s first field experience was as a photographer for the pioneering excavations at Great Zimbabwe in 1929. She went on to work each summer for five years at the excavation of the Roman-British settlement of Verulamium (St Albans) under Tessa and Mortimer Wheeler. She also worked at Samaria (then under the administration of the British Mandate for Palestine). From 1936 to 1939, she carried out important excavations at the Jewry Wall in the city of Leicester. Kenyon was closely associated, along with the Wheelers, in the foundation of the Institute of Archaeology of University College London, later serving as its Acting Director and Secretary as well as Lecturer in Palestinian archaeology.

Kenyon’s was most famous for leading the excavations at Tell es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho, in the 1950s (her first findings from the site were displayed at the Festival of Britain in 1951). She went on to excavate in Jerusalem from 1961 to 1967. From 1962 to 1973, Kenyon was Principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. In the 1973 New Year Honours, following her retirement as Principal of St Hugh’s, she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) “for services to archaeology”.

Did you know? During the Second World War, Kathleen Kenyon served as Divisional Commander of the Red Cross in Hammersmith.

Born in Surrey in 1927, Lalage Bown grew up looking after her younger siblings while their parents lived and worked abroad. She came to Somerville in 1945 to study Modern History and went on to take postgraduate courses in adult education and economic development.

After graduation, Bown took up a role at the University College of the Goldcoast, Ghana teaching African literature and arts. She dedicated much of her career to establishing and expanding adult education programmes in Ghana, Uganda and Nigeria, with a particular focus on helping adult women learn to read and write. She also worked to effect the ‘Africanisation’ of the English curriculum in the university, publishing Two Centuries of African English in 1973.

In 1974, Bown became a Commonwealth Visiting Professor at Edinburgh University. She left Africa in 1981 and became Head of the Department for Adult and Continuing Education at the University of Glasgow. In the 1990s, Bown authored a groundbreaking report on the impact of female literacy. Made an OBE in 1977, Bown has written widely on comparative adult education, community education, higher education (including student mobility), lifelong learning and adult literacy.

Professor Bown died aged 94 on Friday, December 17, 2021, following a brief stay in hospital after a fall.

Lalage Bown on Somerville ‘Collegiate life always has its advantages, but the character of Somerville I think gives it the best of those advantages. One’s fellow students are exceptionally diverse. My small cohort of students back in 1945 included people from Denmark, France, Poland, Guyana and New Zealand.’

Lucy Banda Sichone grew up in Zambia (then known as Northern Rhodesia) and came to Somerville in 1978 as Zambia’s first female Rhodes Scholar, studying PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics). While she was at Oxford, her fiancé and her daughter remained in Zambia. During her second year at Somerville, she married her fiancé and had her second child before returning for her third and final year of study. Just as she finished her Finals, Banda Sichone received word that her husband had been killed in a car crash. Friends from Somerville helped her to buy mourning clothes and pack up her things before leaving. She wrote to Principal Daphne Park the following autumn, thanking her for all that had been done (‘It is not something I am likely to forget’).

Banda Sichone returned to Zambia and practised as a lawyer and public defender. She ran for a position with the United National Independence Party (UNIP), then Zambia’s ruling party and went on to serve as Secretary for Legal, Constitutional and Parliamentary Affairs.

Founding the Zambian Civic Education Association in 1993 to provide civic education and legal aid, Banda Sichone taught citizens’ rights and represented Zambians in court pro bono. She also wrote a series of newspaper columns which were fiercely critical of government corruption and the abuse of power. Prosecuted by the state for her outspokenness, she was forced briefly into hiding. She died in 1998 at the age of 44, leaving behind four children and many foster children.

Did you know? Lucy Banda Sichone’s portrait was the first of a female Rhodes Scholar to hang in Milner Hall in Oxford’s Rhodes House. Speaking at the portrait’s unveiling, fellow Zambian Rhodes Scholar Sishuwa Sishuwa said, ‘Lucy was not an imposing figure, but she had an imposing mind. As a Zambian, I feel the gap left by Lucy Sichone to this day and her life is a challenge to my own… Lucy’s was a life lived well and in the service of others’.

Madeleine Shaw Lefevre had strong connections to the Liberal political milieu that created Somerville (she was the niece of a former Speaker of the House of Commons, her brother was a Liberal Member of Parliament and her father was a former Vice-Chancellor of London University). From her appointment in 1879, she presided over Somerville Hall much as she would have done over a country house, overseeing the acquisition of premises, managing finances with scrupulous devotion and ensuring that students did not draw attention to themselves.

Shaw Lefevre’s policy of ‘steady, but unobtrusive infiltration’ set the perfect tone for Somerville’s early years, when its status was beset by considerable uncertainty and fluctuating student numbers. Elizabeth Wordsworth, the founding Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, said that the value of ‘such a figure-head to a recently formed women’s college, exposed as it was to the freest criticism from both friends and foes, can hardly be over-estimated.’ It was in large part thanks to Shaw Lefevre’s influence that Somerville settled so successfully into the Oxford environment, enabling her successors to negotiate full membership of the University for women students on the foundations that she had built.

Did you know? Shaw Lefevre was responsible for converting John Ruskin to the cause of women’s education. ‘I was told he was not much in favour of women’s colleges,’ she later recalled, ‘but I persuaded him to come and see Somerville… several of the students having joined us as we went along, he sat down in one of their rooms and discoursed to them in his delightful way while they gathered round him and literally sat at his feet.’

Margaret Casely-Hayford grew up in London and came to Somerville in 1980 to study Law. She was called to the Bar in 1983, working for City law firm Dentons for twenty years and becoming a partner. One of the first black British women to become a partner in a City law firm, Casely-Hayford was named Black British Business Person of the year in 2014.

During her term on the Board of NHS England, Casely-Hayford was one of the Directors who promoted and championed ‘NHS Citizen’, the listening structure for the National Health Service. She was Director of Legal Services for the John Lewis Partnership for nine years and spent four years on the Board of the British Retail Consortium. After chairing ActionAid UK, she was awarded a CBE in 2018 for charitable services. Now retired from executive roles, Casely-Hayford supports and advises organisations on governance and she also offers advice to young entrepreneurs and those, in particular women and BAME or LGTBQ+ people, who wish to embark upon board careers.

Casely-Hayford is a member of the Institute of Directors’ Governance Advisory Board and a Fellow of the Centre for Public Impact. She is Chair of the Advisory Board of the award-winning Ultra Education and is also Patron of the John Staples Society, a body created across the Leathersellers’ Federation of Schools to develop social mobility. Casely-Hayford supports Target Oxbridge, which helps talented black students to apply for and study at Oxford and Cambridge. She is the Chancellor of Coventry University and Chair of the Globe Theatre. She also a member of the Metropolitan Police Oversight Panel. Casely-Hayford is an Honorary Fellow of Somerville.

Margaret Casely-Hayford on Somerville ‘It gave me confidence and self-belief, and it also gave me a platform to be stronger in the cause of promoting women and diversity. I’ve always been a champion of equality, pretty much from the age of 11 onwards. Going to Somerville gave me greater strength to be able to champion what I believe.’

Margaret Thatcher grew up in Lincolnshire and came to Somerville in 1943 to study Chemistry. After graduation, she worked briefly as a research chemist before training as a barrister. In 1959 she was elected MP for Finchley.

Thatcher became Secretary of State for Education and Science 1970-1974 under Edward Heath. The Conservatives were defeated in 1974 following which Thatcher replaced Heath as leader of the party. She became Prime Minister in 1979 when the Conservatives returned to power and she held office for three consecutive terms, resigning in 1990 following a leadership challenge by Michael Heseltine. A self-described conviction politician, Thatcher privatised state-owned industrites and utilities, reformed the trade unions, lowered taxes and reduced social welfare expenditure. Thatcher’s cuts to higher education led to her being the first Oxford-educated post-war prime minister who was not given an honorary doctorate by the University. Abroad, she cultivated relationships with the world’s leaders (with Ronald Reagan in the US in particular), resulting in an international profile and influence for the UK which has rarely been greater during peacetime. In 1992 took her seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven.

The Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust (MTST) was set up at Somerville in 2013 and offers scholarships to foster academic excellence, supporting individuals to succeed and equipping them to excel in their chosen field.

Did you know? Thatcher remained in contact with Somerville and with her tutor (Nobel Prize-winner Dorothy Hodgkin). She reportedly said that she was prouder of becoming the first prime minister with a science degree than becoming the first female prime minister. In 1980, she sent an open letter to Somerville about her time at the college. ‘One last thought – or is it a feeling,’ she wrote.  ‘I loved those years, I really did.’

Born in London into a Quaker family, and home schooled until she was 17, Margery Fry came to Somerville in 1892 to study Mathematics (although, in accordance with her family’s wishes, she never took any examinations).

Fry was librarian of Somerville from 1899 until 1904, when she left to become Warden of the women’s residence at Birmingham University. She worked for the Friends’ (Quakers’) War Victims Relief Committee in France 1914-18 and in 1918 she joined the Labour Party. She was elected Somerville’s fourth Principal in 1926, and was responsible for remodelling parts of the college, including the installation of the striking green and blue mosaic tiles on the ground floor of House. Fry referred to Somerville’s ‘students’ (where others still insisted on the more old-fashioned term ‘undergraduates’) and she herself was described by one Somervillian as ‘direct, vigorous and sincere’.

After her time at Somerville, Fry went on to lead the cause for prison reform. In 1918, she became secretary of the Penal Reform League, which merged with the Howard Association in 1921 to form the Howard League for Penal Reform. In 1921 she was appointed a magistrate (one of the first women magistrates in Britain) and in 1922 she became education adviser to Holloway Prison. She was known for her opposition for the death penalty and her support for compensation for victims of crime.

Did you know? Margery Fry’s brother was Roger Eliot Fry, artist and founder of the Omega Workshops and one of the Bloomsbury Group. Margery Fry once suggested to a group of Somerville students that when at home they should decorate their parents’ fireplaces in gold paint.

The Scottish astronomer, mathematician and geographer Mary Somerville’s interest in science was first kindled as a child by the natural world. During her adolescence, Somerville became an omnivorous autodidact, teaching herself Latin and Greek and seizing on chance encounters with family members and friends to acquire new books (including Euclid’s Elements). As a young woman, Somerville would rise early to play the piano, paint during the day then stay up late to study Euclid and algebra.

Somerville’s first marriage was not a happy one, primarily because her husband did not support her academic interests. When he died in 1807, she returned home to Scotland, where she promptly resumed her studies. It was at this time that she first read Isaac Newton’s Principia, which influenced her profoundly. With the encouragement of John Playfair, professor of natural philosophy at University of Edinburgh, she started to solve mathematical problems posed in the mathematical journal of the Military College at Marlow, leading to her first public recognition after her solution to a diophantine problem was awarded a silver medal in 1811.

In 1812, she married Dr William Somerville, who supported and greatly aided her studies. A move to London in 1819 led to a role as private tutor to Ada Lovelace and the two women attended the scientific gatherings where they met Charles Babbage. Somerville College owns a letter from Babbage to Somerville inviting her to view his ‘Calculating Engine’, an offer which Somerville frequently took him up on.

Mary Somerville was the author of five books. She published the first, The Mechanism of the Heavens, when she was 51. The second, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, ran to nine editions and sold over 15,000 copies and established her reputation in elite science. Her third book, Physical Geography, was the most popular of all her books, but her fourth book, Molecular and Microscopic Science, while also a popular success, led Somerville to wonder whether she should not have focused solely on mathematics, which she considered her natural inclination.

From 1833 onwards, the Somerville family spent much of their time in Italy, where Somerville continued to write and engage in current scientific debates. In 1868, four years before her death aged 91, she was the first person to sign John Stuart Mill’s unsuccessful petition for female suffrage. A mathematician to the last, she spent the day before her death revising a paper on quaternions.

In 1879, just seven years after Somerville’s death, Mary Ward’s suggestion of the name ‘Somerville’ for the as-yet unnamed non-denominational hall, was universally accepted by its founders.

Did you know? The gender-neutral term ‘scientist’ (as opposed to natural philosopher or man of science) was coined specifically to describe Mary Somerville by the philosopher William Whewell in 1834.

Mary Ward was closely involved in the negotiations surrounding the foundation of Somerville Hall. She was the person who originally suggested that Somerville should be named for Scottish scientist Mary Somerville. The choice was deliberate: to keep the naming of the new establishment well away from the religious figures for whom other such halls and college had been named.

Ward was also a novelist, and her strong Victorian values made her work very popular (it was said that Julia Stephen recommended to her daughters Virginia (later Woolf) and Vanessa (later Bell) that they should take Mrs Ward as one of their role models of femininity. Her aim in ensuring that Somerville came into existence was what she called the ‘equalisation’ for women. She was Somerville Hall’s first secretary and her cousin was Emily Penrose, who would go on to become Somerville’s third Principal.

However, Ward was far from holding the suffragist sympathies shared by so many Somervillians at that time. She did not advocate ‘votes for women’, and in 1909, she wrote an article in the Times explaining that she felt legal, financial, military and international problems were ones that only men could solve. She went on to become the founding member of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League and to create and edit The Anti-Suffrage Review.

Did you know? Mary Ward’s passion for educational work lives on today, with the London adult education centre, the Mary Ward Centre, named for her.

Onora O’Neill was educated in Germany and London before coming to Somerville in 1959. She began by studying Modern History, but soon changed to PPP (Philosophy, Psychology and Physiology). After graduating, O’Neill went on to complete a doctorate at Harvard under the supervision of John Rawls.

During the 1970s, O’Neill taught at Barnard College, the women’s college in Columbia University, New York. She returned to Britain in 1977 and took up a post at the University of Essex as Professor of Philosophy. In 1992 she became Principal of Newnham College Cambridge, a post she held until 2006. O’Neill remains a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Cambridge. She lectures and writes on justice and ethics, and in particular on the work of Immanuel Kant.

O’Neill was President of the British Academy in 1988-9 and chaired the Nuffield Foundation from 1998 to 2010. As Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve, she took her seat as a crossbench member of the House of Lords in 1999. She has served on the House of Lords Select Committees on Stem Cell Research, BBC Charter Review, Genomic Medicine and Nanotechnology and Food. From 2012 to 2016, O’Neill chaired the Equality and Human Rights Commission. In 2017, she won the Holberg Prize for her ‘distinguished and influential role in the field of philosophy and for shedding light on pressing intellectual and ethical questions of our time’. O’Neill is an Honorary Fellow of Somerville.

Did you know? Onora O’Neill changed subjects at Somerville after her history tutor, Barbara Harvey, sent her to see the renowned philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe. ‘Barbara sent me to Elizabeth Anscombe, who interviewed me very nicely about causality,’ O’Neill recalls. ‘I wrote something on it and Anscombe apparently wrote a one-liner back to Miss Harvery which said “this girl is hungry for philosophy”. So I was allowed to change.’