Eminent Somervillians

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’.

Born in Oxford, Sayers grew up in Huntingdonshire, in a village where her father was the rector (she later took several of her characters’ names from the gravestones of the local church). She went to boarding school in Salisbury and won the Gilchrist Scholarship to Somerville in 1912, studying Modern Languages and taking a First in French. After her studies, Sayers worked for the publisher Blackwells and then as a copywriter. Her first book of poetry was published in 1916.

Considered one of the chief writers of the ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction, Sayers went on to publish 14 detective novels and short stories featuring the character Lord Peter Wimsey. In Gaudy Night (1935), Wimsey teamed up with Harriet Vane, writer of detective stories, working with him to investigate a series of poison pen letters circulating in Vane’s alma mater, Shrewsbury College (loosely based on Somerville, and described as having an architectural ‘style neither new nor old, but stretching out reconciling hands to past and present’). The sequel to Gaudy Night, Busman’s Honeymoon had originally been a play, co-written with fellow Somervillian Muriel St Clare Byrne. It was the play’s success which led Sayers to take up writing full-time, and her later plays included (for radio) The Man Born to Be King, which caused some controversy for its portrayal of the figure of Christ speaking in modern English. After the war, Sayers taught herself Old Italian and embarked on a scholarly translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. She died at the age of 64 whilst working on the third volume, Paradiso, and her translation included extensive notes setting out the theological meaning of what she called ‘a great Christian allegory’.

Did you know? Between 1922 and 1931, Dorothy L. Sayers was employed as a copywriter at S.H. Benson’s advertising agency, working on campaigns for Guinness and Colman’s Mustard. She created the slogan ‘Guinness is good for you’.

Born in London, Joyce Reynolds came to Somerville in 1937 to study Literae Humaniores (Classics). She took her Finals in 1941 and went on to work for the Board of Trade, where her study of the production and consumption of consumer goods later influenced her work on how the Roman world had run its own ‘civil service’. After the War, Reynolds won a research scholarship to the British School at Rome and her interest in the Roman inscriptions round at sites of excavation began to grow. She quickly became the leading expert on the inscriptions themselves as well on workshops that had produced them. Her most influential work has been on the inscriptions from the Greco-Roman city of Aphrodisias in modern Turkey, which she has used to explore historical questions about Roman government and the relations between the imperial centre and the provinces.

Reynolds took up the role of Director of Studies in Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge and in 1957 she was appointed to a Lectureship in Classics at Cambridge University. In 1982 she was made a Fellow of the British Academy. She was Reader in the Epigraphy of the Roman World at Cambridge in 1983-4. Reynolds is a Gold Medallist of the Society of Antiquaries and Fellow of the British Academy, by whom she was awarded the Kenyon Medal for outstanding achievement in Classical Studies and Archaeology. She is now Reader Emerita at the University of Cambridge and an Honorary Fellow of both Newnham and Somerville. One of her current projects is a brief account of texts on items of pottery for a multi-volume work on the House of the Menander at Pompeii.

Did you know? Joyce Reynolds taught a number of eminent classicists, including Mary Beard, who recalls the power of Reynolds’ teaching and the firmly sceptical approach it encouraged (‘Do you really know that, Miss Beard? Is that the only way you can interpret the evidence?’).

Eleanor Rathbone was born into a noted Liverpool family of social activists. She only received formal schooling for a year before coming to Somerville in 1893 to study Literae Humaniores (Classics). In 1897, Rathbone became the Honorary Secretary of the Liverpool Women’s Suffrage Society Executive and in 1919, when Milicent Fawcett retired, Rathbone took over the presidency of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (previously the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies).

Rathbone was the first woman to be elected to Liverpool City Council, representing Granby ward from 1909 to 1934. In 1922, she stood as an Independent at Liverpool East Toxteth and was defeated by the sitting Unionist MP. She was elected to Parliament as an Independent in 1929 representing the Combined English Universities (and becoming the first in a long line of Somervillians to enter Parliament) and remained an MP until her death.

She campaigned for Family Allowances (introduced in 1945, and later called Child Benefit), ensuring in particular that they were paid directly to women. Rathbone was also the Founding Chair of the Parliamentary Committee for Refugees, which she established following the Munich settlement and Kristallnacht. The committee became the vehicle for challenging officials and ministers to ‘break with the fatal policy’ of quotas and voluntary financial support in order to welcome Jewish and political refugees from Czechoslovakia, and was instrumental in moving the British government to welcome Jewish and political refugees from Czechoslovakia, and subsequently all of Nazi occupied Europe. Among these was the German Jewish Classicist Lotte Labowsky, who studied at Somerville and latterly became a Fellow of the College. In 1942, Rathbone also put pressure on the government to publicise evidence of the Holocaust.

Did you know? Eleanor Rathbone was one of the founding members of a Somerville student society which called itself ‘The Associated Prigs’. It met on Sunday evenings for ‘collective talk on social subjects’, covering topics including factory legislation and how criminals should be punished.

Esther Rantzen went to school in the US and London before coming to Somerville in 1959 to study English. At Oxford she performed with the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) and shortly after graduation she was recruited by the BBC.

Rantzen worked as a research for a number of current affairs programmes before moving to present the BBC series That’s Life! in 1973. She became the show’s presenter for 21 years. She founded the charities ChildLine (promoting child protection) in 1986 and The Silver Line in 2012 to combat loneliness in the lives of older people. In 1988 Rantzen created a new television series called Hearts of Gold which celebrated acts of outstanding kindness or courage.

After the death of her husband, film-maker Desmond Wilcox, Rantzen made a landmark programme on palliative care. She has campaigned to raise awareness of ME/CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome) and was the creator of the ‘Children of Courage’ segment for BBC’s Children in Need. In 1991, she was awarded an OBE for services to broadcasting and in 2015 she was made a Dame of the British Empire (DBE) for services to children and older people. Rantzen is Patron for the charity Operation Encompass and a Trustee for the charity Silver Stories. She is an Honorary Fellow of Somerville.

Esther Rantzen on Somerville ‘It was unsnobbish, it was egalitarian, it was a bit left wing, it was a bit… out there… Somerville is tolerant, broad-minded, celebrates diversity of all kinds.’

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’.

Emily Penrose went to school in London before moving to Athens with her family. She came to Somerville in 1889 to study Literae Humaniores (Classics), learning Latin and ancient Greek from scratch. At the time she was studying, the first examinations in her degree (Honour Moderations) were not open to women, so Penrose moved straight on to Finals without taking any other examinations. In 1892 she became the first woman to achieve First class honours in the subject, although Oxford did not yet allow women to take degrees.

On finishing her studies, Penrose was offered a combined post as tutor, librarian and secretary by the then Principal, Agnes Maitland. Penrose did not accept the post, moving instead to London and working as a lecturer for a time before being appointed Principal of Bedford College in 1893. In 1894, she was also appointed to the post of Professor of Ancient History there (though at no extra stipend). In 1898 she moved to Royal Holloway College, and she returned to Somerville as Principal in 1907.

Under Penrose’s leadership, Somerville began to admit only women who would read for full degree courses even though they could not yet take the actual degree. In 1908 she introduced an entrance examination for the college. She was also responsible for the appointment of more tutors, and for their integration into Somerville’s governing Council. During the First World War, she oversaw Somerville’s temporary move to Oriel College. Penrose was involved in establishing a group to work towards the admission of women to full membership of the University, and she was instrumental in ensuring that in 1920 the University of Oxford granted women the right to matriculation and to all degrees. She also worked for the cause of education outside Oxford, serving on the Advisory Committee on University Grants (the body which advised on the distribution of funding to British universities) and as the only female member of the Royal Commission on University Education in Wales in 1916. On her retirement in 1926, Penrose became the second women to receive an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law (DCL) from Oxford (the first had been Queen Mary in 1921) and in 1927 she was made a Dame of the British Empire (DBE) for services to education.

Did you know? One Somervillian, the medievalist Helen Waddell, expressed the view of many when she said to Penrose, ‘We feel it was you who made it inevitable that women should be recognised by the University.’

Daphne Park, the so-called “Queen of Spies” (1940, Modern Languages), appears never to have had a dull moment in a life and career that culminated in her becoming Controller Western Hemisphere of MI6, the highest position ever attained by a woman in the Secret Intelligence Service at that time. She later returned to Somerville as Principal where she oversaw the first conversations about admitting men to the college.

Daphne Margaret Sybil Désirée Park was born in Surrey on September 1st 1921. Weeks later, her father, John Alexander, a former WWI Intelligence Officer and aspiring gold prospector who never actually married her mother, took the family to Africa. Daphne pegged her first gold claim aged three, finding a single nugget which she then lost. 

The rugged conditions of life (including hungry lionesses, tsetse fly and malaria) were enough to induce Daphne’s mother Doreen Park to lease a coffee plantation in the Kenyan hills. Here, the family home was a mud hut without running water or electricity. As she knew that she herself was going blind, her mother gradually she taught Daphne to read at a very early age.

Having taught Daphne via a correspondence course for five years, in 1932 her parents decided that they could not teach her any more and so her mother scrimped and scraped for the fare for her to come home to England. At the age of 11, Daphne walked three days to the nearest road and hitched a lorry ride “through a cloud of locusts” to Dar es Salaam. There she “switched on my first electric light and pulled my first loo chain” and sailed back to England to attend the Rosa Bassett school in Streatham, South London. Her Monmouth grandmother and London great-aunts became her guardians. She would never again see her brother, David, who died aged 14. She was not to see her parents again until 1947, when she was 26 years old, as war-time communications made it impossible.

Money was extremely tight throughout her school and university years. Daphne thus remained grateful all her life to the Surrey County Council official who, after meeting Daphne and being impressed by her refusal to fudge her reasons for attending university in order to gain a £75 loan, created a special scholarship for her. Daphne arrived in Oxford from London just as the Battle of Britain was occurring, which had a profound effect on her: “The very month that I went up, the docks were set ablaze and the Battle of Britain took place. One was thinking about something much, much bigger than oneself.” She wore secondhand clothes all through Oxford and was always short of money, but the wartime absence of young men gave her extra chances. She became president of the Liberal Club and was only the second woman to speak at the Oxford Union. She never really looked back.

On graduating in 1943, Park turned down jobs in the Treasury and the Foreign Office to make a direct contribution to the war effort. She was summoned for interview at FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry – which had evolved to undertake unconventional tasks among the Services). There, by providing an over-elaborate answer to a question about ciphers, she attracted the attention of the head of coding at the Special Operations Unit, who put her on his staff. It was the beginning, as she admitted, of her “very interesting war”.

After a period instructing a range of agents in the use of codes, Daphne Park was promoted to the rank of sergeant and sent to Milton Hall in Leicestershire, where she helped to train the Jedburghs, special teams formed to support the Resistance in Europe. She was, however, sacked for insubordination after she told a senior officer he was incompetent, and in 1944 went to work as a briefing and dispatching officer in SOE (Special Operations Executive) in North Africa.  When she got there, she was looked up after by Barbara Lucy Keeley (who was also in the SOE) who was PA to Colonel Anstey (later Sir John) who ran Massingham (the SOE codename for Algiers operation) and SPOC (the Special Projects Operations Centre in Algiers based at the Villa Magnol which planned resistance support operations in to Southern France and the Southern France landings in August 1944). There are a number of references to Daphne Park in Algiers in 1944 in Margaret Pawley’s book Obedience to Instructions, including the recollection that on one occasion after a visit to a restaurant, Daphne was left in charge of some prisoners, armed with a sten gun, while her dinner companions including the local gendarme went to retrieve their stolen jeep.

By the end of the war, Park’s wartime activities in SOE had left her deeply compromised in Europe and disqualified her from entry into the Diplomatic Service. Instead, bitterly disappointed and still a FANY officer, she was sent to Vienna in 1946 to set up an office for FIAT (Field Intelligence Agency Technical), directing the search for Axis scientists who had been involved in interesting projects during the war and were wanted for interview by the British. Her work in Vienna strongly influenced her career. Witnessing the kidnap of scientists by the Soviets and the disappearance of Poles and Czechs she had trained during the war made Daphne Park determined to discover more about the communist regime. Her assistance to the intelligence services secured her an interview back in London. She was duly offered a job and entered the Service in July 1948, the time of the Berlin airlift.

Park rose rapidly through the ranks of MI6. In 1954, after a stint learning Russian at Newnham College, Cambridge, Park was notionally appointed second secretary at the British Embassy in Moscow, but in fact served as station head for the Intelligence Service.

She arrived in the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War. Stalin had died the previous year, Beria had been shot and the Bulganin-Khrushchev thaw was beginning. The Soviet Union was opening up, and she travelled widely, reporting on all aspects of Soviet life.

Once, during the Suez crisis, when Britain was under attack at the UN, demonstrators swarmed angrily up to the British embassy. As the riot unfolded, the embassy’s military and naval attachés, in full uniform, approached a Russian officer who was observing the destruction. They saluted him and said: “The ambassador would be obliged to know when this demonstration will end, as he is having guests for luncheon.” According to Daphne Park, the reply came: “This spontaneous demonstration of the people’s wrath will end at a quarter to one precisely.”

Her tradecraft was impeccable. SIS had taken on the case of a Russian spy in Canada who had been turned by the Canadians but then recalled to the Soviet Union. There were fears that he had been compromised, and he was instructed to appear, alone, in a particular Moscow street at a particular time carrying a shopping bag in his left hand. Daphne Park was sent to the rendezvous. When he arrived with the bag in his right hand, and in the company of a woman, she correctly surmised that he was indicating that he had indeed been compromised.

Daphne Park’s next posting (1959-61) was as Station Controller in Leopoldsville in the Congo, during the granting of independence that was to prove one of the principal crises of the Cold War. She subsequently served as Station Controller in Lusaka in Zambia, Hanoi, capital of the North Vietnamese government, during the Vietnam War and Ulan Bator in Mongolia. All these postings were highly eventful. They were also characterised by Daphne’s fearlessness, which was legendary despite the fact that she liked to convey the impression of being a grandmother rather than a spy. Indeed, her preferred modus operandi was to build relationships rather than engage in underhand dealings. Specifically, Daphne refused to bear weapons and famously countered an attack from an armed mob by getting out of her car, opening the bonnet and exclaiming, ‘Thank goodness you’ve come along – I think I have a problem with my carburettor.’ The men promptly laid down their weapons and offered their assistance.

Her career was not without controversy, however. It is alleged that she claimed privately to have been involved in the 1961 abduction and murder of Patrice Lumumba during the Congo Crisis. The true nature of her work was publicly revealed only in 1993, when an edition of BBC’s Panorama named her as a senior MI6 officer.

Daphne Park was recalled to London in 1973. Her career in the Secret Intelligence Service culminated in her appointment as Controller Western Hemisphere in 1975, the highest post ever occupied by a woman at that time. She retired from the SIS in 1979, having been elected Principal of Somerville College, Oxford.

As Principal of Somerville, Park oversaw the college’s first conversations about whether to admit men to the college. She also worked tirelessly for the College Appeal, raising much-needed funds by making frequent visits to the USA, the Gulf States and the Far East. A member of the British Library Board, Chair of the Legal Aid Advisory Committee and Governor of the BBC, Park was also a Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University. In 1990 she was created Baroness Park of Monmouth.

Daphne Park retired from Somerville in 1989 and was succeeded by ex-diplomat Catherine Hughes. In 1990, during Margaret Thatcher‘s final year as Prime Minister, she elevated Park to a life peerage, as Baroness Park of Monmouth. She took the Conservative whip. According to Lord Rooker, Park chose ‘Monmouth’ in her title not in reference to the market town where she had family history, but to honour Monmouth House, a building in which her friends in the Secret Intelligence Service worked.

Did you know? Daphne Park’s first appearance in the Somerville records is as one of the undergraduates who volunteered to take part in a mock Blitz organised by the City Council to test Oxford’s preparedness, where her ‘realistic impersonation of a hysterical foreigner deprived of house, sense and all coherent speech had shown up some weak spots in the city organisation’.

This profile is indebted to the following biography, which contains a full account of Daphne Park’s fascinating life and career. 

Watch an interview with Baroness Park reflecting on her wartime career

We wish to express our thanks to the Royal British Legion for allowing the use of the above film.

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.’