Eminent Somervillians

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 invited 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? Two months after the publication of Somerville’s critically acclaimed book Mechanism of the Heavens, fellows of the Royal Society of London pledged £156.10 to pay for a marble bust of Somerville by renowned sculptor, Francis Chantrey, to sit in their meeting room. Today, a copy of the Chantrey bust can be found in the Mary Somerville Room.

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.

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.’