Eminent Somervillians

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.

Penelope Fitzgerald was born into a literary family where ‘everyone was publishing, or about to publish something’, and her mother was a Somervillian. In 1935, Fitzgerald came to Somerville too, to study English. She was a brilliant student, graduating with a congratulatory First and gaining the accolade ‘Woman of the Year’ in the Isis (her First was so impressive that her exam scripts were kept by her tutor, though they are now sadly lost).

After Oxford, Fitzgerald worked for the BBC and established and edited a literary magazine. Her path to literary greatness, though, was neither smooth nor straight. In 1942, she married Desmond Fitzgerald, whose time serving in the Western Desert (where he was decorated for bravery) saw him return to civilian life an alcoholic. A difficult, penurious period followed, with frequent spells of precarious living, including homelessness, a houseboat that sank twice and drudge work for Fitzgerald at an Oxbridge crammer.

Fitzgerald was 58 when she published her first book, a biography of Edward Burne-Jones. She said she wrote her first novel, The Golden Child, to amuse her husband during the last years of his life. After his death, Fitzgerald experienced a late and intense flowering of creativity, publishing her first five novels between 1977 and 1982. Offshore, inspired by her life on the embattled houseboat, won the Booker Prize in 1975. 1995 saw the publication of what is often regarded as her masterpiece, The Blue Flower, about the eighteenth-century German poet and philosopher Novalis. Acclaimed as one of the best historical novels ever written, it won the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1999, Fitzgerald was awarded the Golden PEN Award from English PEN for ‘a Lifetime’s Distinguished Service to Literature’. She died the following year. In 2013, her posthumous reputation was cemented by the publication of Hermione Lee’s biography.

Did you know? Fellow Booker Prize-winner Julian Barnes says that he has reread the first scene of The Blue Flower(which begins in the middle of washday), many times, ‘always trying to find its secret, but never succeeding’.

Susie Dent came to Somerville in 1983 to study Modern Languages. She went on to take a Master’s degree in German at Princeton. She began working for Oxford University Press, and shortly after that, she appeared for the first time on Channel 4’s Countdown. Since 1992, Dent has made over 2500 appearances in the show’s ‘Dictionary Corner’. She is the Honorary Vice-President of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP: formerly the Society for Editors and Proofreaders), and the author of How to Talk Like a Local (Arrow Books 2010).

Did you know? In her talk for Somerville’s 2020 series The Upside, Dent selected some of her personal ‘words of the year’, including ‘Mumpsimus’ (someone who insists that they are right, despite clear evidence that they are wrong), ‘Stiffrump’ (an obstinate individual) and ‘Empleomaniac’ (a person whose thirst for public power and office know no bounds).

Helen Darbishire was born in Oxford and came to Somerville in 1900 to study English. She became a visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway College, returning to Somerville in 1908 to take up the position of tutor in English. Her work as a literary scholar focussed on Wordsworth and Milton and she was appointed a University Lecturer at Oxford, later becoming the first woman to be chair of the faculty board of English at Oxford. In 1925-6 she held a visiting professorship at Wellesley College.

Darbishire was elected Principal of Somerville in 1931, resigning her University lectureship but continuing to teach and lecture. While some had been concerned that she might be too academic to make a success of the principalship, she in fact brought a much-needed eye for detail, a warmth of personality and a zest for new projects that proved energising. Her tenure saw the expansion of the college, with major building works (one as a result of an endowment from Winifred Holtby) and the recruitment of tutors including Dorothy Hodgkin (who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for Chemistry).

Darbishire was a trustee of Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s home in Grasmere, and in 1943 she became Chair of Dove Cottage, working to make it a study centre. In later life, she moved to the Lake District.

Did you know? Helen Darbishire had no difficulty at all in maintaining her academic research alongside her Principalian duties: when an item of college business required urgent attention, a messenger would take the necessary documents to Darbishire’s customary seat in the Bodleian.

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.’

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.’

Educated in London, Fiona Caldicott studied medicine and physiology at St Hilda’s College, Oxford before going on to work as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. She served as President of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and went on to be the first woman Dean of the Royal College of Psychiatrists before becoming its first woman President in 1993. She was made a Dame of the British Empire (DBE) in 1996, the year she also became Somerville’s tenth Principal. During her time at Somerville Caldicott also served as Pro Vice-Chancellor for Personnel and Equality at Oxford. Known affectionately as ‘Dame Fi’ by Somerville’s students, she placed great importance on ensuring that Somerville was a supportive environment for its members.

After her term as Principal, Caldicott chaired the National Information Governance Board for Health and Social Care, investigating how patient data was used in the NHS. The resulting Caldicott Principles enshrined a lasting means of balancing the information needs of medical research with the rights of patient confidentiality. From 2009 to 2019, Caldicott was Chair of the Oxford University Hospitals NHS trust. She was made an Honorary Fellow of both St Hilda’s and Somerville, and in 2018 was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

You can read a record of condolences shared with Somerville on the occasion of Dame Fiona’s death here.

Did you know? Almost as famous as ‘Dame Fi’ was her beloved feline companion Pogo, who took up his official position as college cat at the same time that his mistress became Principal. At a gaudy in 2018, the mere mention of Pogo’s name prompted a standing ovation.

Vera Brittain was born in Staffordshire. She won an exhibition to read English at Somerville. In 1915, after just one year, she left the college to work as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD). Brittain’s fiancé, her brother and two close friends all died during the War. When she returned to Somerville, she changed her degree course to Modern History, hoping to understand the causes of the conflict.

Brittain became a committed pacifist and in a 1930 Armistice Day article in the Manchester Guardian she framed the challenge for her generation: ‘How to preserve the memory of our suffering in such a way that our successors may understand it and refrain from the temptations offered by glamour and glory – that is the problem which we, the war generation, still have to solve before the darkness covers it.’ Her elegiac memoir Testament of Youth is one of the greatest portraits of life in the First World War. When it was published in 1933 its first print-run sold out within a day.

Although Brittain’s pacifism fell out of favour with the onset of the Second World War, her reputation was restored when Testament of Youth was reprinted by Virago in 1978. In 2013, the Guardian described it ‘one of the most powerful and widely read war memoirs of all time’. Brittain’s daughter (and fellow Somervillian), the politician Shirley Williams, said her mother ‘had no idea that she was going to be a permanent figure in the literary canon’.

Did you know? Virginia Woolf stayed up all night so that she could finish reading Testament of Youth. She wrote to a friend saying that it was ‘A very good book of its sort. The new sort, the hard anguished sort, that the young write; that I could never write. Nor has anyone written that kind of book before.’

Lalage Bown (1945, Modern History) was a pioneering educationist who devoted much of her career to establishing and expanding adult education programmes in Ghana, Uganda, Zambia and Nigeria, with a particular focus on the empowerment of women through literacy.

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. Although only 22 at the time, Lalage was prompted to question the department’s British literature-oriented curriculum, believing that poems such as Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ had little meaning for African students, and that it was important for them to encounter writing by and about African people.

The scepticism of her colleagues, who doubted such texts existed, led Lalage to bet a bottle of beer that she could produce numerous passages written in English by African authors over the previous 200 years. Within two weeks she won her beer, and the texts she had collated were distributed to students and teachers. Eventually Bown edited the resulting anthology, Two Centuries of African English, including prose by the 18th-century writers Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, as well as more contemporary politicians and authors such as Jomo Kenyatta and Chinua Achebe. Two Centuries of African English subsequently became a core text for adult education and other classes throughout Africa. 

This story is indicative of a life devoted to expanding the provision and scope of adult education, particularly for women. Lalage spent much of her career establishing and expanding adult education programmes in Ghana, Uganda and Nigeria, with a particular focus on helping adult women learn to read and write. 

In 1974, Bown became a Commonwealth Visiting Professor at Edinburgh University. She left Africa in 1981 to take up a role as Head of the Department for Adult and Continuing Education at the University of Glasgow. In the 1990s, Bown authored a ground-breaking 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.

Did you know? Professor Bown recorded a special message for Somerville students enduring the hardships of Covid lockdown in 2020. Recalling her own time at Somerville in the late 1940s, she offered words of comfort and urged students to look for the ‘change beyond the change’. Watch the video here.