The History of Lucy Cavendish College
Lucy Cavendish College was founded in 1965 but it may be said to have originated in 1950 when two women, Margaret Braithwaite and Kay Wood-Legh, met for lunch at Tony’s restaurant with the avowed intention of making the occasion a weekly event, and of inviting academic women to join them: women like themselves who for various reasons felt isolated from the mainstream of University life. Their first invitation was to Anna Bidder. Margaret Braithwaite was a philosopher, Kay Wood-Legh was a medieval historian, and Anna Bidder was a zoologist.
All three were graduates of Newnham College and all were teaching and doing research in the University but, not holding fellowships in either of the then women’s colleges, Girton and Newnham, they lacked the stimulation and support of collegiate life. Their weekly gatherings went some way to resolving their feelings of isolation and by the Lent term of 1951, several other women had joined the group.
Because lunch-time meetings were inconvenient for some, the group agreed to dine together instead of lunching. Although the group had originally met to provide some kind of corporate life for women who were not closely connected with a College, they felt strongly that a Third Foundation was needed to increase the number of undergraduate places for women in Cambridge and began to work towards this end.
In 1950 Cambridge had a lower proportion of women undergraduates than any other university in the country. The proportion of female to male undergraduates was just under 10%, compared to nearly 20% in Oxford and 23% nationally.
Interest in promoting a Third Foundation was not confined to members of the Dining Group. Running parallel with their activities was another group headed by Dame Myra Curtis, the retiring Principal of Newnham. The two groups were not without contact and collaboration began in May 1951 with the joint preparation of a memorandum suggesting how a new foundation could be constituted, but there was a fundamental difference in their approach.
The philosophy of the Dining Group was to start a women’s undergraduate college by having a strong academic nucleus and to gather students around it. This differed from the approach of the other group (who later went on to establish New Hall) where the concern was to make more places available quickly through collecting a number of students together and finding two or three senior members to look after them.
The year 1951-1952 was a period of intense activity for the Dining Group, transforming them from an informal gathering of individuals to a group with a distinct corporate identity: a trust fund was established, memoranda were drafted setting out their aims and proposals, minutes of meetings were recorded for the first time, discussions were held with representatives of the University, financial estimates were prepared, and letters were written to potential supporters. In a financial estimate prepared by the Dining Group in March 1952 it was noted that a capital sum of £52500 would be required to establish a Third Foundation. In actual fact, when Lucy Cavendish was founded in 1965 we had just £3000 in the bank!
The trust fund was established with a generous gift of £2000 from George Parker Bidder III, a sum equivalent today of £33000. George Bidder was the father of Anna and he had great sympathy with the ‘Third Foundation’ project and wanted to make a capital gift so that the Dining Group could “put down a deposit for a house and so have real existence”. He made the gift anonymously so as not to embarrass his daughter.
This portrait of George Bidder now hangs in a room in College House which bears his name.
So we have the Dining Group and Dame Myra’s group lobbying the University for a third college for women, and in June 1952, the Council of the Senate published a report recommending “a new autonomous foundation for women students should be set up with the restriction that the number of students should not, until further order, exceed 100”. To put this in context – in 1952/53 there were 7800 male undergraduates at Cambridge, whereas female undergraduates at Newnham and Girton were strictly limited by the University to 500.
The publication of this report was followed by a meeting in July 1952, chaired by Dame Myra Curtis and attended by Fellows of Girton and Newnham and members of the Dining Group, where the resolution was passed to establish an ‘Association to Promote a Third Foundation for Women in the University of Cambridge’. And from the ‘Third Foundation Association’ emerged New Hall in 1954.
The original aim of the Dining Group to establish a new college for women undergraduates was thus taken over by the Third Foundation Association. However, the Dining Group continued in existence, and turned its attention to the increasing numbers of graduates, both research students and particularly senior members involved in teaching, who were not fellows of colleges, and thus somewhat isolated from collegiate life. They redefined their purpose and aim as:
“to have concern for the problems of academic women in Cambridge, and by providing practical assistance and the stimulus of regular social contact, to encourage academic achievement in teaching, learning and research”.
Increasing concern for these ‘non-fellows’ prompted the University to consider various initiatives from the mid-1950s onwards, culminating in a report published in 1963 which recommended the establishment of new collegiate societies for graduates. In November 1964 the Dining Group applied to the University for recognition as the Lucy Cavendish Collegiate Society, setting out in its Trust Deed to be:
Lucy Cavendish Collegiate Society was granted formal recognition as an ‘Approved Society’ in July 1965, a new category of institution established in 1964, which gave the University the power to recognise “institutions of a less formal and more experimental character than is implied by an Approved Foundation”.
As if to underline the experimental nature of Lucy Cavendish, The Times reported on the 11 October 1965:
“As the new academic year at Cambridge begins, anyone who walks to the river down Silver Street may see outside one of the houses a notice that says ‘Lucy Cavendish College, Temporary Offices’. So it is that without towers or turrets, without chaplain or porters, without a building of its own or even a foundation grant, Britain’s first graduate college for women has quietly come into being”.
As The Times article suggests, our first premises were a modest two rooms on the ground floor of 20 Silver Street. One of the rooms was kept for the secretary, Sharon Lowes, and the Tutor and Secretary to the Governing Body, Dr Kate Bertram, mainly used the other, with filing accommodation for the President, Dr Anna Bidder. Each of the rooms was furnished with a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, a telephone and a metal wastepaper basket, which legend says was frequently upended to provide for additional seating.
The photograph shows the entrance to the office in 1965. We remained here, courtesy of the University, until June 1966 when we moved into two 18th-century cottages in Northampton Street, nos.17-18 which had been completely refurbished.
The 10-year lease of the buildings was given, through the University, by Magdalene College. The ground floor contained the George Bidder Room, parlour and kitchen, while the upper three rooms in one provided small offices for the President, Tutor and Secretary, and the other had three residential rooms that were rented out to graduate students at £5 [per week] inclusive of hot water and central heating. As Sue may have explained on your tour of the College before lunch, we first moved to this site in 1970, into College House. However, we retained the premises in Northampton Street for student accommodation for a number of years.
This is Margaret Seay (Peggy) outside the College premises in Northampton Street around 1967. She was our first resident student, from Smith College, Massachusetts and arrived in 1966 to study number theory for a Ph.D. When Peggy asked for a college scarf, the fellows asked her to design one. By 1970 we had 10 graduate students and this is the earliest known photograph of our student body taken on College House lawn.
Under the terms of our recognition we were an ‘experimental graduate college’ and so were not permitted to take undergraduates. However, in October 1970, we accepted the first of a new category of students: women wishing to read for the degree of Bachelor of Education. Cambridge University had been the last in the country to accept the concept of an all-graduate teaching profession. In 1970 following the recommendation of the Robbins Report, the University had agreed that the 3-year trained certificated teachers within the area of the Cambridge Institute of Education who had been accepted by a Cambridge College of their choice could read for a 4th-year B.Ed. degree. Two students were admitted in the first year, Joyce Dobbie and Joan Hillier, with Joyce being the first Lucy student to gain a first class degree (in 1971). The system came to an end in 1978, but altogether Lucy Cavendish admitted 73 of these B.Ed.
In the meantime, following publication in late-1969 of a national report ‘University Development in the 1970s’, it became government policy that there should be a doubling of student numbers in universities from 225,000 (in 1970) to a total of 450,000 by 1981. Consequently, in June 1971 the University amended its Statutes, so that Approved Societies were no longer to be restricted to graduates only, and Lucy Cavendish was enabled to admit up to 50 mature (over 25 years of age) and affiliated students as undergraduates to read for a Cambridge first degree.
In October 1972 we welcomed our first intake of undergraduates. There were twenty of them, varying in age from 25 to 36, and from diverse backgrounds and occupations, including secretaries, housewives, teachers, and an actress. As the UCCA (Universities Central Council for Admissions) handbook had as yet no information about Lucy Cavendish, most had learnt of the College through personal contacts, but also from publicity in newspaper articles or on radio. It is said that one such applicant was ironing in an army station in Germany and heard of Lucy Cavendish on BBC Radio Woman’s Hour. She was determined to apply for admission as soon as she was posted back to England. And here are the first four Lucy students to gain a BA at their graduation in June 1974.
We were limited to having no more than 50 undergraduates at any one time but this restriction was eventually removed in 1988, and in 1990 we were granted approval from the University to reduce age limit for the admission of mature students from 25 to 21. The end of next week sees the start of the new academic year and we will have 116 undergraduates coming into residence.
Returning to our status as an ‘Approved Society’, it was a position that was not to be envied. It meant that we could be abolished by the relatively simple process of a Grace of the Council of the Senate and we were not eligible for financial assistance from the Colleges Fund. The College was therefore anxious to take the next step and become an ‘Approved Foundation’. In so doing we had to assure the University that:
we were financially viable; we had achieved a sound level of academic standing; we were capable of teaching the mainline subjects; and we had agreed sensible Statutes and Ordinances for our governance.
Lucy Cavendish became an Approved Foundation in 1984 under the presidency of Lady Bowden, now Phyllis Hetzel. It was perhaps the most momentous event in Lucy’s history thus far and the recollections of Phyllis Hetzel reveal that the final outcome was by no means certain. She wrote:
“There were no clearly defined rules about the proofs needed. The College had to work these out on its own and provide convincing evidence that they had been met. It had been a long process with a touch and go finale. The affirmative vote in the Council was by a majority of one, after their third deliberation. At last, five years of strenuous effort had met with success.
Approved Foundation status meant that the University had assumed some responsibility for our survival: we were now eligible for financial assistance from the Colleges Fund, and we could only be abolished after the Chancellor of the University had ordered a special enquiry by a committee under an independent chairman.
Twelve years later, in 1996, the College Trustees submitted a request that the College should be granted the status of a full College of the University, and thus become entirely self-governing. On 22 July 1997, Her Majesty the Queen approved the grant of a Charter of Incorporation to Lucy Cavendish College. As noted in Varsity, there was a neat little symmetry to this approval: the decision to admit Lucy Cavendish as a College of the University came 50 years after women were granted full membership of the University, and 100 years after it voted overwhelmingly to refuse them admission.
Since its foundation, the College has been committed to widening women’s participation in higher education, often through innovative means. In 1996 we established the Centre for Women & Leadership, the first of its kind in the UK. It brings to the College senior women from a wide range of disciplines and professions and promotes dialogue about issues relating to women and leadership on a national and international level.
This photograph shows Margaret Hodge, the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Employment and Opportunities, addressing a lunch meeting at the launch of the Cambridge Work-Life Project in October 1999. This was a research study carried out by the Centre for Women & Leadership in partnership with the Public Policy Institute at Harvard, which investigated the impact of family-friendly work policies on the ethos and morale of staff and managers, and on the productivity and profitability of the companies.
Responding to the Government’s initiatives to expand Britain’s pool of doctors and to recruit a greater number of mature students into medicine, Lucy Cavendish helped set up the Cambridge Graduate Course in Medicine. Launched in September 2001, it is designed to train graduates from any discipline to become doctors in just four years.
The lack of support derived from collegiate life prompted those early members of the Dining Group to begin meeting once a week, first for lunch and then for dinner. At ‘Lucy’ the pursuit of academic excellence has long been combined with a supportive and informal environment, from weekly formal dinners where Fellows, staff and students meet on equal terms to inclusive student activities.
In those early days of the 1960s, the George Bidder Room at 17-18 Northampton Street could seat no more than fourteen for a meal, so college dinners were held in Gonville & Caius College. When the College acquired Strathaird (this building) in 1973, it became possible to provide lunches (c.1987) and a weekly formal hall (c.1988). However, the Dining Room in Strathaird was not large enough to host the Annual Dinner and these continued to be held at Trinity College. It was not until the completion of Warburton Hall (where you had lunch) in the spring of 1995 that we held the Annual Dinner in our own hall for the first time since Annual Dinners began in 1967.
Without the large-scale facilities of other colleges, sporting activity in Lucy Cavendish depends on the inclinations and enthusiasms of individual generations of students. We had our first boat crew in 1981 and successive crews have participated in rowing events, with this year’s crew being no exception.
The diversity of backgrounds, and the rewarding and life-enhancing opportunities attested to by many ‘Lucy’ students is repeatedly commented upon and celebrated in the national press. One of the more stirring examples came from a piece published in the Independent on Sunday on 28 March 1999, written by Michael Bywater and for me it sums up what Lucy is all about. I’d just like to read you a few lines:
As Michael Bywater has so conveniently raised the matter of who was Lucy Cavendish, I’ll close by explaining who she was and why her name was chosen for the College.
Lucy Cavendish was born Lucy Caroline Lyttelton on 6th September 1841. The Lyttelton family had a broad interest in the matters of education. Her grandmother was Royal Governess to Queen Victoria’s children. Her father, Lord Lyttelton, showed great practical interest in projects such as evening classes, training colleges and the establishment of external examinations. Her brother, Edward, became a headmaster of Eton.
Lucy became a maid of honour to Queen Victoria in 1863. The following year she married Lord Frederick Cavendish, the second son of the Duke of Devonshire . He was an MP and in 1882 was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland. Tragically, within a few hours of taking up this appointment, he was assassinated in Phoenix Park in Dublin .
After his death Lucy pursued her interests in the education and welfare of girls and young women, becoming a notable speaker and indefatigable money raiser. These included the Girls Public Day School Company (GPDSC), created in 1872 to provide funds for the establishment throughout England of large day schools for middle-class girls, it became a life-long interest for Lucy and she attended their meetings regularly. “I wish I knew more about leases and repairs” she confided when the GPSDC was looking for a house in which to install their first school.
Another interest was The Yorkshire Ladies Council for Education which was founded in 1870 in an effort to co-ordinate the policies of a number of scattered committees which arose as a result of the 1870 Education Act. Lord Frederick Cavendish was much involved in its early years, but after her husband’s death Lucy began to preside over its meetings. She remained President for 27 years from 1885-1912.
In 1894 Lucy was appointed a member of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education (the Bryce Commission) by the then Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery. She was one of three women in a membership of seventeen. The others being Dr. Sophie Bryant , an educationalist and Head of the North London Collegiate School, and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, Principal of Newnham College. The Commission was asked to look at the state of secondary education alone but also considered both elementary and technical education. Its recommendations laid the foundations of new administrative structures for secondary schools.
On 6 October 1904 the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon Lady Frederick Cavendish at the formal inauguration of the University of Leeds. Degrees were presented to “a number of distinguished persons connected with Yorkshire by birth or otherwise, many of whom had rendered notable service to the cause of education”.
She died on 22nd April 1925.
In a letter published in the Cambridge Review on 2 May 1964, two of the founding fellows explained their choice of name for the College. Here is what they said: ‘There is also a family connection in that she was the great-aunt of one of the founding fellows, Margaret Braithwaite’.
All three were graduates of Newnham College and all were teaching and doing research in the University but, not holding fellowships in either of the then women’s colleges, Girton and Newnham, they lacked the stimulation and support of collegiate life. Their weekly gatherings went some way to resolving their feelings of isolation and by the Lent term of 1951, several other women had joined the group.
Because lunch-time meetings were inconvenient for some, the group agreed to dine together instead of lunching. Although the group had originally met to provide some kind of corporate life for women who were not closely connected with a College, they felt strongly that a Third Foundation was needed to increase the number of undergraduate places for women in Cambridge and began to work towards this end.
In 1950 Cambridge had a lower proportion of women undergraduates than any other university in the country. The proportion of female to male undergraduates was just under 10%, compared to nearly 20% in Oxford and 23% nationally.
Interest in promoting a Third Foundation was not confined to members of the Dining Group. Running parallel with their activities was another group headed by Dame Myra Curtis, the retiring Principal of Newnham. The two groups were not without contact and collaboration began in May 1951 with the joint preparation of a memorandum suggesting how a new foundation could be constituted, but there was a fundamental difference in their approach.
The philosophy of the Dining Group was to start a women’s undergraduate college by having a strong academic nucleus and to gather students around it. This differed from the approach of the other group (who later went on to establish New Hall) where the concern was to make more places available quickly through collecting a number of students together and finding two or three senior members to look after them.
The year 1951-1952 was a period of intense activity for the Dining Group, transforming them from an informal gathering of individuals to a group with a distinct corporate identity: a trust fund was established, memoranda were drafted setting out their aims and proposals, minutes of meetings were recorded for the first time, discussions were held with representatives of the University, financial estimates were prepared, and letters were written to potential supporters. In a financial estimate prepared by the Dining Group in March 1952 it was noted that a capital sum of £52500 would be required to establish a Third Foundation. In actual fact, when Lucy Cavendish was founded in 1965 we had just £3000 in the bank!
The trust fund was established with a generous gift of £2000 from George Parker Bidder III, a sum equivalent today of £33000. George Bidder was the father of Anna and he had great sympathy with the ‘Third Foundation’ project and wanted to make a capital gift so that the Dining Group could “put down a deposit for a house and so have real existence”. He made the gift anonymously so as not to embarrass his daughter.
This portrait of George Bidder now hangs in a room in College House which bears his name.
So we have the Dining Group and Dame Myra’s group lobbying the University for a third college for women, and in June 1952, the Council of the Senate published a report recommending “a new autonomous foundation for women students should be set up with the restriction that the number of students should not, until further order, exceed 100”. To put this in context – in 1952/53 there were 7800 male undergraduates at Cambridge, whereas female undergraduates at Newnham and Girton were strictly limited by the University to 500.
The publication of this report was followed by a meeting in July 1952, chaired by Dame Myra Curtis and attended by Fellows of Girton and Newnham and members of the Dining Group, where the resolution was passed to establish an ‘Association to Promote a Third Foundation for Women in the University of Cambridge’. And from the ‘Third Foundation Association’ emerged New Hall in 1954.
The original aim of the Dining Group to establish a new college for women undergraduates was thus taken over by the Third Foundation Association. However, the Dining Group continued in existence, and turned its attention to the increasing numbers of graduates, both research students and particularly senior members involved in teaching, who were not fellows of colleges, and thus somewhat isolated from collegiate life. They redefined their purpose and aim as:
“to have concern for the problems of academic women in Cambridge, and by providing practical assistance and the stimulus of regular social contact, to encourage academic achievement in teaching, learning and research”.
Increasing concern for these ‘non-fellows’ prompted the University to consider various initiatives from the mid-1950s onwards, culminating in a report published in 1963 which recommended the establishment of new collegiate societies for graduates. In November 1964 the Dining Group applied to the University for recognition as the Lucy Cavendish Collegiate Society, setting out in its Trust Deed to be:
Lucy Cavendish Collegiate Society was granted formal recognition as an ‘Approved Society’ in July 1965, a new category of institution established in 1964, which gave the University the power to recognise “institutions of a less formal and more experimental character than is implied by an Approved Foundation”.
As if to underline the experimental nature of Lucy Cavendish, The Times reported on the 11 October 1965:
“As the new academic year at Cambridge begins, anyone who walks to the river down Silver Street may see outside one of the houses a notice that says ‘Lucy Cavendish College, Temporary Offices’. So it is that without towers or turrets, without chaplain or porters, without a building of its own or even a foundation grant, Britain’s first graduate college for women has quietly come into being”.
As The Times article suggests, our first premises were a modest two rooms on the ground floor of 20 Silver Street. One of the rooms was kept for the secretary, Sharon Lowes, and the Tutor and Secretary to the Governing Body, Dr Kate Bertram, mainly used the other, with filing accommodation for the President, Dr Anna Bidder. Each of the rooms was furnished with a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet, a telephone and a metal wastepaper basket, which legend says was frequently upended to provide for additional seating.
The photograph shows the entrance to the office in 1965. We remained here, courtesy of the University, until June 1966 when we moved into two 18th-century cottages in Northampton Street, nos.17-18 which had been completely refurbished.
The 10-year lease of the buildings was given, through the University, by Magdalene College. The ground floor contained the George Bidder Room, parlour and kitchen, while the upper three rooms in one provided small offices for the President, Tutor and Secretary, and the other had three residential rooms that were rented out to graduate students at £5 [per week] inclusive of hot water and central heating. As Sue may have explained on your tour of the College before lunch, we first moved to this site in 1970, into College House. However, we retained the premises in Northampton Street for student accommodation for a number of years.
This is Margaret Seay (Peggy) outside the College premises in Northampton Street around 1967. She was our first resident student, from Smith College, Massachusetts and arrived in 1966 to study number theory for a Ph.D. When Peggy asked for a college scarf, the fellows asked her to design one. By 1970 we had 10 graduate students and this is the earliest known photograph of our student body taken on College House lawn.
Under the terms of our recognition we were an ‘experimental graduate college’ and so were not permitted to take undergraduates. However, in October 1970, we accepted the first of a new category of students: women wishing to read for the degree of Bachelor of Education. Cambridge University had been the last in the country to accept the concept of an all-graduate teaching profession. In 1970 following the recommendation of the Robbins Report, the University had agreed that the 3-year trained certificated teachers within the area of the Cambridge Institute of Education who had been accepted by a Cambridge College of their choice could read for a 4th-year B.Ed. degree. Two students were admitted in the first year, Joyce Dobbie and Joan Hillier, with Joyce being the first Lucy student to gain a first class degree (in 1971). The system came to an end in 1978, but altogether Lucy Cavendish admitted 73 of these B.Ed.
In the meantime, following publication in late-1969 of a national report ‘University Development in the 1970s’, it became government policy that there should be a doubling of student numbers in universities from 225,000 (in 1970) to a total of 450,000 by 1981. Consequently, in June 1971 the University amended its Statutes, so that Approved Societies were no longer to be restricted to graduates only, and Lucy Cavendish was enabled to admit up to 50 mature (over 25 years of age) and affiliated students as undergraduates to read for a Cambridge first degree.
In October 1972 we welcomed our first intake of undergraduates. There were twenty of them, varying in age from 25 to 36, and from diverse backgrounds and occupations, including secretaries, housewives, teachers, and an actress. As the UCCA (Universities Central Council for Admissions) handbook had as yet no information about Lucy Cavendish, most had learnt of the College through personal contacts, but also from publicity in newspaper articles or on radio. It is said that one such applicant was ironing in an army station in Germany and heard of Lucy Cavendish on BBC Radio Woman’s Hour. She was determined to apply for admission as soon as she was posted back to England. And here are the first four Lucy students to gain a BA at their graduation in June 1974.
We were limited to having no more than 50 undergraduates at any one time but this restriction was eventually removed in 1988, and in 1990 we were granted approval from the University to reduce age limit for the admission of mature students from 25 to 21. The end of next week sees the start of the new academic year and we will have 116 undergraduates coming into residence.
Returning to our status as an ‘Approved Society’, it was a position that was not to be envied. It meant that we could be abolished by the relatively simple process of a Grace of the Council of the Senate and we were not eligible for financial assistance from the Colleges Fund. The College was therefore anxious to take the next step and become an ‘Approved Foundation’. In so doing we had to assure the University that:
we were financially viable; we had achieved a sound level of academic standing; we were capable of teaching the mainline subjects; and we had agreed sensible Statutes and Ordinances for our governance.
Lucy Cavendish became an Approved Foundation in 1984 under the presidency of Lady Bowden, now Phyllis Hetzel. It was perhaps the most momentous event in Lucy’s history thus far and the recollections of Phyllis Hetzel reveal that the final outcome was by no means certain. She wrote:
“There were no clearly defined rules about the proofs needed. The College had to work these out on its own and provide convincing evidence that they had been met. It had been a long process with a touch and go finale. The affirmative vote in the Council was by a majority of one, after their third deliberation. At last, five years of strenuous effort had met with success.
Approved Foundation status meant that the University had assumed some responsibility for our survival: we were now eligible for financial assistance from the Colleges Fund, and we could only be abolished after the Chancellor of the University had ordered a special enquiry by a committee under an independent chairman.
Twelve years later, in 1996, the College Trustees submitted a request that the College should be granted the status of a full College of the University, and thus become entirely self-governing. On 22 July 1997, Her Majesty the Queen approved the grant of a Charter of Incorporation to Lucy Cavendish College. As noted in Varsity, there was a neat little symmetry to this approval: the decision to admit Lucy Cavendish as a College of the University came 50 years after women were granted full membership of the University, and 100 years after it voted overwhelmingly to refuse them admission.
Since its foundation, the College has been committed to widening women’s participation in higher education, often through innovative means. In 1996 we established the Centre for Women & Leadership, the first of its kind in the UK. It brings to the College senior women from a wide range of disciplines and professions and promotes dialogue about issues relating to women and leadership on a national and international level.
This photograph shows Margaret Hodge, the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Employment and Opportunities, addressing a lunch meeting at the launch of the Cambridge Work-Life Project in October 1999. This was a research study carried out by the Centre for Women & Leadership in partnership with the Public Policy Institute at Harvard, which investigated the impact of family-friendly work policies on the ethos and morale of staff and managers, and on the productivity and profitability of the companies.
Responding to the Government’s initiatives to expand Britain’s pool of doctors and to recruit a greater number of mature students into medicine, Lucy Cavendish helped set up the Cambridge Graduate Course in Medicine. Launched in September 2001, it is designed to train graduates from any discipline to become doctors in just four years.
The lack of support derived from collegiate life prompted those early members of the Dining Group to begin meeting once a week, first for lunch and then for dinner. At ‘Lucy’ the pursuit of academic excellence has long been combined with a supportive and informal environment, from weekly formal dinners where Fellows, staff and students meet on equal terms to inclusive student activities.
In those early days of the 1960s, the George Bidder Room at 17-18 Northampton Street could seat no more than fourteen for a meal, so college dinners were held in Gonville & Caius College. When the College acquired Strathaird (this building) in 1973, it became possible to provide lunches (c.1987) and a weekly formal hall (c.1988). However, the Dining Room in Strathaird was not large enough to host the Annual Dinner and these continued to be held at Trinity College. It was not until the completion of Warburton Hall (where you had lunch) in the spring of 1995 that we held the Annual Dinner in our own hall for the first time since Annual Dinners began in 1967.
Without the large-scale facilities of other colleges, sporting activity in Lucy Cavendish depends on the inclinations and enthusiasms of individual generations of students. We had our first boat crew in 1981 and successive crews have participated in rowing events, with this year’s crew being no exception.
The diversity of backgrounds, and the rewarding and life-enhancing opportunities attested to by many ‘Lucy’ students is repeatedly commented upon and celebrated in the national press. One of the more stirring examples came from a piece published in the Independent on Sunday on 28 March 1999, written by Michael Bywater and for me it sums up what Lucy is all about. I’d just like to read you a few lines:
As Michael Bywater has so conveniently raised the matter of who was Lucy Cavendish, I’ll close by explaining who she was and why her name was chosen for the College.
Lucy Cavendish was born Lucy Caroline Lyttelton on 6th September 1841. The Lyttelton family had a broad interest in the matters of education. Her grandmother was Royal Governess to Queen Victoria’s children. Her father, Lord Lyttelton, showed great practical interest in projects such as evening classes, training colleges and the establishment of external examinations. Her brother, Edward, became a headmaster of Eton.
Lucy became a maid of honour to Queen Victoria in 1863. The following year she married Lord Frederick Cavendish, the second son of the Duke of Devonshire . He was an MP and in 1882 was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland. Tragically, within a few hours of taking up this appointment, he was assassinated in Phoenix Park in Dublin .
After his death Lucy pursued her interests in the education and welfare of girls and young women, becoming a notable speaker and indefatigable money raiser. These included the Girls Public Day School Company (GPDSC), created in 1872 to provide funds for the establishment throughout England of large day schools for middle-class girls, it became a life-long interest for Lucy and she attended their meetings regularly. “I wish I knew more about leases and repairs” she confided when the GPSDC was looking for a house in which to install their first school.
Another interest was The Yorkshire Ladies Council for Education which was founded in 1870 in an effort to co-ordinate the policies of a number of scattered committees which arose as a result of the 1870 Education Act. Lord Frederick Cavendish was much involved in its early years, but after her husband’s death Lucy began to preside over its meetings. She remained President for 27 years from 1885-1912.
In 1894 Lucy was appointed a member of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education (the Bryce Commission) by the then Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery. She was one of three women in a membership of seventeen. The others being Dr. Sophie Bryant , an educationalist and Head of the North London Collegiate School, and Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, Principal of Newnham College. The Commission was asked to look at the state of secondary education alone but also considered both elementary and technical education. Its recommendations laid the foundations of new administrative structures for secondary schools.
On 6 October 1904 the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon Lady Frederick Cavendish at the formal inauguration of the University of Leeds. Degrees were presented to “a number of distinguished persons connected with Yorkshire by birth or otherwise, many of whom had rendered notable service to the cause of education”.
She died on 22nd April 1925.
In a letter published in the Cambridge Review on 2 May 1964, two of the founding fellows explained their choice of name for the College. Here is what they said: ‘There is also a family connection in that she was the great-aunt of one of the founding fellows, Margaret Braithwaite’.
