Eminent Somervillians

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.

Born in Edinburgh, Elspeth Barker came to Somerville in 1958 to study Literae Humaniores (Classics).

Barker’s first novel O Caledonia was published in 1991 and won four awards, including the David Higham Prize and the Angel Fiction Prize. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. She was a feature writer and reviewer for the Independent on Sunday, Guardian, Sunday Times, Observer, LRB and TLS, Harpers & Queen, Scotland on Sunday, Country Living and Vogue

In 2012 she published Dog Days, a collection of her journalism.

Barker taught creative writing in the UK, Europe and the US and was Visiting Professor of Fiction at Kansas University. She was a judge for the McKitterick and Sagittarius prizes. She also wrote for The Literary Review. She died on April 21st 2022, and her obituary was published in the Times.

Did you know? In 2017, writer Ali Smith called O Caledonia ‘A sparky, funny work of genius about class, romanticism, social tradition and literary tradition.’