The Somerville College Class of 1952
The current pandemic has made many people think about the value of their education and the importance of old Somerville friendships. In this spirit of reflection Judith (Mundlak) Taylor has compiled a report on the year of 1952. Judith herself lives in San Francisco; she and her husband have two children and six grandchildren. She has had a distinguished career as a neurologist and Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine. She is now a significant horticultural historian.
A recent encounter online with a charming graduate of LMH (G. Mawrey, 1960) made me think about my own classmates and wonder where they might be now. Three of us still form a tight-knit little group which has had a round robin (e-mail) over many years as well as seeing each other whenever we could. We share our joys and sorrows and mutter about the inevitable aches and pains which are upon us all. It is, after all, sixty-eight years since we all went up. At first we were five. There were Valerie (‘Wally’) (Catmur) Vesser, Cynthia (Coldham) Jones, Jane (Brown) Evans, Felicity (Chugg) Morrogh and me, but Jane and Felicity have both died. In addition I am independently in contact with another class member, Franziska (Zweig) Loening. Two of my other close friends had already died of cancer more than twenty years ago, Carole (Rosen) Marsh and Esther (Mond) Breuer. Liz Cooke very kindly offered to send out a notice to the alumnae she has on her e-mail list, asking them to get in touch with me if they wished. Five responded. Between all of us we can account for about twenty of our classmates who are most probably still active. There is doubt about one or two of them. Their only contact had been a Christmas card and at least two people did not send one this last year.
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Looking at this statistically, there are three confounding factors which skew these numbers. One is of course death, getting closer and closer as we age. The second is the fact that people in their ninth decades are not always able to use e-mail. The third is the fact that some of the students had not enjoyed being at Somerville and do not wish to be in touch with any of us. I know of two in this category. We all share certain things in common. Dr Vaughan was Principal, a truly amazing woman I still revere even though she contaminated a university building with so much radioactive strontium it cannot be used for the next thousand years. She had been a medic in the Spanish Civil War and learned about the huge importance of blood banks in saving lives. As soon as World War Two was declared she immediately set to and started organising a national blood bank in Britain. Coming from that environment to the molasses pace of Oxford colleges in 1947 she shook the whole place up by being the first principal to install a telephone in her office. Up until she did that little men on bicycles carried messages back and forth. Dr Vaughan cared about us. She invited many of us to tea at her lodgings more than once. She also did yeoman service in helping to care for Elizabeth Anscombe’s seven children.
