President’s Report

HRH PRINCE CHARLES LEARNS ABOUT THE COLLEGE’S RADICALLY INCLUSIVE HISTORY FROM SPECIAL COLLECTIONS ASSISTANT, DR JANE ROBINSON REBECCA KEDDIE

worked on a number of projects including indexing the College Log Books, cataloguing photographs from the Vera Brittain/Shirley Williams collection and scanning the 1872 travel diary of Amelia Edwards.

Exhibitions

In Michaelmas Term 2020, an exhibition on the centenary of degrees for women at Oxford was put on display in Green Hall. This was hastily reassembled in June when we welcomed HRH the Prince of Wales to the college in June 2021. Jane Robinson (1978) conducted His Royal Highness through the exhibition and Anne showed him photos from the archives of his mother and great grandmother visiting the college in 1968 and 1921 respectively. We were very sorry to learn of the death of alumna Baroness Williams of Crosby and an exhibition commemorating her life was displayed in Green Hall from April to May 2021. In May 2021 the long process of digitising the Paradise of Dainty Devices https://tinyurl.com/ paradisedaintydevices from the Percy Withers Collection was finalised and it was published on Digital Bodleian. This autograph/visitors book, contains poems, drawings and messages from almost 40 important 20th Century cultural figures, including Max Beerbohm, Walter de la Mare, Paul Nash and W B Yeats. The project was generously funded by donors Karen and Ian Gray, and its publication makes unseen content freely available to the world for the first time – well worth a browse!

John Stuart Mill Library

The John Stuart Mill lectures in 2020 and 2021 were cancelled because of the pandemic. Similarly we have been unable to hold any seminars or visits this year. However, we hope to be able to restart a programme of events in Michaelmas Term 2021 and look forward to another visit from researcher/digitiser Professor Albert Pionke from the University of Alabama in December

Publications

The website, ‘Education and Activism: Women at Oxford, 1878-1920:’ commemorating the centenary of women’s formal admission to the University of Oxford was launched on 14 October 2020, the 100th anniversary of the first degree ceremony for women. The website, which is a collaborative project between the archivists of the former women’s colleges, the Bodleian Library and the History Faculty, has been welcomed by researchers and academics and is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of women’s education. The pandemic did cause some delays to the project, but most of the content is now available and includes not only digitised material from the former women’s colleges archives (such as a complete set of The Fritillary, the magazine of the women’s colleges) but new content and essays about the early days of women’s higher education at Oxford.

Hopefully 21-22 will feel a bit more normal and I look forward to seeing many of you again at in-person events when it is finally safe to hold them again!

ANNE MANUEL College Librarian