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..... and Grace Chisholm Young became the first woman to receive a doctoral degree in mathematics from the University of Gottingen

..... the government of the colony of South Australia became the FIRST to allow women to stand for parliament

..... Octavia Hill, who pioneered the movement for open public spaces and better living conditions for the poor, was one of the founders of the National Trust

..... on July 26th the tallest woman in British medical history was born at Bartley Green, Northfield, West Midlands. Her name was Jane (Ginny) Bunford and her abnormal growth started at the age of 11 following a head injury. Shortly before her death in 1922 she stood 7’7” and but for a spinal disorder would have measured another 4’’. Her skeleton is preserved at the Anatomical Museum in the Medical School at Birmingham University and has a mounted height of 7’4”

..... Lilian Murray became the first woman member of the British Dental Association after passing her exams in Edinburgh

..... women were allowed to vote for the first time. This applied to a referendum in the municipalities concerning sale of spirits

..... Dolores Ibarruri ..... better known as La Pasionaria, one of the moving spirits behind the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War and the most famous Spanish woman of her generation she was born on December 9th. Although a committed Communist, she inspired people with her courage, her presence, the power of her oratory and her belief in the Russian Revolution. She was portrayed on posters alongside Lenin and Stalin and it was she who led the recruiting campaign for the Republican army. A battalion was named after her and the name of La Pasionaria is most often associated with her rallying call at the beginning of the war "No pasaran" ( they shall not pass). No woman in Spain was as influential, famous and notorious as she was but inevitably her reputation led to stories being told on the Nationalist side of her cruelty, in particular to prisoners and nuns. When the Civil War ended she left for exile in Russia where she lived for 38 years. From 1942 to 1960 she was secretary-general of the Spanish Communist party and then its president. When she returned to Spain after the death of Franco she found herself out of touch with the new generation and they found her an embarrassment and restrained her from speaking too often in public. In the 1960s she was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize and the Order of Lenin. During her lifetime La Pasionaria was acclaimed by Communist political leaders and artists and writers in Spain. Picasso dedicated more than one work to her and she is also believed to have inspired the character Pilar in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls , a part played by Ingrid Bergman in the film. She died in 1989

..... Dorothy Madge Smith ..... doyenne of London Teaching Hospitals matrons who was born in Norfolk and educated at Swaffham Grammar School. In 1916 she went to Guy’s Hospital and in 1927 was appointed matron. Two years later she was promoted Lady Superintendent and Matron of Middlesex Hospital. Here she made an immediate impact by two reforms which she instigated – patients’ breakfast time was moved from 5 am to 7 am and the sisters must have one weekend off each month in addition to one day off each week. During the war she was a sector matron but still found time to sit on the Nursery Advisory Board for the RAF and for the Prison Nursing Service. From 1944 to 1955 she was chairman of the General Nursing Council. In 1946 she was invited to return to Guy’s Hospital as Matron with overall charge of the female staff and her arrival there heralded an era of change – not least with the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948. She was appointed OBE in 1943 and CBE in 1953, the year of her retirement. She died in 1991

..... Elizabeth Dean ..... founding member of the British Socialist Party and the suffragette movement in Manchester in the early part of the century. She educated herself when her parents refused to allow her to stay on at school. Outraged at the inferior status of women before the First World War she became an early feminist helping the suffragette founders such as Christabel Pankhurst in their militant actions. After the war she was president of Hulme Women’s Guild and became active in the Co-operative Party

..... Countess Beauchamp nee Else Schiwe ..... born September 19th, she became chatelaine of Madresfield Court in Worcestershire which was kept ready during the 1939-45 war in case the Royal Family should have to leave London. The house also had a significant influence on the novelist Evelyn Waugh who drew on his experiences of staying there for Brideshead ReVisited. She inherited it on the death of her husband and in 1979 the peerage became extinct. During the war she ran the local WVS and Madresfield

was made ready for the Royal Family. Its treasures were stored in the railway tunnel under the Malvern

Hills. She gave sterling service to the Order of St John of which she was made Dame Grand Cross and presided over the Worcestershire branch for nearly 30 years. Appointed MBE and Grand Commander of the Danish Order of Dannebrog. She died in 1987

..... Esther Muir ..... American actress who played scores of “dumb blondes” in the Hollywood films of the 1930s. She was born in New York and appeared in Broadway musicals in the 1920s. Her first film was in 1932 with Buster Keaton Bedroom and Bath and her last was X Marks the Spot in 1942. Though typecast she starred with Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, George Raft, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and was in A Day at the Races (1937) with the Marx Brothers. She retired from the cinema in 1942 and began a lucrative career as a property dealer. She died in 1995 having reached her centenary

..... Evelyn Bunning neé Evelyn Alma Kusel Smith ..... born September 17th one of the last grand colonial hostesses. She was a trained nurse, skilled in tropical medicine but became famous for her stylish hospitality in the 1940s whilst the wife of the general manager of the Nigerian Railway. In the 1920s (unusual for a young woman) she set out to work as a nurse in the Bahamas and in the 1930s her expertise in tropical medicine took her to Nigeria, where she met her husband. As a hostess she was an accomplished mixer of cocktails and introduced her guests to roulette. She died in 1997

..... Isobel Baille ..... world famous soprano was born in Scotland and her name became synonymous with Handel’s Messiah which she sang for 26 years giving more than 1,000 performances. She spent most of her life in her adopted city of Manchester, England and from the age of six began launching a career which was to see her on platforms with such great conductors as Sir Malcolm Sargent and Sir Henry Wood. She was awarded an honorary degree by Manchester University in 1950 and a year later was awarded the CBE. She branched out into teaching and at the age of 65 years she started to coach scholars at the Manchester School of Music. She was 38 years old when she died in hospital in Manchester in 1983 only two months after she “took a rest” from a lecture tour. After her death a fund was set up to help young singers to get a chance to gain public performance experience and it is known as the Isobel Baillie Performance Award

..... Mary Lyon - Lady ..... born October 24th, her mother was the Countess of Wemyss who was one of the founding members of that aristocratic coterie dubbed “ the Souls” on account of their intellectual conversation. She was born Mary Pamela Madeleine Sibell Charteris, the result of her mother’s affair with Wilfred Scawen Blunt whom she met in Egypt. Her father did not see her again for 10 months after her birth and then had to do so in secret. She grew up as the daughter of Lord Wemyss with three brothers and two sisters. In 1915 she married Algernon (Tom) Strickland but he died of tuberculosis in 1938. Five years later she married Major John Lyon and pursued the life of a country lady from her home , Apperley Court. Her days were spent foxhunting and entertaining and the house had plenty of servants. She lived here until her death in 1991 at the age of 95, a reminder of a lost era of house parties and evening games and a slower pace of life

..... Mary 'Mae' Marsh ..... in Madrid, New Mexico. She began to work at Biograph in 1912 with D.W. Griffith who said she was '‘born a film star’. In 1917 she left Biograph to become one of Samuel Goldwyn’s first stars. She returned to D W Griffith in 1923 and made The White Rose with Ivor Novello and also starred with him again in a British film The Rat. With the advent of sound her career faded except for very small roles but she appeared in every film her great friend, John Ford, made. Some say that she was the greatest actress of the silent cinema and was compared to Eleanora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt in the theatre. She starred in two of the major cinema classics The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance and gave a magnificent performance in each. She was slight, freckled and red-headed and had all the innocence and girlish looks that Griffiths liked in his stars. The poet Vachel Lindsay wrote two poems about her in the 1920s and called her ‘the Madonna’ of the new art of cinema. Her last film was in 1961 and she died in California in 1968

..... Nesta Inglis ..... who for 25 years was the redoubtable headmistress of Tudor Hall, the girls school which she effectively re-founded in the 1930s. She was the granddaughter of Gen. Sir John Inglis and was educated at Tudor Hall one of the oldest girls’ boarding schools in England. She went on to establish a small boarding school in Harrow but in 1935 was persuaded to move – lock, stock and barrel – to Chislehurst, where Tudor Hall was situated. She resuscitated the school with 22 pupils and when the war began the school was evacuated to Burnt Norton, a house in the Cotswolds. Subsequently she acquired a large estate, near Banbury, for £12,000 and the school never looked back. Although she had no university qualifications she was a gifted teacher and attracted other exceptional teachers to her staff. She also did a lot for the school’s musical reputation. She retired at age 65 but remained an active supporter of Tudor Hall until her death in 1990

..... Ngaio Marsh .....crime writer who won acclaim with her first book in 1934 A Man Lay Dead. She was soon named as one of the four pre-war queens of crime the others being Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. She outlived them all, dying in 1982 in her late 80s. She was born in New Zealand where her father was the unambitious son of an English tea-broker, who became and remained a bank clerk in Christchurch. Her mother had a particular interest in amateur theatricals and Ngaio took male parts in school plays, had a distinct talent for art and wrote a play. She lived in the hills outside Christchurch, in a house built for her father, and remained there until her death. She went to England when in her early 30s and ran a shop in London with Nelly Rhodes, member of a wealthy family. For a brief time she was a fashion model and invented Roderick Alleyn, her detective. The name came from her father's school which was founded by Edward Alleyn, the actor. Her crime stories were immensely successful but unmentionable by the local literari in her New Zealand hometown. She achieved an immense reputation in New Zealand as a theatrical producer and when she was awarded the DBE it was regarded as an acknowledgement of her work in the theatre and nothing to do with her 'whodunits'

..... Olga Rudge ..... violinist and mistress of the American poet Ezra Pound, with whom she made an important contribution to the rediscovery of Vivaldi's music. She was born at Youngstown, Ohio and was taken to Europe by her mother at the age of seven months where her mother supported the family by giving singing lessons. She was educated at Catholic schools in London and Paris and gradually lost all trace of her American origins. Olga soon made a name for herself with recitals in the capitals of Europe and met Ezra Pound in Paris in 1923. In no time at all he was commissioning violin sonatas and composing music for her himself. In July 1925 she gave birth to his daughter Maria in Italy and then put their daughter out to foster with a peasant woman. The following year his wife Dorothy was delivered of a son, Omar. For some years he lived with Olga and his wife in turn and in 1929 Olga bought a house in Venice. In 1936 she began her research on Vivaldi and on investigating the composer's manuscripts in Turin she turned up no fewer than 309 unedited concerti. Subsequently she formed the Vivaldi Society in Venice and gave concerts of his works. In 1939 she published a catalogue of his works including photocopies from Dresden - the originals had perished in the Second World War . Her daughter Maria discovered the full truth about her parentage during the Second World War and in 1946 married Boris Baratti. Pound died in 1972 and his wife the following year. Olga lived in Venice in a house filled with memorabilia of her lover. She died in 1996 aged 101 years

..... Olga Spessivtseva ..... Russian ballerina who was born July 18th, daughter of an opera singer. When her father died she was sent to an orphanage in St Petersburg which had theatrical connections and in 1903 she was enrolled as a member of the Russian Imperial School of Ballet . She graduated in 1913 when she joined the Maryinsky Theatre Company. Within three years she was established as a soloist. In 1916 she was invited to partner Njinsky for a New York season and on her return to Russian in 1917 was promoted ballerina. For the next few years she enjoyed enormous success and in 1921 was taken to London by Diaghilev to dance Princess Aurora in his great revival of The Sleeping Beauty. Although the production is remembered as the most perfect ever staged, financially it was ruinous and she was not seen again in England until 1929 when she danced Act 11 of Swan Lake. In 1934 she toured Australia where the first signs of mental instability appeared and she announced her retirement on her return to Paris in 1935. At the beginning of the Second World War she moved to New York where in 1942 she completely broke down. Her rich 'protector' arranged for her to enter a private sanatorium but when he died his executors disclaimed responsibility for her and she was transferred to a state hospital for the insane where the staff did not know who she was. She languished in the asylum for more than 20 years before a new drug and the intervention of her old friend, Anton Dolin, secured her release in 1963. She went to live at the Tolstoy foundation farm in Rockland County, New York State which had been founded by Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, as a rest home for Russians. In 1964 the BBC showed a short programme of her life and two years later a book was written, by Anton Dolin about her called The Sleeping Ballerina

....... Pearl Pleydell-Bouverie neé Pearl Barrington Crake ..... born January 6th at Buckingham Gate in London. She was taken to live in Hampshire where her father was a serving officer in the Rifle Brigade at Winchester. Her father died in 1911 and she spent her holidays either in Europe or at Crathorne in Yorkshire with her aunt, Violet Dugdale. Crathorne was turned into a hospital in 1914 and she worked there as a VAD until 1916 when she joined the Military Intelligence Directive at the War Office. She stayed there until 1919 and then went to the South of France with her mother where she met her husband, the 2nd Lord Montagu of Beaulieu. They married in 1920 and had three daughters and a son. During their marriage she travelled to India, Persia and Palestine and at home developed an interest in local affairs which intensified after her husband died in 1929. She was commodore of the Beaulieu Sailing club from its formation in 1931 and organised the sailing regatta. Her other involvements include the Red Cross, Girl Guides, British Legion, Women's Institute, Lymington Lifeboat Institution, the New Forest Association and Beaulieu Village School. She remarried in 1936, Capt. Edward Pleydell-Bouverie and soon afterwards he was appointed commander of the Royal Yacht Victoria and Albert. In the Second World War he became British Liaison Officer to the French fleet at Toulon and subsequently Naval Attaché in Paris. She stayed on in Palace House with her son and daughter and this eventually became the local headquarters for the Red Cross and Air Raid Precautions. Her second husband died in 1951 and she moved into the Lodge at Beaulieu when her son took over the estate. She remained active in village affairs and in 1994 took part in The Last Summer, a BBC television programme which recalled memories from the summer of 1914. She died in 1996

..... Suzy Prim neé Suzanne Arduini ..... born November 11th, she was a French actress who specialised in femme fatales. She made her stage debut in 1897 and her last film in 1976. In 1910 she joined the Theatre de L'Oeuvre but her looks, personality and sex appeal proved better suited to erotic revue and she was soon snapped up by the Folies Bergere. But she never deserted the theatre stage and in 1937 her performance in La Dame Aux Camelias is remembered as one of the most moving. Her cinematic heyday was in the 1930s when she appeared in more than 50 films and in the 1950s and 1960s she became involved in the production side of the cinema- unusual for a woman in those days. She never married but had a long liaison with Jules Berry, the great screen villain of the 1920s and 30s. He died in 1951. She died in 1991 having enjoyed an extraordinary long and varied theatrical and cinematic career. Films include Mayerling (1935) Le Chemin de Rio (1936) and Carrefour (1938)

..... Victoria Florence Sanger Freeman ..... legendary figure in the circus world where she was known as "the Queen of the Elephants". She was born on September 28th into a family which took its shows to every part of the British Isles and beyond and which at one time was commanded to appear at Windsor Castle by Queen Victoria. In 1917 she married James Freeman who was considered the most versatile of all British circus performers and appeared as Pimpo, the clown. The wedding was in secret at Burstow Church but on their way back they bumped into her parents and broke the news to them. All was forgiven and he continued to be Sanger's greatest all-round performer. Her reputation had been established before the First World War as a bareback rider and she went on to work with a big elephant act. When she died in 1991 she was the last of the great Sanger circus dynasty which proudly bore the title "The Greatest Name in Circus" - a billing never repeated since she and her brother, George, toured the Last Lord Sanger's Circus in the early 1960s. The show finally ended in 1962 when her brother was petitioner for the compulsory winding-up. Thus came to an end the Sanger circuses which had spanned 117 years. When her husband died in 1961 she spent her last years quietly in Brixton. Her grandsons continue to work with other circuses