1899
England
..... the first meeting of the International Women’s Congress was held
..... Sarah Hertha Ayrton became the first female member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers
..... the Women's Farm and Gardening Association was formed, bringing together professional women working with the land. During WW1 they played an important role when they set up and ran the first voluntary Women's Land Corps. In 1917 the government took it over as the Women's Land Army
Celebrated women born in this year
..... Aline MacMahon ..... born May 3rd she was an American actress who was a compelling presence on Broadway and in Hollywood for over fifty years. She made her stage debut in 1921 and in 1930 was picked to play the lead on Broadway in Once In A Lifetime. A Hollywood talent scout spotted her and signed her up and she played the same part in the 1932 film. For the next seven years she was kept bust in Hollywood by Warner Bros and films include Five Star Final (1931) with Edward G Robinson, Gold Diggers of 1933, The Eddie Cantor Story (1953) and in 1944 she was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress of the Year in Dragon Seed, a version of Pearl Buck's novel about the Japanese invasion of China. She died in 1991
..... Ann Bishop ..... doctor who devoted herself to medical research which ranged from the biology of protozoa to the effects of anti-malarial drugs. She was born in Manchester and educated at Manchester High School and Manchester University. In 1921 she began her scientific research and in 1925 became an honorary research fellow at Manchester. She took her doctorate at Cambridge Bishop and then spent three years in London at the National Institute for Medical Research and then joined Cambridge University’s Molteno Institute as a Beit Memorial Research Fellow in 1929. Three years later she became a Yarrow Fellow at Girton College and from 1937 to 1966 was a research fellow there when she was appointed a life fellow. It was in 1937 that she joined the staff of the Medical Research Council and in 1942 became director of the Medical Research Council’s Chemotherapy Research Unit at the Moltino Institute. She remained here until her retirement in 1967. In 1959 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal society. She died in 1990
..... Clarice Cliff ..... born January 20th, her pottery is still one of the most collectable of all. She started working in the Potteries at the age of 13, gilding and banding ware and in 1916 began working at Wilkinson’s Pottery where her dedication and talent were eventually recognised by a director of the firm who later became her husband. Her most successful period was between 1927 and the mid-1930s and her hard work, artistic vision and instinct for what people wanted resulted in her boldest and brightest designs , epitomising the Jazz Age of Art Deco for collectors. This period in the Potteries produced a streak of famous women designers and innovators in the field of ceramics – Susie Cooper, Charlotte Rhead and Mabel Leigh
..... Doris Speed ..... celebrated for her superb portrayal of Annie Walker, landlady of the Rovers Return in the television soap Coronation Street. The character was created especially for her and she was said to have based her performance on the character of her own Aunt Bessie. She appeared in the first episode of Coronation Street in 1960 along with husband Jack ( Arthur Leslie) and dominated the Rover's Return for the next 23 years until illness forced her to leave the series. In 1983 the press published details of her real age which was over eighty although she claimed to be still in her sixties. At the time of joining the cast of Coronation Street she had claimed to be in her early forties. when the truth was revealed she suffered depression and said that she would never go back on the Street after that. During the 1990 celebrations of the Street's 30th anniversary she appeared on the television spectacular and received a standing ovation from the rest of the cast. Doris Speed was born on 3rd February in Manchester and went on stage at the age of five. Her early childhood was spent touring with her music-hall parents but in 1915 she took a course in shorthand and typing and soon after completing it was offered a post with Guinness in Manchester where she became a typist and where she stayed for the next 40 years or so. In her spare time se became an active member of the local amateur dramatics group and after many years established herself as an accomplished performer. She began to do radio world in Manchester and in the late 1950s appeared in a police series Shadow Squad which was written by Tony Warren, creator of Coronation Street and it was he that created the part of Annie Walker for her. In 1977 she was appointed MBE and two years later received an award for "Outstanding Services to Television. She eventually left her home and went into an old people's home in Bury, Manchester, where she remained until her death in 1994
..... Dorothy Hinckley neé Dorothy Kate Bown ..... born May 17th, she was an acrobatic dancer on the West End stage in the 1920s whose partner once sent her flying into the orchestra pit. Her dancing combined athletic and acrobatic movements more akin to gymnastics than ballet and caused a minor sensation in stage circles at the time. She danced under the name of Dorothy Neville and her solo spot was billed as “Twists and Twirls”. At the height of her fame in the 1920s she was earning £200 per week. When she married in 1930 she pronounced her dancing days over and after the war she and her husband founded a successful business that supplied silica sand to industry. She retained her love of dancing however and at the age of seventy taught her granddaughter to do cartwheels. She died in 1999 aged 99 years
..... Eileen Agar ..... born December 1st in Buenos Aires to a British father and American mother who was an heiress to a biscuit-making company which led Eileen and her sisters to be dubbed “Tres Cosas Buenas” after a biscuit which was popular at the time. She was one of the last surviving members of the English Surrealist movement to which she was admitted in 1936 when some of her works were chosen for the International Surrealist Exhibition, alongside works by Salvador Dali and Magritte. She earned the distinction of being one of the very few women among the avant-garde élite to be taken seriously as an artist. She died in 1991
..... Helen Lyndon Goff ..... better known as P L Travers, the famous author of the Mary Poppins Books which were published between 1934 and 1989, she was born on August 9th. The books became popular with millions of children through the Walt Disney film in 1964 which starred Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke although she found the Hollywood version rather flat and one-dimensional. She was born on the Queensland coast of Australia and was privately educated. She had a spell in theatre where she acted and danced with the Alan Wilkie Shakespearian Touring Company and in 1924 went to Britain. She was already a regular contributor to the Irish Statesman and the editor invited her to Dublin where she was introduced to W B Yeats who helped to develop her interest in magic. Mary Poppins was published in 1934. During the Second World War she worked for the Ministry of Information which sent her to America and this prompted a different kind of children’s book I Go By Sea, I Go By Land (1941) which dealt with British evacuees and their reactions to the New World. But it was her series of Mary Poppins books which were the most popular and they were translated into most European languages. They began in 1934 and ended in 1989 with Mary Poppins and the House Next Door . She adopted P L Travers as a pseudonym because it did not betray her gender but if pressed would admit to Pamela and Lyndon. She died in 1996
..... Margaret Harrison ..... one of the four Harrison sisters who were all leading lights on the British musical scene. Beatrice was a cellist, Monica was a singer and Margaret and May were violinists and they attained celebrity after Beatrice’s cello duets with a nightingale were broadcast in the 1920s. During their careers the sisters worked with many international performers and conductors and were friends with Delius, Elgar, Bax, Ireland and Quliter, the composers. Margaret was the youngest and in 1904 followed May and Beatrice to the Royal College of Music. It was just before her fifth birthday and she was the youngest student the college had ever taken and she could already play Bach. In 1908 she went to study in St Petersburg with May and in 1918 made her professional debut at the Wigmore Hall. During the 1920s she performed as a soloist, made several recordings and toured many countries with Beatrice. The two sisters retired from public performances in 1958 and after Beatrice died in 1965, Margaret did not play again. However in 1985 her interest in music was revived with the publication of Beatrice’s autobiography and she began the Harrison Sisters’ Players recital group and set up the Harrison sisters’ trust to conserve the family archive. For fifty years she was also one of Britain’s top breeders of Irish Wolf-hounds. None of the sisters married and Margaret died in 1996 and was buried at St Peter’s, Limpsfield, Surrey in the cemetery where her parents and sisters were buried as were Delius , Eileen Joyce and the conductors Sir Thomas Beecham and Norman Del Mar
..... Margaret Wakehurst neé Tennant ..... born November 4th on her father’s 76th birthday. He already had 12 children by his first marriage which included Margot Asquith. She was brought up at Glen until she was six but when her father died her mother began to divide her time between Byfleet in Essex and Lennox Gardens in London. She was educated at home and during the First World War was at school for a brief time. She then served as a Red Cross volunteer and after the war was presented at Court. In 1920 she married John Loder and they had three sons and a daughter and in 1924 he was elected Conservative MP for Leicester. In 1936 he succeeded his father as 2nd Lord Wakehurst , left politics and from 1937 to 1945 was Governor of New South Wales. She was a great success in Australia and whilst there founded the Women’s Australian National Service. The following years were spent working with the Order of St John and for the English Speaking Union. She also joined the committee of the Victoria League of the British Commonwealth, became involved with the Ballet Benevolent Society and served on the executive committee of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. In 1952 her husband was made Governor of Northern Ireland and she was active in the field of mental health and founded the Northern Ireland Mental Health Association, with its headquarters in Belfast. They retired in 1964 and she was appointed a DBE. Four years previously she had been made Dame Grand Cross of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. When her husband died in 1970 she decided to be known as Dame Margaret Wakehurst and became president of the National Schizophrenia Fellowship. She died in 1994 aged 94 years
..... Mary Jarred ..... born October 9th at Brotton in the North Riding of Yorkshire. In the heyday of choral societies during the 1930s and 1940s she was a much sought after soloist. She had a deep, rich voice and excelled in Bach, Handel and Mendelssohn. She also starred on the operatic stage and in the 1930s made frequent appearances at Covent Garden. During the Second World War she gave recitals at the concerts which were organised by Myra Hess at the National Gallery. In 1953 she appeared as Mother Goose in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in the first British performances of the work at Glyndebourne. She retired shortly afterwards and gave lessons, first as a private teacher and then as Professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music from 1965 to 1973. She died in 1993
..... Nan Wood Graham ..... model in one of the world’s best known paintings American Gothic (1930) by her brother Grant. The painting portrayed a sombre pitchfork-bearing Iowan farmer and his equally sombre daughter standing before a cottage but it was disliked by the locals of their home-town of Cedar Rapids who felt that the artist was mocking their simplicity of life. One irate local claimed “ That painting should be hung in a cheese factory. That woman’s face would sour milk”. Nevertheless it made a personality out of her. When her brother died in 1942 she became an enthusiastic historian of his work along with other academics. From the 1950s onwards there have been at least 500 take-offs of the couple in the painting including one featuring Bob Hope and another starring Sir Denis and Lady Thatcher. In the late 1970s Nan Wood brought a lawsuit against Hustler magazine for pasting her face on the nude torso of a voluptuous model. In 1984 she was going blind and entered a nursing home in California where she remained until her death in 1990
..... Nesta Cox (Nesta Ellen) ..... known as “Nanny” Cox. She was born December 19th in Norfolk and at the age of three was orphaned and taken in by the family of an Anglican clergyman at Farnham. After her training she started work as a 15 year old nursery maid and was soon appointed to nanny by the family of a Royal Indian Navy captain in Ceylon, where she spent four years. After an appointment in Gloucestershire, she moved to the house which was to become her home for the rest of her life, Chateau Nanteuil, in the Loir et Cher. In 1925 she was issued with her carte d’identité and became one of the many British nannies employed to bring up French children between the wars. The use of English at Chateau Nanteuil was strictly forbidden except in the nursery and as time passed she abandoned conventional English and used a form of her own invention – a nursery “Franglais”, When war broke out in 1939 she refused to leave and eventually she and the de Bernard family were recruited by Col. Buckmaster’s ‘Reseau Adolphe’ which later became part of the much larger “Prosper Network”. Her first task was to help Madame de Bernard to interview the often dubious “English” men and women who claimed to have been sent by London. The network eventually received Yvonne Rudellat, the first woman agent sent by the SOE into occupied territory. The park of Nanteuil was used to hide arms and radio transmitters sent in by the RAF. In 1943 the de Bernards were arrested by the Gestapo and deported and Nanny was left in sole charge of the children and the house. When the war ended the de Bernards returned from the concentration camps, their health broken. The school, Nanteuil, was re-opened and the English pupils reappeared. Nanny Cox enjoyed occasional visits to England and lived to look after her original children’s children and then the children of those children. She died in 1992
..... Lady Norman neé Priscilla Cecilia Maria Reyntiens ..... born March 20th, her father was ADC to King Leopold 11 of the Belgians and her mother was the second daughter of the 7th Earl of Abingdon. In 1921 she married Col Alexander Koch de Gooreynd of the Irish Guards but the marriage was dissolved in 1929. She served on both the London County Council and the Chelsea Borough Council and was later on the board of the Maudsley Hospital. She was also vice-chairman of the Women’s Voluntary Services for Civil Defence from 1938 to 1941, was honorary president of the World Federation for Mental Health and vice-president of the Royal College of Nursing. In 1933 she married Montagu Norman, the financier and Governor of the Bank of England. During the Second World War she was a founder member of the WVS (later the WRVS) and in 1944 was appointed a JP. When her mother died in 1950 she succeeded to the Worsthorne section of the Towneley estates and two years later ceded the property to her elder son, Simon Worsthorne, who assumed the surname and arms of Towneley by Royal Licence in 1955. She was appointed CBE in 1963 and died in 1991
..... Ruth Morrah neé Houselander ..... born August 21st a Somerset bank manager’s daughter. She read history at St. Anne’s College, Oxford ( which was then known as the Society of Home Students) and in 1923 married Dermot Morrah, who combined writing ‘leaders’ for the Times and The Daily Telegraph with a Fellowship at All Souls and being Arundel Herald Extraordinary. They had two daughters. During the Second World War she ran the Red Cross in Bermondsey and in 1944 began her 20 year stint on the bench . In 1945 she was appointed chairman of the Tower Bridge Juvenile Court. When she retired in 1964 she worked tirelessly for the adoption committee of the Catholic Crusade of Rescue for which she was awarded the Papal decoration Pro ecclesia et pontifice. She loved cats, needlework, the Catholic Church and travel and visited China for the first time when she was in her 80s. She died in 1990
..... Valentina neé Valentina Nicholaevna Sanina ..... in Kiev. She studied drama in Kharkov and when the Russian Revolution began escaped from the Bolsheviks with the family jewels. She met her future husband , George Schlee, on Sebastopol railway station. She travelled to Athens and Rome and joined the Chauve Souris Theatre in Paris and in 1923 they arrived in New York where they became prominent in café society. Her dramatic clothes and style made her stand out and in 1928 she opened her own fashion house. This venture proved a great success and she became renowned for her Russian peasant costumes. Her clothes were timeless, outside fashion and followed her belief in the free movement of the body. Besides designing for private clients she established a reputation for stage design and created costumes for such plays as The Philadelphia Story and High Spirits. Her clients included Katharine Hepburn, Gloria Swanson, Gertrude Lawrence, Irene Selznick and most notably Greta Garbo with whom she had a feud which continued well into the 1980s. She died in 1989
..... Vera Von Der Heydt ..... born December 11th, she was a convert to both Jungian psychology and Roman Catholicism. She was received into the Catholic Church in 1937 and had her first meeting with Jung about the same time. During the Second World War she moved to Oxford where she met Dr John Layard who trained her in Jungian psychology. She worked as an analyst in London and in 1954 became an early member of the Society of Analytical Psychology. She was later appointed chairman of the Guild of Pastoral Psychology and was also a founder member of the Association of Jungian Analysts and the Institute for Religious Psychotherapy. She died in 1996