FRIENDS OF NEWNHAM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23599, 8 September 1938, Page 16

FRIENDS OF NEWNHAM

QUEEN MARY ENROLLED i '* ; PURSES PRESENTED 1 (From Our Own Correspondent) - ; (By Air MaiU • ' • LONDON, Aug. 15. - The Guilds of ; Friends look after funds required for „the preservation of some Of England’s cathedrals. The friends of Newnham College will make it their chief interest to collect the £46,000 still needed for new buildings. Queen Mary was enrolled as the first member of the Friends of Newnham College when she visited Cambridge to open the . first block of the hew buildings at Newnham.’ The full cost of the projected. additions to the college will be £IOO,OOO, towards which £54,000 has been collected. Miss J. P.‘ Stirachey, principal of Newnham, in welcoming Queen Mary, spoke of her warm interest" in the building scheme and her very generous donation to the fund, adding: “Weare proud-to think that while in the past many Cambridge colleges have received munificent benefactions from the Kings and Queens of England, your Majesty is the first English Queen wno has thus befriended a Cambridge women’s college.” The amount aUfeady collected came through .the efforts of past and present students, who- had worked with the utmost devotion, and; the generosity of other friends. A considerable part of the building scheme had now been carried out—alterations in three of the other buidings and the construction of the first new block. The cpllego was deeply grateful to its architects, : 4isS Elisabeth Scott, Mr Shepherd,, and Mr Breakwell; - for their skill, patience, and ingenuity, and for their tact and taste in the design and decoration of the new building. Newnham students were to be found all over the world, in the professions, In public wotk, as daughters. Wives, and mothers. Their contribution to the welfare of humanity was not a negligible one.' Queen Mary then named the Fawcett building, and declared it open. . .'An-ifiteresting visitor was Mrs Alfred Marshall, who had been one of the first • five-'resident students in the small .house--in Regent street, Cambridge. - when within two years of starting advanced courses for women students the pioneers of the movement realised that some'student home must be provided. Another was Miss Philippa Fawcett, the woman who brought such distinction to Newnham in 1890 when s)ie took her mathematical, tripos, and;it was announced that she was above Senior Wrangler. »

PURSE PRESENTATIONS,, * More than 40 purses, presented dn aid of the building.fundi were received by Queen Mary. 1 Among . the /donors’ representatives, who passed ,ih procession before hbf was the blind student, Miss Ruth Hitchcock, who hhd taken first classes in: .both pdrts of the theological tripos;? I "the second ' part iin June this year. ?,.She presented a purse on behalf of the present students ;of Newnbam.

Two six-year-old twins, Joanna ahd Alison Cook,, both dressed in blue, conveyed to Queen Mary the purse from Kimway School, Cambridge; One from the Richmond group was handed over by Shirley Booth, aged three, who immediately afterwards shouted triumphantly. “I’ve done It, mummy!’’— much to the amusement of everyone; The fellows, of the college were presented by the principal, and the vicechancellor niade a speech of thanks amd asked Queen Mary to accept from the principal a souvenir of the ..occasion an 'antique etui with gold fittings. Later, the architects. Miss Elizabeth Scott and Mr J. C. Shepherd, the consulting engineers, and others concerned with the constructional work, weirs presented'. : ° ■'<"■■' Miss Scott’s name is well known in connection with the design of th< Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stra I ford-on-Avon.