A Cambridge Notebook #6
Gibbs at 300 | Lettice Ramsey & Julian Bell | Cambridge's Bletchley women
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Spring at last
I’m pleased to report that after what has felt like 40 days and 40 nights of rainfall, spring is definitely in the air in Cambridge. Bright yellow daffodils cluster on riverbanks, crimson tulips have been spotted in front gardens, and lime green buds are perking up otherwise bare branches. Best of all, in a positive sign that summer might be just around the corner, the Midsummer Common cattle are back, indulging in the occasional leafy snack and politely curious about cyclists and passersby like me taking photographs of them.
April showers and freak thunderstorms are never far away in this corner of eastern England, however. A couple of weeks ago, as I walked along the Backs by the river in late afternoon, the setting sun made King’s College Chapel and the Gibbs Building look as if they had been dipped in molten gold, with dark blue-grey clouds roiling ominously overhead. But an imminent drenching didn’t put off the punters punting fearlessly along the muddy Cam below (just visible in the photograph).
Gibbs at 300
I discovered when I got home that the large Gibbs Building (seen on the right of the Chapel above) is celebrating its 300th birthday this year. There’s a beautifully illustrated history of ‘Gibbs 300’ here, with an accompanying online exhibition. According to college legend, when the construction of King’s College Chapel in the fifteenth century was interrupted by the Wars of the Roses, the masons left behind a large, half-cut stone in the Front Court. Three hundred years later this would become the foundation stone for the Gibbs Building, built between 1724 and 1732.
As well as being the College’s second-oldest building and a Grade I listed world-class heritage asset, Gibbs is still very much the ‘working heart of King’s’ where many administrative offices are sited and academic Fellows research and teach. In the past, some were lucky enough to live there. The ghost story writer M.R. James lived in H5 for nine years before he moved into the Provost’s Lodge in 1905; Rupert Brooke lived in E1 from 1907 to 1908, and E.M. Forster’s good friend and former tutor Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson occupied the same set of rooms in G5 from 1913 to 1928. Forster envied Lowes Dickinson’s rooms, and wrote that it was
‘the most beautiful College set I knew as well as the best-beloved… One room, crimson papered, looked onto the Front Court through the great semi-circular window.’
Of course, Forster’s long-term lodgings (from 1953 to 1970) on A staircase, Front Court weren’t bad either, with a room with a view of the Chapel. Not long after he moved into King’s, he was interviewed by his future biographer P.N. Furbank who described the room’s cluttered charm in the first edition of The Paris Review:
‘Books of all sorts, handsome and otherwise, in English and French; armchairs decked in little shawls; a piano, a solitaire board, and the box of a zoetrope; profusion of opened letters; slippers neatly arranged in wastepaper basket.’
Forster would soon embark on his last published book, a ‘domestic’ biography of his great-aunt Marianne Thornton, in this room. I wrote about it last month, with a photograph of him from this time looking very much at home at King’s (I suspect someone had tidied up beforehand and taken his slippers out of the wastepaper basket).
The photographer and the poet
I’ll be giving a talk about another former King’s student, the poet Julian Bell, in Literature Cambridge’s course on ‘Virginia Woolf and Childhood’ this summer. I first became interested in Bell through his connection to Lettice Ramsey (1898-1985) who, together with her photographic partner Helen Muspratt (1907-2001), was one of the leading women photographers of the 20th century. Lettice Ramsey (née Baker) studied at Newnham College Cambridge and later married the mathematician Frank Ramsey. In the late 1920s she enjoyed taking informal snaps of her Bloomsbury friends including Julian Bell, looking very informal indeed in her photograph above.
After Frank died in 1930, leaving her to bring up two daughters alone, Lettice met Helen Muspratt, a professional photographer then living in Devon. It was Lettice who suggested that they should set up a joint studio together in Cambridge to earn their living: ‘Helen had the know-how and I had the connections,’ she later recalled. Both qualities shine through in Ramsey & Muspratt’s perceptive studio portraits from the 1930s, a selection of which can be seen on the NPG’s website here.
Ramsey gained rapidly in technical expertise and, after Muspratt moved to Oxford, she ran her Cambridge studio independently until she was 80. When E.M. Forster died in 1970, she was hired by King’s College to photograph his rooms, an extensive series held in the college archives. In her seventies she climbed scaffolding inside the Chapel to photograph the stained-glass windows, and was accidentally locked in overnight. More about her life and work soon.
In 1929, when Julian Bell was 21, Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell. ‘I daresay he’ll give you a lot of trouble before he’s done… he’s too charming and violent and gifted altogether.’ Woolf was right to predict that her sister’s much-loved elder son would cause her trouble, but not in ways anyone could have predicted. My 2024 talk for Literature Cambridge is about how Virginia Woolf’s relationship with her nephew grew more complicated as he grew older and more political in his views; my essay based on this talk is below.
Charming and violent and gifted
Julian Bell’s years at Cambridge were formative in terms of his move towards socialism, his relationship with Lettice Ramsey and his decision to become a poet. He was hurt when his aunt Virginia did not encourage him as a writer. But after Julian was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Woolf regretted her words, and wrote a moving memoir about him. Â
The Virginia Woolf and Childhood course runs live online, 8-12 July, then in person in Cambridge, 4-9 August 2024. Courses include lectures, supervisions, discussions and above all close reading, ‘in the tradition of Cambridge English since the 1920s… we explore the historical context of the books, asking what they have to say about their own time, and how they speak to ours.’ (The reference to Cambridge English reminded of my friend and mentor Adrian Barlow’s excellent blogpost from 2011, ‘What is (or was) Cambridge English?’ - you’ll find it here.)
Bletchley women unmasked
Researchers based at Newnham College – a women-only college that is part of Cambridge University - have discovered the names of the 77 alumnae who were recruited to intercept, decrypt and translate military messages during World War Two. They suspect as many as twenty other Newnham students and graduates who held apparently innocuous positions during the war (and later, when asked what they did, said things like ‘Oh, I made the tea’) were in fact secretly working for British intelligence.
A new exhibition at Newnham College has been making newspaper headlines, including a report for The Guardian by Donna Ferguson which can be read here. I love that Virginia Woolf’s friend Pernel Strachey, then Principal of Newnham, did so much to contribute to this work, as a letter from 1939, currently on display in this wonderful exhibition, reveals.
Recommended Substacks (a selection)
- ‘Dreaming in London’ on the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition showcasing the photographic work of Julia Cameron and Francesca Woodman here: ‘Both women resisted photography’s association with objective documentation to create images filled with props and costumes, staged scenes and dramatic poses. Both exhibited messy work, marked with handwritten notes, scratches, and tears.’
- ‘On the brink of Spring’ here: ‘So what was borne of an amorphous desire to draw what I saw in this place… has slowly shifted into a mission to record it more formally - to chart its course over a year, to draw, paint and photograph what I see. Such places are so easily taken for granted and the creeping changes that occur can be easily missed.’
- on Hélene Reynard, a former Girton College student who wrote for the Economic Journal and in 1919 was forthright about the blinkered view of certain writers on economic theories: ‘The Guild Socialists must give us a workable theory with human nature as it is, not with men as they would wish to have them. We had almost said men and women, but the only writers who mention women appear to find them a considerable embarrassment to their scheme.’
I meant to write more about new books… but have run out of space for now. Thinking about my favourite books and publications this week has made me wonder: What have you enjoyed reading recently in book-shaped form or on Substack?
Do let me know your recommendations via the comments section below, or drop me a line about anything else that you found interesting in this week’s newsletter. As
writes:Helping someone feel seen and heard is one of the greatest gifts you can give them. I would encourage you to not only subscribe to people here on Substack, but to comment on posts that move you. Letting a writer know that their words mattered to you will completely make their day!’
Coming up on Lost in the Archives this month…
a guest post about the Ascension Burial Ground by
; a new post about Dr Susila Bonnerjee and her sisters at Cambridge; another in my series about writers and their mothers; and my spring selection of new books and modern classics.
‘You spread joy and help us all make connections!’ (email from a kind reader, March 2024) (I’m saving these comments for a rainy day, as
suggested here, and doubtless there are a few of those still to come in this waterlogged Cambridge spring).
What a lovely pic that is of Virginia and Angelika...it could be a still from 'The Hours'
Anne,
What a spectacular picture of the chapel and the Gibbs building. Somehow the detail of the "punters" adds so much, perhaps because they show the scale.
The relationships between aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews can be a powerful one, particularly when the aunt or uncle does not have their own children. Oner of my readers mentioned that in a comment.