Cambridge Notebook #10

In search of a secret garden

‘The Garden Map’ of modern-day Murray Edwards College, showing design and planting laid out by Jo Cobb. Watercolour and ink © Jo Cobb, 2016

Murray Edwards at 70

I walk around the grounds of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge looking for traces of a secret garden. It’s mid-December 2016, and there is a light drift of snow blanketing the flowerbeds and bushes. I look up at the snow-laden branch of a tree and see, incongruously, a tiny toy spinning above my head. Then I spot several more. ‘It’s been a tradition here for years’, Jo Cobb, the head gardener explains. ‘The sixth formers come here for their interviews in early December and spend a couple of days in the college. They each hang a small toy from this tree for good luck. If they get accepted and come back here as students next September, they’ll try to find their good luck mascot.’

It’s almost September again, and I’m thinking about the students who will be beginning their studies at Cambridge soon. Back in 2016, Jo had kindly offered to show me around Murray Edwards’s gardens after I told her about my research on the life of Ida Darwin (1854-1946) who used to live in a house called The Orchard on this site. Her extensive garden there became famous in her lifetime; she travelled widely, and brought plants back to Cambridge to propagate and establish. It was a magical place. The artist Gwen Raverat called it ‘her secret poet’s garden, where the blackbirds sang all day long in the mossy apple trees, and where every flower was a new discovery’ (Period Piece, 1952). But today there seems little trace of Ida Darwin’s garden to be found.

Murray Edwards is a modern college for women undergraduates at Cambridge University and it’s celebrating its 70th birthday this September. Today the college is situated on the bustling Huntingdon Road, just north of the city’s medieval centre, but when it was founded as ‘New Hall’ in 1954 it had just sixteen students who lived in a large, borrowed house on Silver Street overlooking the River Cam (pictured below; the house and grounds are now part of Darwin College for postgraduate students.)

So why, back in the 1950s, was a ‘third foundation’ (as colleges are called before they become established) needed to encourage women to study at Cambridge University? Because by the mid-twentieth century Cambridge University still had the lowest proportion of female undergraduates of any UK university. Something was needed to encourage more women students to enrol at Cambridge, but the University itself refused to give any help.

‘The College’s modest beginnings were no surprise: it had been established in the teeth of indifference and even opposition in a university that had granted degrees to women only in 1947 – the last of any UK higher education institution. At the time, there were just two colleges for women at Cambridge, Newnham and Girton, and competition for admission was fierce.’ (Murray Edwards college website)

By the early 1960s the College was expanding and needed to find a new, permanent home. But with no support from the University, this seemed impossible.

Ida Darwin’s garden

Ida moved to Cambridge in 1880 following her marriage to Horace, Charles Darwin’s youngest son, an engineer and inventor. She had wanted to study at Oxford, but her father would not permit it. So instead she moved to Cambridge as a wife, not a student. It was a passport to another country, and a fresh start for her. She attended lectures and was an enthusiastic supporter of the new women’s college at Newnham (founded in 1871), wanting others to have the chance to study when she herself had not. She became a member of the Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society, and met women who shared her zeal for education and sense of social awareness.

Ida and Horace taught their daughters Ruth and Nora the value of education for women. Ruth attended Newnham College, and Nora studied genetics with William Bateson and later became a celebrated botanist in her own right. Eight years after their mother’s death, in 1962, Ruth Rees-Thomas and Nora Barlow decided to donate their family home, The Orchard, to help to establish the third foundation for women at Cambridge. I’m convinced they did this as a tribute to their mother’s belief that women deserved a good education as much as men did. Their house had to be knocked down to build the new college, and Ida Darwin’s poet’s garden disappeared beneath the rubble. But the sisters’ generosity meant that a new college for women students was able to put down roots in Cambridge.

Today, students who are lucky enough to be given a place at Murray Edwards are encouraged to enjoy fourteen acres of gardens and unlike most colleges, they can walk on the grass, grow their own plants and pick flowers and herbs. As the college says on its website, ‘Murray Edwards College continues proudly to be a college for women, while including and warmly welcoming men as Fellows, staff and visitors.’ You can find out more about the college’s 70-year history here, and there’s a virtual tour of Murray Edwards gardens here.

Ida Darwin, who did so much to support women’s education at Cambridge University, would surely be happy to see Murray Edwards students flourishing in the place where once she gardened.

Murray Edwards College, December 2016. This striking building with its famous dome was designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, modernist architects of the Barbican in London.

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Literary news and links

1. Coming soon: from 13-15 September 2024, Stapleford Granary’s arts and music centre near Cambridge will dedicate a weekend of programming to Philip Larkin, one of Britain’s best-loved poets: you can find more details here. Highlights for me include an exhibition of Larkin’s own collection of photographs, on loan from Hull History Centre, and a talk by Philip Pullen (trustee of the Larkin Society) about Larkin’s doodles and sketches from his letters. On Sunday I’m looking forward to Kate Romano’s new semi-staged production, Larkin’s Blues, telling the story of Larkin’s great loves. As she puts it these were jazz (constant, rewarding) and women (complex, evasive).

2. The wonderful literary magazine Slightly Foxed has been in print for twenty years. To celebrate, it’s running a prize draw to raise up to £20,000 for a great bookish cause: the brilliant BookTrust – the UK’s national charity dedicated to getting children reading. There are no fewer than twenty amazing prizes, including this winter reading retreat (I thought of you,

   Liz Gwedhan
   !)

3. The first woman pilot to circumnavigate the world is to be remembered with a blue plaque in Cambridge. Read more about the dashing Richarda (‘Dikki’) Morrow-Tait here.

   

   Richarda (‘Dikki’) Morrow-Tait climbing out of her plane at Cambridge Airport, 1947.

4. I know it’s far too soon to be thinking of autumn, let alone winter …but bookings open this week for Cambridge’s wonderful Winter Literary Festival 24-24 November 2024; see what’s on and follow the link here.

5. And finally, to remind ourselves in this wind-battered and rainy corner of the UK that summer really is still with us, here’s a cheery photo I posted on Substack Notes a couple of weeks ago. I noticed how determined the sun was that day, filtering through the barred windows of the Cambridge University Library’s upper levels, creating striated paths of light along the corridors and tempting readers outside.

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Coming soon on Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society:

• Julian Bell, Virginia Woolf and ‘the damned literary question’ that divided them.

• As the academic year starts, how much do Cambridge students know about the their university’s shameful past? An interview with Caroline Biggs, author of The Spinning House (History Press, 2024).

• My essay on FM Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter followed by a reading group discussion.

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The best of August reading on Substack

This week I’ve enjoyed diving into

Katie Marquette

’s Monthly musings (‘Farming is hard. So I ordered “Farming for Dummies” and just try not to see the asparagus turned into trees on the way to the barn’);

Fiona Stocker

’s picturesque ‘idle and aimless wandering’ through historical Hobart, Tasmania;

Annette Laing

’s hilarious ‘Historian’s Doomed Romance’ (‘But let’s not miss the point that these amazing evangelicals of 1820 believed firmly that women should be educated… they were modern and striving, as well as passionately religious’);

E.J. Barnes

on the American response to E.M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady (‘I doubt any British reader would have shared Mary Borden’s sense of pity for Delafield’s “narrow” life… Then again, Delafield had those royalty cheques to console her’) and

Deborah Vass

on the artist and gardener Cedric Morris in her delicious ‘August is a wicked month’.

That’s it for now, and thank you so much for reading! Please click on the little heart button/share if you enjoyed this post (it helps others to find my work) and I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments and suggestions.

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