Hello, and welcome to this month’s biography post from Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a 1925 love letter that Lettice Ramsey sent to her future husband Frank Ramsey (arguing why they should NOT get married, but it still counts as a romantic letter, I think). This week’s post is about her life before and after meeting her husband; the determined-looking 17-year-old in the portrait below (painted by her artist mother, Frances Baker) was just about to leave Ireland and move to England to attend Bedales (a progressive boarding school) and go on to study at Newnham College, Cambridge. After a spell in Bloomsbury, Lettice married the King’s College scholar Frank Ramsey and settled in Cambridge, but when her husband died in 1930, leaving her a widow at the age of 31 with two small daughters to support, she picked up a camera and went to work as one half of the photographic partnership Ramsey & Muspratt, whose portraits were widely celebrated.
Helen Muspratt’s archive has recently been acquired by Oxford University, ensuring her future reputation as a groundbreaking photographer, but Lettice Ramsey’s contribution to their pioneering partnership during the 1930s, as well as her career as a professional photographer in Cambridge, is less well known. So here is my biographic snapshot of Lettice Ramsey.
