Annie Barnes (1903-2003) was born in Geneva. Meeting visiting German lecturer
H.G. (Roger) Barnes while working for her doctorate at Berne University led her to a long and distinguished academic career based mostly in Oxford. She  worked at Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall before being appointed Tutor (and subsequently Fellow) in French at St Anne’s in 1947. Her distinction was recognised by the University who made her Reader in French Literature in 1966. A research career stretching from the 1920s very nearly to her death in January 2003 took her from the influence of Shakespeare on Alfred de Vigny, through Jean Leclerc, Pascal (a life-long interest and inspiration), and the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, to Proust, Péguy, and Valéry. Her intellectual dynamism and rigour, and her sparkling, distinctive personality and humour, informed decades of dedicated teaching and generated an ever-refreshed network of friends and collaborators.

Dorothy Bednarowska (1915-2003) was herself a Home Student, graduating with a First in English in 1937. Her graduate studies in Herbert and Donne were interrupted by the War. After a temporary teaching post at St Hilda’s she became Lecturer in English at St Anne’s in 1946 and a Fellow in 1954. A type of professional academic not uncommon in her day but hard to imagine now, she published nothing but poured all her energies into devoted and inspiring  teaching of undergraduates, graduates, mature students, and (innovatively) Summer school students from all over the world. She taught the whole canon from Chaucer onwards and had astonishing knowledge and recall of texts from the whole range, with particular interests in the 19th century and the early American novel. Her students remember her as rigorous but painstakingly supportive, with an outstanding ability to communicate her own deep love of literary texts.

Elizabeth Ely (1932-1961) died tragically young of cancer after a brilliant early career as an academic lawyer. She read Law at St Anne’s, winning a Winter Williams Law Scholarship and a First, and was President of the Junior Common Room. She took the BCL at Oxford and LL.M at Yale, returning to St Anne’s as a Research Fellow and elected Fellow in 1958. As well as teaching and researching with great distinction, she played a crucial rôle in the College’s acquisition of full collegiate status, re-drafting the Statutes speedily to bring them into harmony with those of the other four women’s colleges. Her lively and charismatic personality left a strong impression on all who knew her. The year before her death she married Wadham’s Law Fellow Peter Carter.

Elaine Griffiths (1909-1996) matriculated as a Home Student in 1928. After taking her degree in English she undertook research under the supervision of J.R.R. Tolkien, developing the interest in Old English Philogy which was at the heart of her work. Her teaching career began with tutorials for the residents at the Home Students’ Catholic hostel, Cherwell Edge. She became Tutor (later Fellow) in English in 1938, and during her long St Anne’s career undertook many College offices. On the University level she was Chair of the English Faculty Board and a member of the General Board. One of a great teaching trio with Kirstie Morrison and Dorothy Bednarowska, she shared with her colleagues a total commitment to teaching as the essence of a college Fellow’s work, and like them she is remembered with enormous gratitude and affection by her students. She was a person of great taste and elegance and a consistent upholder of civilised aesthetic values.

Jenifer Hart (1914-2005) read History at Somerville. A brilliant success in the home Civil Service exam in 1936 was followed by eleven years’ distinguished service in the Home Office. In 1947 she left the Civil Service to join her husband Herbert Hart in Oxford. After work for the Delegacy of Extra-Mural Studies she became the first ever Gwilym Gibbon Research Fellow (a fellowship specifically designed for present or past civil servants) at Nuffield College. In 1952 she succeeded Mary Leys as Modern History Fellow at St Anne’s, where she continued until her retirement in 1981. A committed “College person” until very near to her death, she flung herself into teaching, research, and administration with great enthusiasm and skill. Her academic interests were always on the borderline between history and social sciences, and she took charge of Politics teaching for PPE as well as Modern History, and wrote and lectured on the history of the Police, on local government, and on proportional representation. Consistently committed to radical social and political values, she was active in various movements for reform and modernisation in College, University, and City.

Kirstie Morrison (1903-1998) grew up in St Andrew’s and came to Oxford as a Home Student in 1923. By her own account she was told by another college that she was “not university quality” before taking the Home Students’ exam and winning a scholarship. She took a First in English and taught briefly at Bradford Grammar School, before returning to the Home Students as Assistant Tutor (1930) then Tutor (1933). She became a Fellow of St Anne’s in 1952, and our first ever Emeritus Fellow in 1973. Her membership of St Anne’s thus spanned 75 years ; an exact contemporary of Evelyn Waugh, she was still an active user of the College Library in the 1990s. Like the others (Dorothy Bednarowska and Elaine Griffiths) in the great triumvirate of St Anne’s English Tutors, she did not publish but was a gifted and unforgettable teacher of generation after generation of students, noted especially for her mischievous sense of humour and her positive outlook. Like the others she would teach more or less any period, but her interests tended particularly towards Shakespeare and other Elizabethan drama. She gave an innovative series of lectures in the 1960s on the relationship between literature and art.

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was born in Dublin but grew up mostly in London. She read Greats at Somerville, taking a First in 1942. A period as an assistant principal in the Treasury was followed by relief work for the UN with refugees in Belgium and Austria. Discovery of Sartre and other existentialists led to a passionate engagement with Philosophy, and after a year’s studentship in Cambridge she became Tutor (later Fellow ) in Philosophy at St Anne’s. She published on Sartre and on Plato, on metaphysics and moral philosophy, and of course her philosophical concerns are at the heart of the 25 novels for which she became famous, gaining the CBE (1978) and DBE (1987), the Whitbread Prize (The sacred and profane love machine) and the Booker Prize (The sea, the sea). She resigned her Fellowship after 15 years in 1962 in order to devote herself full-time to writing. She is remembered as a dazzling colleague and teacher, little interested in constraints of the syllabus, leading students on fascinating journeys from Rousseau to Worsdworth, from Thomas More to Michael Oakeshott, from St Anselm to Engels.

Marjorie Reeves (1905-2003) read History at St Hugh’s then acquired a teaching diploma and a PhD from London University on medieval mysticism and heresy. She taught History at a teachers’ training college in Camberwell before becoming Tutor in History for the Home Students, thus beginning a 65-year association with St Anne’s. Her work on Abbot Joachim of Fiore and on prophecy and millenarianism in the middle ages and in later centuries brought her an international reputation recognised in her CBE and Fellowship of the British Academy. She also wrote widely on educational policy, local history of her native Wiltshire, and the Anglican church. She contributed decades of devoted teaching and administration to St Anne’s. Ruth Deech in her address at Marjorie’s funeral commented on the lack of compartmentalisation in her life, and wondered if this was the secret of her remarkable serenity.

Annie Rogers (1856-1937) grew up in an Oxford academic family and in 1873 was entered in the newly established exams set by Oxford’s Delegacy of Local Examinations. Having come top in both junior and senior examinations, she was automatically offered an Exhibition at either Balliol or Worcester, until it was  discovered that she was a girl, at which point the Exhibition was given to a boy who had come sixth on the list, and Annie Rogers received four volumes of Homer as a gift from Balliol. When in response to the controversy caused by this story the University instituted separate degree-level examinations for women, she promptly took them and won first-class honours in Latin and Greek (1877). She became a determined but canny campaigner for women’s admittance to full membership of the University, a story she tells with much dry humour in her book Degrees by degrees (1938). She was herself one of the group of women who were (retrospectively) admitted to degrees when the ban was finally lifted in 1920. Meanwhile she had become Secretary of the Association for the Education of Women and of St Anne’s pre-cursor the Society of Oxford Home Students ; she was also on the Council of St Hugh’s. Alongside her campaigning she was an assiduous and gifted Tutor in Classics to Home Students and other women studying at Oxford.