This article is part of a series. Click to read the first, second and third entries. In 1936, the Nettleship Library was 15,000 books housed in “four dark little rooms” at Jowett Walk. The Society of Oxford Home-Students, for 60 years now a somewhat nomadic entity, had desperate need of more permanent space to call its …
This article is part of a series. Read the first entry here and the second here. In October 1920 the statutes were revised so that women in the University were at long last able to matriculate and graduate with degrees. With this revision came a large number of retrospective graduations for those women who had met …
This article is part of a series. Read the first entry here. The flurry of benefaction in which the Nettleship Library had been established could not last indefinitely and, in 1903-4, the committee reported that the budget for books had fallen again. The diminishing book budget [p.9, 1903-1904, A.E.W. Annual Report] To continue to finance the …
The Nettleship Collection is the official name for the Library of St Anne’s College. Why Nettleship? Henry Nettleship (1839–1893) was a Classics scholar described by the ODNB as ‘shy, diffident, hesitant, and sometimes abrupt in manner, inclined to hero-worship, and with a strong sense of injustice’. His wife is more generous in her memorial to …
The early registers of The Society of Oxford Home-Students record a high number of overseas members. 580 total students (of all nationalities) passed through The Society between 1888* and 1911, and of these, 117 were American women. It is interesting to see what an international presence The Society and the women’s colleges (or halls) were …
The Ship for 1939-45 is a window into wartime life at what was then The Society of Oxford Home-Students (and from 1942, St Anne’s Society). The ‘Oxford Letter’ each issue paints a picture of the wider city buzzing with war-work and academic life: “We are a pleasant jumble of civil servants, of officials and clerks …
By 1915, Oxford’s regular population of 3000 male undergraduates had fallen to just 1000 students and in 1917 it was as low as 350. In their place came officer cadets, refugees and growing numbers of wounded. “Cap and gown have given place to khaki, and to “Kitchener’s blue”, for we have some 3,000 soldiers billeted …