The University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford
Barbara Fitzgerald Harvey CBE, FBA
21st January 1928 - 8th August 2025
Funeral Service
Wednesday 24th September 2025 1.30 pm
THE SENTENCES
THE OPENING PRAYER
HYMN Please stand
Praise, my soul, the King of heaven; to his feet thy tribute bring.
Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, who like me his praise should sing?
Praise him! Praise him!
Praise the everlasting King.
Praise him for his grace and favour to his people in distress; praise him still the same for ever, slow to chide, and swift to bless.
Praise him! Praise him! Glorious in his faithfulness.
Father-like, he tends and spares us; well our feeble frame he knows; in his hands he gently bears us, rescues us from all our foes.
Praise him! Praise him! Widely as his mercy flows.
Angels, help us to adore him; ye behold him face to face; sun and moon bow down before him; dwellers all in time and space. Praise him! Praise him!
Praise with us the God of grace.
Please be seated
Words: Henry F Lyte (1793-1847)
Tune: Praise, My Soul, John Goss (1800-1880) (NEH 436)
READING
Ecclesiastes 3, 1 - 15
Read
by
Charles Heywood
PSALM 121 Levavi oculos Please remain seated
1. I WILL lift up mine eyes unto the hills : from whence cometh my help.
2. My help cometh even from the Lord : who hath made heaven and earth.
3. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved : and he that keepeth thee will not sleep.
4. Behold, he that keepeth Israel : shall neither slumber nor sleep.
5. The Lord himself is thy keeper : the Lord is thy defence upon thy right hand;
6. So that the sun shall not burn thee by day : neither the moon by night.
7. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil : yea, it is even he that shall keep thy soul.
8. The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in : from this time forth for evermore.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
READING
John 14, 1 - 6
Read by Elizabeth Edwards
Please be seated
FAMILY MEMORIES OF BARBARA
Nicholas Heywood and David Caldwell
ANTHEM
Ave Maria, mater dei William Cornysh, Master of the Choristers, Westminster Abbey, 1479-1491
RECOLLECTIONS FROM SOMERVILLE COLLEGE
Pauline Adams
HYMN Please stand
The God of love my shepherd is, and he that doth me feed; while he is mine and I am his, what can I want or need?
He leads me to the tender grass, where I both feed and rest; then to the streams that gently pass: in both I have the best.
Or if I stray, he doth convert, and bring my mind in frame, and all this not for my desert, but for his holy name.
Yea, in death’s shady black abode well may I walk, not fear; for thou art with me, and thy rod to guide, thy staff to bear.
Surely thy sweet and wondrous love shall measure all my days; and, as it never shall remove, so neither shall my praise.
Words: George Herbert, (1593-1633)
Tune: UNIVERSITY, from Psalms and Hymn Tunes 1794 (NEH 77)
Please be seated
SERMON
The Revd Canon Dr William Lamb
THE PRAYERS
Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory for ever and ever.
Amen.
HYMN Please stand
Love divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down fix in us thy humble dwelling, all thy faithful mercies crown.
Jesu, thou art all compassion, pure, unbounded love thou art; visit us with thy salvation, enter every trembling heart.
Come, almighty to deliver, let us all thy life receive; suddenly return, and never, never more thy temples leave.
Thee we would be always blessing, serve thee as thy hosts above, pray and praise thee, without ceasing, glory in thy perfect love.
Finish then thy new creation, pure and spotless let us be; let us see thy great salvation, perfectly restored in thee:
Changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place, till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love, and praise!
Words: Charles Wesley (1707-1788)
Tune: LOVE DIVINE, John Stainer (1840-1901) (NEH 408.ii)
Please remain standing
THE COMMENDATION
THE NUNC DIMITTIS
LORD, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace : according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen : thy salvation; Which thou hast prepared : before the face of all people; To be a light to lighten the Gentiles : and to be the glory of thy people Israel.
Music: Amy Beach, 1867-1944
Funeral Service conducted by The Revd Canon Dr William Lamb
Organist:
Robert Quinney, Organist and Fellow, New College
Director of Music: Robert Howarth, University Church
Choir: The University Church Choir
Please join us for refreshments in the Adam de Brome Chapel after the service.
Retiring collection for The University Church.
Charitable donations in memory of Barbara to Alzheimer’s Research UK or The RNLI.
4 Elms Parade, Botley, Oxford OX2 9LG • 01865 245 464 botley@oliverandjamesfunerals.co.uk • oliverandjamesfunerals.co.uk
Family memories of Barbara I’m David
And I’m Nicholas. We are delighted to welcome so many of Barbara’s friends and colleagues here today to remember our cousin.
Born in Teignmouth, she had a sister Peggy, who lived in Barbara’s “beloved Devon” with her husband Charles. Barbara spent many breaks in their beautiful, but in Barbara’s words “bitterly cold cottage” overlooking the sea at Sidmouth.
Barbara went up to Somerville College in 1946, then taught at Edinburgh University and Queen Mary College, London. In 1955 she returned to Somerville to start her 60-year career as a medieval historian with a special interest in Westminster Abbey, its lands and people. For this she was awarded the CBE in 1997 and became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1982, just two of the numerous awards she was given.
My earliest memories of Barbara are of family visits to Woodstock Road where she lived with her mother, before moving to Cranham Street. Later she moved to Ritchie Court in Summertown which caters for retired gentlefolk. When my wife inquired of Barbara what qualifications were needed to be offered a place there, her twinkling eyed response was “you need to have read your Proust”.
Typical Barbara!
It is rumoured that when she came to sell her house prior to moving into Ritchie Court, Barbara illustrated her selflessness and consideration for others in that she did not accept the highest offer but opted to sell to a “man of the cloth” because he would be of more benefit to the community.
On visits to our farm in Essex, she would quiz us on types of crops grown at the period she was researching, yields, animal breeds and carcass weights. We imagined she was calculating how long it would take a monk to consume a sheep!
Retirement freed up time for research at Kew, County Archives and Westminster Abbey. She was rare among researchers to be allowed access to ancient manuscripts. The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster Abbey, wrote to my sister Alison a heartwarming note on hearing of Barbara’s passing saying “She was admired and commanded great affection. Her work and her memory will endure”
On many of her London days, I would meet her at 7 in the morning in Victoria. After a greasy spoon breakfast with me, she would walk to the Abbey or I would drive her to Kew Archives, while she interrogated me about my business endeavours. Her endless curiosity about the lives of others who moved in very different circles to her own, was no doubt a trait that produced such a successful teacher, researcher and writer.
To quote her cousin Andrew “she was an inspiration at a time when I needed it especially during my ten years as a freelance academic; I owe the confidence to do that successfully to Barbara”
Andrew’s sister Elizabeth was invited to tea with Barbara and mentioned she enjoyed knitting. Barbara disappeared to return with a big bag of her mother’s knitting needles, explaining that I was welcome to have them as Barbara had never learned to knit. 50 years later Elizabeth still has those needles.
In her final years Barbara was wonderfully cared for by the staff at Cumnor Hill House, including Lee who greeted her the day she arrived and remained with her throughout her time there.
I must put on record our thanks to my cousin Alison who was the most steadfast and regular visitor to Cumnor, right up to the end of Barbara’s life. Often accompanied there by husband Peter and my cousin Simon, Alison particularly appreciated her sociability and hospitality. From childhood she remembers picnics on the moors near Teignmouth with Barbara and during her student days in Aylesbury, Alison would be treated to her home cooked Sunday lunches at Cranham Street. That gracious sense of hospitality was part of Barbara’s character right throughout her life, and she would always invite Alison to lunch at Cumnor.
All her life Barbara was part of the Somerville family. It was where she was most at home and a place of pride to show family and friends. Wonderful tributes have arrived from alumni, friends and colleagues and from this University church where she worshipped regularly. Even in later years she was brought here by her great friend Janet Greenland, sadly no longer with us.
If Barbara were here now, she would wonder what all this fuss was about. Never one to linger after a meal or family event, she would be up and ready to depart promptly, often to be collected by her trusted driver Steven.
Barbara leaves us with a sense of privilege at having known such a modest and devoted scholar and at having shared so many memorable moments with her. Whether grand and formal occasions such as receiving her CBE from the late Queen at Buckingham Palace or nattering over a cuppa in her study at Somerville, surrounded by her books, that are now securely held and archived there.
Barbara was a truly remarkable lady; she leaves a wealth of indelible memories.
Pauline Adams’ Address, Funeral for Barbara Harvey, 24 September 2025
I speak as one of Barbara’s former pupils, a Somerville colleague, and a friend. An appreciation of her as a historian must wait for another day
70 years ago almost to the day, Barbara returned to her undergraduate college as successor to her former Tutor, May McKisack, who in 1936 had succeeded her former Tutor, Maude Clarke: a formidable academic lineage, and one which showed. At Professor McKisack’s memorial service in 1981 Barbara described the experience of being taught by her in words which will, I think, resonate with anyone whom she herself taught or supervised. I quote them in part as an example of her own distinctive prose style:
We were not put in possession of facts … although our worst errors were very briskly corrected. Nor was it the discussion of ideas that was remembered afterwards, but something else. We left these occasions with a clear, strong, often quite chastening sense of the weight of conclusion that the evidence available to us as undergraduates would bear and how far our essays had respected these due limits. The question: “Did you get that from a reliable source?” was a familiar shot across the bows. For her this meticulous examination of evidence was, I believe, the raison d’etre of the tutorial, and at the heart of an historical education was a training in the use of evidence. …
One of my own earliest tutorial memories is of Barbara handing me her copy of Stubbs’ Select Charters and asking me to substantiate a rash assertion I had made about some aspect of the medieval English constitution. I couldn’t, of course.
S ome years later I was able to observe a variation of this approach in the context of Governing Body meetings. We might be interviewing a candidate for a fellowship, or considering a proposal by the Bursar to abolish the cheese course at High Table lunch If, as was often the case, discussion seemed to be getting nowhere Barbara would lean forward with an encouraging smile, and say “I wonder if I might just ask for clarification?” There could be no surer, or less confrontational, way of exposing muddled thinking.
In the course of her 38 years as a Fellow Barbara combined tutorial and faculty duties with a succession of important college o\ices. A s Dean in the late ‘fifties she had the unenviable task of trying to restrain some of Esther Rantzen’s more outré plans for decorating the Hall for a forthcoming JCR ball
In 1968 she served as University Assessor, Somerville’s nominee to represent the women’s and new graduate colleges on the committees of the University The experience gave her a valuable insight into the administrative workings of the university, and also a ringside view of that year’s student occupation of the Clarendon Building.
Within Somerville she served, unprecedentedly, for 3 separate stints as Vice-Principal. In 1980 she presided over the election of Daphne Park as Principal, and was thus one of the few people in college privy to the information that our chosen candidate was a very
senior spy Throughout her principalship Lady Park, coming from a somewhat di\erent working environment, relied heavily on Barbara’s judgment, discretion, and disinterested advice, as did her successor, Catherine Hughes, in the turbulent period surrounding the decision in 1992 to open Somerville to men.
This was a change which Barbara, always a moderate progressive in college politics, had come to see as essential, though she was to retire before the first men actually arrived. She was this one of the last generation of Oxford academics to spend their entire working career in a single-sex college.
A di\icult working relationship with her senior History colleague tested her resilience and sense of humour (the latter sustained on a diet of P.G. Wodehouse); acutely conscious of the stresses faced by young academics, she was unfailingly supportive and generous to those junior to herself.
As she was to me, during the eight years between my appointment as Sub -Librarian and my election in 1977 to a fellowship, when she served as Fellow Librarian. I suppose that, in modern terms, that made her my line manager, but – though the library sta\ addressed her a\ectionately as “Boss” - that was clearly not how she conceived her role. She was just always there when needed. One of my early tasks was to oversee the adaptation for library use of a range of undergraduate residential rooms. Barbara arrived at a site meeting one morning just as our enthusiastic young architect was outlining a proposal to pick out the mouldings on the Edwardian fireplace surrounds in what he described as “fleshy tints”. The tone of voice in which Barbara simply repeated the words “fleshy tints” was enough to persuade him that it was perhaps not such a great idea, and to reassure me that, even if it were, it was not going to happen on her watch.
She described retirement from Somerville in 1993 as the severest wrench of her life. But as an Emeritus Fellow living nearby she maintained close contact with the college, and with generations of devoted former pupils and their families.
And, of course, she did not retire from scholarship. Well on into her 9th decade, she was still mining the archives of Westminster Abbey, taking on new academic challenges, and continuing to produce the books and lectures on which her reputation as an historian is founded That is something to celebrate in a future memorial service. For now we must simply bid a grateful farewell to the warm-hearted, strong-minded, humorous, wise, and modest woman, to whom Somerville as an institution, and many of us as individuals, owe so much.
Sermon by Rev. Will Lamb, Funeral for Barbara Harvey, 24 September 2025
Are you hastening toward your heavenly home? Then with Christ’s help, keep this little rule that we have written for beginners. After that, you can set out for the loftier summits of the teaching and virtues we mentioned above, and under God’s protection you will reach them. Amen.’
These words come from the very end of the Rule of St Benedict. When reading Barbara’s work, particularly her description of monastic experience in Living and Dying in England, one cannot help but be aware of her deep knowledge and abiding fascination with the Benedictine communities at Westminster Abbey and Christ Church Canterbury throughout the Middle Ages. She may have written about mortality rates, sleeping arrangements, personal hygiene, and disease in these communities. These concerns may seem rather mundane in comparison with the question posed by St Benedict. But there is a sense in which her writing is imbued with a Benedictine spirituality, which is not so much about religiosity or piety, but is much more about the practicalities of caring for the people you live with, attending to the extraordinary dynamics of a community, - whether it be a a monastery, a College, or a parish church, - and listening for the voice of God in a world which is sometimes uncertain and often fragile.
I first met Barbara a few weeks after I arrived here as Vicar. Janet Greenland, one of the churchwardens, took me to see her at home. Barbara was very keen to tell me – and reminded me on subsequent occasions – that she was brought up as a Methodist. I took from that just a hint that my high-church leanings would be under scrutiny. But Barbara also spoke about St Mary’s and its history, which she loved, and about her time as churchwarden.
Barbara served as churchwarden for four years, beginning in 1976. She quickly set about getting things organized. In a little account of her time, she wrote: ‘It must, I think, have been in response to a demand from a higher authority that I made an inventory of all books, pamphlets etc. anywhere in the church, an experience from which I learnt not only what interesting items lurked in dark places, but also how much junk.’ She notes that the junk swiftly vanished following the arrival of a new incumbent.
For all her Methodist upbringing, Barbara betrayed an extraordinary affection for the vagaries of the Church of England – its genius lies not so much in being an expression of organized religion, more an illustration of disorganized religion. For those who have ever attended an Archdeacon’s Visitation Service, there is this rather wonderful description, which betrays her rather dry sense of humour: ‘once a year, with my co-churchwarden, I dutifully waited on the Archdeacon, normally in a church in Headington, and listened to a visitation address which seemed to have very little to do with our problems.’ Wondering about the whereabouts of the churchwardens wands (which are now hidden in the vestry) and wrestling with the question ‘What are Churchwardens for?’, she wrote: ‘the office itself, though I was very proud to hold it, always seemed to me to be rather an elusive one, and I remember wondering from time to time what its essential duties actually were.’ Nevertheless, she found it much more congenial than the role of Head Steward, in which capacity she subsequently served. No rotas to deal with as Churchwarden.
Of course, both roles speak of her commitment to the congregation of St Mary’s, to its development and flourishing as a parish church, and she makes a number of astute comments about the way it has developed over the years – in her analysis, describing the core congregation and the successive generations of students and others passing through, the accent she places on the tension between stability and transience perhaps reflects again a rather Benedictine sensibility.
‘Are you hastening toward your heavenly home?’ This is the question posed by St Benedict.
Professor William Whyte told me a wonderful story about sitting next to Barbara at a memorial event for Sir Howard Colvin. Before he became an architectural historian, he had been a great medievalist and Barbara was his first graduate student. William thinks that it was Colvin, who first suggested that it might be worth looking in the archives at Westminster Abbey. Colvin was a proud atheist and, at his memorial, a statement was read out on his behalf to effect that he neither expected nor desired an afterlife. Barbara turned and said to William that although she greatly respected Colvin, “that wasn’t really up to him.”
St John writes of our heavenly home, when he records the words of our Lord: ‘In my Father’s house, there are many dwelling places’. Of all the gospels, John perhaps reminds us of the promise of the resurrection at almost every point in his narrative. But there is a moment, which beautifully captures this accent on the resurrection right at the end of the gospel, when Mary Magdalen comes to the tomb, and in her grief and confusion fails to recognize Jesus. And yet there is the moment, when the risen Lord simply utters her name, Mary. And in that moment of recognition, she sees the Lord. The story is perhaps a beautiful illustration of the beatific vision, that moment when we meet God face to face, when we know fully, even as we have been fully known, when we find, to quote Charles Wesley’s great hymn, that we are lost in wonder, love and praise. This is the gift of eternal life.
Barbara exemplified with a quiet dignity, a certain diffidence tempered by an extraordinary kindness, what it meant to live a life of faithful discipleship. And yet the gospel reminds us that death is not the last word. Death can never overcome the life and the love which come from God. And God offers to each of us the gift of eternal life, life in abundance, a fulness of life of which are present lives are but a shadow.
We come here today with a mixture of emotions, of sadness, of thanksgiving, of grief. All of these emotions are intensified by the joy of having known Barbara. But we also come here in the conviction that God offers to each of us the gift of new life, eternal life. All of us are invited to respond to that question posed by St Benedict in his rule, with hearts set on our heavenly home. This is a gift which God offers to each of us, and which we pray he will grant to Barbara. Amen.