Horsman Awards
The Somerville Senior Members’ Fund
The Alice Horsman Scholarship was established in 1953. Alice Horsman (1908, Classics) was a great traveller who wished to provide opportunities for former Somerville students to experience other countries and peoples, whether through travel, research or further study. The Alice Horsman Scholarship is open to all Somerville undergraduate and graduate alumni with the exception of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery students at other Oxford colleges. Applicants should be in need of financial support for a project involving travel, research or further study that is intended to enhance their career prospects. Applicants who have secured a place on the Teach First, Police Now or Step Up to Social Work schemes will be looked on favourably. Priority will be given to applicants who have not received previous awards. For information about the application process please email academic.office@some.ox.ac.uk.
This Fund was established to provide small sums to help alumni with unforeseen expenses and hardship. We have also been able to use it to subsidize the cost of individuals attending College events which would otherwise have been unaffordable for them. We hope that people who find themselves in need will not hesitate to call upon the Fund. We are glad to hear from third parties who think that help would be appreciated. We are always grateful for donations to this Fund. Applications for grants should be addressed to elizabeth.cooke@some.ox.ac.uk or lesley.brown@some.ox.ac.uk
Applications are accepted each term.
Somerville London Group The Somerville London Group has expanded its reach over the past year to a global audience with a series of online events that have been attended by Somervillians from as far afield as the US and New Zealand, as well as our existing cohort of supporters from the south-east of England. Numbers attending grew from 45 to almost 200 over the course of the year, demonstrating the huge enthusiasm of Somervillians for entertainment, knowledge and opportunities for online contact and conversation. We began our programme of online events last autumn with two events about pioneering Somervillian journalists, Anne Scott James and Audrey Withers, the queens of Fleet Street in the mid-twentieth century. In September Clare Hastings and her daughter Calypso discussed Clare’s recent biography of her mother: Hold the Front Page! The Wit and Wisdom of Anne Scott James; and in November Julie Summers spoke about her biography of Audrey Withers, editor of Vogue for 20 years from 1940. Baroness Ruth Hunt opened our 2021 programme with a fascinating talk about Working through Conflict: Social Change in the 21st Century, sharing many personal experiences and insights and stimulating some interesting questions. In March Dr Clara Seeger spoke to us about Cultivating a Balanced Mind: An Art and a Science, describing the four functions of the mind and how to achieve a balance between these functions through meditation. In a first for us, the event was participatory with Clara leading a guided mini-meditation for 15 minutes.
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Our final two events looked at women hidden from history. In June journalist and writer Ian Dunt talked to us about Harriet Taylor and her intellectual and romantic relationship with John Stuart Mill. In Ian’s opinion their intellectual partnership laid the foundations for modern liberalism though Harriet’s contribution was either vilified or ignored. In July Professor Ann Oakley spoke about the forgotten wives of her latest book – women whose achievements have been written out of history and who were footnotes to their husbands’ biographies until she shone a long-needed spotlight on their lives. In addition to our events, Committee member Ruth Crawford manages our Book Group, now meeting online every six weeks or so, and which has discussed an eclectic selection of books by Somervillian authors generating some passionate discussions about their merits. We are very grateful to all those who participated in Somerville London Group events over the past year and hope to see many of you in the coming year. CAROLINE TOTTERDILL, Chair of the Somerville London Group.
In addition to the SLG book club, several online book clubs have been established during the past year. If you might be interested in any of these, please contact Liz Cooke (elizabeth. cooke@some.ox.ac.uk) for details.
