Message from the Chair of the GC
Dear Fellow Members,
Though I have been the editor of the UWC Magazine since January 2017, this is the first issue with me in the role of Chair of the GC. Hitherto, I have been in the position of gently nudging others (Ann Hallam, Ruth Allington or Samiha Zaman) to produce the Chair's message to the membership, and now I have had to nudge myself.
I find however that there is no shortage of things to write about. As the Club moves into autumn, we have a really splendid calendar of events. My own particular favourite would be the series of three Library Talks marking the bi-centenary of the passing of the Goals Act in 1823. The first of these talks focuses on the work of Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845) , a tireless campaigner for the better treatment of women prisoners (and their children), including the important rights to be held separately from men, and guarded only by women wardens Elizabeth Fry also helped to found the Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate, which provided materials to incarcerated women so that they could do needlework, a practice known to be calming In addition, doing needlework was a way the women developed a skill that could get them gainful employment upon release. In this endeavour we see reflected the aims of the Fine Cell Work organisation whose Founding Director, Katy Emck, gave us a really interesting online talk a couple of years ago.
Issue number 16: Autumn 2023
Messages from Chair and General Manager.
Autumn events
Book Club and Film Club Programmes.
From the Archives: Profile of Edith Rebecca Saunders (18651945)
Archive Legacy Project
Third Tuesday lunches
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The charity trains prisoners and prison leavers in high-quality needlework skills, and pays them to create beautiful handmade products. (I know how wonderful these products are as, following Katy's talk, I bought several things from their catalogue ) We are currently hoping to arrange a sale table of Fine Cell Work items at the Goals Act talks, which will include some of their lovely small Christmas presents, and hand-stitched Christmas tree decorations.
Another highlight in the events calendar will take place on the 28th November: the fourth in the series of concerts by musicians from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire. If you attended any of their concerts earlier in the year (and they have been hugely popular) you will know that a live music performance of this quality is a real treat. The concert programme is preceded by a talk in the Library by a visiting professor or composer, at which the musical pieces are introduced, and the audience has the opportunity to ask questions. After the performances, a buffet supper is available This makes for a superb evening where guests enjoy all three of our Great Rooms: the Library for a talk, the Drawing Room for music, and the Dining Room for supper
As Alex highlights in his message on the following page, the bedroom refurbishment programme is making great progress, and we are delighted to report that bedroom occupancy is ahead of the 2023 budget projections. Having a place to stay in London is a major factor in women becoming (and remaining) members, so it is important that we are able to provide comfortable and modern accommodation.
Stop Press, October 3rd.
Many of you will have seen the recent reports in the press concerning our application to extend the hours we are able to sell alcohol, in order to bring us in line with similar establishments.
Of course, extending the hours does not mean we will tolerate any excessive drinking or noise, but some of our neighbours seem to have made that assumption, and raised objections We are due to go before the Westminster Licencing Committee on Thursday October 5th, where we will stress that a new license will actually restrict music and entertainment, and that drunken behaviour is antithetical to the UWC commitment to provide a safe and supportive environment for women
Much as I find the word 'vibrant' is overused to the point of meaninglessness, I do feel the Club is providing a truly energised offering to our growing membership, and that this is reflected in the success of the Open Evenings. Do come along to one of these if you can; there are lots of prospective members looking to chat about what makes the Club special, and where better to hear that from than you.
Best regards,
Pauline Foster
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Archive Legacy Project.
Through 2021 and 2022, as the Club celebrated its Centenary in Audley Square, the richness of our archives, as well as its fragility, was brought into focus,. Much of the archive material used in the Library Exhibition was digitised to render it safe for reproduction and display. The digitised material included the earliest so-called ‘Candidates’ Books’ in which details of members elected between 1887 and 1938 were recorded.
When the Centenary celebrations were over and the Exhibition ended, the committee that had steered the project held a final meeting to approve plans for a continuing ‘legacy project’ which would seek further to preserve the UWC archive material, engage members’ interest in it, and render it accessible to digital searches. Three aims were adopted:
To include regular features from the Archives in the UWC Magazine and Newsletters;
To publish selected Archive material on the UWC website;
To prepare a searchable database of entries from the digitised Candidates’ Books.
On page 4 of this Magazine is an example of the first aim, prepared by the Honorary Archivist, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan. To advance the third aim, which is undoubtedly the most ambitious, we will need volunteers from the UWC membership to transcribe entries from the Candidates’ Books into an electronic file. The details to be transcribed will include the full name of the candidate, her academic qualification, proposer and seconder, plus any other notes that might have been added to the original entry.
Ultimately, this work will give us records that can quickly be searched. This means we will be able to respond promptly to genealogical queries from Members and non-Members alike about particular individuals and whether they had joined the UWC in its early years. Other research possibilities will include exploring –with due regard for confidentiality - the age and geographical range of members in the past, their university affiliations, and professional and family networks.
Once we have a clearer idea of how best to organise the transcription process, we will be ready to seek volunteers to be part of it, so do watch out for an announcement in the next few months.
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Thursday, 19th October 2023
The House of Doors
Tan Twan Eng
UWC Book Club: Oct 2023 - Dec 2023.
This is a book that will mesmerise readers far into the future.
Colm Tóibín
The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living in Penang, Malaya (now Malaysia). Interacting with these fictional characters are four historical figures, the chief of whom is one of the great novelists of the day, W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham is presented as an old friend of Robert’s who arrives for an extended visit with his secretary and lover, Gerald, at a time of great crisis in his life.
Maugham has long hidden his homosexuality behind an expensive marriage of convenience, but that marriage is now in danger of collapse after he loses all his savings through the mismanagement of his financial advisors. To recoup his losses, he is in desperate need of a subject for his next book.
Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair and learning of her past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Sun Yat-Sen, decides to probe more deeply. Lesley also confides in him the truth behind the sensational murder trial of an Englishwoman in Kuala Lumpur. In this way Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng provides a backstory to The Casuarina Tree – Maugham’s collection of short stories which were based on his experiences travelling in the area in the 1920s
The House of Doors is a spellbinding novel. It traces the fault lines of race, sexuality and power under empire and above all it examines the complicated nature of story-telling and truth. On the title page Tan quotes Maugham as remarking at the end of his career, ‘Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other’.
Thursday, 16th November
Annie Ernaux
Universal, primeval and courageous, Happening is a profoundly relevant work Financial Times
In 1963,Annie Ernaux, a 23-year-old student and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague. Understanding that her pregnancy will forever disgrace her and her family, she feels she cannot keep the child.
This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. At a time when abortion was illegal in France, she attempted, in vain, to selfadminister the abortion. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days.
Born in 1940, Ernaux (née Duchesne) grew up in Yvetot, a small town in Normandy, where her parents ran a café and grocery shop in a working-class area of the town. She studied at Rouen University, qualifying as a teacher, and later taught at secondary school. The author of some twenty works of fiction and autobiographical recollection – a style for which she is renowned - her books have become contemporary classics in France.
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(L’Événement)
Happening
Afilm based on Happening won the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice International Film Festival.And in 2022 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory’.
Thursday, 21st December 2023
Statues in a Garden
Isabel Colegate
Colegate has no equal ... In shining a light on the past, she also illuminates the present
The Paris Review
Statues in a Garden is set in 1914 during the last, sun-drenched summer before the outbreak of the First World War. Politics have become embittered, there is talk of civil war in Ireland and the shadow of war lengthens and darkens.
But all this means little to Cynthia Weston, society hostess and attractive wife of Aylmer Weston, a cabinet minister in Asquith’s Government, who has embarked on an illicit affair with her nephew by marriage, Philip. So whilst the country seems to be sleepwalking towards dangerous territory on the European stage, it is developments much closer to home which bring down the Weston family. Here Colegate skilfully draws parallels between the personal and the political, allowing the personal revelations and tragedies in the novel to prefigure the catastrophic destruction to come.
Acaptivating portrait of a lost world, Statues in a Garden, which was first published in 1964, is a rediscovered masterpiece by one of the most important and neglected British female writers of the twentieth century.And Julian Fellowes who acknowledged Colegate’s influence when he wrote Downton Abbey must surely have paid her royalties, so clearly is her acerbic matriarch, old Mrs Weston, the inspiration for Violet Crawley.
For further information about the Book Club, contact Jeanne Langley at jslangley.uwcbookclub@gmail.com
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NBAvoid the recent edition of this novel by Bloomsbury Publishing which has a mass of proofreading errors, and buy an earlier edition by Penguin.
If you would like to attend an Open Evening to meet and chat with potential new members, the dates are listed opposite. Write to the Membership Secretary to let her know you will be attending.
membership@uwc-london.com
University Women’s Club Open Evenings.
These are held monthly to give prospective applicants an opportunity to have a tour of the Club, to meet existing members, and to find out what UWC membership entails. These are very informal and friendly occasions, and a great chance to tell others why you became, and continue to be, a member.
In-person Open Evenings: every third Tuesday in month at 6.30pm
October 17th
November 21st
If you cannot come to an in-person Open Evening, why not consider joining the virtual equivalent, on zoom.
Virtual Opening Evenings: every first Tuesday in month at 6.30 pm
October 3rd
November 7th
December 5th
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Third Tuesday Lunches
How do you make the most of your membership? How do you get to know other members of the Club when you join without knowing anyone? We’ve all been there.
There’s only one way – talk to people. Women use their clubs in a very different way to men, who have used their traditional clubs as places to take lunch or entertain business acquaintances.
Women, on the other hand, are more likely to get a sandwich at their desk and keep working.
However, if you can escape once a month and want to talk to other members, come along to the Club on the third Tuesday of each month at 1.00 pm. You will find a gathering of members – sometimes just a few, sometimes more – but all very willing to talk (we can’t stop some of them) on every subject under the sun. Lunch is invariably delicious –the Club food gets better and better – not too heavy so you can face the afternoon without somnolence taking over. Alternatively, just have a sandwich – the choice is yours. It’s all very informal; the main thing is that you will meet other members for a convivial hour or two, make friends, renew acquaintances and generally expand your knowledge of the Club and its membership.
For those who are not tied to work timetables, at around 3pm there is an expedition to an art gallery or current exhibition within easy striking distance of the Club. Our targets over the past couple of years have been all the major Galleries (National, Tate, Courtauld, Wallace, Serpentine) and exhibitions (Jewellery from Van Cleef & Arpels at the Design Museum, Persia and Greece: Power and Luxury at the British Museum, the Chinese in London at the British Library), plus private viewings at smaller Mayfair galleries, a private visit to an artists’ studio, a visit to the Japanese Embassy for its exhibition of Japan through the Seasons – the list goes on.
Several attendees usually return to the Club for the Open Evening, which is also on the third Tuesday of the month. This is well worth attending, both to meet prospective new members and also to meet other recent joiners as well as long standing members. After all the gloomy headlines in the media, it is unbelievably refreshing and uplifting to meet so many bright and engaging women making their impact in the world.
Ann Hallam
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Proposed UWC 'Reading Group'
Aims:
1)to enable members of the group to recommend titles to others;
2)to introduce members of the group to reading they may not have discovered otherwise;
3)to share the enjoyment of reading.
Set-up: each meeting will be planned under a specific genre, e.g.:
Fiction Non-fiction
Historical Biography
Crime Autobiography
Science History
Short stories Arts
Novellas Travelogue
Graphic novels Politics
Gothic
Ahead of each meeting, members will be invited to propose a book in the genre that they would recommend to others, and to send it the title and author details to the Reading Group co-ordinator, who will draw up and circulate a list of three or four. The member recommending a book should be prepared to attend the meeting and say why she chose it, with others invited to ask questions if they have any, or just to listen if they choose.
Apart from the member recommending a title, there would be no expectation that members attending the Reading Group will have read the books selected for a particular meeting. On the contrary, the hope is that members will be encouraged by the discussions to read the books afterwards.
Further details will follow in due course as we develop this concept. Meanwhile, if you have any comments or suggestions, please send them to pauline.foster.uk@gmail.com
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Film Club Programme for Autumn 2023. The discussions take place on zoom, every second Tuesday in the month, starting at 7.00pm, London time.
Tuesday 10th October
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour
In a dystopian Iranian ghost town (Bad City) a lone female vampire in a chador appears as an avenging angel of dominated and scorned womankind, seeking her victims among men who mistreat women. They do not understand who she is or what she does until it is too late…….
Tuesday 14th November
Parasite (2019)
Directed by Bong Joon-Ho.
In Seoul, a poverty-stricken family (the Kims) infiltrate the lives of a super-rich family (the Parks). They contrive to get all the domestic staff dismissed, and themselves hired to replace them. When the Parks leave on a camping trip, the Kims decide to openly enjoy the luxury of their employers’ splendid home. But they discover that the former housekeeper’s husband has been hiding for years in the basement, behind a secret door. And when the Parks return unexpectedly early, comedy quickly turns to full Gothic horror, as class hatred, resentment, anger and self-preservation all bubble to the surface.
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For further information about the Film Club, contact Pauline Foster at pauline.foster.uk@gmail.com
Tuesday 12th December
Of Gods and Men (2011)
Directed
by Xavier Beauvoisplot
The film is based on real events in Algeria in 1996. Eight Christian monks from a Trappist community that had for years ministered to the sick and needy among their neighbours, are taken hostage by Muslim terrorists. The story revolves around the fact that monks had been offered protection by the Algerian government, and urged to avoid capture by leaving the area. By choosing not to abandon their mission, they embrace a fate they could easily have evaded.
The UWC Film Club is an informal discussion group for members who enjoy films. Because it is a virtual club, Country and Overseas members are able to join in as easily as Town members. There is no commitment to attend the discussion each month; you can show up or not, as you like. But if you are intending to come, we do encourage you to have watched the selected film beforehand. All the titles are available to rent cheaply online. To get the discussion zoom link, you will need to register, either through the UWC website, or by an email to: reservations@uwc-london.com.
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GeneralCommitteeMembers2023-2024
Pauline Foster, Chair
Lucinda Orr, vice-Chair
Lucy Wheatley, Hon Secretary
Margarita Zhang, 1st Hon Treasurer
Sarah Lavers, 2nd Hon Treasurer
Raveena Bhondi
Emily Farnworth
Jane Oliver
Madeleine Woodley
Samiha Zaman
Johanna Higgins
Eleanor Meynell
Two members of the 2022-2023 GC, Ruth Allington and Felicity Johnson, stood down in July. No candidates having come forward for election to replace them, the GC decided to seek two co-optees to serve until July 2024.
Eleanor Meynell and Johanna Higgins expressed an interest in being co-opted, and after informal meetings with members of the GC and submitting the required co-option forms, they were both welcomed to join. We are delighted to have them on board.
Their details, and the details of the continuing members of the GC are available to view on the Members’ area of the UWC website.
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The Christmas closure is from December 22nd to January 2nd.
